After a series of tests carried out in August in Latin America, Spain and Portugal, Google officially announced an update to its Adwords algorithm at the beginning of October. The goal is to improve the user experience.
Thus, the quality of the chosen landing pages will now have a greater weight in the calculation of the Quality Score (or level of quality). Along with landing page quality, click-through rate and keyword relevance were already the top 3 factors in Quality Score . However, the ratio of the importance of these 3 factors will therefore tend to evolve towards a greater share in favor of the quality of the landing page.
Indeed, even if the quality of the landing page has long been one of the factors taken into account by Google in the calculation of its Quality Score , this element previously appeared more as a negative signal. Thus, an advertiser who does not comply with the best practices dictated by Google could see his ads suspended or even his account deleted.
Now, the quality of the landing page becomes an element in its own right. Thus, a relevant and good quality landing page for a given query will allow advertisers to better position themselves in Adwords search results and thus reduce their cost per click.
The creation and choice of quality landing pages as well as a relevant Adwords strategy according to the different landing pages therefore becomes essential.
Here are some recommendations and practical advice to help you improve the quality of the landing pages of your Adwords campaigns.
HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT LANDING PAGE(S)?
1. Avoid sending your visitors to the home page. Instead, focus on more specific pages on the website.
2. Use landing pages that meet good ergonomic practices in order to offer the visitor the best possible user experience. For example, avoid pages containing pop-ups (or pop-up windows) or pages that take too long to load.
3. If you have access to Google Analytics data from the website before putting your Adwords campaign online, choose to start with the pages that have the best performance indicators ( low bounce rate , interesting page visit time, fast page loading).
4. Test multiple landing pages for 1-3 weeks to see which perform best (click through rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc.). In particular, you can use the Campaign Experiments feature offered by Adwords to test 2 different landing pages at the same time for the same group of keywords.
HOW TO BUILD YOUR CAMPAIGN FROM KEYWORDS TO LANDING PAGES?
5. Segment your Adwords campaign appropriately into different ad groups based on the destination pages chosen.
6. Keep in mind that there needs to be consistency between the following:
- the keyword searched for/clicked on by the Internet user;
- the keyword group in which the clicked keyword is found;
- the ad: ideally, the keywords must be found there – by inserting them, for example, in the display URL (e.g.: monsiteweb.com/mon-mot-cle) or even by dynamically inserting words -keys in the title or body of the ad;
- the keywords found in the text content of the landing page. Also do not hesitate to optimize your pages for organic referencing (HTML tags, text content, etc.): this can only have a positive impact on your campaign!
7. Deliver on your promises by offering the offer displayed in your ad on the landing page.
8. Use the ad extension Ad Sitelinks (or sitelinks for ads) which, when positioned above the organic results, allows the user to choose more specific pages. Don't forget to take into account the relevance between the keywords chosen for the ad's sitelink and those of the landing page.
If you have any other suggestions for improving the quality of landing pages, please let us know :)!
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