During the Landing Page Clinic at SES NY last week, one of the volunteers from the audience offered up what I thought was a good, solid landing experience. It's for The Entertainment Book, which publishes local discount and promotion books around the country.

The landing page was similar to their home page, with a beautiful look-and-feel and an inviting way for respondents to preview discounts in their zip code. Path based, meaningful segmentation, great branding -- many of the key principles of the post-click manifesto. I'm not the only one who thought it was good either: apparently they had tested many different concepts and variations, and this one was the hands-down winner, as judged by real users.

Yet when it was discussed at the clinic, concern was quickly raised about the image-heavy nature of the page and the form required to get to step two of the path. Would this not negatively impact the Google Quality Score? Wouldn't it be better to have more text, fewer images? Move it towards Google's Platonic ideal of what a landing page should be?

I had to interject.

Google is not your customer. Google is your vendor. You pay them; your customers pay you.

I appreciate that the Google Quality Score impacts your price and position in the SERP. You shouldn't ignore it. You should certainly try to keep it as high as you can. But when the Google Quality Score has become an end unto itself, I think priorities are out of whack.

Creating compelling experiences for your respondents, maximizing your conversion rate, winning over more and more qualified prospects: these should be your primary objectives. Achieving the highest possible return on advertising spend (ROAS) should be your goal.

The Google Quality Score is a factor, but it shouldn't be the dominant factor. What matters more is your Human Quality Score -- how real people react to your landing experience. Do they find it appealing? Are they engaged? Does it motivate them to move forward with you? Ultimately, do they convert?

Let's say you have two landing experiences, X and Y:

X is Google's darling, and gives you a "Great" Google Quality Score for the keyword. As a result, your minimum bid is $4.00 per click. But when real people land on it, only 3% of them convert, the industry average. You could call this an "OK" Human Quality Score.

Y has a format that the Google algorithm doesn't like as much. It has more images, maybe even Flash or video as one of its main elements. It gives you an "OK" Google Quality Score, which causes your minimum bid to be 20% higher, $4.80 per click. But wow, the people who click really love it, and they convert at rate of 10%. You get a "Great" Human Quality Score.

Which would you rather have? Let's do the math.

Assume that the keyword and ad are the same for both, giving you the same click-through rate (CTR), and you get 1,000 clicks. For the sake of keeping the math simple, say each conversion is worth $1,000.

Landing experience X costs you $4,000 and gives you 30 conversions. You win $30,000 of business from that spend, so your ROAS is $7.50 for every $1.00 spent.

Landing experience Y costs you $4,800 and gives you 100 conversions. But now you win $100,000 of business from that spend, so your ROAS is $20.83 for every $1.00 spent.

Your ROAS is 170% higher for landing experience Y and you net 70 additional customers. I don't know about you, but I'll take Y over X every time (and it's not just because I subscribe to Theory Y management). My feelings aren't hurt that Google only thinks I'm OK, if my customers think I'm great, and the economics are in my favor.

Besides, if you take Google at face value, they want people who click on search ads to have a great experience and find "rich and original content". If you focus on building great landing experiences for your customers, you're doing the right thing. Just because Google's ad algorithm may or may not agree with what you and your customers think is great today, doesn't mean that won't change. In fact, it can change quite suddenly.

People who prize a Google Quality Score over everything else live a precarious existence. When Google decides to change their algorithm, then all the learning about optimizing one's score can be made worthless overnight.

Learning about what your customers value, however, has much more staying power. It also has value far beyond Google.

One more point that needs to be made on this subject is the debate over rich media. A number of folks will tell you to avoid having it on your landing pages for fear that it will negatively impact your Google Quality Score. It's almost heretical in some quarters (certain sessions in SES, for instance). But keep two things in mind:

1. Real people tend to actually like rich media. Done well, it can win you an extremely high Human Quality Score. A whole cottage industry of avatars and integrated page video producers has sprung up because these techniques are delivering phenomenal conversion rates. (This is one of the reasons we were so excited to announce the seamless integration of Flash objects into LiveBall earlier this month.)

2. Google paid $1.6 billion for YouTube. Clearly they recognize the enormous value of rich media as well. It's not hard to imagine how that will evolve to be increasingly reflected in Google Quality Score calculations. We are not a society of text. We are a society of images and interactivity. And Google is as eager to tap into that as anyone.

Again, I'm not advising that you should be reckless with your Google Quality Score -- any more than you should be reckless with any of the other secondary factors that contribute to your marketing choices and overall campaign success. And if you can have a "Great" Google Quality Score and a "Great" Human Quality Score, all the better. They're not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Just don't let the tail wag the dog.

Put your Human Quality Score first. Put your end-to-end results first. Put the Google Quality Score in its place, high on your list perhaps, but not quite that high.

-- Scott Brinker