A good landing page = major savings in paid positioning

Given the profitability of paid positioning, many companies will invest more money in this marketing approach over the next few years. However, many are unaware that it is often possible to keep exactly the same budget and substantially increase the number of targeted visits. Several approaches exist to achieve this feat, but one of the least explored approaches is undoubtedly the choice and optimization of the landing page.

The landing page is indeed one of the elements that enters into the calculation of Google's "quality score". On the other hand, few companies attach importance to it since many have the reflex to think that Google cannot analyze it 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 uses a number of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and user queries. Generally, the higher the quality score of your keywords, the better the costs and position of your ads.

The main ingredients of the “quality score” are:

• the history of the click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword and the corresponding ad on Google
• the history of your account
• the history of the CTR of the URLs to be displayed contained in the group of ads concerned
• the quality your landing page
• the relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group;
• the relevance of the keyword and the corresponding ad to search queries;
• the performance of your account in the geographical area where the ad will be displayed

As mentioned in this list, a good landing page has an effect on the "quality score" and therefore may lower your cost per click (CPC) and improve the positioning of your ads. In order to test the importance of these improvements, we therefore carried out a test with 2 of our clients who had very similar Adwords accounts for all the ingredients noted above with the exception of landing pages. They were of course buying the same keywords.

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

Although it is impossible to precisely isolate all the variables, it is still very clear that an optimized landing page generally offers a lower CPC and a better average position. The largest difference (-36%) was found for a very competitive expression of a single keyword. Based on these numbers, optimizing your landing pages could represent a savings of $3,600 on a $10,000/month campaign.

For those for whom such savings sound attractive, here are some recommendations for optimizing your landing pages:

• Limit the use of all-Flash landing pages, these are generally difficult for Google to decipher and may result in longer download times
• Use landing pages that regularly use the keyword you purchased and relevant content visible to Google robots
• Direct the Internet user to the best page on your site…not always to your homepage

Finally, we would like to mention that it is impossible for us to guarantee that you will obtain such results by only optimizing your landing pages. Although we have tried to isolate this "variable", Google never really tells everything and an unknown variable may have caused this improvement. On the other hand, the best approach would probably be to test it…and let us know if you get similar results.