Dynamically populate keyword onto Marketo LPs

[Anonymous]

Hi Community,

We are faced with a challenge of increasing our Quality Score in our Adwords campaigns due to poor landing page relevance (particularly content not being tied closely to keywords).

We want to avoid creating a ton of variations for a single landing page, as it is very manual. We would have to replicate these pages in 3-4 different languages as well.

We use Marketo Landing Pages for our PPC campaigns and are looking to dynamically populate a keyword (through utm_term) into the content, in order to increase landing page relevancy.

I've searched the community but haven't found a clear answer

Let me know what you all think!

Best,

JP

[Anonymous]

This is doable using javascript.  Simply grab the search term from the utm value and place it in the body of the page

[Anonymous]

Hi Jamie,

Assuming that I'm not an expert using javascript, nor in HTML -- where do I go about finding/placing this script on the page?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Hire a web developer. While simple to implement, this isn't something that should be supported by a non-technical person.

It's also pretty doubtful that this trick is going to suddenly spark your SEO.  The Googlebot isn't stupid -- it knows when you're faking relevancy by dropping a keyword into unrelated text.  The right way to use keywords is to write fresh content in a way that straddles the line between natural language and purposeful name-dropping.

[Anonymous]

Hi Sanford,

We have a web developer, and I've seen the snippet of code that needs to implemented.

What I'm wondering is, if anyone has had experience executing this on marketo landing pages.

Also -- this isn't for SEO purposes, rather SEM. We want to tie the keywords that show up in ad copy, to translate over the landing page by way of utm_source URI parameters.

[SanfordWhiteman]

this isn't for SEO purposes, rather SEM. We want to tie the keywords that show up in ad copy, to translate over the landing page by way of utm_source URI parameters.

Same idea. It's not a way to increase the substantive quality of your pages. Think about how easy it is for anyone to do this and you see why it cannot legitimately be a differentiator. Best case it helps a tiny bit. Worst case you get penalized.

What I'm wondering is, if anyone has had experience executing this on marketo landing pages.

Your rendered Marketo LPs, especially if you're using free-form templates, start as the simplest possible HTML documents.  They might as well be in an elementary HTML guide from the 90s (I don't mean that in a bad way, just a matter-of-fact way!).  So you can add whatever scripts (in HTML blocks) you want and you don't have to worry about content loading asychronously or anything like that.  So there's no reason that a general-purpose "insert a query param into marked-off parts of content" script would not work.

[Josh_Hill13]

Per Sanford Whiteman

I would say there are many other tools that can help you manage that situation better, such as Captora. You can certainly tokenize your page to churn out more campaigns faster. You can also hire translation agencies to help this issue.

I suspect Google has already defended against precisely this sort of situation and would hit you hard for this sort of thing. If your pages aren't relevant, make them relevant the right way.

[Anonymous]

Hi Josh,

Thanks for suggesting Captora, I will check them out.

Tokenizing landing pages won't work since we want to personalize pages to anonymous visitors, not those known to our DB.

Here is my example:

We have 1 asset pointing to the demo of product (let's say it's called 'widget' for example).

If a user searches for and clicks on an ad for the terms:

"simple widget system" or

"enterprise widget system"

Using the URI parameters utm_term=simple or utm_term=enterprise, are we able to pull that value and dynamically insert the text onto the landing page in the headline to say "{keyword} Widget System" etc?

I hope this clarifies things a bit.

Let me know what you think.

[Anonymous]

I've done this in the past, and it does not increase Quality Score *directly* as Sanford Whiteman​ said. The spider will read your page's code without Javascript, so it will read your page's title as

<h1><span id="domElementForInsertingTerm"></span> Widget System</h1>

Not to say doing this won't indirectly increase your Quality Score because your page's content will be tailored to the user's search term, which could increase conversion rates. If you have conversion tracking turned on and reporting properly, this increase could increase your QS because your ad is more relevant (converting better).

[Anonymous]

Jason Long​, I was under the impression that conversions (through conversion tracking) do nothing to impact QS... Am I wrong?

Ideally, we'd like for this mechanism to improve quality score (as the replaced text would make the LP tied more closely to the ad/keyword etc) -- although is there a way to have the spider read the pages code after it has fully loaded (including the javascript)?

Of course, we expect downstream conversion to be nominal as well, but that's a plus.

At the end of the day, we don't have the bandwidth to be spinning up/maintaing a ton of landing pages for every keyword (in every language).