If your landing pages are taking too long to load up, then potential customers are going to get restless and may choose to click on another link.
This is even more important since Google decided to include landing page load times in its Quality Score criteria earlier this year, meaning that advertisers pay more for poorly performing pages.
This means that you need to test the loading speed of your landing pages, to see if there are any issues you need to deal with.
AlertSite has just released a useful tool for AdWords advertisers to test the performance of landing pages. Simply type in the landing page URL, and you get a report which details response time, as in this example for gocompare:
As well as giving landing page load time, 1.7 seconds in the case of gocompare's ad, it also give details of the time it takes to redirect, as well as DNS lookup time.
So what if your landing page is too slow?
There are a number of steps you can take to improve page load time, as well as reducing your AdWords costs. Here are a few tips:
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Compress images
This is a good way of losing a few kilobytes from your website and reducing the overall load time - compressing images can reduce the file size by 50% or more.
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Beware of FlashYour Flash powered landing page may be responsible for slow load times, and it makes it harder for the AdsBot to read your page, so removed any unecessary use of Flash.
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Avoid third party content on landing pages
Putting third party content on a landing page can mean that a delay from any provider prevents the page from being fully loaded, and gives you a slower load time.
This can include tracking tags from analytics providers or ads served via networks, so avoid this where possible.
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Use video content with caution
As with using too many images, or Flash elements, video content may be useful for converting visitors but it can also slow load times.
Related research:
Paid Search Marketing (PPC) - Best Practice Guide
Related stories:
Ten tips for product landing pages
Five ways to speed up your website
Graham Charlton is Editor at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin or Google+.
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Consultant at Flimp Media
4:55PM on 20th March 2009
Graham
Thanks for this useful overview on landing pages and you are right to point to the need to be acreful with video, however, I thought I would share with you an innovative approach to video with email from the USA – which is now available over here. FLIMP video sites (www.flimp.net) are video landing pages which have been created to address the issue of slow loading video- along with a lot of other things. Similar to how other web pages function, a flimp videosite temporarily stores the images and audiovisual content in a user's web cache. The reason that the content is stored in the web cache is so that a user can replay a flimp without having to make another round trip to the FLIMP host server. As videos tend to be 10MB in size or larger, video content buffers up into a temporary file in the user's web cache as the video is playing. Thanks to progressive download, the technology is intelligent enough to start playing the audiovisual content before the entire microsite is downloaded. This is why video embedded into a flimp videosite will start playing within one to two seconds once the flimp has been viewed. Have a look at some of the videosite examples at www.FLIMP.net . FLIMP ( which stands for Flash Interactive Marketing Platform by the way) also recommends that to effectively engage your audience that any video used for marketing be under four minutes in length- not only for technical load reasons, but also for viewer attention span reasons. Indeed, video ads on landing pages are more effective at under a minute – dependent on what your message is .
Cheers Sean Randles