How Landing Pages Can Drastically Affect Your Ad Quality Score

When running PPC campaigns, quality score is a clear indicator of how well your ad will rank against others and, essentially, how well it will convert.

There are several different ways you can influence your quality score, from using smaller ads and tighter keywords, but for the purpose of today, I’m going to be focusing on landing pages and why they have such a big impact on your quality score.

Why Landing Pages are Important For Your Quality Score

First, to have a successful landing page, it has to offer a successful experience to the user. Before you do anything, you want to consider what someone will think and feel when they arrive on your landing page (which is the page they’re directed to right after they click your ad).

If you’re selling a service or a product — which you most likely are if you’re driving ads - then you want your landing page to sell. That means you want it to convert.

When you have a well turned-out landing page that performs well, you have a funnel system that brings in a return on investment. You can get much more mileage out of your landing page if you focus on providing an excellent experience. That means making it easy for visitors to purchase what you’re selling, sign up for a newsletter, or take any other action you want them to take.

The more people who land on your page, stick around and, ultimately buy, the higher your quality score will be. The higher your quality score, the cheaper it is to run your ads and the better placement you'll receive.

A good landing page not only improves conversions, it reduces your overall cost per acquisition. And for campaigns with small margins, every bit helps.

How You Can Improve Your Landing Pages

A quality landing page is necessary to improve your quality score, but what exactly does that entail?

1. Provide relevant, original content

This is a no-brainer, really. When a visitor arrives on your landing page, they want to see information directly related to the ad they clicked on. They want to know exactly what the page is about and how it can help them solve a problem.

2. Promote transparency

In this day and age, authenticity is so important if you want to build trust with your buyers. Transparency builds trust, and trust means a higher chance of sales.

How do you do this? By going into detail about your product or service before hitting visitors with the buy button. Think about if the roles were reversed - what would you like to find out before you make a purchase?

3. Make navigation easy

People don’t have time to go digging around for the information they want and need. Instead, they’d much rather it was handed to them on a plate.

To do this, make the navigation on your landing page and site really easy and pain-free. Encourage visitors to stick around, too, by making sure your page loads quickly and is engaging once they finally arrive. High retention rates on your landing pages will increase your quality score.

Linking Keywords to Landing Pages

I talk more about what your quality score actually means and how you can leverage your landing pages to boost it in this week’s Weekly Marketing Tips video, which you can watch right here.

Brad Batesole is an entrepreneur, startup advisor, and marketing expert. He develops training for  Lynda?.com and consults on Marketing & SEO with Branded Crate. Brad has spent more than twelve years working at the crossroads of business development, marketing, and social media. He was featured in Entrepreneur Magazine...

Learn more about Brad and view all his Lynda.com courses.