Many things can affect your landing page experience. For example, is your landing page relevant to what a visitor is looking for? Is it easy to find your contact information? Is the page itself easy to navigate? Your landing page experience affects not only your Quality Score, but also your advertising costs and ad position.

Why landing page experience matters

If you've ever owned a car, you probably know that getting tune-ups can help you get better mileage, prevent costly mechanical problems, and make your car run better in the long run. Landing pages are kind of like cars – make sure they're tuned-up properly, and you'll likely get better performance and savings out of them down the road.

A good landing page experience can help you gain the trust of your customers and keep them coming back to your site. Get more mileage out of your landing page by making it easier for visitors to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or do other things you want them to do on your website.

How we determine landing page experience

To determine your landing page experience, we look at a number of different things, from the actual content on the page to the overall design of the page. Below are some of the things we encourage you to keep in mind when designing your landing page.

1. Relevant and original content
• Is the purpose of your site clear?
• Is your site actually useful to visitors?
• What does your site offer that other sites don't?
2. Transparency
• Is your business and contact information easy to find?
• Are you upfront about any information you're collecting from visitors?
• Can people easily tell what'll happen when they perform an action on your site?
3. Ease of navigation
• Is it easy for people to find what they're looking for?
• Does your site have too many links that might confuse people?
• Can people easily find information to learn more or answer questions?

Excluding your landing pages from review

Mobile visits to your landing page

Viewing your landing page experience

Unlike Quality Score, we don't give you a specific number that shows your landing page experience. Instead, we show you one of three statuses: Above average, Average, or Below average.

You can view this status by going into your Keywords tab and placing your cursor over the speech bubble next to the status of any keyword.

• Above average or Average: If you see either of these two statuses, you're in good shape – your Quality Score won't be negatively affected by your landing page experience.
• Below average: This means that your landing page experience is in need of improvement, and your Quality Score might be lower as a result. You might want to consider some changes to improve your website's landing page, like making sure that customers can find what they're looking for quickly and easily. One way to do this is to create destination URLs for individual keywords.

Landing page experience vs. Site policies

When we review landing pages, we sometimes come across pages that don't follow our policies. For example, if your landing page happens to contain malware (like a virus), that's a pretty bad landing page. Rather than giving you a "Below average" landing page experience status, you won't get a score at all. Instead, you'll see "Not applicable" as your landing page experience status, and any keywords or ads pointing to that website will get a "Site suspended" status. This status means that your website can't be advertised with AdWords because it doesn't follow one or more of our site policies.

Site policies refer to the Advertising Policies that we use to evaluate your landing page (and overall website). If your landing page or website contains something that we don't allow, like malware or illegal products, we might suspend your website to protect our users. When a website is suspended, that means you won't be able to advertise that suspended website until you remove any unacceptable content.

Improving your landing page experience

If you're trying to improve your landing page experience, it might be time to give your landing pages a tune-up. Try reviewing the general guidelines below to help you think of ways to improve your landing page experience and get better performance out of your landing pages down the road.

1. Relevant and original content
• Make sure your landing page is directly relevant to your ad text and keyword.
• Provide useful information on your landing page about whatever you're advertising.
• Try to offer useful features or content that are unique to your site.
• Consider adding reviews that show real opinions from people who've used that product.
2. Transparency
• Make it easy for visitors to find your contact information.
• Distinguish sponsored links, like ads, from the rest of your site content.
• Openly share information about your business and clearly state what your business does.
3. Ease of navigation
• Don't make people hunt around for the information they might need.
• Make it quick and easy for people to order the product mentioned in your ad.
• Make sure people can easily find information to learn more about the advertised product.

The AdWords system visits and evaluates landing pages on a regular basis. If you've made significant changes to improve your landing page experience, it could lead to higher Quality Scores over time. You might not see an impact within the first few days, but you may see results over the next several months.

Does your landing page seal the deal?

updated 04/24/2012