Speed matters when providing assistive experiences

Getting better results from your online ads today requires more than just the right keywords or the right bids. You need to deliver the helpful and frictionless experiences consumers expect from brands. Yesterday at Google Marketing Live, we shared ad innovations powered by Google’s machine learning that help you do just that.

However, even the best ads struggle to deliver results if they’re sending people to slow landing pages, especially on mobile. In retail, we see that for every one second delay in page load time, conversions can fall by up to 20 percent.¹ That’s why we’re making it easier to diagnose and improve your mobile site speed.

See if your mobile pages are slowing you down

Consider this: more than half of all web traffic now happens on mobile. Yet the average mobile webpage takes 15 seconds to load.² And for many brands this equates to missed opportunity, especially when more than half of visits are abandoned if a mobile page takes more than three seconds to load.³ So where does your business land in all of this?

To help you understand how landing page speed affects your ad performance, we introduced the new mobile speed score. Evaluated on a 10-point scale, 1 being very slow and 10 being extremely fast, the mobile speed score lets you quickly see which pages are providing a fast mobile experience and which ones may require your attention.

See your mobile speed score on the Landing Pages page in Google Ads

Mobile speed scores are based on a number of factors, including the relationship between page speed and potential conversion rate. It starts rolling out to advertisers globally today.

Improve your mobile experience with AMP

Now that you know what’s slowing you down, how do you speed up? Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) provide a faster, smoother, and more engaging mobile experience. In fact, AMP pages typically load 85 percent faster than standard mobile pages.⁴ They’re so fast, they appear to load instantly.

Once you’ve sped up your site, you can direct your search ad clicks to those AMP pages and create the super-fast and delightful mobile experiences people expect. Brands like Greenweez, a leading French organic retailer, are using AMP to improve mobile site landing page speed and performance. Greenweez was able to increase its mobile page speed by 5X, resulting in an 80 percent increase in mobile conversions!

Build your case for a faster mobile site

When someone has a negative experience on mobile, they’re much less likely to purchase from you in the future. So if you want to stay ahead of the curve, you need to prioritize speed within your organization. To help you do that, we’ve built two free tools: the Speed Scorecard, which lets you see how your mobile site speed stacks up against your peers, and the Impact Calculator, which lets you estimate the revenue you’re potentially leaving on the table by having a slow mobile site.

You can learn more about these tools and best practices for speeding up your mobile site on Think with Google.

Posted by Jon Diorio, Group Product Manager, Google Ads

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1. Google/SOASTA, “The State of Online Retail Performance,” April 2017
2. Google Research, Webpagetest.org, sampled 11M global mWeb domains loaded using a globally representative 4G connection, Jan. 2018.
3. Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.7K, Global, March 2016
4. Google Data, Global, April 2017