Landing page / page / destination page: What is the difference?

[#1]

Hello, what is the difference between: Landing page / page / destination page in the report?

I want to create custom report, but when i choose page and then destination or landing page, the numbers in the report are different?

[#2]

Hi Alexander

Landing page is generally referred as the entrance page, where a user land on your website after click your ad or any other link.

Page can be any website page.

Destination page, I am not 100% sure about this but this basically can be any page after clicking on any link on a website. Like if you click on Contact Us page, then this page will be destination page.

Hope this make sense.

Abhishek

[#3 · Accepted solution]

Hi there;

Technically, the destination URL is the URL to which users are directed when clicking on the ad.
The landing page is the final URL on which the users "land" after all redirects.
(If there is no redirect the landing page and the destination URL - are the same)

The Policy requires that the domain of the   landing page  and the domain   of destination URL  are the same.

[#4]

Thanks Moshe for making it more clear...!

Abhishek

[#5]

So the landing page and the destination page are the same thing if we don't have redirect right? And if have redirect it will be destination URL and in the analytics report will have a different results when filter them?

[#6]

Yes - the destination page is the page you send a visitor to if they click on your ad - their destination. This is, of course, the landing page. As MosheTLV points out, this is different if redirects are involved - but since you mentioned Analytics and filtering, be warned that redirects can often cause GA tracking to fail. If the redirect is on the page before the GA script then the visitor will not be tracked correctly and since most redirects are at the start of the head section, this is usually the case.

Redirects are something of a red flag to the Google bots, who may disapprove ads if there is a redirect... why? - well because an advertiser who is hoping to sell one of the products banned by Google might try to play the system by apparently sending the visitor to an "innocent" page, and then redirect them to the offending page.

So be cautious when using redirects....

[#7]

Hi Alexander

Yes, be careful with redirects. The kind of redirect Steve is talking about is either using javascript to change the document.location or by using a refresh meta-tag. The redirect is done by the browser. This is not a "301 Redirect". If you are using the javascript method to redirect, be sure to include all of the query string with the redirect. If you use the meta-tag method, the query string, including the gclid, will be lost. That could make a problem with conversion tracking, especially if the redirect is to a different domain.

A better method is the "301 Redirect" from the server side. How you set this up depends on which web server and platform you are using for your web site. The bots are pretty smart these days and can follow the browser side redirects as well as server side. AdWords will disapprove destination URL's that involve too many redirects. I've never seen documentation on how many is too many, but certainly not 1.

Best of Luck!

Pete

[#8]

Many thanks