Land­ing Page Changes

It was under­stood that chang­ing the land­ing page des­ti­na­tion URL across the entire account would have an impact on per­for­mance, because when you change an ad in Google AdWords, you delete the old one with the click his­tory and cre­ate a new one. Ulti­mately you are reset­ting your per­for­mance met­rics back to zero so the new ads need to develop their own click and CTR history.

It is for this rea­son that a steady, more con­trolled approach was taken by opt­ing cam­paigns into the new des­ti­na­tion URL grad­u­ally, over a period of 8 weeks, rather than mak­ing the full switch overnight.

There are two spe­cific char­ac­ter­is­tics which should be noted about the des­ti­na­tion URLs:

• The new domain that traf­fic was being dri­ven to, was dif­fer­ent from the con­trol, for exam­ple: xyz.com vs. xyz-abc.com
• Redi­rects were being uti­lized on this account so the des­ti­na­tion URL in Google AdWords was dif­fer­ent from the new URL where traf­fic was being dri­ven, for exam­ple: 123.com would redi­rect to xyz-abc.com

The des­ti­na­tion URLs were changed strate­gi­cally over time, from 5% of traf­fic going to the new URL in week 1, right up to 100% by week 8.

The Impact on AdWords Metrics

The first met­ric that was impacted by the URL change was click vol­ume. The decline in aggre­gate click vol­ume was almost directly pro­por­tional to the level at which cam­paigns were opted into the new des­ti­na­tion URL. From a high of 19,000 clicks a week, in week 1, only 12,000 clicks were received by week 8, when all des­ti­na­tion URLs had been changed.

There were a few fac­tors play­ing into this drop. Here fol­lows the sequence of events:

• Des­ti­na­tion URL is changed
• Ad Copy CTR and click his­tory is wiped out on impacted ads which hits Qual­ity Score
• Min­i­mum avg. first page bid is raised by the AdWords sys­tem owing to lower Qual­ity Score lev­els (at one point over 500 top traf­fic key­words required a dra­matic increase in min­i­mum bid)
• Avg. Posi­tion drops across the account owing to increased min­i­mum bid requirements

PPC cam­paign met­rics are like domi­noes, a change in one met­ric has a direct impact on another and another, in an almost chain reac­tion sequence.

The drop in avg. posi­tion caused the CTR (click through rate) to drop, by half from a high of 5–6% to a low of 2.5%.

As the key dri­ver of Qual­ity Score, it was para­mount to raise CTR levels.

Min­i­mum bids were lifted across all pre­vi­ously top per­form­ing key­words. The bid require­ments were off the charts in the AdWords sys­tem. Some key­words were demand­ing 100% increases in min­i­mum bid, which in cer­tain cases meant a bid of $25 would need to be raised to up to $50.

As bids were raised, click vol­umes con­tin­ued to drop. Even fol­low­ing aggres­sive bid changes, the AdWords sys­tem con­tin­ued to revise min­i­mum bids mul­ti­ple times. As a result, aggre­gate avg. CPC dou­bled from a pre­vi­ous range of $4–5 to a high of over $8.




It was the increase in avg. CPC of non-branded key­words which was the most dra­matic and costly to the campaign’s bot­tom line. More dol­lars were being spent on fewer clicks.

This would ulti­mately impact the cost per con­ver­sion of the campaign.

In part 2, we will review Google’s feed­back to these per­for­mance met­ric drops and offer some tips to how you can man­age ad copy or land­ing page tran­si­tions to min­i­mize the impact on your account performance.


Biography / Resume : Marta is the Group Manager of Performance Media at Mediative, specialising in paid search (PPC) account management. She drives PPC strategy on several key accounts with multi-million dollar investments. She also ensures PPC projects across the company are meeting KPIs and exceeding client expectations, in addition to identifying new opportunities to grow each client’s digital footprint. With a background in marketing and economics, Marta has an intuitive understanding of clients’ business goals and is adept at identifying the strategic foundation of the project, while possessing the technical skills to manage the tactical analysis and execution of PPC campaigns. Having lived in various countries around the world, Marta’s accent is as linguistically dynamic as the many industries in which she has managed PPC campaigns in the B2B landscape.