Landing Page Experience?

[Mark_A]

Doing some changes, would like to know how quick does G update Landing Page Experience?

Also if I want to create some very focused landing pages is it ok if they are orphans?
i.e. no links from the main site to them.

[RhinoFish]

My gut feeling (I don't keep stats on this), I see changes in 24-48 hours, depending on traffic level. It'll extend out to 4-7 days if the traffic is under 50 clicks / day. Make sure your Analytics and GSC are tied into your Google Ads account, it seems that it makes a difference (again, no data here to back this up).

You can use the data selector to do bracketing tests on your page changes by keeping a log of changes and data pulls:
[support.google.com...]

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I try to talk clients out of PPC dedicated landing pages (aka ophans), because among many other things, it harms your SEO and Social Sharing, which for many, is the whole point of running ads (pay to boost other channels with a much lower Acq cost).

That said, you can do this, just make sure you do not block ANY google bots from your dedicated LPs, that'll tank your QS and ruin the auction math.

[Mark_A]

Hi RhinoFish and thank you for your thoughts. I think an update time of 24-48 hours probably suggests the changes I made didn't yet shift the dial!

In trying to improve my Landing Page Experience I have found that the one page can't seem to achieve average or ideally better than average LPE for the range of keywords I have tried to point at it. They are many words that pretty much describe the same thing, but I can't have the page replete with all of them because it just looks spammy.

I may have to make an orphan LP for groups of KWs and see if that improves my LPE ..

[RhinoFish]

Google's engines understand semantics very, very well, you don't need to litter your LPs with keywords.

Hook up Google Search Console and troubleshoot the things you page doesn't do well.
You should be able to use Benchmarking in Analytics if that's all set up and connected (connect GSC, Analytics and Google Ads).

[RhinoFish]

"I may have to make an orphan LP for groups of KWs and see if that improves my LPE."
Landing people on a navigable website (including being able to find ContactUs, AboutUs, Privacy, etc) is a key ingredient to LPE.
Orphaned, dedicated LPs will often slightly lower your LPE QS component.

[Mark_A]

Hi RhinoFish, you are as always very helpful, thank you.

My Orphan LP contains all the normal web site links to other pages and sections it just isn't linked to from other pages on the site. I hope that will be ok, I am bidding on many KWs some of which don't really have suitable LPs in the normal site. It is for them that I am thinking of dedicated LPs.

The one I just made had a QS of 3/10 with below Av LPE .. I am hoping to get LPE to Average with this change. I am waiting for G to update at the moment, fingers crossed. It is frustrating because the whole website is about this subject :)

[Mark_A]

I don't know enough about what makes up QS etc

I have some keywords that have Above Average Ad Relevance, Below Av LPE, and a QS of 7/10

While I have others also with Above Average Ad Relevance, Below Av LPE, but a QS of 3/10

[RhinoFish]

Relevance and Experience pale in comparison to CTR.
CTR seems to drive 60-75% of the QS.
That said, I believe each score component is log or semi-log, meaning a bad LPE or Ad Relevance will completely tank a good CTR.

3/10 is nasty, check GSC (Search Console), run a page timing test, and work on improving your ads.

Remember that the QS they show you is for the searches that Exactly matched your keyword (even if it was a Broad or Phrase match), so they're showing you insights into what may be wrong, but accuracy of QS in pinpointing the issue is like viewing the problem thru fogged up goggles.

Work mostly on CTR (by working on your ad performance for the keywords that have low QS).
If your have too wide of an array of keywords in the Ad Group, consider splitting them out into another Ad Group, so you can tailor your ads for those keywords.

[FranticFish]

I gave up trying to figure out QS years ago, and have not paid any attention to AR or LPE either. I could not find any rhyme or reason to them.

As RhinoFish says, I focus on CTR, tightly focused Ad Groups, and getting irrelevant keywords down to as close to zero as I can in each group. I HAVE been able to find some rhyme and reason to this. Here's what works for me for ETAs.

1) Multiple Ad Groups with very closely related terms in each group, so that
2) Ad title can contain words that cover all the search terms (reinforcement)
3) Rest of ad is the CTA
4) 3 ad variations for each group to begin with (and use manual rotation)
Plus, do not use dynamic anything. Each title, each description, each extension is a unique asset with unique CTR
5) Extensions are a mix of reinforcement, CTAs, USPs etc - but nothing you can't do without. The bare bones ad needs to suffice, extensions are the icing. Once you get the decent CTR you will see your first place impressions percentage go up and then that's when your extensions really come to bear.
6) Manual CPC

I find that you often need to go in hard to get the impressions and the clicks you need early on, so be prepared to throw some extra money at it. To begin with follow all the bid recommendations even if a bid is 100% of your daily budget (or even up to 15% more).

Monitor your search terms daily to begin with (be obsessive) and learn from what you see i.e. imagine other crap keywords related to the one you've been given and block them too.

Once you have a reasonable CTR for a k/w - 5% and over - look at what you're paying per click and bring down the bid to a margin over that amount, perhaps 20-40%. You will get warnings but so long as you're getting impressions that look OK percentage wise, and definitely if you're getting clicked - ignore the red warnings. They will go away :)

When you have reached 100 impressions for each ad in your ad group, look at the losers / winners there. If there are big losers in CTR, then either pause them or replace them with a new wording and a different (or differently-worded) CTA. Then compare those new ads with the other ones over the same timescale and minimum 100 impressions each. Plus keep an eye on things, and compare each assessment period with the one before. I have found that even 100 impressions isn't enough to get it right sometimes, and I've actually un-paused ads that lost the race for the first 100 impressions but then their historical data was better than one of the two I left running, so I opened up the race to all three ads again and made a different choice the second time. If you let Google automate this they make a choice far FAR too soon. You will get so much better CTR if you keep ad rotation and selection manual.

My feeling is that once you get your CTR over a certain threshold (better than your competitors) then Google trusts that it can rinse your daily budget and stops warning you when you drop your bids to a little over your average CPC. I think that it's not the size of the budget but the ability of Google to be sure that they can spend 100% of it. I've been able to drop bids to a quarter or even a sixth of what I was originally bidding and get CTR of up to 15-20% per group, even if keywords have very poor metrics. Not all do that well, but 10-15% is common. Google exhausts the bigger CPCs some competitors use early on in the day then I get my moment in the sun and get between 3-6 times more clicks than I would for the same spend - 100% of my daily limit either way.

It doesn't always work this well but my feeling lately is that where it doesn't it's because the niche isn't (a) busy enough and (b) the keywords can have multiple intents. As long as the keywords are not ambiguous and the niche is busy then this formula continues to work well for me.

[Mark_A]

Thanks again for the thoughts. I am finding, probably because our site has many quite low volume keywords, that it takes a while for G to update our accounts. I am improving my QS on quite a lot of pages just by including the specific keyword in an un-spammy way, I just have to be patient once I make the change and wait to see the effect it has. :) Patience patience ..