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Google Adwords Quality Score Now Affected by Mobile Optimization

November 22nd, 2011

Google Adwords Quality Score Now Affected by Mobile Optimization

Google recently announced that mobile site optimization now affects your AdWords Quality Score.

As one of the world’s largest mobile web platforms, we wanted to know: what does this mean for our clients and customers?

We asked John Boxall, Mobify’s CTO, who said that the AdWords system will visit your landing page and see what it looks like when viewed by iPhones and other mobile devices with full browsers.  ”This way, Google gets a good idea of what your users on mobile devices will be seeing,” he said.  ”If it’s a good experience, they reward you with a higher Ad Rank.”


If you have mobile ads running, you need to have a mobile optimized landing page.

Google’s logic is that mobile users will have a better experience if you have a mobile optimized landing page and site for your AdWords campaigns. Quality of experience and usability helps determine your overall Adwords Quality Score , and influences your CPC and where your ad will appear on a search results page.

Key takeaway?

If you don’t have a mobile site, you’re paying more than you have to to run your AdWords campaigns.

Looking to the Future

Google is investing heavily in mobile to make sure its users’ have a great experience when browsing, no matter the device.  We recommend going mobile as soon as possible, as mobile traffic is going nowhere but up.

Not having a mobile sites costs you money and exposure, even if you are not an e-commerce site.

We here at Mobify have been saying this for years! In fact, we’ve designed our mobile platform to be fully compatible with Google’s friendly web crawlers.

Having a Mobify-powered mobile site will:

1. Help improve your overall PageRank
2. Increase your Adwords Quality Score
3. Make your mobile users happy
4. Increase your mobile revenue

Our views were recently confirmed when Google and Mobify teamed up for the GoMo initiative.  Get your GoMo score and see how Google views your site on mobile by checking out the GoMo meter.

Read more about how mobile optimization affects Adwords Quality Score.

 

  • http://www.mspy.com Marteria Finch

    he mobile site feels familiar to anyone who has used the desktop site, making it incredibly intuitive to navigate.

  • http://420creative.com Angie Herrera

    The email subject line I received that announced this was incredibly misleading: “Mobile now Affect Google Rankings”  That is NOT the same as “Google Adwords Quality Score Now Affected by Mobile Optimization”. Linkbait much? Unless of course I’m missing something…

    • http://adhack.com James Sherrett

      Hey Angie, thanks for the comment. We decided to go with that subject line for 2 reasons:

      1. We try to keep our subject lines to less than 30 characters (with spaces) to fit in the preview of most email clients.

      2. Most of our clients receive traffic from Google as both organic and paid search results and are very keen to know the latest information on both types of traffic.

      Hope that sheds a little more light on why we chose that subject line.

      Did you enjoy the article and learn something new?

      • http://420creative.com Angie Herrera

        Fair enough, but I was confused at first because I expected the info to be about organic rankings, not paid.

        To answer your question, yes, the information was helpful. Thanks!

        • http://www.mobify.com/ James Sherrett

          Hey Angie, to follow up on our thread here on how Google weighs mobile web optimization in rankings for organic search vs. AdWords, Google has now announced that its search spider, Googlebot, now crawls smartphone websites - http://blog.mobify.com/2011/12/20/googlebot-now-crawls-smartphone-sites/

          Putting a bit of imagination in place we can see how mobile site optimization may soon influence organic search results as well as AdWords Quality Score.

          • http://420creative.com Angie @ 420 Creative

            Yep, I saw that a while back. We also got a couple of emails from Google for AdWords accounts we manage informing us about it as well.

            Thanks!

  • http://www.mackerelmedia.co.uk Nick Craig

    It’s a very interesting development and to be honest I find it fascinating that Google is slowly pushing AdWords ranking and organic ranking closer and closer….the Panda update(s) are trying to weed out poor-quality sites from organic results and this latest development is encouraging site owners to present a top-quality experience for everyone. We speak to our clients constantly about serving users first and foremost and hopefully this will aid our cause.

    Do you know if the Quality Score calculations take into account the subtle difference between an iPhone experience and an iPad experience, for example? The latter, whilst technically ‘mobile’ is much closer to the desktop experience in terms of what the user sees, given the screen size available.

    • Phil Webb

      There’s no way of telling exactly how Google judges sites as seen on individual mobile devices with different characteristics.  

      In our own experience building sites, we’ve found that it’s not necessary to completely rebuild desktop sites for iPad.  Rather, we make more subtle enhancements, like making buttons larger and more finger friendly, and making sure that things like floating footers and lighboxes display correctly.  This contrasts with making sites for the smaller screens present on mobile phones where the entire site is reshaped around core content.

      Similar to you, we’ve taken the approach of serving the needs of our clients’ users.  Ultimately, we believe Mobify and Google share the ultimate goal of providing the best possible experience for the end user.

    • http://www.mobify.com/ James Sherrett

      Hey Nick,

      Thanks for your question.

      We don’t know whether Quality Score makes a distinction between tablet devices and mobile devices or whether they’re all treated as mobile.

      Today the industry standard is to treat iPads and tablets as mobile devices and they are included in mobile devices stats in Analytics, for example.

      But I think as we see iPads and tablets grow in popularity and in their contribution to e-commerce we’ll see them treated as a distinct device type with targeted optimization.

  • Pingback: How Having A Mobile-Optimised Website Can Increase Your Google Quality Score | Whitsunday Mobile Marketing

  • sunil singh

     Thank you

     Your blog is very Informative.

  • http://www.sabaiaberdeen.co.uk Thai

    Mobile sites will become huge in 2012,I for one would not be suprised if having a mobile site will give a slight boost in the serps in the near future.
    All the forecasts show massive growth in this area very soon.

    There are certain local niches for which a mobile site is gonna be pretty much mandatory due to the volume of searches via smartphones.

  • Pingback: Googlebot Now Crawls Smartphone Sites » Mobify Blog | Mobile Commerce and Publishing

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