AdWords now considers the landing page

As an AdSense publisher, you're probably already reading Google's Inside AdSense blog. If not, you should be! But have you also subscribed to Inside AdWords?

I always tell AdSense publishers to pay close attention to AdWords. In fact, that's the first topic of discussion in the first issue of my AdSense newsletter (subscribe now — it's free and you get some special bonuses). AdWords is Google's main advertising program, not AdSense. AdWords existed before AdSense. AdWords is how Google makes its money, not with AdSense — AdSense is merely a vehicle for increasing the reach of Google's advertising program. So changes to the AdWords program must always be looked at closely by AdSense publishers.

AdWords just made an important change to the way it ranks ads. As you know, the ads use a bid-for-placement system to determine who gets shown in which position and how often on target pages. To prevent advertisers from staying in top spot by bidding highly, Google incorporates a feedback system that takes into account different factors, such as the ad's clickthrough rate, to ensure that the best ads get shown regardless of how much they bid. This feedback gets translated into something called the Quality Score.

What's new? The Quality Score now considers the ad's landing page. In other words, Google will crawl the destination page for the ad (the page you get sent to you when you click the ad) and try to determine how well it relates to the keywords associated with the ad. If the page isn't obviously relevant, a lower Quality Score will result and the ad won't be shown as often.

So where would they get the technology to determine how relevant a page is to a particular topic? Probably from the AdSense program, since keyword determination is at the heart of AdSense. Very interesting. I've not looked through my logs yet to see if a new crawler is coming to look at my landing pages (I place the odd ad with AdWords) or if they're just using the AdSense crawler. Many landing pages have AdSense ads on them, too, so it may in fact make sense to combine the two functions into a single crawler.

The addition of landing page analysis to the Quality Score is probably in reaction to consumer complaints that advertisers are bidding on keywords that are completely inappropriate. In fact, many consumers don't realize that AdWords ads (on search result pages) are advertisements and confuse them with regular search links and are probably quite disappointed with what they get when they click those ads…

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!

Comments