Improve Adwords Quality Score by improving landing page experience
A lesser-known fact is that landing pages do not contribute much to high-Quality Scores but they contribute negatively a lot for Low-Quality Scores. A high-quality score shall help in reducing your cost of acquisition and increase your market share, volume and profitability.
How to review the contribution of landing page experience in quality score
Check the landing page experience review in Adwords and if it is average or Above Average then it is great and doesn’t bother after that. However, if it is ‘Below Average’ then improve it by using the following methods:
Techniques to improve your landing page experience and your AdWords Quality Score
Load time
Optimize your landing page to lower the page load time. This may be one of the important reasons hurting your landing page experience.
Spiderability or Crawlability
The page MUST be crawlable by adsbot-google, the Adwords bot. This bot must not be blocked explicitly in robots.txt. This Adwords bot ignores global disallows so don’t worry about that. Avoid Flash, Ajax, text on images, java, etc as the bot is NOT fully capable of understanding these technologies.
Broken Pages
Check all URLs reported in Destination URL report in Adwords. Are you sending the Adwords traffic to pages that don’t exist? Get them fixed or use 301 redirects to send traffic to relevant pages.
Keyword Relevance on the landing page
Check your URL in AdWords Keyword Tool by using the “Website” option. Does Google also see this landing page has copy relevant for keywords you are using it for or not? If not then modify the copy and use relevant keywords. The landing page copy must be contextually relevant to the keywords. Apart from a lower Quality Score, this violation shall also cause high bounce rates and lower conversions.
Transparency and privacy policy
Mention a clear privacy policy if you collect personal information. Use Opt-in methods for collecting emails. Allow content previews without registration. Don’t mess with settings or use fancy settings like disabling the back button or excessive pop-ups or auto-install software.
Navigation
Never use long scroll pages without navigation options. The navigation doesn’t have to be featured though and can be below the fold.
Who shall get maximum advantage of the above techniques
If you are in highly competitive industries and are paying Rs. 1000, Rs. 2500, Rs. 4000, Rs. 6000 per click ($50, $80, $100 per click), work on your landing age experience to make it above average. This might have a significant impact on increasing your QS, lowering your CPCs, increasing conversions, impression share, a mix of these, or all of these which can significantly improve your ROI. For $1, $2 CPCs don’t bother to spend a lot of time on landing page experience. Average may just be fine.
An Important Note
Google evaluates the landing page experience every few weeks. So your changes may take some time (up to a few weeks) to impact the Quality Score.