So.. Here is something that I found very suprising that I thought that I would share.... The other day I made a frame redirect on a webpage for a direct linking campaign on Adwords....or so I thought... Now, my website builder program gives you some lame template with like a blue table, and a "logo here," etc...no content or links or anything... What I usually do when doing this task is to show the html code (since the website building program uses a WYSIWYG editor), delete all of the pre written code for the basic template given by the program, and paste a frame redirect code in there with my hoplink, etc... THEN... I save the new page... WELL, I FORGOT to do that... So, to shorten the story, I was sending people to a blank basic template page via my Adwords ad with no content, links, almost no text and definetely no relevant text... So...THE SUPRISING THING.... I still had a "Great" QS within my campaign...Even though when Google did the scan of my site, it found nothing relevant whatsoever on the blank template page. Now, I have seemed to notice lately, that a lot of times, getting a 'Great' QS score comes a lot from how I write my Ads (at least I think). Because I know it wasn't my landing page being relevant. The other thing that it could have been is having good account history, high CTR's in other campaigns, etc... Or Google has so many factors that we dont know about that we cant make any sense out of things like this.. What do you all think?
Anyone? I thought this was suprising...I probably should have put that in my title, then more people might have said something.
How long has that advert been running? Sometimes Google seems to ignore your landing page for a while, and then suddenly decides to visit it and your quality score will plummet. Have you tracked any visits from the MediaPartners bot to that page? It is interesting, yet I suspect that your quality score will not stay at that level indefinitely.
Sorry - don't tend to visit the forums on a Sunday! It's widely accepted that the Quality Score is strongly influenced by clickthrough rate, and the relevancy of the advert text, but it's still a little surprising that the landing page has such a small part to play in the algorithm. As Taulath says, it may change in a few days, but if not, it certainly raises questions about the importance of choosing the right landing page from an Adwords perspective (although it's still important in terms of getting customers to convert).
Ad copy & CTR is a big part of the QS - since they've started showing the QS I've gome from "poor" to "great" by simply writing a better ad.