A well-designed landing page = huge savings on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Given the profitability of PPC advertising, many companies will be investing more money in this marketing approach in the coming years. Many however are unaware that it is possible to substantially increase the number of targeted visits whilst maintaining the exact same budget. There are several means by which to achieve this feat but one of the least known is most certainly landing page optimization (LPO).

The landing page is one of the factors accounted for in Google’s “quality score” yet very few businesses think much about it as many are led to believe that Google is unable to analyze this aspect in detail. Think again! Before going into more detail, here is a brief definition of the "quality score" and its ingredients according to Google.

The "Quality score" is a dynamic variable calculated for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. In general, a good “Quality Score” means that your keyword will trigger ads in a better position and at a lower cost.

The main ingredients of the "quality score" are:

• The historical Click through rate (CTR) of the keyword and the related ad on Google
• Your account history
• CTR history of all display URL in the concerned ad group
• The landing page quality
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical area where your ad is shown

As mentioned in this list, a well-designed landing page affects the "quality score" and could reduce your PPC advertising costs and improve the positioning of your ads. To test the significance of these improvements, we performed a test with two of our clients, both of whom had very similar Adwords for all of the ingredients listed above to the exclusion of the landing page. They of course purchased the same keywords.

Without further ado, here are the results of our analysis:

Although it is impossible to accurately identify all variables, it is still very clear that an optimized landing page generally results in a lower CPC and a better average position. The most important difference (-36%) concerned a very competitive expression with just one keyword. According to these figures, you could save $3,600 on a campaign of $10,000 per month by optimizing your landing page.

For those interested in saving money, here are some landing page optimization guidelines:

• Limit the use of full Flash pages as Google will often have a harder time decoding them which may result in longer download times
• Use landing pages that regularly use the keywords you’ve purchased and a relevant content that is easily read by Google’s robots
• Redirect the user to the best page on your site ... which may not necessarily be your home page

Finally, we would also like to mention that results can not be guaranteed if only your landing pages are optimized. Although we have attempted to isolate this "variable", Google never really tells all and it is possible that an unknown variable is behind the improvement we observed. The best approach would be to test it yourself ... and let us know if you obtain similar results.