Beyond Your Ads: Why is it Important to Have a PPC Landing Page?

PPC is a huge part of the digital marketing space, with search advertisers estimated to have spent $190.5 billion globally in 2024 (Statista, 2023). It’s a massively influential and useful tool to use for businesses of all sizes to achieve a range of objectives, usually to generate more sales or leads.

While we find a lot of businesses see huge success in venturing out to PPC marketing, we do see many fall short for a number of reasons. One of the biggest and most overlooked factors are the landing pages you take your audiences to. A successful and effective PPC campaign doesn’t end at the ad itself, what happens after a user clicks and lands on your website is just as important.

This is where PPC landing pages come into play…

What is a PPC Landing Page?

A PPC landing page, quite simply, is a standalone web page(s) specifically created to receive traffic from a paid ad.

When compared to webpages, a PPC landing page is designed to be laser focused on a single objective, including relevant and persuasive content in order to encourage users to take the desired action in line with your objectives. Whereas a general webpage on your main website may contain a broader range of information. It’s vital that your landing pages are aligned with the intent from your ad campaigns in order to create that seamless and relevant experience for your users who come from the ads.

Why Are Landing Pages Important?

As we’ve already outlined, one of the main reasons why we encourage businesses to have PPC landing pages is to create synergy between your ads and your website, this gives you a greater ad-to-website experience which ultimately helps drive better results and higher ROI.

We’ve discussed some of the core dos and don’ts when creating a PPC landing page in a previous blog which you can read here. One of the main focuses of these pages is to keep it simple- avoid distracting your audience.

These factors are one of the reasons why a PPC landing page is so important. If you decide for your audience to land on your homepage, or a ‘normal’ webpage, you may be at risk of overwhelming them with too many choices.

Your homepage might provide an overview of your brand, list all of your services or products, and include a large navigation menu that goes to various parts of your site. This works really well for general visitors as you’re looking to nurture them through a longer journey, however, this type of layout can distract your PPC audiences from taking the main action you want.

If your ad campaigns are designed to drive more conversions, then your PPC landing page can capture your audience and reinforce this intent in a few ways:

• Simple layout
• Testimonials
• Limited time offers 
• Easy to reach CTA’s (Call To Actions) 

All of these features will help make your PPC funnel that much more effective and optimised for generating conversions.

Alongside this is the benefit of an improved ROI. Every click in your PPC campaign will ultimately cost you money, and by taking users to a targeted page which is designed to convert PPC users, you’re making every pound count.

The Other Benefits of PPC Landing Pages

As we’ve discussed so far, the main benefits of landing pages are having a strong relevance and alignment with your ads alongside pushing for a better conversion rate and ROI. However, there are four other benefits you can get with a PPC landing page:

1) Improved Quality Score

Having a highly relevant PPC landing page that provides a good user experience plays a great role in boosting the overall performance of the ad account by improving its quality score.

Google’s quality score is a key metric of an ad account, it’s made up of multiple components, but the most relevant one is the overall landing page experience. This measures the relevance of your landing page to your ad and keywords, as well as the user experience of the landing page itself, including site speed and usability.

Provided you have chosen keywords which are relevant to your business, an improved quality score can lead to cheaper CPCs (Cost Per Click) and a better positioning of your ad placements in search results. By having compelling, relevant content within your PPC landing pages as well as offering a seamless user experience, you can boost your overall ad account performance outside of conversions and ROI.

2) A/B Testing Opportunities

With a specific landing page for PPC, you should have a greater opportunity to change and test different elements of the page itself. These could be things that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to change on your main website as it could have knock-on effects.

However, with a PPC landing page it’s much easier to change headlines, CTAs, the positioning of product information / contact form as well as the overall layout, allowing you to test what does and doesn’t work for the best results.

3) Precise Tracking and Analytics

A third great benefit of PPC landing pages is the fact you’re able to analyse performance more accurately than with your standard, core webpages. You’ll be able to review metrics like bounce rates, time on page and conversion rates. This gives you the data to make decisions for your A/B testing opportunities which in turn, gives you a positive feedback loop when seeing which layouts or design choices work best.

4) Scalability

Once you begin to optimise your campaigns based on this increased level of data, your campaigns will start to grow and so can your collection of landing pages. Once you find a landing page layout that works for your main ad funnel, you can start to expand on this to cover other areas of your business. Allowing for continuous improvement and scaling of results.

Final Thoughts

While normal webpages are essential for general traffic, they’ll likely fall short when it comes to driving relevant traffic and conversions from a PPC campaign. Having a well-designed PPC landing page will ultimately bridge the gap between the user searching for your relevant business keywords, visiting your ad and completing your desired action. This can help you align better with your ad campaigns, engage your audience further and drive more conversions.