Thursday 7 December 2006

Free Hosted Business Pages with AdWords Starter Edition

Google is now making available a service whereby advertisers who don't have a web site can get a free, hosted web page with their AdWords account. The page requires no HTML knowledge to create and can be used as the landing page for their advertisement. As the Inside AdWords blog puts it

"A hosted business page is an informational webpage that new advertisers can create when they sign up for AdWords Starter Edition [which can be used] to tell people more about your business when they click on your ad."

This new feature is only available in AdWords Starter Edition for new signups in the U.S.

My first thought, is, so if they then upgrade to Standard Edition, presumably they then lose their landing page, so this feature is actually going to cause users to stick with the Starter Edition which, as we all know, is extremely featureless and inflexible compared to the Standard Edition.

My second thought is, given all the uproar that has occurred as a result of the AdWords algorithm changes that occurred this year, particularly with regard to landing pages, I can't help but wonder whether these free landing pages will somehow escape the same rigorous evaluation that everyone else has to put up with, so will these advertisers get an unfair advantage?

Also, it will be interesting to see, when and if the quality score is added to the ad group stats, as mentioned in a previous post, how these advertisers compare against those with their own web sites.

Note: More information on hosted business pages is also available in the AdWords Help Center.

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