subject: Google Adwords Optimization: Does Your Landing Page Affect Your Advertising Costs? [print this page] One of the most important aspects of maximizing your return on investment for the money you spend on online advertising is to keep your costs as low as possible, and one of the interesting ways that you can help to keep your costs lower as a Google Adwords advertiser is to have a high quality landing page that you are directing website visitors to. Your advertising campaign itself is very important, but the web page that you are sending visitors to is also related to the success of your pay-per-click ad campaign because this affects a metric called your quality score which is related to your minimum bid.
As an Adwords advertiser your minimum bid will decrease over time for a successful advertising campaign that has a decent click-through rate, and another factor that can allow your minimum bid to go lower is how Google measures the quality score of the landing page that you are sending visitors to. The quality score is measured by determining how relevant your text ad, keywords, and landing page are to someone who is searching for a specific keyword term. The reason this is a very important metric for Google is that one of their main priorities is delivering a great user experience for anyone who uses their search engine, so they will allow you to decrease your minimum bid for an advertising campaign if you are delivering a relevant user experience.
When you are logged in to your Google advertising account, the quality score for each ad campaign that you are running will be listed in the column that says "qual. score" on a scale of 1 to 10. If your quality score is a 10/10 then it is as high as it can go, but you can only get your quality score this high if the page that you are sending visitors to is very closely related to your ad and your keywords. Having a higher quality score will decrease the cost-per-click that you are required to pay, and it can also affect your ad position on the search engine listings page.
Your landing page that you are directing website visitors to will have a significant impact on your advertising costs, and so will the relevancy of your keywords and text ad since Google prides itself on delivering a superior user experience. If you would like to keep your Adwords advertising costs as low as possible then you should strive to get your quality score as high as possible on the scale of 1-10, and continue to tweak and improve your campaign and landing page so that you can get your minimum bid as low as possible.
