Are Your PPC Landing Pages Optimized for Google’s Quality Score?

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A post on AdWords Insider from early March 2008 stated, ” As part of our continuing efforts to improve the user experience, we will soon incorporate an additional factor into Quality Score: landing page load time. Load time is the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad.”

You can check out the load time of your landing page by viewing your AdWords’ campaign, clicking into an Ad Group on to the Keyword tab and then hovering over the magnifying glass to check your keyword’s status. Once the window opens, then you want to click on the “Details and Recommendations” link next to the Quality Score heading. The link will take you to the keyword analysis page.

It’s interesting that Google has recently alerted advertisers within their campaign dashboards to sync destination URLs to their display URLs. Using redirects for tracking can certainly affect load times and forces advertisers to use Google’s internal conversion tracking tools including Google Analytics.

One thing I have noticed (but have not formally tested so it’s just a “feel”) is that not having proper meta tags on your landing pages that are relevant to your AdWords’ keywords even if your body copy and headlines are relevant, tend to bring down quality scores. Google references their webmaster guidelines as a way to help improve your landing page quality scores.

If you analyze your log files or use some third party tracking, you may have noticed Google Ad-bot visiting your landing pages. Google crawls your landing page to determine mutliple factors including, “the usefulness and relevance of information provided on the page, ease of navigation for the user, page loading times, how many links are on the page, how links are used on the page” as well as other specific factors like a privacy policy for landing pages asking for personal information.

I recommend learning more about Google’s quality scoring of landing pages by visiting this Google FAQ. With Google representing over 60% of the search market, advertisers have to remain on top of these constant changes in order to compete not only against other companies within their industry but also against losing profits from derived from their limited PPC budgets. Good luck – it’s only getting harder.

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