What impact does your landing page really have on your PPC campaign

Good landing pages are ones that convert and are highly important to the success of every paid search, PPC campaign.

If your landing page doesn’t match up with your ad copy or the expectation it promised, visitors will become just another bounce statistic and the cost and effort of getting them to click on your ad will be wasted.

But how do landing pages impact on quality score?

There is much talk about landing pages, landing page design and rightly so but they have less impact on Adwords quality score than might be commonly believed.

Well, that is not entirely true as landing pages do contribute to quality score when:-

• Estimating first page bids
• Deciding whether keywords are eligible in the bid process
• Calculating cost-per-click (CPC)

but not when calculating Ad Rank (in what position on the results page ad will appear).

Quality Score (QS)

QS is calculated in real-time each time a searcher enters a search query and used when the decision made:-

• if your ad will be shown
• what position it will appear
• what each click will cost

You can get an indication of how well Google thinks you’re doing. The keyword tab in your Adwords account displays a relative scale between 1 (poor) and 10 (excellent) for each of your keywords with 7 as an average and minimum target.

It is influenced by how well the search phrase entered matches your ad copy, and keywords your bidding on, which in turn influences CTR (click-through-rates).

It is a circular process with CTR having a major influence on QS used to calculate Ad Rank.

Google keeps the details pretty close their chest and don’t explain in any great depth just how the calculation is made but gives some explanation here.

Ad Rank

Ad Rank is the process Google uses to decide which advertiser’s ads will appear and in which order on the page.

When someone carries out a search Google assigns an ad rank to every keyword that matches the search query and is done in the split second it takes for the results page to load.

It is calculated by the simple multiplication of QS x max CPC and compared with the the ad rank of every other matched keyword.

The highest ranked keyword gets top spot and so on down the ad rank scores. The actual ad displayed depends on the rotation schedule chosen in campaign settings.

So what about landing pages…

Although landing pages may not be the critical factor for PPC marketing (getting searchers to click on your ad) they have a major contribution to make when the overall success of the campaign is considered which, after all, is the objective in the first place.