The "Latency Tax"
Many traffic managers focus only on creatives and copy, but ignore infrastructure. Google uses a crucial metric called Quality Score to define how much you pay in the click auction.
One of the biggest weights in this score is the "Landing Page Experience". If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load on mobile networks (3G/4G), Google penalizes your account.
The Math Behind the Loss
It works like an auction where quality "discounts" the price. Look at the practical difference:
Competitor A (Slow Site)
Quality Score: 3/10
CPC: $ 5.00
You (Optimized Site)
Quality Score: 9/10
CPC: $ 2.00
Over a month with 1,000 clicks, the savings amount to $ 3,000.00. A website built in Next.js with clean code is not a cost; it's an investment that pays for itself just in media savings.
Core Web Vitals
Beyond costs, Amazon discovered that every 100ms of latency costs them 1% in sales. Speed is, quite literally, money.