The difference between a landing page for search and one for social is not the design. It is that one visitor typed a question and the other was interrupted.
That is not a metaphor. It is visible in the platforms’ own product structures, and both of them publish exactly what they judge your page on. Those two lists are different, they are more specific than most people assume, and at least one widely repeated belief about them is contradicted by Google’s own documentation on three separate pages.
Everything below is quoted from live platform documentation.
The structural difference, in the platforms’ own words
Google’s campaign objectives are scoped by campaign type, and this produces a fact worth pausing on: a Search campaign offers no awareness objective at all. The options are Sales, Leads and Website traffic. Awareness appears only on Display, Demand Gen and Video. Every objective available in Search presupposes that the person is already trying to do something.
Meta’s objective list starts from the other end. Its first and broadest objective is Awareness, which Meta describes this way: “Build awareness of your business. This objective will help you reach the largest number of people who are most likely to remember your ad.”
And the auctions are triggered by different things. Meta states plainly: “When advertisers create ads, they tell us who they want to show their ads to by defining a target audience.” Google’s equivalent trigger is the search term.
So on one platform you are answering a question someone asked. On the other you are interrupting someone who asked nothing. Every subsequent difference between the two pages follows from that, including what each platform measures.
What Google actually judges, and the belief it contradicts
Start with the correction, because it changes how people spend their time.
Quality Score is not what determines your cost per click. Google states this in three places. On the Quality Score page itself: “Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction. It’s a diagnostic tool to identify how ads that show for certain keywords affect the user experience.” On its spending page: “Quality Score is an aggregated estimate of your overall performance in ad auctions, and isn’t used at auction time to determine Ad Rank.” And on its ad quality page: “these scores are not inputs in the ad auction.”
The same page also says: “Quality Score is not a key performance indicator and should not be optimized or aggregated with the rest of your data.”
That does not mean quality is irrelevant to price. It means the mechanism is different, and the real mechanism is more consequential. Ad quality enters the auction through Ad Rank thresholds, which Google describes as follows:
“Thresholds are determined dynamically at the time of each auction based on various factors, including: Your ad quality: To help maintain a high quality ad experience for consumers, lower quality ads have higher thresholds.”
And what a threshold does to your bill:
“If your ad is the only one that’s eligible to show, (for example, because none of your competitors meet their Ad Rank thresholds), you’ll pay the reserve price… This means that depending on your ad quality and Ad Rank thresholds your ad could be relatively expensive, even when no ads show immediately below it.”
Read that twice. You can be the only advertiser in an auction and still pay a lot, because the floor is set by your own quality.
The landing page criteria Google names. They are on the Ad Rank page, in one sentence, and this is the closest thing to a specification the platform publishes:
“the usefulness and relevance of your ad and landing page, the expectations users have about your landing page based on the clicked ad creative, ease of landing page navigation, as well as other Search Quality signals.”
Its practical guidance adds four items: give people what they are looking for, keep messaging consistent from ad to landing page, make the site mobile friendly, and improve loading speed. It also offers a proxy: “Try using conversion rate as a proxy for good landing page experience. It doesn’t impact your landing page status, but it can be a good way for you to measure and optimize.”
And a myth Google kills explicitly:
“Keep in mind, the word-for-word phrase from a search term doesn’t need to be on your landing page.”
Its example is a search for “South Chicago Chihuahua-friendly budget hotels”, which “doesn’t need to lead to a landing page with the headline ‘South Chicago Chihuahua-friendly budget hotels.’”
What Meta judges, and the sentence that should change your priorities
Meta reviews the page too, and says so: “This review process may include the specific components of an ad, such as images, video, text and targeting information, as well as an ad’s associated landing page or other destinations.”
But the harder statement is about what happens when nothing is actually against the rules:
“Lower quality ads which do not necessarily violate our policies may experience impacted performance.”
And its business-facing article puts a price on it:
“If advertisers repeatedly post policy violating or low-quality ads, our system may associate their Page, domain, ad account or other associated entities as lower-quality, making ads created from these entities less competitive in auctions.”
“That means it will cost more and advertisers will see fewer results than if the ads did not contain these attributes and associations.”
Now the part that most directly changes how you build a social landing page. Meta lists the signals it monitors for ad quality, and two of them are on your site rather than in the feed:
“Hide ad / Hide all ads from this advertiser / Hide ad due to repetition / Report ad / Landing page bounce rate / Landing page dwell time”
So on Meta, how long someone stays on your page is an input to what your next impression costs. That is a more direct economic consequence than anything Google says about page speed in organic search.
Its published list of what makes a landing page experience low quality is equally specific: lacking substantive or original content, a disproportionate volume of ads relative to content, pop-ups and interstitials “that disrupt the user experience”, unexpected content experiences such as splitting an article across multiple pages, and misleading experiences about products, shipping times or support.
And on the ad side, three named failures that all produce a mismatch on arrival: withholding information “in order to entice someone to click a link to understand the full context of something”, sensationalized language that creates “an unexpected experience when people click to a landing page”, and engagement bait.
A recurring argument between a marketing team and a finance team starts here, and it is entirely explained by published defaults.
Google. The default click-through conversion window is 30 days. The default engaged-view window is 3 days, the default view-through window is 1 day, and windows can run from 1 to 90 days. On attribution models, Google has narrowed the field sharply: first click, linear, time decay and position-based “are no longer supported”, leaving data-driven, which is the default, and last click.
Meta. The standard settings are click-through at “1-day or 7-day after a link click”, view-through counting “events that occurred within 1-day after an impression of your ad”, and engage-through at 1 day after a non-link click, which includes a video played for five seconds.
Note what view-through means there: an impression, not a view of any particular duration. Someone who scrolled past your ad and bought the next day can be counted.
Meta itself warns against the comparison people habitually make: “Results cannot be compared in the Campaign Overview table across ad sets with different attribution models. Each attribution model uses different counting mechanisms, and comparing across different attribution models will lead to inaccurate conclusions.”
If Meta says that about two ad sets on the same platform, adding up Meta conversions and Google conversions into one number is worse.
One honest caveat. Meta’s live documentation no longer states which attribution setting is applied by default; the article that once did now redirects elsewhere. The widely repeated figure survives in search caches only. Read the setting in your own account rather than citing a number.
One update to note, because outdated advice is everywhere: Interaction to Next Paint replaced First Input Delay on 12 March 2024. Any guidance still citing First Input Delay is more than two years stale. Google also warns that lab tools cannot measure this metric at all, since “there is no user input”, and points to Total Blocking Time as the lab proxy.
On ranking, Google’s own answer is more measured than either camp usually admits:
“Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems… Keep in mind that getting good results in reports like Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report or third-party tools doesn’t guarantee that your pages will rank at the top of Google Search results… trying to get a perfect score just for SEO reasons may not be the best use of your time.”
So it is a ranking signal, and chasing a perfect score for search reasons is something Google explicitly discourages. Meanwhile, on the paid side, Google lists “improve loading speed” among its landing page recommendations, and Meta counts bounce rate and dwell time in ad quality. The commercial argument for speed is stronger than the search argument.
What follows for the two pages
The search page answers the question that was typed. Above the fold, in the visitor’s own terms, without requiring a scroll to confirm they are in the right place. Google’s “expectations users have about your landing page based on the clicked ad creative” is the criterion, and it is satisfied by continuity, not by repeating the keyword.
The social page earns the attention it interrupted. The visitor had no question. They need a reason to keep reading before anything is asked of them, which is precisely what dwell time measures and what bounce rate punishes. A page that opens with a form is optimizing against the signal the platform is watching.
Both pages must not contradict the ad. Google disapproves “inconsistencies between the ad and the landing page”, promotions “not relevant to the destination”, and offers “unavailable or aren’t easily found from the destination”. Meta names withholding information and sensationalized language for the same reason. The two platforms independently arrived at the same rule.
Redirects deserve care. Google specifically disapproves “redirects from the final URL that take the user to a different domain”, and requires the display URL domain to match the final URL.
And thin pages are a named problem. Google disapproves destinations with content “replicated from another source without adding value”, and those “solely designed to send users elsewhere”. Meta names lacking “substantive or original content”. A landing page consisting of a headline and a form qualifies under both descriptions.
The practical summary is short. Build one page that finishes a thought someone started, and another that starts a thought nobody asked for. Then read each platform’s own criteria rather than a benchmark, because neither platform publishes a benchmark, and every number you have seen for average conversion rate or average cost per click came from an agency describing its own client list. Building the two pages alongside the campaigns rather than after them is part of our B2B paid acquisition work, where the landing page counts as part of the buy instead of as something the client supplies.
Frequently asked questions
Does Quality Score affect what I pay per click?
Not directly. Google states on three separate pages that Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction. Ad quality does affect price, but through Ad Rank and through Ad Rank thresholds, which set the reserve price. Google says lower quality ads have higher thresholds.
Do I need the exact search term on my landing page?
No, and Google says so explicitly. Its guidance states that the word-for-word phrase from a search term does not need to be on your landing page, and gives an example of a long query that does not need to become a headline.
Does Meta judge my landing page?
Yes. Meta states that its ad review may include an ad's associated landing page, and lists landing page bounce rate and landing page dwell time among the signals it monitors for ad quality. It also says low-quality associations make ads less competitive in auctions, so they cost more.
Why do Google and Meta report different conversion numbers?
Because they count different things. Google's default click-through window is 30 days and its default model is data-driven. Meta offers 1 or 7 day click-through and a 1 day view-through triggered by an impression. Meta itself warns that results cannot be compared across different attribution models.
Should the two landing pages be different?
Yes, but not visually. A search visitor arrived with a stated question and needs it answered above the fold. A social visitor was interrupted and needs a reason to care before anything else, which is why Meta measures how long they stay.