BERT Relevance: using AI to improve landing page relevance in Google Ads

In paid search advertising, it’s essential that your customers’ search terms closely match your landing page content. This alignment, known as landing page relevance, plays a critical role in how Google evaluates performance through the landing page experience metric. Landing page relevance considers factors such as content relevance, ease of navigation, and internal linking. When landing pages fail to meet these expectations, brands can suffer from lower Quality Scores and increased costs. That’s why our tech team created BERT Relevance, a tool that uses AI to uncover mismatches between search terms and landing page copy. By improving landing page relevance, brands can make more informed decisions around content optimisation, query management, and campaign structure, ultimately improving paid search performance and ROI.  

The challenge of measuring landing page relevance

Content relevance is crucial. ‘Landing page experience’ significantly influences a keyword’s Quality Score, which in turn affects the cost per click (CPC). Google categorises your ‘landing page experience’ score as below average, average, or above average. Given the wide range of factors this metric encompasses, these broad categories offer limited insight, often leaving analysts uncertain about the necessary actions. BERT Relevance demystifies this metric, with a particular emphasis on content relevance. Our goal in creating this tool was to uncover mismatches between search terms and landing page content, allowing us to make strategic decisions on improving landing page copy, generating new content, or removing irrelevant search terms.  

Which insights BERT Relevance uncovers

Our tool BERT Relevance gives insights that guide strategic decisions in campaign management, from refining ad content and keywords to optimising landing pages and segmenting campaigns based on specific themes or services. These insights enable marketers to improve:

• Landing Page Optimisation: Enhance pages with low BERT Relevance scores to better align with search terms or redirect ads to more relevant pages.
• Query-to-Page Relevance: Ensure alignment between the search term and the landing page. Discrepancies can lead to low BERT Relevance scores and a poorer user experience.
• Search Query Refinement: Reassess the effectiveness of search terms in driving traffic at either search query or query cluster level, identifying poor performing search queries and search query themes.

 

The BERT Relevance workflow

1. Search query report from Google Ads: The process begins with the collection of search queries, performance data and the landing page URL.
2. Keyword Clustering: We then cluster the search queries from Google Ads using OpenAI and GPT4. Clustering this data makes it easier to extract insight across a very large data set (10k search queries at a minimum).
3. Content Scraping via Puppeteer: We scrape the content from each landing page URL using Puppeteer, a nodejs library for javascript enabled web crawling.
4. Content Classification: We then use our BERT Relevance model, based off a machine learning model used for sentence/text embedding generation. This assesses the alignment between landing page content and search terms – the output of this is our ‘BERT score’ used to define the relevance of the search term vs. the landing page.

 

From insight to impact: how our clients have benefited

Account Restructuring

When onboarding a new client that previously had a fragmented account structure, we used insights from a long term BERT Relevance report to determine the most relevant landing page to use for each ad group within the new account structure. The new account structure resulted in a 19% increase in impressions being classified as ‘above average’ for the Google landing page relevance score, with an average quality score increasing from 6.5 to 9.2.

Search Query Funnelling 

For a retail client with a large product inventory, the report identified search queries which were triggering multiple ad groups/landing pages. The BERT Relevance report provided insights that informed us where to add negative keywords to ensure that the most relevant landing page is targeted for each search query. This resulted in both more relevant adverts, which recorded a 6% increase in CTR%, and an 8% improvement in conversion rate for associated keywords.

Blocking Poor Performing Traffic

We now use the report on a regular basis to identify poor performing search query ‘clusters.’ This groups search queries into similar themes. In isolation, poor performing search queries may go unnoticed. However, the clustering approach has proven to unearth poor performing one or two word themes, which we have used to add as negative phrase keywords to block irrelevant traffic.

Informing CX/CRO Strategy

The report identified poor performing landing pages which were being impacted by advert relevance issues, which informed our CX/CRO strategy, allowing us to prioritise landing page tests based on traffic and BERT Relevance score.  

Why landing page relevance matters

Improving landing page relevance is one of the most effective ways to strengthen paid search performance. By better aligning search queries with landing page content, brands can improve Quality Score, reduce wasted spend, and create a more relevant user experience. BERT Relevance enables this by providing clear, actionable insight into how well landing pages support the intent behind search terms. Whether used to inform landing page optimisation, search query refinement, or broader CX and CRO strategy, improving landing page relevance allows teams to focus effort where it delivers the greatest impact.  

Connect with the team

Want to improve landing page relevance and Quality Score in Google Ads? Speak to our team to understand how BERT Relevance can help turn insight into measurable performance gains.