For PPC Marketers or anyone advertising their business through Google Adwords, you are familiar with the concept of “Quality Scores” for your account. Higher quality scores can help lead to lower costs and better positions for your ads on Google Adwords. Quality scores are representative of how relevant your ads and landing pages are to a person searching for a specific keyword phrase. Tightly grouped ad groups with similar keywords, ads focused on the keyword being bid on, and landing pages matching user intent from the search, all help you to achieve higher quality scores.

One of the most important criteria in achieving high quality scores is the landing page experience, the page a person visits after clicking on your ad. Google Adwords makes it very clear on how you can improve a user’s landing page experience:

“You can improve your landing page experience – and Quality Score – by focusing on three things: relevant and original content, transparency, and ease of navigation.”

Take a look at the last 3 words of that statement again: “Ease of Navigation”. This is where a mobile optimized site comes in and how a mobile website can help you improve your overall Adwords quality score.

Ease of Navigation with Mobile Websites

A visit from someone surfing a non-mobile optimized website from an iPhone will most definitely have an unpleasant experience. A user is forced to “pinch and zoom” just to see important information on your site. The text is hard to read and they probably don’t even know where to click. Most likely they will click off from your site and go back to the search results. Their experience was “unpleasant” and will lead to low quality scores from mobile visitors.

With a mobile website, you provide only the most important information, navigation and links that you want a visitor to select from, thus providing a user with a “pleasant” mobile experience which ultimately helps your Google Adwords quality score. Which site below do you think Google would give a better quality score? (image credit)

Mobile Quality Score Questions

Ask yourself these questions that Google asks when determining Adwords Mobile Quality Score:

1. Is it easy for people to find what they’re looking for?
2. Does your site have too many links that might confuse people?
3. Can people easily find information to learn more or answer questions?

It’s very clear in the above example that the Mobile Optimized Website helps to achieve all 3 of those questions better than the non-Mobile Optimized site.

Google Adwords allows you to even “Segment by Device” to see how visits from mobile devices are performing over visits from desktop computers.

Conclusion on Mobile Websites Improving Adwords Quality Scores

There really aren’t too many secrets to improving your quality score with Google Adwords. One of the biggest ways you can improve a user’s experience is through landing page optimization. With more and more users accessing websites through smartphones, you can bet that a mobile optimized site will help a user easily navigate throughout your site which in turn helps to improve quality scores. If you’re running Adwords for your client or for your website, you’re basically throwing money out the door if the site is not mobile optimized. A user will have an unpleasant experience and Google will bring down your overall quality score.

More Reading:

• Mobile website optimization now factors into mobile search ads quality