The Dos and Don'ts of PPC Landing Pages Header

29th July 2024

The Dos and Don’ts of PPC Landing Pages

When it comes to improving efficiency and maximising the results from your PPC activity, many overlook the landing page their ads are taking users to.

With the cost involved in bringing users to your website through Google Ads, it’s vitally important to ensure the page users land on is functional, well-designed and encourages users to convert.

Below we’ll go through a number of different Dos and Don’ts to help refine your landing page and drive better results from your Google Ads campaigns.

Landing Page Dos

Do Keep It Simple

As we mentioned before in not distracting users on a landing page, you want the page users are directed to to be clean and simple. Your page should be easy to navigate and read, yet include the information needed for users to understand your product or service.

Text should be in small, easy to digest paragraphs, broken up by enticing imagery or other graphic elements to encourage users to stay on the page. Additionally, your specific goal should have an easy to reach and noticeable CTA.

Ideally you want to design a landing page that establishes a journey for the eyes and naturally encourages a user to continue scrolling and reading through your page.

Do Have Your CTA (Call To Action) Above The Fold

Essentially, the further down your CTA (Call To Action) is – the lower conversion rate you’re likely to achieve. Having the enquire/purchase button after rows and rows of text may well bore a user and cause them to click off your site.

Instead, you want to have an eye-catching graphic or image at the top of your landing page – along with some compelling and informative content. You then either want to have your CTA sitting next to, or just below, your first few punchy lines of text.

This gives users enough insight into your product or business and is quickly followed with encouraging the user to take the desired action on your website.

Do Write Compelling Copy

The text within your landing page is another super important element to your PPC landing page. In particular, the headline and subheader are most critical as these are the aspects that first hook a user when they arrive on your landing page.

Ensuring your headline includes your focus keyword(s) and that content throughout your landing page also centres around your target keywords is crucial to ensuring your keyword quality scores are high.

Compelling copy throughout your landing page will also help improve engagement time, and ultimately conversion rate by keeping users interested in what you offer.

For example, in this landing page, it has been designed specifically for users who are visiting our site from Clutch. Rather than sending them to our homepage, we have designed this landing page so it is tailored to the context of their user journey.

Example landing page

Do Have Trust Indicators & Testimonials

Another element to improving your PPC landing page is some form of trust indicator. This could be in the form of reviews or testimonials. Having genuine feedback from your previous customers can be really beneficial when it comes to new users.

A user who is unfamiliar with your business is most likely sceptical about the quality of your product or service. Having reliable and authentic testimonials or reviews can really help remove those doubts from new users – and encourage them to convert.

Do Test Your Landing Pages

Another crucial element to optimising your PPC landing page is to test different layouts and designs of your landing page. Google Ads gives you the ability to A/B test different landing pages – meaning you can send 50% of users to one page, and the remaining 50% to another page.

Numerous different elements of a page can be tested – from different images, to different CTAs or different text layouts.

Continuously testing a different aspect of your landing page then allows you to gather data and understand what aspects help improve engagement time and converts, and which don’t.

Heatmap and analytical tools such as Hotjar allow you to review exactly how users are interacting with your page, and which elements they focus on. Using these types of tools will further help gather data from which you can optimise your PPC landing page.

Landing Page Don’ts

Don’t Distract

When creating your landing page, you want to avoid creating too many distractions and areas for users to click off. This includes links to other pages or areas of your website.

If you’ve paid for a user to click onto your site based on a specific keyword and purpose, you want to ensure they move further down the sales funnel by creating a simplistic landing page.

Having specific widgets or buttons for users to click only deters them from making a purchase or submitting a form. Essentially you want to review every element of your landing page – every part of the page should be directing users towards your desired action/conversion.

Don’t Have Your CTA (Call To Action) Below The Fold

Following on from the previous point around not distracting users, you also want to ensure the desired call to action (CTA, such as purchase or sign-up) is towards the top of your page.

Keeping your CTA way down at the bottom of the page, following several paragraphs of information can divert users away from your main aim or encourage users to simply click off your site.

Don’t Make Your Landing Page Too Wordy

Although you may need information to tell users about your product or service, as well as your business, you don’t want to bog down users with dozens of paragraphs of text. Seeing a huge wall of text as soon as a user clicks on a url can be massively off-putting and cause the user to click off the page.

You want to have a well designed, engaging and eye-catching landing page. It should flow naturally between short paragraphs of text and other elements or images, encouraging users to absorb information – and ultimately perform whatever desired action you want users to take on your site.

Don’t Have a Slow Landing Page

This is an element many don’t consider and can have one of the biggest impacts on performance. It’s estimated that for every 1 second a user has to wait for a landing page to load, dropoff rate increases by nearly 10%! An alarmingly high number for businesses already paying money for users clicking onto site.

Ideally you want a landing page to load in under 3 seconds. Google offers a useful and free PageSpeed Insights tool which provides an insight into computer and mobile load times, and which elements of the page are slowing down your site speed.

Making improvements to site speed has the added benefit of reducing bounce rates and increasing conversion rates across all channels, making it a very worthwhile task to undertake.

Don’t Have A Website That Isn’t Mobile Friendly

Following all of the previous points on what not to do for your PPC landing page and website, it is also crucial to ensure your website works seamlessly across mobile.

Typically, businesses generate anywhere from 50-70% of traffic from mobile phones, meaning you could be missing out on a huge number of conversions if your website doesn’t work well across mobile.

Often the biggest stumbling block for user experience across mobile is specific elements of a page that look and work well on desktop but do not translate well across mobile.

Examples for this include huge pop-ups that dominate over 80% of a mobile screen that are intended to only cover a small portion of the screen. Instead you want to have a sleek and easy to navigate mobile experience for users – making it easy for users to scroll through your site and ultimately convert.

Conclusion

It’s clear from this list there are numerous factors that can impact your landing page – with some being easier fixes than others. Depending on your capabilities, you may not be able to test every point mentioned above.

Additionally, there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach when it comes to optimising your PPC landing page – every sector and business works differently. However, even being able to experiment with different CTA positioning, wording or different images can make a difference.

Exactly how you go about making changes and optimisations to your landing page can differ depending on what resources you have. The most important aspect is simply testing different elements of your landing page. In doing so you should start to see the positive benefits in terms of conversion rates as a result.

If you feel like you could do with a helping hand in optimising your PPC landing pages, it might be time to speak to the experts…

Our award-winning team has helped countless businesses generate more sales and improve ROI across Google Ads – find out more about our services or get in touch today!

Author - Stefano Bianco

Stefano is a Senior PPC Account Executive with a background in Advertising and Marketing, and experience working across a number of B2B and B2C clients.

Ben

Hi! I’m Ben, CEO of The SEO Works

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