Here is a quick update on my experiences with Google’s Adwords Quality Score for keywords. I am testing a new PPC campaign and build new landing page around an existing website. I did not try something completely different, but it was still a notch different to my landing pages from other campaigns. And I have to say – almost sure enough I was suffering a loss in quality score values. Out of all my keywords NONE received a great quality score even though each keyword was mentioned at least once on the landing page. Most keywords received a “good” rating, but I had some that came in as poor even though they were a) related to the landing page by topic and being mentioned (100% match) on the landing page itself. Minimum bids ranked from $0.10 to $0.30 for the good keywords and $0.40 to $5.00 for the poor keywords.
Here is the main observation I made. I had already mentioned that before, but too many images in the upper part of a landing page seem to cause my keywords to rank less good. My landing pages has enough text content for sure (about 400-500 words), but apparently that is not enough for Google. There is enough text content above the fold so that the visitor is not greeted by images alone, but apparently that is not enough for Google to consider the landing page as of high quality.
So, I think I know what triggered the page to rank bad for quality score assignments. I am using a coupon-style image on the page and it repeats itself about 3 times (1 above the fold, 1 one page down, 1 at the bottom of the page). There is also an additional image that makes the header at the top of the page. The landing page is about 2.5 page folds long. Apparently that kind of setup is causing the problem. They keywords are on the mark and I also embed them into the URL for dynamic keyword inclusions. I guess I have to make the landing page smaller and go not beyond 1.5 page folds (2 maximum) and reduce the number of repeat-images displayed.
I decided to let my campaigns run for a day or two to see if I can get some clicks and see how the program converts in the end. I cleaned up the Adwords campaigns and removed all the “poor” rated keywords and adjusted some of the other ones.
What are your experiences with landing page design and Google Adwords Quality Score ratings? Have you seen something similar or is this an isolated case of me being stupid and making rookie mistakes?
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Hi interesting post I don’t know if this helps you but we have done a ton of experiments on landing pages and it seems the most important factors are the same kind of things that you would do if you did SEO for those key words on the page. What is in the H1 and H2 tags makes a ton of difference as well as the Alt tags on the image. As for the pictures I am not so sure this is to much of a problem if you have enough text as our landing pages generally get a “great” quality score with a large image at the top.