Web development, SEO and digital marketing have gradually melded into a single, unified practice over the last decade. Organizations that still treat the three disciplines as separate entities fail to leverage the benefits of a unified ecosystem. One of the ways this plays out is through more expensive but less effective pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
PPC data provides solid marketing numbers. But it does so much more than that. The same data reveals a lot about the state of a website and how its developers are keeping up with a modern web. This suggests that the web development team really needs to understand PPC data and what it means to their efforts.
Speed and Quality Score
Web development and PPC marketing intersect at multiple touchpoints. The most visible, according to San Diego-based Pixsan Solutions, is the landing page. Here is why: a website’s technical performance directly affects ad costs. This is because of Google’s dependence on ‘quality score’.
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Pixsan describes quality score as a measurement of the user experience for a given page. User experience is everything to Google, because it affects whether users are happy with the company’s search results and ad placement. Unhappy customers will stop using Google.
User experience impacts quality score. Likewise, quality score affects how much advertisers are forced to bid in order to get their ads displayed. When quality score goes down, bids go up. That means even a slight drop in quality score can mean an advertiser is paying more per click. What does this have to do with web development? In short, page speed contributes to a landing page’s quality score.
Slower Speeds Equal Lower Scores
Slower page speeds annoy users. If a page takes too long to load, users will not even hang around long enough to let it finish. They will move on to the next website. In the end, slower speeds equal lower quality scores and the subsequent higher bids for ads.
Think of slow page speeds as a tax on the marketing budget. An organization is paying more per click than it really has to. Above and beyond this tax is the bounce rate. Slow loading pages not only increase cost-per-click, but they also increase bounce rates.
A bounce occurs when someone lands on your site but doesn’t stick around long enough to do anything. It equates to wasting money in the sense that you are paying for a click that has no chance of leading to a conversion. So then what’s the point?
The Importance of Data Context
The web development team can also benefit a great deal by understanding data context. Web developers can identify friction points through PPC data, points that do not normally show up in a local testing environment. Here are two examples:
- Tracking Accuracy – PPC data is heavily tied to pixels and tags. A simple change to a button ID or url structure can break a conversion tag, leaving the marketing team flying blind. But contextual PPC data can tell the web development team that something has gone wrong.
- Messaging – Inconsistent messages between ads and landing pages increases bounce rates. However, contextual PPC data can point web developers to the source of the problem, which could be something as simple as a caching error.
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All of this matters because paid ads need to generate an acceptable return. If they don’t, they are not a worthwhile investment. But failing to generate the desired return is not always a marketing problem. Quite often, it’s a combination of marketing and web development issues that need to be addressed with a more unified strategy.
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