Google Testing Online Advertising For Quality
If you use Google as one of your online advertising providers then you will need to look closely at your landing page. Google are in the process of testing landing pages for quality and may penalise those don’t meet certain standards.
Google Testing Blog released a post announcing this campaign last weekend. Paid ads that appear in the sponsored section or on the pages of publishers will ranked according to merit. As the post states, you cannot pay to get a top listing:
we don’t allow buying a spot at the top of the results list. This idea builds trust with users and allows the community to decide what’s important.
What determines quality, that is still an unanswered question. Online advertising is generally about your ad and how it attracts a click. Now it will need to look at the site’s landing page as well. In their normal style, Google are big on announcing what they are going to do and small on what you need to do get through their testing. The closest they came was in the following:
The idea was that we would penalize the ranking of paid ads in several circumstances: few users were clicking on a particular ads, an ad’s landing page was not relevant, or if users don’t like an ad’s content.
Not a lot of help however I think you can assume from that statement that slow pages, pages that don’t bear much relevance to the actual ad and those that are full of flash may get penalised. Misleading pages will definitely come under close scrutiny. Getting clicks through traffic from your online advertising is only going to get harder if you rank poorly.
This is possibly another attempt by Google to weed out poor performing ads. If advertisers cannot get a good ranking for their ad units it is quite likely they will move on to other forms of online advertising. Google has spend the last year or more trying to trim back the number of advertisers with poor performing ad units. This is just another nail in their coffins.
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