Hello, from my research, it has been shown over and over again that a landing page that was no "leaks" will yield significantly higher conversion rate. That being said, I have had some issues with quality score and google adwords for some landing pages. I was wondering if anyone out there has any experience or knows whether or not google or the other search engines (yahoo and bing) will penalize me if I remove the top level navigation on a landing page in a PPC campaign. I am inclined to think that it is very possible I will get penalized for this.
Most of our landing pages don't have navigation and are single pages. For some accounts we create mini sites, 2-3 pages with a very simple nav. To keep conversion rates up, make sure you have the conversion element, (ie - buy button, form, signup), on every page.
I just got done having a discussion with Google about the navigation. From their response it seems quite clear that an "orphaned" page separate from a large main site has a significant impact on quality score in a PPC campaign. It also seems that from this you could easily conclude that natural SEO is significantly affected by this as well. Having a product that is sold from your within your website versus an "orphaned landing page" is something that you will have to do a cost benefit analysis of. The reason is because in general, removing navigation should significantly improve conversion rate. But also, removing navigation at the same time means you take a hit from google and loose some "brand juice." Here is what google said: >From user feedback, we find that users like landing pages which have complete information about the business or the website in various sections, because these sites are trustable. This is why we encourage landing pages that have complete navigation and adequate information in them. Your main landing page is the active webpage where customers “land†when they click your ad. Landing page quality refers to the quality of your main landing page, as well as other pages with the same domain that are linked to the main landing page. For your question regarding clickbank, please know that we don't allow bridge pages. If you are able to advertiser the link directly, then that's the only way we can allow the advertisement of the website. You can review our landing page and site quality guidelines to determine what kind of a landing page you can build: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675
I would do it anyways and try it out. You can't argue with profit if a separate landing page works better. Everything in life has advantages/disadvantages.
True, when it really comes down to it I am going to have to run some AB Tests. But keep in mind we have two situations, both PPC & SEO. The quality score is going to be quite low if you run a PPC campaign to an orphaned page it seems. However, you could always put invisible links to the orphaned page and from the orphaned page to your main site to trick google. What it really comes down to, however, is an A/B split test.