The Importance of Landing Page Optimization
Posted in Search Marketing by Mark Barrera on June 12th, 2006 
If you are a current Google Adwords advertiser or are thinking about joining the Adwords program, take notice of recent changes by Google.
Recently Google displayed a notice in all Adwords accounts notifying advertisers of a change in the terms of service and a change in the way an ad’s quality score is determined.
In the new Adwords terms of service it states that the price an advertiser now pays is partially determined by the relevance of the landing page. Google will now be sending spiders to crawl the landing pages and check for the presence of keyword material that is relevant to the term that the searcher intially used.
What does this mean?
This means that you can most likely no longer simply pick a page in your site to send traffic to any more. The better targeted your landing page is, the less you will pay for each click. This can mean big savings for large ppc campaigns. Web site owners must now put up the initial investment needed for the creation of optimized landing pages in order to achieve long term savings.
Experienced users have been optimizing their landing pages for a while now. You may ask, “Why do I need to optimize a landing page?” The answer is that you want a user who is searching for a term such as “dallas mortgage lender” to be presented with ads from websites that are the most relevant for that term. If the advertiser sends you to a page about real estate for sale and the user wants to pre-apply for a mortgage then you have just wasted the users time by sending them to a page that is off topic to their search. Google has always stated that they want to improve the search experience for all users so this is their answer. By rewarding the advertisers who use properly optimized landing pages, the searcher is more likely to get to a relevant site because Google will show their ad higher.
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