Due to shoppers turning to the net for many of their purchases Google has updated their policies on landing pages increasing your landing pages weight on your overall “quality score.”

What is a quality score and why does it matter?

Your quality score determines in large part how much you pay to advertise with Google. How much you pay for a click or impression.

Quality score is the overall score Google assigns to you as an AdWords advertiser using a number of different weights and factors in their calculation (including the performance of your ad and click through rate(s) of your campaigns for each keyword/ad combination).

Although this change and increased weight for landing pages is controversial and may lead to short-term, increased costs for many advertisers, its long-term benefits will far out -weigh the immediate discomfort. By weighing and weighting landing pages Google is slowly connecting the final stage in advertising and marketing.

The weighting of landing pages gives advertisers an incentive to pay more attention to their landing pages (an often over looked link in the online marketing chain). This concentration on content will provide a better overall experience for end users, both the advertiser (in increased sales and conversions) and the visitor (who will have a better, more targeted, more appropriate web experience).

To understand why this is important and how it will help the industry you must understand how Google already implements the Quality Score in relation to click through rates (CTRs).

Initially the use of the quality score has helped motivate advertisers to more properly connect key terms to ads.

The more appropriate an ad is to the key term searched for, the better overall click through rate and the better the account performs (and the less an advertiser has to pay to maintain a good ad position). For example if someone searches for “Florist” and an advertisement appears for “Rose Carpentry Services” appears, the user will most likely NOT click on the ad. The advertiser is not targeting their ads correctly, linking inappropriate ads to key terms. The “Rose Carpentry Services” ad is showing (impressions) many, many times, with relatively few clicks, bringing down the keyword and account’s overall Click Through Rate (CTR).

THE HIGHER YOUR QUALITY SCORE (BASED IN LARGE PART BY YOUR CTR) THE LESS YOU HAVE TO PAY TO MAINTAIN A GREAT RANKING

The difference in the bid price for an account that is optimized as opposed to one that is not is incredibly substantial. I have seen, for accounts bidding on the same terms, a difference of over 1000% in the amount bidders were charged per click for the about the same position. You need to constantly monitor your account.

By determining your Quality Score by factoring in landing page relevance and importance Google is making sure advertisers aren’t needlessly sending large amounts of quality traffic to a poor quality site. And, those advertisers that don’t conform (through landing page reinvention and testing) will continue to pay a premium over their competitors to have their ads running on the AdWords network.

Keep monitoring and refining your landing pages!

For more information on creating a successful website, or to have your website analyzed and evaluated by Online Visions please contact us:

http://www.onlinevisions.com.au

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