Improve PPC conversions with mobile speed score

At Google’s recent Marketing Live conference in San Jose, Anthony Chavez, Product Management Director at Google Ads, disclosed that landing page speed scores are now available in Google Ads.

During the conference’s marketing innovations keynote, Chavez affirmed that beyond optimising for keywords, bids and ad copy, improving the speed of your landing pages is one of the best ways to get better performance on mobile.

This is not ground-breaking information – discussions on studies of loading speeds and conversion rates occur widely. Some key findings from a report titled “The need for mobile speed”, produced by DoubleClick in 2016, showed the importance of page speeds on conversions:

• The average load time for mobile sites over 3G was 19 seconds
• 53% of visits to mobile sites are abandoned after 3 seconds
• When comparing faster sites (5 seconds) to slower ones (19 seconds), the faster sites had average session lengths that were 70% longer and bounce rates that were 35% lower
• Mobile sites that loaded in 5 seconds earned almost double the revenue of websites that took 19 seconds to load.

However, having a specific mobile speed score for your landing pages within Google Ads is brand new and will help advertisers to improve conversion rates and prioritise efforts on landing pages that need tackling most. The new metric is designed to help advertisers allocate limited resources more effectively.  Mobile speed score is available now as a column in the Landing Pages tab of the Google Ads dashboard.

The score is a measure of how quickly your page loads after clicks on your mobile ads. The score is a range from 1 to 10, ten being fastest. It is based on several factors identified in the relationship between page speed and potential conversion rate and is updated daily, so you can track how your optimisations are working over time.

Beyond the user behaviour benefits that a faster site speed brings are the potential improvements to Quality Score. Site speed is also a factor of Google Ads landing page experience which affects Quality Score and Ad Rank, so faster load times can directly lead to cheaper CPCs.

Chavez goes on to suggest that advertisers consider Accelerated Mobile Pages (or AMP), which is supported natively in Google Ads. Landing page platforms like Unbounce are looking to add AMP directly to their page builders to improve conversion rates.

The new metric continues to demonstrate the increased importance that Google is placing on mobile speed. An update to Google’s mobile rankings algorithm, making site speed an influential ranking factor, went live in July 2018.

A final stat from Chavez showed how site speed could have a significant impact on the bottom line: >50% users would not purchase if a site takes too long to load.

To learn how Oban International can help you improve your site speed or optimise your PPC campaigns, please get in touch.