Warning! AdWords Increasing Landing Page & Quality Score Requirements

Here’s a heads-up and a warning to all Google AdWords advertisers: According to Google’s own Inside AdWords blog, they’re about to tighten up landing page and quality score requirements across the board.

The following factors will significantly impact all AdWords advertisers:

1. Landing Page Quality. Google is increasing the weight given to landing page quality in determining AdWords Quality Score. This means that poorly-designed landing pages, especially “squeeze pages” that have no navigation, will see Quality Scores severely impacted, or will be banned from the AdWords network altogether (a welcome change to advertisers like myself who play by the rules).

2. Landing Page Relevancy. Weight given to landing page relevancy is going up as well. This means that both the keyword phrase that triggers a user’s ad, as well as the ad copy itself, must be relevant to the content on the landing page. You’ll see those annoying ads with content like “click here dude, really, click here” disappearing as they’re “slapped” out of existence by these changes.

To cope with these changes – and even excel and defeat your competitors who are not aware of this – the following tips will assist you:

• Make sure your landing page(s) include full navigation, enough content and information to let a user know what your site is all about, and most important of all, eliminate “squeeze pages” as landing pages in your AdWords campaigns.
• Review your ad groups to be sure keyword groups are tightly themed. As an example, an HVAC contractor offering repair services would want Ad Group A to focus solely on air conditioning repair and point those ads to a landing page dedicated to a/c repair, while Ad Group B that focuses on furnace repair should have ad copy relevant only to furnace repair, and all ads should point to a furnace repair landing page.
• As always, make sure you don’t have any issues with any pages in your website that violate AdWords policies, such as pop-under or hover fly-in ads, exit splash pop-ups, any type of scripts that collect user information with user consent, and so on.