The Adwords Nanny Knows What's Good For You

Today brought a meaningful program change for Adwords customers. The load time of your landing page now impacts your Quality Score.

In English, this means that the speed at which your site loads can have an effect on where your ad shows. If the site is too slow, then your ad's QS drops and you have to bid higher to keep your original position.

Here's how they show it in the Adwords interface:

You can be "faster than average" or "great". (There surely are other tiers, but I'm not going to pack a landing page up with slow-loading widgets just to find out).

This is yet another reason to have dedicated landing pages -- i.e. not your home page -- with navigation stripped out, optimized images, flash etc.

It also is another reason to pay for solid web hosting.