Since the Quality Score has a direct impact on calculating your Actual CPC, should you optimize your landing page to reduce your CPC, and improve your ad’s position?
Google has stated that the landing page is taken into consideration when determining the Quality Score. Does this mean Google will spider your entire site from your Adwords destination URL, then evaluate it using their search algorithm? Will they use techniques like Latent Semantic Indexing to determine if your site and landing page are relevant to your keywords and ads?
If that’s not enough, consider this. Additionally, it is known that Google has a tremendous amount of data on web usage. Some other possibilities are that Google could use information from the Google Toolbar to provide an indication of whether or not users are judging our site to be valuable, and include this as another metric when calculating the Quality Score.
If all that doesn’t happen, at the very least does your landing page get crawled?
I asked Google these questions. Their answer was very vague. I was told that Google does crawl the adwords destination url, however it is nothing like a regular web crawl.
Bottomline, it seems that a optimized landing page can lower your actual CPC, and/or improve your position in the SERP’s.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
how does one optimize a landing page to improve CPC and positioning? shouldn’t the landing page be optimized for organic purposes anyway? am i wasting money by sending users to my homepage instead of an optimized landing page?
avi, at the very least, you can optimize the landing page by making sure it has some crawlable text that is relevant to your ad & keywords. I don’t know if you’re wasting money by sending traffic to your homepage…that depends on your business objectives. But as a general rule of thumb, it’s always better to send PPC traffic to an optimized/relevant landing page. Especially for increasing your conversion rate.
The best PPC programs will take the person to a landing page that reflects the entered keyword. If Google is crawling this page, they would see a high coorelation and give your ad an advantage. This makes sense, as it follows the Google credo of relevancy.
How good is the user experience when they type in Hot Wheel Cars and land on a page that is about Toys — and where you then must hunt for the cars you seek.
Now if you are managing thousands of keywords, how do you manage such a feat? Let’s say you are managing someone like Sony with thousands of products? Based on previous discussions, a server-side dynamic landing page should fit the bill. Yes?
And in the end, isn’t this PPC quality score no different than organic SEO? Makes good sense to me.