Google AdSense

Pages with more content take longer to load. They also (potentially) contain more useful information. Is this a hit on quality websites?

From your experience, and if you've optimized pages or changed hosting companies.. Did page load time affect your CTR?

My experience is not very much, and I wouldn't expect it to unless we're talking about shaving off 3 seconds of more on page load time which is astronomical.

So yes, it should affect your overall earnings but on the fringes where pages load too slow or lightning fast, everything in the middle is not worth the effort/money, best optimize for user experience and traffic, AdSense will then follow.

In my opinion, most of your bottleneck issues with page load time have nothing to do with server speed -- but rather bandwidth limitations.

So if Google uses a barometer (not sure what measurement this could be) to test page load speed, are they using a modem, cable, DSL, or T1 connection while clicking on that link?

Using a cable connection, the page will load faster than a modem connection. Using a T1 connection, the page may load faster than when using a DSL connection.

Be interesting to see how much better it might do if GOOGLE sped up their servers...

But if this results in a decline in people loading up pages with lots of decorative bells and whistles, this may not be a bad thing.

FarmBoy

netmeg, I'm not sure if that was a typo? 806kb for a background is HUGE? That's like saying you don't have a pet, apart from that elephant over there.

I've experienced a slight increase in my adsense revenue since upgrading to a faster server. It makes sense that faster load times might inprove revenue, but only because it improves the user experience and means they don't click away before the site loads.

Interesting concept though...

Yep, typo. It's 806 bytes.

Since then, we're down to the sub-ten second range, and eCPM has increased along with CPC. I made other changes around that time, so it's hard to know what made the difference, but stats were dropping steadily up till the time I fixed the problem.

Profile your sites, definitely.

It has done wonders for the performance of my site, and lightened the load on my single dedicated server. Gave me more time before I need to go to a dual-server setup... and I have no doubt it has helped me achieve better revenue since users seem to be sticking around more/longer (more pageviews per visit).

I would like to remove the other Google javascript code too, because that is now still causing about 75% of the page load time, but unfortunately it is the code to generate the AdSense ads, so I leave it there for now :)

It is a disappointing task to optimize sites, use underloaded dedicated servers on 100 mbit outlets, compress pages on the fly, put expire headers on almost all static content and then conclude that the page load time is mainly determined by an external third party who used to have the fastest internet services in the world, but can't cope with the load today.

As a side note, I don't look at my weekly/monthly stats of AdSense on a regular base anymore because they take too much time to load. It seems Google has some serious performance problems in the AdSense backoffice.

LOL! I'm not jumping in on this discussion, but that's pretty funny.

I think the main penalty in slow pages is that, bluntly stated, it pisses your visitors off and they go elsewhere. Visitors leaving a site means less opportunity to put an ad in front of them that they'll find interesting.

Whether google has this factored into their prices, again it's anyone's guess but I'm guessing they don't.

Hey, that's my comment! I was planning on compiling the data and starting a thread when I got back from vacation. I get back tonight, so I'll post some statistics tomorrow.

It should be noted that a faster server and a faster connection not only boosts CPM and pageviews, but also rankings. I'll post more tomorrow...

Since we moved to .NET a few years ago, we've implemented their output caching and page loads went from 2-3 seconds to under 1 second. We also enabled gzip, even on our dynamic content, and that helped page load even more, especially for our really long pages.

However, ad placement changed when we upgraded the site to .NET so it is tough to define exactly what caused the increase in AdSense revenue, but it did increase significantly and I wouldn't say the ad placement changed a ton.

hope you`ve had a splendid vacation. What would you say is a reasonable size in terms of KB to make Lord Google Engeneers happy after their latest algo modification ?

I have AwStats always running, also in the period Analytics code was on the site. The 8% increase was within AwStats, not between two statistics packages. AwStats doesn't hurt performance so much because it is using the logfiles generated by the webserver and not javascript in the browser (well, as long as you don't use the javascript browser capabilities detector of AwStats).

P.S. I have never seen a delay with AWstats.

[edited by: CrustyAdmin at 4:40 pm (utc) on Mar. 19, 2008]

Though recently I moved to a dedicated server at vast expense. It's probably the most underused dedicated on the planet. No abnormal increase in traffic after 5 weeks.

Still, would have had to do it next year anyway and I'm not moving back - a good site speed is a solid base for furure growth. Nothing more annoying to visitors than a slow site.

Not from where I am standing.
I moved to a dedicated server. The clicks are about 20% more per day, but earnings are down.

as publisher, if you have slow loading pages, you increase the chance that someone clicks on an ad, provided that a) he's already on your website and b) the ads are displaying as long as possible while loading the next page. may be the visitor is less interested in your ads than in your content, but why not take advantage of his impatience. it's about programming technique..