Has the Google AdWords Landing Page Quality Score Changed? Find Out!

by Joe

“Google is asking that you have a targeted page for every keyword that you would like to advertise against. They’re saying that if the keywords aren’t in the title tag, content, and if the page isn’t specific to the keywords that you would like to advertise against, there’s a good chance that the page won’t show up in the top Google AdWords listings, even if you’re willing to pay or bid the highest amount for a listing there.”

We keep pretty close tabs on Google AdWords Quality Score updates and we had not heard of this new initiative by Google. We thought that if this is truly a new Quality Score algorithm, then we have a lot of work to do with our clients! So, I thought I would do some investigative work to uncover the details of this new landing page initiative. I went straight to the source: our Google AdWords Representative, and our Google AdWords Quality Score Representative.

According to my Google Representatives there has been no recent updates to the landing page Quality Score ranking system. Basically, there are still three elements of your landing page that determine your landing page Quality Score:

Keyword Relevancy: Google scans your URL to make sure that your landing page is relevant to the search query and ad text. The post from SEW takes keyword relevancy to the extreme by dedicating every single keyword in its own unique landing page. Keep in mind that you need to have your account structured so that your keywords are tightly themed. These keywords should send users to a highly relevant landing page. But you don’t need to create thousands of dynamically generated landing pages to achieve relevancy.

Landing Page Load Time: Google wants to make sure that they provide the best user experience possible. If a user clicks on an ad and the landing page takes an excessive time to load, then that is a poor experience. Basically, make sure that your landing pages are clean and clutter free so that they load as quickly as possible.

Content Relevancy/User Experience: This is the element of the landing page Quality Score that is murky, even to us! Google also takes into account if your landing page provided the information/product/service that the user was searching for. I tried to drill down to find exactly how Google gauges this somewhat subjective aspect of a landing page but my Google Representatives said there are “triggers that indicate relevancy” but they wouldn’t go any further. My insight? I think they mean optimize your landing page toward conversion generation.

If you are still unclear as to if your landing page has any issues, you can just check your AdWords account! Within the AdWords keyword analysis tool, you can find this information:

We agree with the SEW article that relevancy is the key to success. However, the Google AdWords Landing Page Quality Score has not undergone a major overhaul that requires advertisers to create individual landing pages for every single keyword.

How to Target Holiday Shoppers Through Gift Finder Keywords And Landing Pages

by Amber

While consumers will still be buying Christmas presents this year as normal, they will be a little more picky about what they’re buying, how much they’re paying, and where they’re buying.

So far this week we’ve learned about earning extra revenue by advertising via shopping search engines, and how to maximize your ROI by shopping cycle bidding strategies. As day three in our holiday series, I’m going to go over how to generate even more seasonal sales by using a gift finder landing page and keywords.

When it comes to buying Christmas presents consumers need ideas. They need to find items that are in their price range, and they need to find these items quickly.

For an e-commerce site, the best thing to do on your site during the holidays is design a gift finder landing page. A gift finder landing page will immediately allow customers to find gifts by gender, by price and by category. This is a smart way to guide people along the way by giving them choices that they can easily select from and begin shopping. When it comes to converting traffic to your site, one universal marketing truth holds true: you need to flat out tell consumers what to do and where to go on your site. Don’t leave it up to them to navigate their way around. A gift finder landing page is the key to this strategy.

Without going overboard by making too many options, create your gift finder landing page first by gender.

• Male
• Female
• Little Girls
• Little Boys
• Teen Boy
• Teen Girl

Whatever best describes your product is what you should list. Then you can allow consumers to narrow down their search by price.

• Gifts under $25
• Gifts under $50
• Gifts under $100

At this point, depending on your product or service, you can add specific categories to your page.

• For the Home
• For the Office
• For the Kitchen
• For the Chef
• For the traveler

Now that you have these categories on your gift finder landing page, you can add keywords into your PPC campaign that will to take users to the individual categories. I have keywords in my account during the holidays for “gifts under $25,” “gifts under $50″, “gifts for her”, “gifts for him”, etc. and these worked really well for me last year. I’m expecting them to work the same this year. Then in your PPC ad text you can literally have your headline be the same as your keywords, “Shop Gifts for Her”.

Gift finder landing pages are a smart strategy because they direct people to the most relevant products on your site. They allow people to pick and choose specific areas they need whether its gender based, price based, or category based; it’s all right there an organized neatly which makes shopping easy and quick.

Understanding the AdWords Quality Score

quality score and ad auctions on the Google Blog. If you use AdWords read it, it’s worth the time. In my opinion the most important paragraph in the post is this one:

"What matters in this decision is not simply an advertiser’s value for a single click -– the maximum CPC that the advertiser is willing to pay — but rather the total estimated value of showing that ad: the value per click times the number of clicks that the ad is likely to receive."

Translation;

AdWords Quality Score = Google Revenue Potential
High AdWords Quality Score = High Google Revenue Potential
Low AdWords Quality Score = Low Google Revenue Potential

I spend a lot of time in forums and other areas where AdWords users congregate and without fail the most common question (and biggest source of frustration) is the AdWords quality score. Advertisers just can’t understand why they are getting a poor quality score because in their eyes their campaign/ad group/keyword/landing page is "completely relevant" and should have a perfect 10/10 quality score.

Once you understand that in terms of it’s ad network Google’s yield management practices are what drives the quality score it becomes a little easier, at least from a conceptual level, to improve your quality score. Yield management, from an ad serving point of view, means extracting the maximum amount of revenue from a fixed quantity of perishable goods and/or services (ad impressions).

Simply stated that just means Google wants to make the maximum amount of ad revenue from every single ad impression generated within their ad network. If you want to improve your quality score demonstrate to the quality score (yield management) algorithm that your ad stands to make more money for Google than other ads in the same auction and you will receive a better quality score.

Typically when I reach this point in the conversation with people a common response to the above is something along the lines of I’ll raise my bids so I’m in a higher position and that should improve my CTR. A higher bid + a better CTR should give Google what they want and should help me raise my quality score.

Unfortunately that approach doesn’t work and often just ends up frustrating the advertiser when they see all the extra money they are spending but are not seeing an improvement to their quality score. In relation to determining your quality score, Google normalizes CTR by ad position. That just means that Google knows higher positions get higher click through rates and that’s taken into account when determining your quality score. When an advertiser increases their bid to get a higher position and improve their CTR all they’ve really done is moved a poor performing ad into a higher position on the page. They won’t see an improvement in their quality score and will likely just end up drastically increasing their actual CPC without any quality score related benefits.

The best way to improve your quality score, both short and long term, is to work on improving your CTR. CTR is huge part of the quality score and can be influenced by advertisers rapidly with great ads / ad groups. Check out the following for more info about CTR and improving CTR:

source: www.ppcdiscussions.com

 Review your website for new keywords

you even look up your first keyword. Once you have your strategy in place, Amber revealed six free keyword tools that will help you expand your list. After you have laid the strategy ground work, expanded your keyword list with every possible variation - where do you go from here? Where do you get even more keywords and additional traffic? Sometimes what you are looking for is hiding right in front of your eyes. Conduct another thorough review of your website, especially those pages that are deep within your site, for even more keywords ideas; you’ll be surprised at what you discover!

Sure, you know every limb of your keyword animal from head to long tail, and you know the 20% of your keywords that drive 80% of your traffic - but there are always ways to strengthen your keyword list, expand your keyword real estate, and increase your traffic. Yes, there are keywords that are hiding right out in the open and you just need to stop thinking so hard and find them! When you created your original keyword list you made an expansive list of your services and products, which is a great way to start but there is a keyword goldmine you may not be excavating to it’s fullest potential: here is a list of pages on your site that you should review again for potential keywords.

Product/Service Pages

Yes, when you created your initial keyword list, you brainstormed on every possible variation on your products & services. But I encourage you to look again. Don’t just look at your product/service name or benefits, really think about the solution you have to offer your potential clients. When users are searching, they are not always looking for a specific product because they don’t know the solution to their problem, so they may search on the symptom to their problem.

For example, if you offer lawn care service, your clients may not always be searching for “lawn care.” They may not even be searching for your core services such as lawn trimming, landscaping, grass seeding, hedge shearing, tree removal, but they maybe searching under “dead grass solution” if they need help with their lawn; or “hedge service,” or “raised flower bed” when they are searching for landscaping services. These are all symptoms to larger problems - how can you be the solution? Review your product/services pages and give this some thought!

FAQ Page

You may be answering questions about your company on your site that you are not addressing with your keyword list. Most FAQ pages give users a better understanding of who your company is, what you have to offer, the details of your offerings, and why they should choose you over the competition. Basically, this page answers questions (that’s obvious) and builds trust. Reviewing your FAQ page can be helpful in two ways: first, it will help you build your keyword list for terms & phrases you can add to your long tail keyword list; and second, this is a good source for PPC ad copy. Your PPC ad copy is basically providing an answer to a query, so there maybe text on this page that will inspire you!

News/Updates Page

New products, new services, speaking engagements, conference appearances, strategic alliances, news articles, product reviews, acquisitions, and list the goes on and on in regards to topics that you can cover on the news/updates page of your site. There could be new keywords lurking within these news items! A speaking engagement topic may contain keywords you don’t have your in campaign, or users may be searching for the firm with whom you are forming a relationship. A product/service review from another website may highlight a benefit or solution that you hadn’t even thought of before!

About Us Page

Branded terms almost always generate highly qualified traffic. Since the user knows who you are and they are actually searching for you, it doesn’t get any better than that! However, on your About Us page, how do you describe your company? There could be terms on this page that users are searching on, but they just aren’t aware they are actually looking for you. When users don’t know exactly what they want, they will describe it and see what the SERPs have to offer.

Site Map

If you were writing a term paper (and your website was the actual paper), then your site map would be the outline. Do a review of your site map just make sure that your keyword list has every bullet on your website outline, as these are the most important points/pieces of information on your site.

And a quick note: don’t forget to review these pages on your competitors’ sites as well!

Finding keywords within your website can be like finding loose change in your couch. It was yours to begin with, you may just have lost it temporarily. But when you do re-discover what’s been lost or misplaced, it gains extra value - even it’s only a nickel, or a long-tail keyword. These efforts will help you build a better keyword list and generate more traffic.

source: ppchero.com

Bidding on branded keywords

According to a study conducted by Hitwise, one in seven brand searches do not end up at the searched-for brand’s website. This is an indication of a number of search trends:

* Bidding on branded keywords, your own as well as those of your competitors, is absolutely necessary.
* When users search for a specific brand name, six out of seven times they already know what they want and who they want it from.
* However, when users search on branded terms they are not always committed to that branded term, but they are searching for similar services/products. Therefore, their search begins with a brand term they’re already familiar with but they are actually in the research phase of the buying cycle.

If you are going to employ this strategy, you have to adhere to the proper copyright and trademark laws, as well as the editorial guidelines governed by the search engines. If you play by the rules you can bid on your competitor’s branded keywords and acquire that one-in-seven users who aren’t committed to the brand that started their search.

First, let’s review the basic copyright and trademark laws as they apply to PPC. For this article I am going to focus on bidding on competitor’s brand names. Bidding on competitor’s names is allowed, and this practice was upheld in the decision of Geico vs. Google in 2005. Geico sued Google for allowing competitors to bid on their name and trademark phrases. The court decided that as long as sponsored ads do not confuse the consumer, then this practice is legal. Marjory Stewart, a Milwaukee-based intellectual property and business law attorney, said of the Geico/Google case:

“What looks like a victory for Google after the early part of the decision of the court, may include liability on the finer points of trademark law.” She said. “A company can be held vicariously liable for trademark infringement if it has the right to control someone else downstream or DOES control them and that party infringes on another’s mark. Some of the results in the Geico case involved sites that used the Geico mark without Geico’s permission. That’s a problem.” She said that it is possible for companies like Google and Overture to be held liable for “contributory infringement” if they intentionally induced another company to engage in infringing conduct.

Bidding on a competitor’s name was deemed acceptable; but it was the advertiser’s intentions that were called into question and how they use competitor’s names within their messaging. As long as an ad is not misleading or misrepresenting your competitor, then the ad is legal. Google, Yahoo, MSN and every other search engine have established their own regulations in order to mitigate any association with contributory infringement. This is where comparison marketing comes into play.

Also, let us make the distinction between bidding on a competitor’s name and using their logo. Using a competitor’s logo for any purpose is strictly prohibited. Unless you have written permission to use a company’s logo or symbol, don’t do it.

If you are going to bid on a competitor’s brand terms, then your intentions can not be malicious or misleading. In fact, if you are going to target these terms you need to make sure that your intentions are pure and that you make this crystal clear to the search engines. The only strategy we use when bidding on these kinds of keywords is to make direct comparisons between the searched-for brand and what our client has to offer. Most searchers are looking for the best service, product, and price. If we know that our offering presents an alternative, then we’ll call a searcher’s attention to our ad and let them decide who addresses their needs best.

We believe in playing fair and generating great results, and hopefully you do as well. If you are going to utilize this strategy, make sure that you follow these steps:

* Bid low on competitors’ names. As stated earlier, six out of seven users have a clear idea of they what are looking for when searching a specific brand name. Your ad should serve as an alternative to the user’s query, and so you shouldn’t bid aggressively, otherwise your ROI will suffer.
* Write relevant, targeted ad text. Yes, you can bid on competitor’s names but take caution when using it in your ad text. I would highlight the service/product that a user maybe searching for, as opposed to using the your competitor’s name within the ad. Remember, each search engine wants to deliver a quality user experience, and in doing so they want to make sure that users are served the best possible results for their query. Relevancy is their core concern, so it should be yours as well.
* Directly compare your services/products to your competition on your landing page. Using a competitor’s name in your ad text could get your ad rejected, but you need to mention your competitor on your landing page, otherwise your quality score will suffer. Making a direct comparison to your competitor, and using branded keywords (yours and theirs) in the process, will let the search engines know that your intentions are not malicious.

Bidding on your competitor’s branded terms can be a successful way to draw qualified traffic to your site and generate additional conversions. However, be sure that you adhere to the established laws and editorial guidelines, otherwise you will have wasted your time and negatively affected your quality score with poorly chosen and executed keywords. Remember, with this strategy you are seeking that one-in-seven user who is looking for what you have to offer, they just may not know they want it from you - just yet.

source: ppchero.com