Get visitors to your landing page faster with parallel tracking

As technology enables more assistive experiences, consumer's expectations for seamless web experiences are now higher than ever before. In fact, a one second delay in mobile page load can decrease conversions up to 20%.¹ But when someone clicks an ad with URL tracking, this can cause a delay that prevents them from reaching a website for hundreds of milliseconds.² While this may not sound like much, this lost time can impact campaign performance.

To avoid these delays and create better user experiences, we'll begin rolling out parallel tracking later this year. With parallel tracking, users will head immediately to your landing page after clicking your ad while their browser processes URL tracking requests in the background. We've seen this help users on slower networks reach landing pages up to several seconds faster.³ When more visitors can reach and engage with your site more quickly, this can help reduce wasted ad spend and increase conversions for your business.

Important next steps

Parallel tracking will finish rolling out to all AdWords accounts in early 2018. If you use a third-party provider, you should reach out to them as soon as possible to make sure your clicks will continue to be measured with parallel tracking.

Providers will need to make changes to their platform that could take several months to complete, so it's important to get started early. We're also working closely with key providers to help make the transition as easy as possible for all advertisers.

To learn more about parallel tracking and how to prepare, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Leo Sei, Product Manager, AdWords

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1. "State of Online Retail Performance," Akamai, April 2017
2, 3. Google Internal Data, Japan/India/US. Aggregated anonymized data from a sample of users that have clicked on an AdWords ad with URL tracking, August 2017