Landing pages: approval, quality and SSL
Ad Grants requires every advertised domain to be approved by Google and served over HTTPS. Our own data says the number of pages you promote is the biggest single predictor of spend.
Oskar SznajderCo-founder Webup!
October 20, 2026 · 5 min read
Three requirements sit on the landing page, and together they are the bottleneck that decides whether an Ad Grants account works at all.
1. Every domain has to be approved
You can send grant traffic to more than one website, but each domain must be submitted and approved by Google. An unapproved domain in an ad is a policy breach, and the ads pointing at it will not serve.
2. An active SSL certificate
Any site used in the ads must be served over HTTPS with a valid certificate. This one is binary and easy to miss after a hosting move or a certificate expiry — and an expired certificate takes the ads down with it.
3. The page has to be about the phrase
This is where the policy requirement ("a well-optimized site with substantial information about the organization") meets what we actually measured across 5,482 landing pages.
The number of pages you promote is the strongest structural predictor of spend we found. Median monthly spend against promoted pages: $51 with one or two pages, $6,867 above forty. There is no plateau. A typical organization promotes three pages.
Accounts that spend the whole grant have a remarkably uniform profile: a median of 23 promoted pages, 611 keywords and 19 keywords per page. Accounts with keywords and zero impressions also have a uniform profile — 3 pages, 101 keywords, 34 keywords per page. Three pages and a hundred keywords is the entire diagnosis: the account has nowhere to send traffic, so no keyword has anything to win an auction with.
What actually makes a page work
| Are the words of the phrase on the page | Impressions per keyword | Rated "poor page" | Chance the keyword starts |
|---|---|---|---|
| All words of the phrase present | 16.1 | 43.9% | 29.1% |
| Partly — at least one | 7.1 | 53.5% | 15.9% |
| No word of the phrase appears | 3.0 | 62.2% | 8.3% |
Five times more impressions, and it comes from whether the phrase appears in the text — not from how long the text is. One in four phrase → page pairs has not a single word of its phrase on the landing page it points at.
Content volume: a floor, not a scale
Longer pages do get rated "poor" less often — 73% of keywords at 2–4k characters against 42% at 13–16k — but the whole big jump sits between 4k and 6k characters, and content volume has no relationship with account spend at all. So: get above 4k characters, aim for around 8k, and stop. Commission a list of phrases to cover, not a character count. On a limited budget, several pages of 8k beat one page of 20k, because each page is a separate home for a separate group of phrases.
And page speed?
We tested 40 pairs of pages from the same account, near-identical in content volume, differing by 15 or more points of speed score. After correcting for multiple testing, none survives. A fast page is better for the user and worth having — what we dispute is that it lifts campaign results.
What to do
- Pick 8–10 topics your organization genuinely covers and give each its own page.
- Put the phrase in the page title and in the H1, and make sure it appears in the body.
- Then spread keywords across those pages, 10–25 per page.
The reverse order — keywords first, pages later — does not work, because the keywords have nowhere to lead.
See which of your pages Google rates as poor
PING.NGO checks approved domains, SSL and the match between each keyword and the page it points at.
