which attribute describes a good landing page experience (the exam question is a decent audit)

studying for the google ads cert years ago i hit the question which attribute describes a good landing page experience and rolled my eyes at it. relevant content, transparency, easy navigation, fast load. classic exam filler.

then a client page tanked its quality score and i had nothing better to work from, so i walked that page through the four like a checklist. it held up embarrasingly well.

1: relevance. the ad said emergency drain cleaning, the page opened with welcome to our family business since 1998. the search intent and the first hundred pixels had nothing to do with each other. the headline got rewritten to repeat the ad almost word for word.

2: transparency. no address anywhere, no real photos, a stock image of a smiling man in a hard hat. we added photos of the van, the licence number and a phone nubmer in the header.

3: navigation. the full site menu was sitting on the page, so about a fifth of the paid traffic wandered off into the blog and never came back. stripped it down to a logo and the phone number.

4: load time. 4.1s on mobile, most of it a hero video nobody watched past two seconds. deleted the video.

quality score went from 4 to 7 over three weeks or so and cpc came down maybe 20%. the page moved from 2.1% to 2.8% on the same spend.

none of that is clever and none of it needed a designer. the exam answer just happens to describe what a paid landing page is supposed to do, and most pages i audit fail two of the four. the nav one gets almost everybody, they think leaving the menu on is being helpful.