• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, February 21, 2019

If you spend as much time on your mobile phone as I do, you will likely appreciate a Google algorithm update now allows advertisers to see the load speed times of more mobile landing pages.

The mobile speed score update, announced earlier this week, requires fewer ad clicks to generate a score and appears on the advertising console.

The score is evaluated on a 10-point scale, with 1 being very slow and 10 being extremely fast. The mobile speed score is based on a number of factors, including page speed and potential conversion rate.

Google introduced the mobile speed score in July 2018, to enable marketers to see the landing pages providing the fastest mobile experience and alert them to one that might need attention.

Now the company continually tracks performance. Google internal analysis suggests that 53% of visits to a mobile site are abandoned if the page takes more than three seconds to load, according to Prashant Nair, product manager, Google Ads, citing data from 2016.

A bad experience on a landing page not only can harm its capability to convert site visitors, but can also affect ad performance, since Google takes landing page experiences into the auction pricing models.

Google offers a report for common performance metrics such as conversions and statistics on all landing page URLs for Search, Display and Video campaigns.  

In addition to a mobile speed score, there’s a rating that indicates how mobile-friendly the pages are based on a test. There’s also a valid AMP click rate score that indicates how often pages load as valid Accelerated Mobile Pages.