According to the most recent post in adwords blog google has included landing page as one of the many factors for determining quality score. Google will look at the content and layout of the pages linked from your ads and determine the relevance of your ad with the landing page.
They always have done contextual placement. I did notice that they will limit ads in certian low ctr areas of a site to place more preference on higher ctr areas. Is this what you are referring to?
No, i mean to say that from now on they will take into account the landing page content also along with CTR and ad text while determining your quality score, which would ultimately determine how much you pay for a particular bid.
I thought they did that all along. Not very impressive. People will just analyze the algo and cloak the landing page.
They haven't, it's new. Here's the article. What do you mean by "not very impressive"? You don't think the landing page should be part of the algo used to determine the quality score?
That's pretty cool- IMO. And it's a brilliant idea! As far as cloaking landing pages; that doesn't seem like a good idea. More of a waste of time than anything.
I love it and have always hoped it would somehow be factored into the algo. I'll be watching my campaigns closely today...a few things I'm doing may be setting me up for some higher costs if the landing page carries a lot of weight in the quality score calculation. As for the cloaking, yea, a complete waste of time. These aren't the organic serps - I want to send the user to a page that directly relates to what they are looking for. I'm not trying to get them there so the click on ads...it's about sales of actual products and services.
I'm with Rob on this, just pay for adwords that actually relate to what you are selling and why would you need to cloak??
I meant I thought they've been doing this for a long time now. For them to finally wake up, do it now and advertise it as if it was revolutionary is quite surprising to me.
Nobody else (Yahoo!, msn etc...) can even attempt to do such a thing w/ accuracy. I think it's pretty impressive.
There are open source program that will do 90% of the work to build such a feature. It's really no big deal technically. Spider the target keywords. Spider the content site. Spider landing page. Spider the ad. Get a breakdown of keywords, keyword density etc. Add a mathematical formula to each of them. You get a score for each combination and voila. MSN or Yahoo can add this easily.
Yahoo is catching up. MSN is brand new. Google had a lead so they are ahead but Yahoo and MSN may be able to provide the same relevancy. The games have just begun. I agree that so far G's search engine is better. But let's talk about this again in one year.