Creating an effective PPC campaign can almost be done entirely inside the Google Ads platform, except for one key component: your landing page. Landing pages are connected to your website and need to be created through your site editor.
The landing page is often thought of as the final hurdle or the last piece of the puzzle in creating a successful conversion. Thus, it is important that you not only learn how to create landing pages for Google Ads but also how to optimize it to ensure that this site produces conversions and doesn’t accidentally drive traffic away!
What Is A Landing Page?
When you create your first PPC ad messages on Google Ads, you are asked to enter a URL address. This is your landing page; it is the place on your website where your ad traffic lands, which is where it gets its namesake.
What Is The Goal Of A Landing Page?
The purpose of your landing page, as mentioned before, is to facilitate conversions. The goal is to connect people that clicked your ad with the offers included in the ad copy.
With the PPC advertising model, clicks cost money. Thus, you want to try and turn as many of those clicks into conversions as possible. This will reduce your wasted spend and ensure that you generate more money than you spend.
How Does A Landing Page Achieve This Goal?
For a landing page experience to be successful and help PPC marketers achieve their advertising goals, it needs to accomplish three things.
Frictionless
Every second that a lead spends on a landing page needs to nudge them towards converting and not pull them away. When things get in the way of helping a customer convert and instead drive them away, it causes friction.
Friction manifests itself in many ways. If there are too many things on the page that distract from the conversion process, it creates friction. If the page loads too slowly, it creates friction. If there are too many steps in the checkout or conversion process, it, you guessed it, adds friction.
Friction is your greatest enemy and should be reduced however possible!
Relevant
When a potential customer clicks on your ad message, it is because they care about whatever offer, product or service you advertised. If the landing page doesn’t follow up with the same product, service or offer, then it creates an experience that lacks relevance and cohesion.
Your ad traffic will feel like you promised something and then didn’t deliver and that’s not the kind of experience you want to create!
Relevance also matters in Google’s eyes. While your landing page is detached from Google Ads, Google still analyzes the page and determines its quality, relevance and other qualities. These traits make up your Google Ads Quality Score. That score impacts where your ads appear, how much you spend for clicks and more.
Your landing pages absolutely must be relevant to the keywords you’ve targeted!
Value Added
You don’t have a lot of room in your ad messages to describe everything that makes your company and its products or services so great. You only have room to offer just enough value to entice a customer to click to learn more.
When this person travels to your landing page, that’s exactly what they expect to be able to do! Your landing page needs to add value to what was described in the ad copy.
Customer testimonials, product images/videos, detailed descriptions, reviews and many other assets will all add value to the ad experience and your landing page. But, don’t go too overboard that your value added creates friction!
Don’t Neglect Testing And Measuring Your Landing Pages
As your landing pages begin to attract ad traffic, it is crucial that you pay attention to how these visitors are behaving. Are your clicks turning into conversions? Or, are you seeing a lot of customers leave the page without moving any further on the site?
The truth is that your landing page isn’t going to be successful at first try. PPC marketers work endlessly to find ways to improve these crucial pages on their sites. You need to always be monitoring the metrics and testing new ways to enhance the landing page experience to unlock even more conversions!
Conclusions
Over time, these changes to your landing page experiences will help you understand what your audiences expect after they’ve clicked your ads and how these experiences make or break your conversions. These insights will help you optimize your landing pages, produce higher quality scores and unlock greater PPC success!
Reference Guide: https://www.wordstream.com/landing-page-optimization
Reference Guide: https://ppcexpo.com/blog/how-to-make-a-good-landing-page
