How does Google AdWords evaluate ad ranks where there are landing page variants?

S

I’m using a Google AdWords campaign to drive traffic to my landing page. There is a debate about whether to include links to our privacy and terms of trade pages on the landing page. If we include them it may help our AdWord costs and rankings. But we may lose conversions. So I thought I would test this with a variant of the landing page without privacy and terms links.

My question is: How will Google AdWords look upon this? If half the traffic from the same ads hits a variant without the links and half hits a variant with the links what will it do to my ad costs and rankings? Without understanding this its probably not such a good test…

3 replies

Quinn_Omori
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Hi Steven - You won’t be penalized at all for what Google deems “ethical testing” (more on that here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2576845?hl=en&ref_topic=1745207), so as long as the rest of the content between your variants is close to the same. Because you are introducing new content in the new variant, you can see a negative effect on your QS, but it would be because the new variant’s content itself contributes to a lower score–your score won’t be lowered strictly because you have more than one version of the page though.

Lou_Sturm

Hi Steven!

I’d thought and chime in and add to Quinn’s helpful points!

If you’re worried about losing conversions, I’d also recommend including your Privacy Policy in a LightBox. That way, visitors can click on the Privacy Policy if interested, but it’ll open in a pop-up so they can remain on the landing page and focused on your Call-To-Action.

Additionally, sometimes it’s all in how you phrase something. Unbounce’s dear friend, Michael Lykke Aagaard thought that a privacy policy would hurt his conversions.
However, after A/B testing, he found he was losing conversions due to how the Privacy Policy was phrased. His audience preferred seeing a solid policy with no cuteness factor. Changing it to “We guarantee 100% privacy. Your information will not be shared” boosted his conversions by almost 20%.
You can read more about his test here.

I’d love to hear if anyone else in our community has tested their Privacy Policy and its phrasing. Do your customers prefer an informal or an authoritative tone?

S

Thanks Quinn and Lou for the info and suggestions.
Cheers, Steve.

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