As the new year starts coming around, it’s natural for companies to think about goals and ways to improve upon the business they were able complete the year before. While this is important for all businesses, reevaluating your current strategies is especially important for businesses that live or die on the Internet, and with PPC particularly.
To ensure you’re not paying too much for your advertising space with PPC, there are a few things you want to be careful about. One of those things is your quality score. And while some have argued that your quality score isn’t actually as important as was once thought, having a solid landing page will help to increase your click through rate, which will also help boost your quality score and make your PPC efforts all the more profitable. So with the coming of the new year, here are three areas of your landing pages to reevaluate in order to have higher quality scores and more PPC success in 2016 than you did in 2015.
You Have Bad User Experience
Regardless of how great your ads are that lead to your landing pages, if you can’t convert a visitor due to bad user experience on the page, it’s done little good to you to get someone there in the first place. According to Dan Shewan of WordStream, Google bases good user experience on a landing page on relevance to the search terms through useful content, the transparency of the page, how easy it is to navigate, and how long someone spends on your site. If any one of these areas is lacking, you could see your quality score take a hit, resulting in your entire PPC campaign floundering. Consider checking out all the landing pages for your active campaigns to ensure each page is doing its job.
Your Page Takes Forever To Load
Along the same vein as having a bad user experience, if your pages take too long to load, this could be killing the effectiveness of your PPC campaign as well as your quality score. Pauline Jakober of Search Engine Land also states that not only is a slow page load time bad for your PPC efforts, but it’s also bad for your SEO efforts too. This is because visitors don’t have the patience to wait for your site to load. Even if what they would have found would have fit their query perfectly, having to wait on a page to load completely just isn’t going to happen, resulting in a bounce from your page and a major hit to your quality score. If your pages are taking too long to load, talk to your web developer about what you can do to speed this process up.
You’re Not Optimized for Multiple Devices
With all the possibilities for Internet-connecting devices coming into 2016, it seems almost crazy for a company that does a lot of online business not to have their site, and especially their landing pages, optimized for multiple devices. However, there are still plenty of companies who have yet to include mobile devices as being compatible with their marketing efforts. So to get the highest possible quality score, you’ve got to have your landing pages optimized for devices other than just computers.
In fact, Larry Kim, a contributor to Search Engine Watch, shares that when Google sees your mobile ads having a lower click through rate than your desktops ads, that can lower the quality score for all your ads, regardless of platform. For example, if the ads that show up for your online medical assisting degree don’t perform well on mobile but are fine on the desktop, you could see both getting lower quality scores as a result of the bad mobile experience. So if you’ve been waiting for a reason to begin catering your ads to certain devices, you may have just found it.
To give your PPC campaigns the best chance for success in the new year, consider using the tips mentioned above to help bolster the quality score of your ads and make your time and effort truly worth your while.
