Google has always been about improving user-experience on the web. This focus has recently been upon improving mobile load speed and in July 2018 it announced that page speed is a ranking factor for mobile searches (as well as for desktop searches, which began in 2010). It is also a factor for Google Ads advertisers as well.
When users have a slow experience on mobile, they’re much less likely to find what they are looking for or make a purchase. So as faster landing pages deliver better ROI, in July 2018 Google Ads introduced the new mobile speed score (from 1-10), which takes into account many factors including the relationship between page speed and potential conversion rates.
In a further development, Google Ads has recently tweaked its mobile speed score algorithm to reduce the number of ad clicks needed to generate a speed result on the advertising console. This means that advertisers can view the column in their account to see how Google rates each landing page being used from the ads, and focus on those that have a low score to see what can be done to improve load times.
Google Ads product manager, Prashant Nair states “Fifty-three percent of visits to a mobile site are abandoned if it takes more than three seconds to load” (citing Google data collected in 2016). Therefore being able to more quickly determine an ad’s landing page speed will assist in the reduction in the time it could take to improve that speed.
Google suggests that mobile marketers adopt mobile-specific technologies like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to improve mobile speed scores. “AMP pages typically load 85 percent faster than standard mobile pages. As a result, 90 percent of AMP pages see a high mobile speed score of 10,” Nair said.
Google has a useful mobile site testing tool which can compare your site with a benchmark and suggest where improvements could be made.
If you want to know more about how mobile load speed can impact your business’s revenue, please contact us.