How do you optimize a landing page for PPC marketing? Not only is this a common question asked by new PPC marketers and Google Ads users, but it is also an extremely critical one to answer.
Think about it — your landing page is the last step in the PPC process. A prospective customer has seen your ad, been enticed enough by the message to click and now they are brought to your landing page to potentially convert.
If this site can’t close the deal, then you’ve not only lost a possible customer, but you’ve also been charged for the click from the ad. Thus, you must optimize your landing page experiences so that they facilitate conversions.
Understand What Your Landing Page Needs To Do
The short version is that your PPC landing page needs to convert clicks. However, you need to think critically about how you define a conversion and what your goals are for PPC marketing.
What action do you hope that customers perform? Is it a simple lead generation? Acquiring signups for a webinar? Encouraging downloads for an eBook?
The clearer your goal, the more focused your landing page will be and the more direct it will be at generating conversions.
Know Your Audience
The audience is a huge factor in creating a successful PPC landing page. You need to understand who the typical visitor to this page will be and what sort of language, offer, etc. will resonate best with that type of person.
If your campaign is directed at driving B2B conversions, then you need to think about what type of business your company serves. And, what sort of pain points that your products or services resolve for that business.
Conversely, if your PPC campaign is directed at consumer sales, then think about your market demographics. What is the age, gender, location, income level and interests of your typical customer? How can you serve these specific traits in your landing page experience?
It’s worth mentioning that if you are targeting multiple audience segments, it is best to create separate campaigns and landing pages for each unique audience.
Put Your Offer Front And Center
When a prospective customer clicks your ad and visits your landing page, it is because they were enticed by the offer in your ad copy. Whether this was a specific product/service, a special coupon offer or otherwise, that offer needs to be front and center on your landing page. After all, this is why they clicked in the first place!
Putting the offer front and center on your landing page will ensure that your ad experience is cohesive from start to finish. Once you’ve introduced the offer discussed in the ad copy, you can add additional value by including more information about that offer, such as:
- How is your business unique from all the others?
- How are you better than the competition?
- Special offers or promotions are you running to make it even more enticing to convert?
- What exactly does the customer get by converting?
- What do your past customers/clients have to say about your business?
Make It Easy For Prospects To Convert!
Part of the landing page experience is the process that a prospect needs to undergo to convert. Ideally, you want as few steps in this process as possible because every added move is an opportunity for the customer to click away.
Fewer steps mean less friction and friction can be the difference between a conversion and a lost opportunity. This also includes how the landing page loads! If the page takes too long, the prospect will leave.
Be sure to test load speeds and the conversion process on both mobile and desktop devices!
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords!
Google Ads will analyze your landing pages and compare their quality and relevance to the targeted keyword. Thus, the same language and keywords used in your ad copy must be also present on the landing page.
If the landing page experience is too different from the ad message, not only will it detract from the conversion process, but it will also hurt your quality scores on Google Ads. Quality score is a massive success factor that impacts your ad rank and costs, so you don’t want to overlook keyword optimization on your landing pages!
Conclusions
Similar to many of your PPC management activities, landing page optimization is a process and not a one-time step. You should always be paying close attention to your clicks to conversion ratios. These metrics will help you identify areas where your campaigns are producing clicks, but failing to convert. This could be a sign of a lackluster landing page that needs further optimization!
