Should You Prevent Landing Pages from Being Crawled if it Interferes with Google AdWords?

A Google AdWords advertiser on DigitalPoint Forums mentions that his landing pages -- which he uses specifically for AdWords (thus far) -- have been creeping up in the search results, and he feels that the additional clicks are interfering with the continuous need to test and retest his AdWords campaign. He wonders if he should prevent these PPC pages from being crawled by the spiders and only use them explicitly for his AdWords campaign.

It is suggested that instead of preventing decent traffic that might yield to conversions that he instead look for a decent analytics package to differentiate between the types of clicks so that they can pinpoint whether the clicks came from an organic search result or from a sponsored listing:

Most decent stats packages will allow you to differentiate. If you don't have a stats package, you can use Google Analytics for free.

Discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

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posted Tamar Weinberg in Google AdWords at May 8, 2007 10:29 AM Comments (3)

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great source... this info is a good addition on what I am studying now.. the Google Adwords. Thanks for continue posting about google adwords. :)

Posted by jhona at May 8, 2007 21:28

No he should not stop the spiders, his quality score on the pages based on end user date (Click path, time on pages etc) might be jeopardized. If he wants higher PPC placement he should focus on segmenting his ad groups into smaller more niche specific groups in Google and Yahoo (Panama) quality and relevance are based on segmentation of ad groups.. tighten up the campaign's in the auction based search engines and do not worry about the bots.

Posted by Heather Paulson at May 9, 2007 01:27

It depends on how you much you want to micro analyze your traffic sources. If you want to see if ppc traffic / any new traffic source behaves differently than natural listings (and it probably does), create another duplicate "ppc" landing page / directory of landing pagges and tack on a no follow / no index on to them.

Your other option is to invest in a more sophisticated third party tracking software. Different programs have different levels of tracking individual sources and will allow you to track ppc vs natural without changing your site significantly.

I'm personally a fan of installing several tracking methods and trying to minimize possible errors in the process, ie setting different directories/landing pages for sources, setting up my own reporting program, and employing a sophisticated third party tracking program.

Posted by Mike at May 9, 2007 12:57

Should You Prevent Landing Pages from Being Crawled if it Interferes with Google AdWords?

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