A lot is said about Landing Pages and their layout, where forms should go, what should be above & below the fold, what your "call to action" should look like and where it should be. This process is important for converting visitors, but many AdWords advertisers prioritise landing page layout over content and it's the content that can cost you, a high conversion rate is only good if you receive traffic.

Google AdWords will crawl your landing page in the same way that it would crawl your website for organic listings, testing content relevancy, coding and load speed. This process is aimed at providing paid-search visitors with the same level of relevancy they could expect from the natural listings.

To quickly explain the process, Google looks at your keyword, Adtext and landing page and compares the relevancy of all three, making an estimation of visitor experience and applying an overall score, known as the "Quality Score."

Google describes the Quality score as follows: "The AdWords system calculates a 'Quality Score' for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query. A keyword's Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC)."

Those advertisers that spent ages designing, building and perfecting the look of their landing page at the cost of optimisation and content will find that their keywords receive very low quality scores and as such, high CPC's and less traffic than desired.

For the purposes of this post I will assume you know how to build an optimal PPC campaign and concentrate on the Landing Page optimisation.

Starting at the top and working downwards:

Page Title:
It is recognised that Google generally indexes 65 characters of a page title, and when it comes to AdWords it is beneficial to utilise this space to give the crawler its first indication of what this landing page is about.

Choose keywords from your AdGroup that you favour and construct a page title containing those keywords.

Example: If your keywords and Adtext are focussed on X-Box Consoles and your Landing page content is focussed on selling X-Box Consoles, don't use a Page title like "Bill's Electronics - Selling the latest electrical goods" Get X-Box keywords in there in a natural way (Don't just put a load of keywords in a string, make it a readable title).

Meta Description:
The Meta Description is not seen by AdWords visitors, but it is crawled and may add a tiny bit of weight to relevancy. Make sure that you utilise the 152 characters available, to produce a natural sounding page description continuing the theme of the product and including keywords.

Meta Keywords:
It is widely accepted that Meta Keywords do not carry weight from an SEO angle but again, they get crawled and if they add anything at all to the relevancy of your PPC landing page it is worth the moment of effort it requires. DO NOT keyword stuff here, simply choose some of your short-tail, broader keywords and add a small selection to the Meta keywords tag.

Headers:
<h> tags carry a decent amount of weight when it comes to page relevancy, so make sure that your headlines include a sought after keyword in a natural way that will make sense to visitors.

Text Style Tags:
Tags that embolden your text, such as <b> and <strong> and also <i> or <em> which make text italic, should be used to place emphasis on a selection of keywords. This brings emphasis to the reader but also the crawler. Important: Use this sparingly, relevantly and don't overdo it, the reader is important and placing emphasis on every other word will likely drive them elsewhere.

Image Alt Tags
"Img Alt's" should contain chosen keywords as well. Alt's are often overlooked when optimising a page, placing keywords into "Image Alt's" simply re-enforces the relevancy of the landing page in relation to its keywords.

Code to Text ratio:
The "code to text ratio" of a landing page is very important as Google needs to see that you are presenting enough information to visitors, but also that you are presenting that information in an optimal manner. General consenus is that a "code to text ratio" of around 25% is optimal for crawlers so getting as close to this number as realistically possible will help with optimisation efforts. There are various tools available on the web that will tell you your code to text ratio.

Site Inclusion:
Google Crawlers will probe links from your landing page to make sure you are not simply linking to alternative sites that are not relevant to the landing page. Try to make sure that your top-level navigation is included. A way to do this without distracting users from the content or design features is to add text links below the fold. If you feel that this approach damages your design, links to your homepage, sitemap, privacy policy, terms & conditions and contact us in the footer of the landing page should suffice.

Page Load Speed:
The speed at which your page loads has a significant effect on quality scores. Google is of the belief that clicking through from the search engine results pages (SERP's) should be as quick as flicking a page in a magazine. If your website does not provide this user experience, you are going to get penalised for it.

Use of multiple images and flash movies will slow a page as they take time to load, so make sure you're not going too overboard with your design.

Again, there are various 3rd party tools available to check page load speeds, so check it out and if you're hitting over 3 seconds it may be time to trim your page a little.

Summary
There are many other factors that affect quality score and this guide will not guarantee 10/10 for every keyword, but getting the above right will go a long way to improving the performance of an AdWords campaign.

The quest for high quality scores requires work and attention to detail but creating a quality PPC campaign and an optimal landing page will cover off visitors, leaving you to focus on conversions.

Google AdWords ad scheduling setting lets you specify certain hours or days of the week when you want your PPC ads to appear. Ad scheduling can give your PPC campaign a better 'bang for the buck' by improving your ROI by making sure that your ads only run when it makes the most sense for your business.

If you are from a B2B context you might schedule your ads to run only on business hours - let's assume only weekdays say from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm. targeting business hours when you think your audience is looking for your products/services. Setting up the ad scheduling is easy as ABC - or B2B! Simply log in to your AdWords account, go to the settings tab, then advanced settings and there you find the ad scheduling settings.

But how can you be certain your scheduled ads actually target your audience effectively, that you are spending your cost per click on your desired audience? This is very your Google Analytics account come into play. Google Analytics Custom Reporting can help you take out the guesswork in ad scheduling when your audience is looking for your products/services. Let your website visitors, who are your audience determine when to target your PPC audience.

By setting up a custom report you can find out how visitors are behaving on your website at what hours of the day, at what days, pages per visit and bounce rate. With this information you can adjust the PPC ad scheduling and budget accordingly.

To set up custom reporting simply login to your Analytics account, click on custom reporting in the left menu and in the top right corner click on "create a new custom report". Nothing needs to be installed or verified.



In the left menu called 'Metrics' click on 'Site Usage' and drag-and-drop 'Entrances' (along with good traffic quality indicators 'Time on Site', 'Pages per Visit', and 'Bounce Rate') one by one across to the 'Metric' boxes. Then do the same thing with 'Dimensions', click on 'Visitors' and drag-and-drop 'Day' over to the 'Dimension' box and 'Hour of the Day' over to the 'Sub-Dimension' box.



Then rename your custom report to whatever you want to call it by editing the title. Click the 'Preview' button to see your custom report and if you are happy with the report then finally click on 'Create Report'. Now you have created your custom report!

With these metrics in your custom report you can now in more detail find out how visitors behave on your website, during what hours of the day and at what days. Based on the information you get from the report you might want to refine the PPC ad scheduling.



In the example above the majority of entrances to the website happened in late afternoons between 2:00 pm and 5:00 pm and the majority of entrances happened on Mondays and Fridays. From this example scheduling the PPC ads to run only on 8:00 am to 6:00 pm on only weekdays would be advisable.

Set aside a couple of hours to learn Google Analytics custom reporting. Apart from creating a custom report in Google Analytics to refine PPC spend and strategy you can create a custom report to help you optimise your online leads and conversions. More about that in another blog post.

Regarding display URLs in AdWords ads, Google states that the domain must be identical to the destination URL's domain.  But besides this rule, advertisers are free to incorporate keywords at the end of the display domain to be read as subfolders.  An example is this ad, which bolds the term for my query "sony laptop" at the end of the display URL:


The question begs to be asked, if we can add keywords to the end of a display URL why not incorporate those keywords before the domain via display URL subdomains?  Just to clarify, a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger root domain, they read like this in a URL:


To my surprise, not many advertisers are utilising keywords in display URL subdomains.  It's a great opportunity to include an ad group's targeted term at the front of the display URL, so users read those relevant bolded keywords first.  Take advantage of it! 

The ad above with the subdomain "nokia-mobile-phones"  goes to the page "www.top10co.uk" which clearly doesn't include such a subdomain:



Google's AdWords help section confirms that this is a legal technique which is acceptable by AdWords.  However, when I phoned our Irish friends, the Adwords representative I spoke with told me this was not permitted - it's such a rarely used technique that even the Adwords rep's don't know about it!

So be sure to utilise this technique in your AdWords ads.  Also, remember that you can delete the "www." in display URLs which means 4 more characters for optimising your display URL. Now go... re-optimise those ads!

The Exact Keyword Tracking Tool by the folks at ROI Revolution allows paid search advertisers to view the exact search queries of their visitors.  Broad-match is one of three Adwords keyword setting that results in ads running based on general keyword terms and what Google believes to be relevant variations; even if these terms aren't in a campaign's keyword lists.  With the Exact Keyword Tracking Tool, the exact phrases that triggered the broad-match ad to be issued can be retrieved, instead of only allowing adwords users to view which keyword terms they've bid on drove traffic to their site.

Typically, broad-match phrases are more expensive to bid on than their counterpart's exact-match and phrase-match, due to their higher traffic volumes (and more competition).  Utilizing this tool, Adwords managers can discover trends in long tail keyword phrases that would not otherwise be revealed in typical analytics data.  With this knowledge, managers can bid on their new-found phrases, probably at lower costs due to the lower volume, detailed orientation of long-tail keywords.

The script for Google Analytics can be found here (note there are two versions: ga.js and urchin.js).

Once the script has been implemented, where will you find this data in Analytics?

1) Traffic Sources > AdWords > AdWords Campaigns report and use the Dimension User Defined dropdown.

2) Using the Visitors > User Defined report.

Tip:  Let the new code run a couple of days so you can see results

As Google continues to expand, their opportunities to pedal Adwords ads and recycle clicks within the Googletron empire spread.  Google was first recognized as a superior search engine because of its unique algorithm that gave weight to back links and valid content, Google rejected the loud advertisements of competitors like Yahoo and AOL and was preferred by users because it gave them what they wanted; relevant results and no advertising mess.  But then they started shopping around for other companies, and today Google holds stakes in the likes of British Sky Broadcasting and partners with Sony BMG Entertainment.

On the paid search side of the fence Google introduced Adwords, software offering corporations and peons alike the opportunity to advertise on their results pages with a clean 95 character box based ad.  Adwords really took off when they introduced content match, allowing advertisers to publish on a range of websites, instead of exclusively keeping them to the Google search results pages.  Last year this meant $16.4 billion, the majority of Google's revenue. 

As  they purchase more advertising sites, they are able to send their advertisers to more places, in turn receiving more ad revenue.   Their new mobile phone platform ANDROID delivers advertisements which Google can bleed into to the Adwords profit stream.  They even issue their ads through Fox Interactive Media division, which include sites like MySpace, American Idol, and Rotten Tomatoes.

In the Organic search engine results, Google is benefiting big time from rolling into media.   Purchasing YouTube in 2006 Eric Schmidt, the chief exec at Google, said to BBC "the powerful media platform complements Google's mission to organize the world's information."  Organize the world's information by buying it up?  Doesn't that enter the flood gates to self promotion across multiple medians?  Namely, the exclusive recycling of clicks within the Google umbrella? 

For example, I search the term "muffin top" looking for the popular Life Savers candy commercial.  The second organic result is a YouTube video, complete with an image of the commercial.  I will click this top link, keeping me within the Google family from query to content.  However, there are other websites offering the same video which also rank on the first page, but without the (promotional) image signifying to users "video here!". 

In short, Google is sucking up revenue by expanding where they send their ads while simultaneously keeping the organic results in the family when possible.  As Google continues to build on its metropolis of content across mediums, our searching options as users continue to shrink.  Is it worth it to have access to relevant content if it will be littered by ads and pulled from a diminishing pool of non-google results?

Is Google becoming a search monopoly?  Deciding how we will browse instead of their original premise, relying on good content to rise on its own merit.