An optimized landing page is integral to a successful Google adwords PPC campaign. Once you attract potential links to your ad, you have to create a page where visitors get all the information they need to convert into customers. But, designing a robust landing page is more than the visual appeal.
You have to be strategic with information and optimize the page with the best practices. A PPC agency with industry experience can help in this endeavor.
First, let’s understand the basics of PPC landing pages.
Why Do You Need a Dedicated PPC Landing Page?
Objectively, paid campaigns are straightforward to deliver what you pay for. Whatever you put in a campaign, the results vary accordingly. Hence, it will help if you have proper targeting and ad placement strategies to initiate your efforts.
A landing page makes this simple by converting clicks into registrations or sales and collecting valuable user data. Although the landing pages for PPC are typically off the radar of search engines, they need optimization to attract customers and reduce your cost per click (CPC).
Here are ways to optimize your PPC landing pages.
Ensure Relevance to the Search Query
If you have a higher bounce rate on your landing pages, it’s time to dig into the causes of this issue. A lack of relevance of the page to the search query is the most probable reason.
In Google AdWords, quality score is an essential parameter for campaign optimization. If you want to lower your CPC, you need a score of six or higher. A significant part of quality score measurement includes landing pages. Here, relevance is crucial.
Connect your landing pages with the search intent and related keywords of your ad groups. For example, if a customer looks for ‘red shoes’ and you have them on your website, pair the intent and keyword to create a relevant campaign.
Ensure Personalized and Dynamic Experiences
Even after making your landing pages relevant to a search query, you need engaging content to reduce the bounce rate. Help your visitors to find the information they expect. Offer them a reason to sign up for your offerings and remember you for the next purchase.
Personalized landing pages can make this happen. Focus on your visitors and provide information that matters to them and solves their problems. Persuasion is what you need to make visitors agree with your terms and sign up for your pages. You can talk about an issue that catches their attention and provides a solution if they convert.
Leverage Point of Action Assurances
In any paid campaign, a customer will not trust you unless you give them a solid reason. Point of action assurances can work as trust icons on your PPC landing pages. Put them near the CTA button where visitors can see the badge. They can be the industry awards, certifications, Visa logo, or logo of your antivirus suite. When visitors look at these icons, they feel at ease while trusting you.
Remember, the words may be just a dime in a dozen unless verifiable facts back them. So, please don't refrain from sharing information about your company, people running it, address, and more. Also, add social proof in the form of testimonials, reviews, security badges, ratings, awards, and press mentions.
Add Optimized Forms and Fix the Broken Ones
For B2B companies, the landing pages need optimized forms for lead generation. Here, the PPC agency knows how to trim the form and make it suitable for your ads. For conversion-friendly forms, you may need to reduce the fields, not ask for phone numbers, have trimmed content, strategic placement, and an attractive CTA.
Although there are no industry standards for optimizing landing page forms, you can make them better by removing bad copy, such as weak headlines, non-optimized titles, etc.
Focus on Speed
You can’t expect a user to stay on your page and complete the action if it takes forever to load. Research says that 73% of mobile users leave websites that are slow while loading. If your PPC landing page takes too long after a customer clicks on your ad, there is no scope of conversion. It can also impact the ad ranking by signaling slow speed to Google.
Every one-second delay in page response causes a 7% fall in conversion. So, speed is the game here. Use automated tools to check the speed of your landing page and find the underlying causes. Once you have them, start resolving the issues by optimizing images, minifying the JavaScript files, and leveraging the cache data from the static elements of your landing page in their browsers.
Choose a Proper Design Format
Although a PPC landing page may look and read like a generic web page, it should be designed to bring a spike in conversions. Every page needs a pattern and design hierarchy that appeals to the visitors. Plan the design structure for easy navigation as a user will expect to find the desired information fast and easy. Once they find this information, you must make it easy for them to take the relevant action.
For example, if you want more visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, put a precise and visible CTA right above the fold. Avoid pop-ups as they can kill the navigation and distract the visitors. Most importantly, design a landing page that's mobile-friendly to enhance your conversion rates by 5% or more.
Use Optimized Images
If your PPC landing page doesn't have high-quality images, it is missing a critical conversion factor. The photos on the landing pages should be related to what you are giving away. Use the image of your product you are selling through that platform.
An experienced PPC agency will make sure that there is congruence between the image and the copy of the page. For example, if you are offering a video tutorial, display a screenshot of your video on the landing page. Even for the opt-in form, you can use an image of a person looking at the form fields to create a visual impact.
Landing pages can do the heavy lifting in your PPC ad campaign. Optimizing them is essential to make this happen with more conversions and lower CPC.
Author Bio:
Shirley Daniel is a copywriter and content strategist. She helps businesses stop playing around with content marketing and start seeing the tangible ROI. She loves writing as much as she loves the cake.
