When it comes to PPC, the goal is simple: drive high-quality traffic to your website. Traffic that converts to real customers.
But it’s no secret that even with the most fine-tuned PPC campaigns, you sometimes fail to see good results due to website limitations. It might be that you're driving traffic towards an irrelevant page, or even just one that's not user-friendly. This is where landing pages come into play.
Dedicated landing pages have been a part of successful PPC campaigns for years now, but with the recent update from Google Ads it’s become more important than ever before. Google is now planning to actively demote the ads that go to irrelevant PPC landing pages, and prioritise ones that align with user intent.
We're here to help you make sure you get the most out of your paid ad campaigns - and that includes your landing page. So in this post we're going to take an in-depth look at creating landing pages, the purpose they perform and why they're so important.
Let’s start by talking about what exactly landing pages are and what makes them different to any of the potentially suitable pages on your website.
A PPC landing page is a standalone web-page, created specifically to support a certain marketing or advertising campaign.
It's not usually accessible in any other way - you can only 'land' on it by following the link in your PPC ad. It doesn't appear in your website menu and it doesn't appear on a search engine results page either.
This is not the only difference between PPC landing pages and the other pages on your website. They also have very clear and concise information about your product and service with a compelling call to action. Landing pages exist to streamline the customer journey and generate conversions so they are designed to serve these goals.
Now that we covered ‘what’, let’s talk about why you should use a landing page for your ad campaigns. There are actually a lot of benefits to using a dedicated PPC landing page, but here are the most important ones:
Anything that increases the conversion rates of your PPC campaigns is always worth exploring, even if it sometimes feels like a modest increase like 1%. As you can see below, a small boost in conversation rates can translate to significant revenue increases.
This is even more impressive when you realise this can come from a relatively small amount of traffic and without any significant increase to your ad spend. Effective PPC landing pages can help you maximise the impact of your traffic, without even having to generate more traffic.
Your quality score consists of 3 metrics: expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page relevance.
Obviously, if your landing page content is designed towards a specific ad and target audience, it increases the relevance between them. In turn, this can increase your quality score. And the higher your quality score, the higher your ad rank is. As your ad rank determines how much you pay per click on your ad, as well as the position it appears in, this is an absolute net positive.
Improving your rank should increase your traffic, but it should also lower the cost-per-click (CPC) of your PPC ad too, meaning you decrease your cost per conversion as well as improving your conversion rate.
As landing pages are tailored specifically to a single PPC ad, they allow for incredibly tight targeting. You can speak directly to your intended audience segment, addressing their needs or meeting their pain points. It allows you to promote your product or service with pin-point specificity, making the people who see it more likely to convert.
Imagine finding an ad that presents your perfect product to you. One that will ease your pain point, make an aspect of your life so much easier. You click on the ad, brimming with excitement, only to find yourself on a confusing, word-filled page that doesn't seem to relate to your life-changing product at all. Or a busy homepage, pointing you a hundred different directions except towards the product you came to purchase.
You'd be frustrated right? Suddenly the product will lose its shine - or you'll head to a search engine and just follow the first link you see. Even if that's a competitor's version of the product.
It's easy to churn customers during an overly complicated user journey. Nowadays, people are browsing the internet with only half their attention, they're easily distracted and will quickly change their mind on purchases.
With a dedicated landing page, your users will arrive on the exact right page everytime. You can minimise the distractions and remove a lot of steps from their user journey to make sure they are encouraged along the path to a conversion.
Landing pages give you the flexibility to test various combinations or elements and get a clear picture of the impact of these changes. From simple swaps of colour on a submit button, to reworded CTA's or headlines, or a complete redesign of your contact form - any change can cause a dramatic increase in your conversion rate.
A landing page will let you identify exactly which change increased your conversions so that you can replicate this change as necessary. Similarly, if your conversion rates dip it will make sure you know what needs returning to it's original state.
More than half of the traffic now comes from mobile devices, yet, this is still an aspect that is often being overlooked when it comes to the websites and landing pages. Mobile specific landing pages are crucial for the positive user experience and keeping them engaged, especially when browsing on the go. Keep in mind things like page load time, but also placement for call to action (perhaps introducing a sticky CTA in the bottom of the page for a quick and easy tap-to-call).
As you can see from all the benefits they bring, the purpose of a PPC landing page is - essentially - to create a seamless user experience.
With paid advertising, the traffic you earn comes at a cost. This makes it important that you get the best conversion rates you can - and having a great PPC landing page helps with that. It lets you control exactly where your users end up, helping you show them everything they need to see to turn a website visit into a purchase.
It is important to highlight that not every PPC landing page is made the same. One of my favourite PPC Landing page examples is the results for a campaign I ran in Google Ads. The account was very well optimised and already used a variety of landing pages, so we began to look at ways of making more out of the traffic that we were getting. And once we implemented the newly designed landing page, the results were absolutely astonishing:
In the fast changing world of PPC, it is important to keep every step of customer journey in mind, and the landing page is probably the most important one of them all. It is crucial to make every click you pay for count and make the most out of your advertising campaigns. By creating tailored landing pages, you will be able to increase your conversion rates, improve your quality score and ad rank, subsequently decreasing your cost per click and cost per conversion, which in turn will increase your ROAS.
In our next blog post we'll talk about what makes landing pages convert and what are the best practices when it comes to creating tailored PPC landing pages.
Originally the Founder of leading Digital Agency in Derby, Frogspark (with Liam Nelson) and now the leader of The Digital Maze – our WordPress/Woocommerce & Performance Marketing business founded off the back of acquisitions of Boom Online & Evolve Trader. Rob specialises in high-level strategy relating to eCommerce, SEO, PPC, CRO, digital strategy and Web Design. With over 14+ years in the Digital Agency leadership, Rob has been involved with hundreds of marketing projects and campaigns with some of the best known brands.
Sign up to The Digital Maze Newsletter
