Improve Adwords Quality Score by improving landing page experience

Did you know?

Fact -1: A lesser known fact is that landing pages do not contribute much for high Quality Scores but they DO contribute negatively a lot for Low Quality Scores.

Fact 2: A high quality score shall help in reducing your cost of acquisition and increase your market share, volume and profitability.

Ok. Got it. But, how can I review the contribution of landing page experience in quality score?

Check the landing page experience review in Adwords for the individual keywords. If it is average or Above Average then it is great and don’t bother after that. However, if it is ‘Below Average’ then improve it by using the following methods:

6 Techniques to improve your landing page experience and your AdWords Quality Score

1. Load time

Optimize your landing page to lower the page load time. This may be one of the important reasons hurting your landing page experience.

2. Spiderability or Crawlability

The page MUST be crawlable by adsbot-google, the Adwords bot. This bot must not be blocked explicitly in robots.txt. This Adwords bot ignores global disallows so don’t worry on that. Avoid Flash, Ajax, text on images, java etc as the bot is NOT fully capable of understanding these technologies.

3. Broken Pages

Check all URLs reported in Destination URL report in Adwords. Are you sending the Adwords traffic to pages that don’t exist? Get them fixed or use 301 redirects to send traffic to relevant pages.

4. Keyword Relevance on landing page

Check your URL in AdWords Keyword Tool by using “Website” option. Does Google also see this landing page has copy relevant for keywords you are using it for or not. If not then modify the copy and use relevant keywords. The landing page copy must be contextually relevant to the keywords. Apart from lower Quality Score, this violation shall also cause high bounce rates and lower conversions.

5. Transparency and privacy policy

Mention clear privacy policy if you collect personal information. Use Opt-in methods for collecting emails. Allow content previews without registration. Don’t mess with settings or use fancy settings like disabling back button or excessive pop-ups or auto-install software.

6. Navigation

Never use long scroll pages without navigation options. The navigation doesn’t have to be featured though and can be below the fold.

Who shall get the maximum advantage of the above techniques?

If you are in highly competitive industries and are paying Rs. 1000, Rs. 2500, Rs. 4000, Rs. 6000 per click ($50, $80, $100 per click. last week I came across a keyword which had the suggested bid of US $710 per click. Yes, you read it right Seven Hundred Ten US Dollars per click. Insane? I know!), work on your landing page experience to make it above average.

This might have a significant impact on

1. increasing your QS,
2. lower your CPCs,
3. increasing conversions,
4. impression share,
5. a mix of these or
6. all of these which can blow your ROI through the roof !

For $1, $2 CPCs don’t bother to spend a lot of time on landing page experience. Average may just be fine.

An Important Note!

Google evaluates the landing page experience every few weeks. So your changes on landing page may take some time (sometimes ... up to few weeks) to impact Quality Score.