The Google AdWords team has announced that they are changing the way that the "Quality Score" is derived for AdWords advertisers. They want to encourage advertisers to provide greater relevancy between the advertisement and the page that a searcher would land on when clicking through an AdWords advertisement link.

For example; if a searcher looking to buy a "video game controller" clicked through an AdWords link and landed on an advertiser's page that focused on computer monitors, the relevance would be fairly low. Thus from a searcher's perspective, the experience might be considered poor when using AdWords. If an AdWords advertiser does not provide a focused landing page, the advertiser will likely end up spending more of their advertising budget on key phrases if the content is not deemed relevant by Google.

Overall, Google wants searchers to have a great experience when using AdWords and then continue or increase their use of Google and AdWords listings. AdWords, if you're not aware of it, is how Google makes its money and is therefore largely responsible for their $100B+ market capitalisation.

From the Inside AdWords blog:

"...Advertisers who are providing robust and relevant content will see little change. However, for those who are providing a less positive user experience, the Quality Score may decrease and in turn increase the minimum bid required for the keyword to run..."

There is a guidelines section for building landing pages on Google which gives advice that one might use even for normal web page building:

"...Ensure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and your ad text...In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your ad does link to a page consisting of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalogue page), provide additional information beyond what the user may have seen in your ad or on the page prior to clicking on your ad..."

How do you focus your AdWordscampaign so that you are targeting the right group? Consider running a comprehensive analytics suite like WebTrends in order to track search engine referrals and the resulting behaviour of the traffic being generated by your AdWords campaigns. Consider the behaviours that you will be measuring such as:

You can test several alternative landing pages over a short period of time and see exactly where you have the most success, then further tweak your landing page as you gain an understanding of what content converts an AdWords click through into sale or win.