I know it was a tough week for a lot of AdWords advertisers, provoked by the recent update of Google’s Landing Page Algorithm.
I researched as much as I could and the conclusion is that 4 types of sides are hardest hit:
- Squeezes pages (the lending pages whose single purpose is to gather an email address in exchange for a free report which not always is really free !)
- One Page Sales Letter Web Site or Pitch Page
- Affiliate Web Sites
- Web Sites build for Google AdSense
In a nut shall the Google AdWords changes are a
It will be good long range but now a lot of people will suffer.
However, to explain the New Landing Page Algorithm I’ll start defining new terms Google created:
- Quality Score = it is the basis for measuring the quality of your keyword and determining your minimum bid on Google, the quality of your ad’s landing page, and other relevancy factors. (WOW! The devil is in details…)
- Landing Page = an active Web Page where customers will “land” when they click your ad. The web address for this page is also called a destination URL or clickthrough URL
- Daily budget = is as always has been, the amount you’re willing to spend on a specific AdWords campaign per day
- Ad Served Percentage (%) = represents how often an ad has been shown in relation to the rest of the active ads within the same Ad Group
- Display URL = it is the URL displayed on your ad to identify your site to users (limit 35 char., can be different to the URL your ad links to, but it should be an actual URL that is part of your site)
- Ad Delivery = how quickly your ads are shown within a specific AdWords campaign each day. When you select a budget for your campaign you can choose: 1) Standard Delivery – the ads impressions will be spread across the day, 2) Accelerated Delivery - the adds will be display as often as possible until your budget is reached. For both cases if your budget is set below the system-recommended budget, you ads may not receive all possible impressions.
Now, we all are talking the same language, let’s see what Google’s New Landing Page Algorithm means.
The idea is not a new one, Google announced in December 2005 that they began to implement “The New Landing Page quality score”. What happened in first 2 week of July is just an update of the Algorithm.
What is new now?
In addition to evaluate your keywords and your ads, Google now:
- Scrutinizes your landing pages
- Calculate a “Quality score” for every landing page
What is “Quality Score”, in Google Words:
Quality Score is determined by
- your keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google
- relevance of your ad text
- "historical keyword performance” on Google
Well, make sense even though “historical keyword performance” looks subjective to me. We don’t know historical keyword performance when we choose them!
The Quality Score measurements makes the advertiser increase relevancy!
But how good, fair, balanced they can be when they determine this Quality Score.
Up till now we already noticed:
- advertisers whose on line business has been shut down
- a friend of mine told my that class action suits already exists
- a general resentment towards what is seen as “un fair” changes exist as well
Let’s not panic and try to overcome by educating ourself about what does Google wants!
The Google point of view is that some advertisers are delivering
"a poor user experience” (which actually means pages with a low Quality Score, those are required to pay much more for their clicks).
What Google wants to see is:Important Note: With other words instead to jump and increase the pay per click we better try to create high quality score pages.
- Relevant and substantial content. TIP: in AdWords, link to a page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information about the product/service in your ad
- Ensure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and your ad test
- Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content. Up till now it was a good practice to make outgoing links blend in with the rest of a page’s content because this is a sure way to get more clicks which translate in more money for you. Well, now Google wants those ads to be clearly marketed as sponsored links
- Try to provide info without requiring registering, or providing a preview of what users will get by registering. WOW again! Attention squeezes pages authors! If you’ve got a squeeze page, that means that you are going against Google’s guideline! It will be harder now to acquire a big opt in list!
- Build pages that provide substantial and useful info to users. This means provide additional info beyond what the user may have seen in your ad or on the page prior to clicking on your ad.
If you don’t do this:With other words Google doesn’t like pages with a lot of ads or pages that have duplicate content – GET ORIGINAL CONTENT!
- Your position in the Search Engine Results pages will suffer
- Your cost per click (CPCs) will go up
You should have unique content as well. Up till now using free articles from article directories has been used and abused, it was a great way to build content fast, now you will pay a penalty in your AdWord cost.
In Conclusion, what do we do now?
If your site is affected try to:
- Update your site or landing page using Google’s guidelines (the points you just read it above), then ask them to re-evaluate your site, call Google at 866.246.6453, ask for a “manual review” of your site, Google will do it, but I don’t know how long will take!
- Improve your Quality Score(QS) of your landing page.
To improve the QS:
- Remove all AdSense ads from your landing page
- Create more original content for your site
- In your squeeze pages, add more content but without to create a lot of repetition, or move this page to another site you own, a site with good page rank and lots of content because the squeeze page will inherit some of the main domain’s quality score
- If you have 2-5% keyword density on your landing pages Google will improve your quality score a little
- Use your keywords in your landing page’s filename. If you are bidding on antiques, make your landing page antiques.html
- The landing page’s title tag matches the keywords you’ve targeting
- Use the header tags:
This is all I know; comments will be appreciated and carefully considered.
In a hurry it was easy for me to Blog, but this can be a perfect subject for a eBay Wiki as well, I’ll think about it.
To our success
Michaela Cernescu
