The Google AdWords blog has announced that they will be extending the Quality Score feature of AdWords to incorporate landing page load times.

The Quality Score is the dynamic variable that Google calculates for each keyword used by an advertiser to determine where an advert will be displayed in the rankings, based on relevancy, clickthrough rate and other factors. By including the new factor of load time for a landing page, Google is giving advertisers another factor that should be considered as a potential way of improving the ad rank at a lower cost, so therefore it could be another factor in improving the ROI of a campaign.

Load time is the length of time it takes for a page to load in the browser, so it can be dependent on the size of the page, the text content, images and underlying page code. Google says that a faster loading page creates a better experience for users, and therefore pages that take longer to load will be penalised as part of the Quality Score ranking criteria.