AdWords Help

Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines

As part of our commitment to making AdWords as effective an advertising program as possible, we've outlined some site design guidelines to better serve our users, advertisers, and publishers. We've found that when our advertisers' sites reflect these guidelines, two important things happen:

• The money you spend on AdWords ads is more likely to result in paying customers.
• Users develop a trust in the positive experience provided after clicking on AdWords ads (and this turns in to additional targeted leads for you).

Furthermore, following our site guidelines will help improve your landing page quality score. As a component of your keywords' overall Quality Scores, a high landing page quality score can affect your AdWords account in three ways:

• Decrease your keywords' cost-per-clicks (CPCs)
• Increase your keyword-targeted ads' position on the Content Network
• Improve the chances that your ads will win a position on your targeted placements

Learn more about Quality Score.

Advertising Policies

We actively review landing pages against our Advertising Policies, with which your ads need to comply in order for you to advertise with AdWords. We do not tolerate the violation of our Advertising Policies and will disable ads associated with such landing pages that violate these policies.

Below, we re-emphasize some of these policy violations. Please visit our Advertising Policies pages for a more detailed list.

• Inaccurate claims and deceptive content (includes certain types of competitive claims, generic superlatives, trademark infringement, unauthorized use of copyrighted content, false endorsements, scams, and other deceptive practices)
• Low quality affiliate sites
• Violations of Google's Software Principles
• Violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines

Quality Component

Other than complying with our Advertising Policies, we also recommend that advertisers bear in mind the three main components of a high quality website: relevant and original content, transparency, and navigability. Maintaining a positive user experience in these areas will help improve your site's landing page quality. Read more about these components below, as well as in this FAQ.

Relevant and Original Content

Relevance and originality are two characteristics that define high-quality site content. Here are some pointers on creating content that meets these standards:

Relevance:

• Users should be able to easily find what your ad promises.
• Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful information about the product or service in your ad. For instance, direct users to the page where they can buy the advertised product, rather than to a page on your site with a description of several products.

Originality:

• Feature unique content that can't be found on another site. This guideline is particularly applicable to resellers whose site is identical or highly similar to another reseller's or the parent company's site, and to affiliates that use the following types of pages:

  • Bridge pages: Pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company

  • Mirror pages: Pages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site; your site should not mirror (be similar or nearly identical in appearance to) your parent company's or any other advertiser's site

• Provide substantial information. If your ad links to a page consisting mostly of ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), it must also provide additional, unique content.

It's especially important to feature original content because AdWords won't show multiple ads directing to identical or similar landing pages at the same time. Learn more about this policy.

Transparency

In order to build trust with users, your site should be explicit in three primary areas: the nature of your business; how your site interacts with a visitor's computer; and how you intend to use a visitor's personal information, if you request it. Here are tips on maximizing your site's transparency:

Your business information:

• Openly share information about your business. Clearly define what your business is or does.
• Honor the deals and offers you promote in your ad.
• Deliver products and services as promised.
• Only charge users for the products and services that they order and successfully receive.
• Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content.
• Ensure any prices or billing methods are easily located on the website and would be obvious to users.*
• In cases of recurrent billing or subscription situation, the price and billing interval must be present in a clear and obvious location on the page where the user provides their information, and a mandatory opt-in box must be present.*

Your site's interaction with a visitor's computer:

• Avoid altering users' browser behavior or settings (such as back button functionality or browser window size) without first getting their permission.
• If your site automatically installs software, be upfront about the installation and allow for easy removal. Refer to Google's Software Principles for more guidelines.

Visitors' personal information:

• Unless necessary for the product or service that you're offering, don't request personal information.
• If you do request personal information, provide a privacy policy that discloses how the information will be used.
• Give options to limit the use of a user's personal information, such as the ability to opt out of receiving newsletters.
• Allow users to access your site's content without requiring them to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.

Navigability

The key to turning visitors into customers is making it easy for users to find what they're looking for. Here's how:

• Provide a short and easy path for users to purchase or receive the product or offer in your ad.
• Avoid excessive use of pop-ups, pop-unders, and other obtrusive elements throughout your site.
• Make sure that your landing page loads quickly. Learn ways to improve your load time.
• Turn to Google's Webmaster Guidelines for more recommendations, which will improve your site's performance in Google's search results as well.

In keeping with our policies about high-quality user experiences, we advise against promoting the following types of sites. In some instances, ads for such sites will not be allowed to run. Note that this is not an exhaustive list and we are constantly updating in response to user complaints. Types of sites that go against our guidelines include:

• Data collection sites that offer free items, etc., in order to collect private information. Also known as information harvesting.
• Arbitrage sites that are designed for the sole purpose of showing ads
• "Get-rich quick" sites.
• Poor comparison shopping or aggregating sites whose primary purpose is to send users to other comparison sites, rather than to provide useful content or additional search functionality.
• Sites that are double-serving ads.

For additional information about landing page quality, please review our full set of FAQs on this topic.

View all related policies