Paying for ads in Google or Bing search result pages (SERPs) is a staple of most digital marketing strategies as it's a relatively quick and easy way to create an incoming traffic stream. But while getting paid search traffic to your website may be relatively easy, it can also be a really easy way to waste what might be a limited marketing budget if you're a smaller business.
But what can you do about it, well in this piece we've taken a look at 6 tips to help you make a great PPC landing page.
Why Your PPC Landing Page Matters
There are several reasons why your PPC landing page matters:
- Better user experience
- Increased leads/sales
- Improved ROI
These may or may not seem obvious, but so many business still fail to get even the basics right when deciding where to send PPC traffic. The outcome of this may not always be seen by the business who is advertising either, there may be a number of sales that the business is happy with, yet the right landing page could improve that further.
6 Tips For Better PPC Landing Pages
So how can you improve your existing landing pages or what should you consider when creating new ones? Here are our top tips to better PPC landing pages.
1. Consider what you want the user to do
Before anything else, take some time to consider what outcome you desire from your PPC ads and landing page. Perhaps you're looking for leads, maybe direct sales or possibly brand building, whatever you want the outcome to be, having a clear understanding of that will help you when it comes to deciding what detail and information to include on your landing page.
If you're looking leads for example a lead gen form is essential, but if you're looking to make a direct sale then a lead gen form is useless and would get in the way of the user experience.
2. Relevance of the landing page to the ad
Relevance has a huge impact on the potential conversion rate for your landing page. Think about this from the perspective of the user, how frustrating do you find it when you're searching for something online only to click an ad and find no information which relates to what your were looking for or what was mentioned in the advert?
Your users will have the same frustrations and a lack of relevance from the ad to the landing page will lead to a higher bounce rate and lower conversion. Lets say you sell cars and are running an ad for a specific manufacturer, sending the user to a landing page for a different manufacturer or all of the cars on sale isn't the best experience for the user and would likely lead to a worse return on your ad spend.
In short, whether you're creating a bespoke landing page for your PPC or sending traffic to an existing page of your website, make sure the landing page relates to what your user will be searching for.
3. Key Messaging
This is more relevant to those who are creating landing pages specifically for their PPC campaigns, but can also apply to scenarios where existing website pages are being used.
The right messaging helps to get your point across quickly and when we think about the type of users who arrive through PPC and their typical behaviours, they are usually looking for quick answers and information. Taking a little time to think about the key information that your PPC visitors will be looking for and making this prominent on the landing page can help users to understand your products and services quickly.
Messaging is not just about the words you write on the page, but also about how you write them. Long paragraphs of copy can provide useful context, though when a user is looking for quick answers this is unlikely to appeal and will be ignored. Think about using key headings which are clear and easy to read, making the key points in a few words.
4. Clear call to action
As mentioned earlier, knowing the outcome your would like to see from users on your landing page will help you to determine the right call to action to include. There are a number of objectives that you might want to achieve, for example:
- Sale
- Lead gen
- Newsletter sign up
- Brand awareness
It's best to try and stick to a primary objective per landing page too, trying to cover all the bases on a single landing page will lead to clutter and a lack of clarity for the user, resulting a reduced chance of conversion.
Depending on the action you want the user to complete, think about the location of the CTA on the page too. If you're looking for lead gen, keep your form simple and near the top of the page so users can access it easily, consider repeating it later down the page too incase a user scrolls down. If you're a e-comm retailer, think about the purchase journey for the user and how easy it is for them to complete a purchase.
5. Test Your Page and Forms
This should go without saying but it's often overlooked as we're busy and want to get on to the next task quickly, but test your landing page end to end, thinking like the user.
What can be a relatively quick job to test your landing page, purchase journeys and lead gen forms can be the difference between PPC campaign success and huge amounts of wasted budgets. If your form isn't working for example, a user isn't going to go and find other contact information elsewhere, they'll just leave. It's also likely that they won't get in touch to tell you your form is broken either.
Make sure you're checking things on desktop and mobile devices too, the majority of your users will probably use mobile devices so make sure you test in the same way that your users will experience your landing page.
6. Review data and optimise
Getting your new landing page live feels great doesn't it? You're getting some visits and probably a handful of leads and conversions too and that's you're work done, but what about how your landing page performs over the next few weeks and months?
It's really important to keep checking in on th data that you can get for your landing page through Google Analytics to make sure that your landing page continues to perform as you expect it to. User behaviour changes and so can the ability of your landing page to convince users that your business is the one they need, if you don't check in on them every now and then you could end up with a poorly performing page.
Conclusion
Anyone can throw together a landing page that "does the job" but if you really want a landing page that brings in the traffic and conversions then you need to do some research.
