Your Landing Page Is Below Average

jriddick

jriddick

Stealth Assassin
Mar 8, 2010
228
4
0
I have an Adwords campaign running, but it's saying my landing page is below average.

On the landing page, I have the keywords mentioned in about 400 words of content amidst the other products.

Not that many words because it's an ecommerce store, I want to display the products.

What are some things I can do to change my 4/10 Quality Score?

I have multiple keywords in the 4-6 range.

Thanks.
 


I can only presume that you campaign isn't as targeted as it could be. This is usually the cause of low quality scores.

First thing would be to split your keywords into smaller more targeted lists and create a separate ad group for each list.

You can then create a super targeted landing page for each new targeted ad group/keyword list. The same goes for your ad. As your keywords are more targeted you can create a more targeted ad also. This should provide a much better CTR on your ad and in turn bring your CPC down.

It may take some time for your quality scores to rise as your account history is taken into consideration. Your campaign CTR average maybe really low and it will take a while to bring this average up. Obviously I don't know this to be the case with yourself.

You should always be split testing landing pages and ads to get the best CTR and conversion rates. You may start by paying a premium for your clicks, but over time they will reduce based on the overall performance of your campaign.

An example of why this is the case:

Site A has a CTR of 2% and pays £2/click, over 1000 impressions, Google makes £40
Site B has a CTR of 5% and pays £1/click, over 1000 impressions, Google makes £50
Site B will be displayed above Site A even though they pay half as much per click.

The aim is to get everything as targeted and relevant as possible, you will profit, Google will profit, everyones happy.

Good luck.
 
swiftmoney said:
I can only presume that you campaign isn't as targeted as it could be. This is usually the cause of low quality scores.

First thing would be to split your keywords into smaller more targeted lists and create a separate ad group for each list.
Click to expand...

I have a separate ad group for each keyword. And there are only 22 keywords in this campaign right now.

swiftmoney said:
You can then create a super targeted landing page for each new targeted ad group/keyword list. The same goes for your ad. As your keywords are more targeted you can create a more targeted ad also. This should provide a much better CTR on your ad and in turn bring your CPC down.
Click to expand...

It's an ecommerce site, so I can't really go creating a separate landing page for each keyword. My competitor's send their traffic to their homepage as well.

I think my ad is fine, it just gets shown in the 5 position which is killing CTR.

swiftmoney said:
It may take some time for your quality scores to rise as your account history is taken into consideration. Your campaign CTR average maybe really low and it will take a while to bring this average up. Obviously I don't know this to be the case with yourself.
Click to expand...

I can't change the CTR until I change the Avg. Pos, which won't change until I change the Quality Score, which won't change until I change the landing page.

Here are my current dismal stats:

Impressions: 1,664
Clicks: 1
CTR: % 0.06
Avg. POS: 5.7
 
productionhead said:
You think your ad is fine when it gets a .06% CTR?

lol
Click to expand...

I'm saying in terms of Quality Score, they say it's average which is why I've been focusing on the Landing Page quality because they say it's below average.

And most of the time, the ad is displayed 6 or 7, so far below the fold it's a wonder I even got that 1 click.
 
jriddick said:
It's an ecommerce site, so I can't really go creating a separate landing page for each keyword. My competitor's send their traffic to their homepage as well.
Click to expand...

I'm not an expert in ecommerce but I have a profitable ecomm site and from all of the case studies and resources I've read one of the worst things you can do for an ecomm site is just send people to your home page.

If they are searching for "mens sweaters" then send them to the "mens sweaters" category/page of your store. If they are searching for "Nike sweaters" then link them to the Nike sweaters.

Also, there are a ton of free case studies and resources out there specifically for ecommerce you just have to go look for them.
 
swiftmoney said:
Right. Even averaging position 5 you should still be getting a decent CTR.
Click to expand...

My top account has a campaign has an average position of 3.5 with a 1.60% CTR and another campaign with an average position of 4 with a 1.18% CTR.

An average position of 5 means you are almost NEVER top 3, so i'm not surprised his CTR is so low.
 
jriddick said:
I'm saying in terms of Quality Score, they say it's average which is why I've been focusing on the Landing Page quality because they say it's below average.

And most of the time, the ad is displayed 6 or 7, so far below the fold it's a wonder I even got that 1 click.
Click to expand...

Yup.

What's your targeting? broad/phrase/exact?

You're probably going to need to jack up your CPC and get your average position between 3.5-4 so that you can start getting some volume to boost your Quality Score over time.
 
On some of my campaigns (also e-commerce), highly targetted with seperate campaigns for each product group I was also getting some low quality scores.

There was no logic for the low quality scores - the ones that were low were actually more relevant (title tag, h1 etc) than the ones that were high.

At first I accepted this and removed them from the ad groups (trying to improve the overall quality of the campaign / account).

Later I put them back in with very high bids. Guess what happened :)
 
mpbiz said:
I'm not an expert in ecommerce but I have a profitable ecomm site and from all of the case studies and resources I've read one of the worst things you can do for an ecomm site is just send people to your home page.

If they are searching for "mens sweaters" then send them to the "mens sweaters" category/page of your store. If they are searching for "Nike sweaters" then link them to the Nike sweaters.

Also, there are a ton of free case studies and resources out there specifically for ecommerce you just have to go look for them.
Click to expand...

This.

Put yourself in a customer's shoes, maybe in a different niche if doing it in your niche is hard for you.

If you're looking for "genital herpes" and you get webmd.com in the results, would you like that or would you like going to Genital Herpes - HSV-1 & 2 - WebMD: Symptoms, Treatments, Causes, Transmission, and Tests directly, which I hear Greg Fowler, a scammer has btw.
 
K-Noop said:
Yup.

What's your targeting? broad/phrase/exact?

You're probably going to need to jack up your CPC and get your average position between 3.5-4 so that you can start getting some volume to boost your Quality Score over time.
Click to expand...

I'm only targeting exact. I've jacked up my bids, the average position is verrry slowly rising.

I think I'll let the campaign run for a couple more days before changing up the ads to something more along my competitor's lines.

Here's an update:

Imp: 2427
Clicks: 1
CTR: 0.04%
Avg. POS: 5.4
 
Surely that 0.06 is not the "search" CTR. You must be looking at both search and display click through rates as a whole? Create separate campaigns for search and display.

I had a similar problem recently where Google was displaying their usual unhelpful message: "landing page is low quality". My ad was in low positions (about 5). I raised the bids and the QS increased right up from 4 to 10. The CTR did dramatically improve with the increased position though, so it was probably the CTR that helped the QS.
 
Wong Shun Leung said:
Surely that 0.06 is not the "search" CTR. You must be looking at both search and display click through rates as a whole? Create separate campaigns for search and display.

I had a similar problem recently where Google was displaying their usual unhelpful message: "landing page is low quality". My ad was in low positions (about 5). I raised the bids and the QS increased right up from 4 to 10. The CTR did dramatically improve with the increased position though, so it was probably the CTR that helped the QS.
Click to expand...

No, that's search alone. Here's an update on the state:

Imp: 4355
Clicks: 5
CTR: .11%
Avg. POS: 5.3

This is a very tightly controlled campaign initially because I wanted to see how much traffic there is in exact.

I plan on changing this campaign soon, but will probably keep running it for several days.

My main competitor in this space spends $X,XXX a month and has over 1,000 keywords in his PPC campaign.

I plan on overhauling my entire site, uploading many more keywords, and relaunching this campaign with a much higher budget.
 
The top 3 tend to get more clicks but then I find in some cases that they can be window shoppers. Serious searchers usually look carefully before clicking.

Aim for a CTR of at least 1.5%. I personally aim to pause or try and improve anything lower than that as it will drag down the account quality as a whole.

Hope this helps a little. Adwords can be frustrating sometimes.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom