Updated January 11, 2023
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Landing Page Relevance
Improving your quality score in AdWords is one of the easiest ways to reduce how much you are spending per click. So, if your CPC is too high, instead of worrying about increasing your budgets you can focus on lowering your quality score because Ad Rank, the metric Google use for deciding where your ads are shown, is based partly on quality score. And a big part of the quality score is landing page relevance…
What is Quality Score
Google tells us that quality score is made up of three different things:
- Ad Relevance
- Landing page relevance
- Expected CTR
Expected CTR is a metric that Google keep to themselves, so we don’t know exactly how to influence that. But, ad relevance and landing page relevance we can influence.
Ad Relevance – The TLDR Version
In this article, we’re going to focus on landing page relevance because ad relevance is relatively easy to fix. To get good ad relevance you just need to make sure your ad is closely related to the keywords you’re using it with. If you’re having trouble doing that it’s probably a sign you should make smaller Ad Groups with fewer keywords in them. That way the ads can be more focused on the keywords you’re using.
Get More People Landing on Your Landing Pages
There are a number of questions that Google ask at when they are judging your landing pages before it decides on the quality score:
- Does the page deliver what the ad promises?
- Are the user’s privacy and personal information protected?
- Is the page transparent about its purpose
- Does the landing page let users navigate the web normally?
- Does the page load quickly?
The first question is pretty simple. If your ad talks about women’s shoes, don’t send users to a page that’s selling self-help books. But, it does highlight that you need to drive users to specific landing pages, and that sending them to your homepage might not be enough to secure a conversion.
Keeping Things Private
Exactly how Google determines if your site is protecting leads privacy and personal information isn’t clear, but having your site set up as HTTPS and making sure it uses SSL protocols is a good start. Also, companies that have been found to be selling lists of leads to other companies have seen their landing page quality drop.
Transparency
This should be a basic business principle, but if for some reason you are trying to hide something from a lead it will hurt your landing page quality score. For example, if you are a reseller of products, but try to make it look like your site is the official site, or you are running an affiliate marketing site, you may have LPQ issues.
Navigation
Navigation and landing pages can be a difficult topic. Obviously, the focus of a landing page is to drive a specific action. So adding navigation can distract from that purpose. Some companies like HubSpot, for example, create landing pages on their marketing automation platform without navigation by default.
So best practice for conversions might not be the same as Google best practice. But you have to keep in mind that Google wants the user to have the best experience possible, not for you to get the most conversions possible. To get around this we suggest making sure the navigation links on your landing page are also highly targeted to your ads. I.e. other content related to that keyword.
Faster, Faster!
The faster your page loads the more Google likes you. Simple.
Staying on Top of the First Page
If you’re on top of these five factors of landing page quality, you will see your quality scores increase over time. As the quality scores go up, you should find it easier to get your ads to the top of the first page, and that should mean more customers!
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