The rankings of ads in AdWords, and the minimum prices paid per keyword, are being shaken up as Google rolls out a new quality score for the service.
In this post on the Inside AdWords blog, Landing page quality update, Google state that they are making changes to the way landing pages are scored.
This may be beneficial, or it may be troublesome, for those of you using Google’s AdWords method of PPC marketing. If somebody else’s quality score for an ad for the given keyword ranks lower than your own after this update, you will make a gain for the quality score for that keyword, but you will lose out if your own quality score goes lower. Personally, I am seeing more impressions, more clicks and lower costs, but a lower click-through rate, over my whole set of campaigns when I compare the statistics of 1st to 4th July to those of 8th to 11th July. If this is a sign of things to come, then I am quite pleased!
One of the factors that influences your landing page quality score is going to be the relevance of your keyword to the landing page, so a certain amount of optimisation to rank for that keyword, as if you were trying to rank for the free listings, certainly won’t go amiss.
When designing landing pages, it’s a good idea to consider common sense. Is your page informative and helpful to a user? Do you have any original content on it that pertains to the subject matter of the keyword? If so, then you stand to get a good quality score for your landing page.
There’s a way of dynamically varying the text on your page, according to the keyword used to access your page. I’ll be talking about that soon.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
