Adwords Landing Page Quality Update Explained

Last week, Adwords has gone live with the expected changes of how it evaluates landing page quality. This is what Inside Adwords Blog explained the changes were being implemented before the December holiday season:

We want to do everything we can to serve the most relevant and highest quality ads to our users. By making improvements to landing page quality, we’re not only able to help users (who are your potential customers) find what they want, but also help you maximize your leads because your ads will no longer have to compete with ads that are providing a poor user experience. It was best to launch these long-planned improvements as soon as we were ready to go, technically speaking.

To summarize it, these are the 3 major points:

#1 High CTR does not mean high quality landing page

An ad with a high CTR does not necessarily translate to a good user experience. For example, an ad may promote a new computer science curriculum from a college with search query ‘New Computer Science Curriculum 2007′, but after clicking on the ad, the user may be taken to a page that shows Spanish language curriculum.

#2 High conversion rate does not mean high quality landing page

A landing page may have very high conversion rate simply because the product or service is very much seasonal and is currently in very high demand. However, Google focuses on the actual content and relevance of the landing page to a user who clicks on the ad and ends up on the web page.

#3 Using Website Optimizer does not improve the landing page quality

Inside Adwords Blog explained,

Using Website Optimizer to experiment with your landing page does not have any impact on your Quality Score or your landing page quality. Website Optimizer evaluates your conversion rates to tell you which marketing messages are converting most often on your landing page, whereas the Quality Score doesn’t incorporate any conversion information.

This is the description on homepage of Google Website Optimizer,

Website Optimizer is a free and self-service tool. Without extensive experience or resources, you can run multivariate experiments on landing page content, including headlines, promotional copy, and images.

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