Understanding landing page experience

30/11/2019

Landing page experience is Google Ads’ measure of how well your website gives people what they’re looking for when they click your ad. Your landing page is the URL people arrive at after they click your ad, and Google Ads analyzes it through a combination of automated systems and human evaluation. The experience you offer affects your Ad Rank and therefore your CPC and position in the ad auction. Your ads may show less often (or not at all) if they point to websites that offer a poor user experience.

This article explains how you can improve your landing page experience. For specific instructions on how to optimize your website for mobile, see Principles of mobile site design and Create an effective mobile site.

Before you begin

Landing page experience is different from policy violations. If your site violates Google Ads policy, you receive no landing page experience rating at all, and your ads don’t run.

Instructions

You can improve your landing page experience by taking any or all of the following steps:

  1. Offer relevant, useful and original content

    • Make sure your landing page is directly relevant to your ad text and keyword.

      • Be specific when the user wants a particular thing: If someone clicks on an ad for a sports car, they shouldn’t wind up on a general “all car models and makes” page
      • Be general when the user wants options: If someone’s looking to compare digital cameras, they probably don’t want to land on a specific model’s page
    • Provide useful information on your landing page about whatever you're advertising.
    • Try to offer useful features or content that are unique to your site.
  2. Promote transparency and foster trustworthiness on your site
    • Openly share information about your business and clearly state what your business does
    • Explain your products or services before asking visitors to fill out forms
    • Make it easy for visitors to find your contact information
    • If you request personal information from customers, make it clear why you're asking for it and what you'll do with it
    • Distinguish sponsored links, like ads, from the rest of your website’s content
  3. Make mobile and computer navigation easy
    • Organize and design your page well, so people don’t have to hunt around for information.
    • Make it quick and easy for people to order the product mentioned in your ad.
    • Don’t annoy customers with pop-ups or other features that interfere with their navigation of your site.
    • Help customers quickly find what they’re looking for by prioritizing the content that's visible above-the-fold
  4. Decrease your landing page loading time
    • Make sure your landing page loads quickly once someone clicks on your ad, whether on a computer or mobile device.
    • Consider turning your landing page into an Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP).
  5. Make your site fast

How to check your landing page experience

The new Google Ads experience is now the exclusive way for most users to manage their accounts. If you’re still using the previous AdWords experience, choose “previous” below. Learn more

  1. Sign in to your Adwords account.
  2. Go to your Keywords tab.
  3. In your Keywords tab, place your cursor over the speech bubble next to the status of any keyword. You’ll see one of three rankings: above average, average, or below average.

Your Quality Score includes a measure of your landing page experience, so you can get a sense of how well you’re doing by checking your Quality Score as well.

What happens after I make improvements?

The Google Ads system visits and evaluates landing pages and websites on a regular basis. If you make significant changes to improve your landing page experience, you may see higher ad quality (and higher Ad Rank) over time. You might not see an immediate impact, but you may see results within days or weeks.

Mobile

The Google Ads system also visits your landing page to evaluate your mobile site (as viewed by mobile devices with full browsers, like Android devices and iPhones).

If you have a distinct, mobile-optimized version of your site, we recommend you configure your server to show the mobile-optimized site when the Google Ads mobile User-Agent is detected crawling your site. Currently, we use two HTTP User-Agent header to identify Google Ads mobile visits:

  • Android: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0; SM-G920A) AppleWebKit (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome Mobile Safari (compatible; AdsBot-Google-Mobile; +http://www.google.com/mobile/adsbot.html)
  • iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 9_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/601.1.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0 Mobile/13B143 Safari/601.1 (compatible; AdsBot-Google-Mobile; +http://www.google.com/mobile/adsbot.html)

By default, the Google Ads system reviews advertised landing pages to assess landing page experience. If you don't want some of your landing pages to be reviewed, you can follow the steps below to restrict the Google Ads system from visiting those pages.

Tip: Evaluate your landing pages with the “Landing pages” page

The “Landing pages” page includes two metrics that can help you identify which of your landing pages could provide a better experience on mobile devices:

  • Mobile-friendly click rate: This rating indicates how mobile-friendly your pages are based on Google’s Mobile-Friendly test.
  • Valid AMP click rate: If your pages are AMP pages, this rating indicates how often your pages load as valid AMP pages when people click on your ads. This rating is based on the AMP Validator test.

The “Landing pages” page is available in the new Google Ads experience. Learn more about how to evaluate your landing pages.

More information

How to exclude your landing pages from review

Important: Blocking the review of even just one of your webpages can have serious effects:

  • Ads not showing: You may end up with a significant drop in Ad Rank because we won't have as much information to determine your landing page experience and relevance. Your ads may show far less often (or not at all) and you may need to significantly increase your maximum cost-per-click bids. Even with higher bids, however, it's unlikely that your ads would show very often and may not even show at all.
  • Ads disapproved: If you restrict access to the final URL of your ad's landing page, your ads can be disapproved according to our policy and won't show at all. Refer to the Google Webmaster Guidelines to make sure that your pages are still accessible to ads quality crawling.

While we strongly recommend against restricting our system's automatic review of your landing pages, you can edit your site's robots.txt file as shown below to avoid a review.

  • To block all AdsBot crawls, disallow "AdsBot-Google"

  • To prevent Google Ads from crawling your entire site, add the following to your robots.txt file:

    User-agent: AdsBot-Google
    Disallow: /

  • To prevent Google Ads from crawling your mobile site, add the following to your robots.txt file:

    User-agent: AdsBot-Google-Mobile
    Disallow: /

    Some portions of your site may not function as active landing pages for your advertisements, and you may have reasons to prevent the Google Ads system from accessing them. To prevent the Google Ads system from accessing certain parts of your site (for example, inside the directory named “/shopping_cart/”), add the following to your robots.txt file:

    User-agent: AdsBot-Google
    Disallow: /shopping_cart/

    Keep in mind, your non-mobile URLs will still be crawled.

These instructions apply only to AdsBot. There are other Google-owned bots that review websites as well (googlebot, for example). In order to avoid decreasing Ad Rank and increasing CPCs for advertisers who don't intend to restrict Google Ads visits to their pages, the system will ignore blanket exclusions and wildcards (for example, User-agent: *) in robots.txt files

Effect of policy violations on landing page experience

A "below average" landing page experience is different from a policy violation.

If a landing page doesn’t follow our advertising policies any associated ads will be disapproved and won’t participate in the auction. If an ad is disapproved because the landing page violates policy, you'll see "Not applicable" as your landing page experience status

* Nguồn: Google