A few readers left comments on my most recent post discussing different landing page examples. They found the designs to be inspiring. Some commenters wondered if my designs – which were mostly minimalistic with little text and a single call-to-action button – would hurt Quality Score. I thought these comments deserved further study, so in today’s post, we’ll be looking more closely at the issues surrounding these questions, including:
- The role of landing page relevance in Quality Score
- Some examples of PPC landing pages that balance relevance with pleasing design aesthetics
- Whether it’s possible to optimize landing pages for Quality Score in the context of contemporary web design trends
Landing Page Relevance and Quality Score
When determining Quality Score, Google takes into consideration the relevancy of the landing page. Google looks at many factors to decide the quality score of a landing page, with relevance being a major one.
Let’s look at an example to illustrate what this means, using the search term “fishing equipment”:
The only result I got for this Bass Pro Shops ad was this, so unless I want to change my search query, this is all I have to work with. Although I personally know that Bass Pro is a great place to buy fishing equipment, I don’t know whether the landing page will actually provide me with the gear I want or not until I click on it:
The quality of the landing page is not great, but it is relevant to the search query, so that is what is important. In this instance, the search engine results are quite accurate as I only searched for “fishing equipment”.
Google doesn’t know if I’m looking to buy a new creel or some replacement line, so this page is relevant to me.
Now, as you might expect from Google, the definition of what constitutes a good landing page experience can vary widely from one page to another. For example, according to Google , landing page experience is evaluated based on:
- Relevant (determined mostly by the presence of keywords on the page), useful and original content
- Transparency and trustworthiness
- Ease of navigation
- Encouraging visitors to spend time on your site
Let’s look at how the criteria above applies to our Bass Pro Shops example. The information on this website is useful and relevant to what I am looking for. I’m not sure if the content on this page is “original,” but even if it’s not, two out of three ain’t bad.
There is no transparency because the page is not asking for any personal information. I would guess that being one of the largest sports retailers in North America is probably trustworthy enough for Google.
Ease of navigation is questionable in this example. The left sidebar has navigational links to different product categories, but other than that, the website is a little confusing. The navigational links on a website also act as keywords that Google uses to determine the relevance of the site.
If you were to scroll down beyond the visible part of the page in the screenshot, you’d also find these product category images, which definitely hit the mark in terms of user experience and ease of navigation:
This page meets all of Google’s criteria for a good landing page experience. The ad is effective, with social and customer review extensions, and an offer in the ad text. Overall, the ad is good and the landing page is also good.
I won’t try to guess what the Quality Score of this ad is, but it seems to show how relevant the landing page is to the ad.
What factors go into Quality Score?
You can improve your Quality Score by optimizing your ad text and your landing pages. To get a lower cost per click, you’ll need to improve your Quality Score. There are several factors that go into Quality Score so let’s take a look at what those are:
- Ad relevance
- Expected CTR
- Landing page experience
Ad relevance
The ad relevance tells you how well your ad text matches your keywords.
It’s generally a good idea to include the main idea of the keyword in your ad text, as well as some unique selling points that will make your ad more attractive than your competitors. I have found from my own experience that even small changes in the words used can make a big difference in how the reader understands the advertisement.
For example, when eBay changed their ads to say “buy it on eBay” instead of “find it on eBay,” they saw a much better click-through rate. The word “buy” implies that eBay is a place where you can purchase items, while “find” does not directly suggest that.
Expected CTR
Your expected CTR is an indication of how probable it is that your ad will be clicked.
To get started, you need to choose appropriate keywords and place them in logical ad groups. This will allow you to write ads that are compelling and get users to click on them.
Landing page relevance
The relevance of your landing page can be improved in many ways.
For example, Joe Khoei from SalesX (where I am on the board), says that using Dynamic Text Replacement on Unbounce landing pages helped his client, Children’s Learning Adventure, increase conversion rates (calls and form fills) from 1.4% to 3.3% over 8 months.
Better Landing Page Quality is usually achieved when personalization features such as DTR are used because it creates happier users who are more likely to engage with ads.
It is important to find a balance between QS and CR and to try to improve both areas. Fortunately, they’re not mutually exclusive outcomes.
How to Better Track Your Quality Score Improvements
If you’re looking to improve your Quality Score, you’ll need to keep an eye on your ads and landing pages to see if your changes are effective. During this phase, it is very important that you do not forget the main goal, which is to make your business expand.
No executive ever said their goal for the company was to improve their quality score next quarter. Remember that it can be helpful to see if you could save money, but it is not a key performance indicator for businesses.
The easiest way to track changes in QS used to be through an AdWords Script or a tool like Optmyzr, but now the data is also available directly in AdWords.
There are also tools that make it easy to get data from the past. For example, Optmyzr can help with this.
To get at the daily variations in AdWords, you have to do a few things:
- Use the old interface. The new one doesn’t include subcomponents yet.
- Look at the data with the segmentation for “day” turned on. Simply looking at the QS between two compared date ranges doesn’t get you the daily data because both fields will show the ending value.
To track how your QS has changed based on your landing pages, go to the AdWords interface and turn on the landing page component. Then, download the data with a daily segment.
=A3/A2-1 After exporting the data, you can use a spreadsheet formula to compare the current value to the historical one. For example, you can divide the current value by the historical value and subtract 1. If the value in A2 is the same as B2, the field will contain a 1. If not, it will contain a 0.
You can filter out instances where the LPQ has not changed. This will help you see the impact that optimizing your landing pages has on Quality Score as a subfactor.
The Purpose and Importance of Landing Page Quality
I was still on the team when we added landing pages as the last component to Quality Score. We realized that advertisers could easily write ads that would make users want to click on them, but then take them to a landing page that wasn’t very impressive, or even to a site that might be a scam.
After looking at what happened after users clicked on ads, we realized that we needed to take a closer look at the user experience on the websites that these ads led to. We used both manual and automated processes to assess these websites and found that many of them were not providing a good experience for users.
What matters for landing page quality?
Here are some of the things Google cares about for landing pages:
- The page needs to deliver what the ad promises
- The user’s privacy and personal information must be protected
- The page should be transparent about its purpose
- The landing page should let users freely navigate the web
- The page should load quickly
Deliver what the ad promises
The simplest way to follow the first part would be to. After all, if you want to drive conversions, you should take users to relevant landing pages that are related to what is offered in your ads.
Protect the user’s privacy
Privacy gets a little trickier.
What Google wants is that you user’s information with third parties without their permission. If you’re collect leads and selling them, you could have problems with the leads’ quality.
Be transparent about the page’s purpose
This also rolls into transparency.
If you work as a middleman, you need to be honest about it. If you create a landing page with little content, or a doorway page that simply directs the user to another page, you may have issues with your LPQ. This is because these pages generally don’t provide much value, and can make it more difficult for the user to get to where they want to go.
Allow users to freely navigate
Its tricky for advertisers to provide options for users who click on their ads and are taken to a landing page, rather than being taken to the most relevant page on the advertisers site. The user can only do two things on most of these pages: convert or leave. If someone is interested in what you offer but doesn’t feel comfortable submitting their information right away, they may try to find more information by browsing your main site. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they may leave, which is seen as a bad thing by Google.
A best practice for landing pages is to make them focused on a single goal, without navigation or other distractions. However, I believe that it can be more effective to use your paid advertising budget on a combination of relevant pages, rather than just one.
When creating your ad campaigns, consider which page on your website would be the most relevant for each keyword or ad group. This will help you create more effective campaigns. Sending paid traffic to a landing page that asks for too much commitment from the user can result in a lower Quality Score, as people may only choose to leave the page instead of converting. It’s a matter of their perceived readiness.
To avoid being penalized, direct your paid traffic to pages that are relevant to what they are looking for. This could be a section of your website or a separate landing page that you create for each stage of the buying process. If you want to avoid the issue of too many options, create landing pages that are relevant to your visitors and offer the right product or service at the right time.
This means that your site should contain all the information that a user might need in order to make a decision about your offer. If you can provide this information, users will be more likely to trust you and give you their information.
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