Optimized Landing Pages Reduce Ad Costs

Optimizing a website for organic search rankings is well-known. Less common is optimizing for ad engines, crucial for managing the cost and effectiveness of paid traffic.

Ad targeting on social media and search engines relies on algorithms that bid for placements on advertisers’ behalf. Algorithms evaluate an ad and its linked landing page, assigning a relevancy score that influences the cost and performance. Meta calls the score “Quality Rank”; Google refers to it as “Ad Rank.” Both prioritize the relevance of an ad to the landing page.

Bidding engines on Meta, Google, and others optimize around a goal, typically conversions (for ecommerce). Low click rates on ads drive up their costs, as do landing experiences with low conversions.

But an optimized experience can reduce ad costs. Note the chart below showing my firm’s A/B test on Meta. The test traffic was split: half went to a standard ecommerce product page and half to an ad-engine-optimized version. Both used the same ad and budget. The optimized experience received 28% more traffic due to lower per-impression ad costs and drove 99% more revenue than the product page.

3 AEO Hacks

Ad engine optimization (AEO) prioritizes the relevance of a landing page to an ad. Little relevance produces high bounce rates and low conversions. Ad engines detect this and penalize the campaign with higher ad costs. Custom landing pages are the traditional fix. They work well for bottom-of-funnel and long-running campaigns but not for top-of-funnel customer acquisition, especially on social media.

For example, a shopper searching Google for a “red four-slot toaster” has a clear purchase intent and would likely convert from a landing page featuring red four-slot toasters.

But a consumer on Facebook might see an aspirational kitchen ad that happens to feature a red four-slot toaster, requiring a different landing approach.

Consider these AEO hacks:

• Mirror campaign creative. The simplest way to increase relevance is to mirror the images in the ad onto the landing page. This reassures shoppers they are in the right place, preventing an early bounce.

• Make it easy to buy all of the products. The top reason shoppers bounce is they can’t find the product, or it looks different. Incredibly, landing pages without the promoted products are common. It’s especially problematic on mobile, where the product may be swipes away from where the shopper lands. Hence ensure the landing page shows all products in the ad, not just the category or one item.

• Enable all intents. An ad showing a model on a beach wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and a hat could drive multiple interests: the t-shirt, shorts, summer, beachwear, or more. A landing experience focused on just one of those items will result in high bounces.

An optimized page makes it easy to buy, say, the advertised t-shirt while providing easy navigation to the other products. The page simultaneously shows all products in the ad and draws visitors into the broader category. The more visitors that browse, the more signals return to the ad engine, increasing the relevance score and lowering ad costs.

Algorithm Driven

To function, optimized pages require implementing the ad engine’s conversion API (“CAPI” for Meta and Google) to send the engagement signals. Testing and evolving the AEO experience is helpful — manually or automated.

Advertising on Meta, Google, and other channels is now algorithm-driven. Improving performance means optimizing for the algorithm. The combined quality of the ad and landing page directly impacts ad costs.

Google’s Cookie Reversal Raises Questions

Google announced on July 22, 2024, that it would not remove third-party tracking cookies from the Chrome browser after all, leaving many advertisers to wonder, “What now?”

“We are proposing an updated approach [to tracking cookie depreciation] that elevates user choice,” wrote Anthony Chavez, Google’s Privacy Sandbox vice president. “Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing.”

Google announced its “new path” for cookies on July 22.

Privacy advocates have warned for decades about the tiny bits of code we lovingly call cookies since, when placed in a web browser, they could track individuals across websites, Google search queries, location, and other behaviors.

Yet third-party or tracking cookies have legitimate uses for cross-site personalization, targeted advertising, and website analytics.

Regardless, all this data collection means Google, Criteo, and others know loads about nearly every person online, making “internet privacy” a thin veneer.

Thus Google has promised for roughly five years to remove tracking cookies, but no more. The reversal has advertisers and industry observers questioning the future.

Here are five aspects to monitor.

Will Regulators Approve?

Google’s plan to keep cookies and its Privacy Sandbox must still pass regulatory muster.

Simon Poulton, executive vice president of innovation and growth at Tinuiti, a marketing firm, wrote to Practical Ecommerce in an email that regulatory approval was the “elephant in the room” when discussing Google’s decision.

Google faces scrutiny from governmental agencies interested in consumer privacy while also negotiating with agencies that rely on cookies and fear their elimination enhances Google’s own ad platform.

This latter group includes the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is investigating Google’s Privacy Sandbox. The CMA was concerned that ad targeting via the Sandbox (Topics API, for example) extended Google’s dominance in the digital advertising industry.

Referring to a briefing Tinuiti released in April of this year, Poulton wrote, “As part of our coverage, we noted that privacy and competition are in direct, insoluble tension.”

“We went so far as to suggest that Google would be unable to move on an absolute deprecation (and transition to the Privacy Sandbox) under the current circumstances,” continued Poulton.

Given Google’s announcement, this seems to have been the case.

For its part, the CMA noted on its website, “The CMA will now work closely with the [Information Commissioner’s Office] to carefully consider Google’s new approach to Privacy Sandbox.”

Thus Chrome, third-party cookies, and the Privacy Sandbox can likely proceed as Google’s Chavez proposes, but there’s no certainty.

Does Google Benefit?

The CMA and others have argued that Google’s Privacy Sandbox would have strengthened the company’s position in the ad business since targeting would rely on its technology.

“The fear is that Google’s new [Sandbox] framework might limit competition by making it more challenging for other companies to operate effectively in the ad space,” wrote Piotr Korzeniowski, CEO of Piwik Pro, an analytics platform, in an email.

But others argue that tracking cookies fuel Google’s existing ad business.

So which is it?

“Google is in a precarious position to own the most popular browser, advertising network, and many more ‘most popular’ digital products and services,” wrote Korzeniowski.

Hence Google’s decision to keep cookies and still move forward with the Privacy Sandbox presumably wasn’t so much about what benefited its own ad business as taking a balanced approach for its entire company, customers, and regulators.

Industry Preference?

Assume that all the various regulatory bodies, whether focused on privacy or competition, approve of Google’s “new path for Privacy Sandbox on the web.” Will industry participants such as Tinuiti and Piwik Pro choose cookies or the Sandbox?

“As privacy awareness increases, more users are expected to opt out of cookies, especially with more stringent regulations, clearer opt-out mechanisms, and rising consumer awareness of the topic,” Korzeniowski added. “Google’s plan to integrate the consent mechanism into browsers is a bold move. However, they did not plan this without ensuring it wouldn’t significantly impact their data collection and advertising business. I bet they will keep opt-ins above 70% because of how they design the mechanism.”

Walled Gardens

Third-party tracking differs from first-party. For example, TikTok does not require a tracking cookie to know what interests visitors; it has first-party data.

Tinuiti’s Poulton wrote, “Keep in mind that [third-party] cookies have no bearing on search or social (or any walled garden) tracking or advertising performance. So, while this is big news, I constantly remind folks that many advertisers on Meta, Amazon, and Google-owned platforms would not see any impact from [third-party] cookie deprecation, anyway.”

One could argue that even those platforms benefit from third-party data, but Instagram and Facebook advertisers, for example, are not likely impacted much in the near term.

However, eliminating tracking cookies would disrupt many others, such as services that place ads on publisher websites, email messages, and streaming videos.

Advertisers

The final takeaway from Google’s cookie announcement is that digital advertising is changing: We could have both cookies and the Sandbox. What worked five years ago may not now or in the future.

What won’t change is the value of first-party data. That’s what advertisers should focus on in this new advertising era.