Google Hits Slow Ads

According to a Vnunet story, as part of its AdWords program, Google willstart hitting ad pages that take too long to load by adding a penalty to the quality score, an index that determines how the ad will be placed in a search result.   The Inside AdWords blog said,   "Users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time forlanding pages to load. They are also more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate."   Page loading times will be monitored by the introductionof a load-time feature in the keyword analysis page in AdWords. Once it’s up and running, offenders will have a month to clean up their act.   As an advertiser’s quality score falls,the user will have to increase the minimum bid, which gives the lowest cost an advertiser can pay for each click. However, those with fast loading times will see their minimum bids decrease.