3 best practices to optimize your landing pages and boost your Google Ads campaigns

What’s the interest of launching a Google Ads campaign if you do not make your landing page worthwhile? Viewers will click on your basic CTA, end up on an unattractive landing page, and all your ads work will be lost for nothing. 

Dedicating time to improving your CTAs and landing pages is never a waste of time. Landing pages are a valuable resource since it is the first page a potential customer will go to after clicking on a CTA. It is the step that separates him from taking action. Don’t neglect that as you could miss important generation opportunities!

We concocted 3 Google Ads landing page best practices for you. We blended them with ways to increase your Google ads conversion rate thanks to efficient landing pages to give you the keys you need to nail it. When reading this article, Google Ads CTAs and landing pages will no longer have any secrets for you…

Why do your Google ads campaigns
need a high-quality landing page?

Google Ads provides a diagnostic tool that helps you compare your ad quality to your competitors. It’s called the Quality Score. 

This tool gives you a score between 1 to 10 that helps you evaluate the relevance of your ads. Note that “landing page experience” is one of the three criteria of scoring. To perform well, your landing page must be relevant and useful for people who click on your ad. Why does it matter? Why shouldn’t you send customers directly to your homepage? 

Well, a landing page centralizes all your marketing efforts. It is the outcome of your work that will be decisive for customers. Will they take action or not? Will they give you their email address or not? 

A clear and well-designed landing page will help you: 

1. Reduce the bounce rate: use targeted landing pages to maximize your conversions. It is important to make potential customers want to stay on your page, otherwise, they won’t take action.
   
   
2. Improve your quality score: as we just said, your quality score is an important metric to make your ads rank higher.
   
   
3. Increase your conversion rate: the gap between an unknown website visitor and a future customer can be strengthened by your landing page efficiency: don't miss that opportunity!
   

   
   3 BEST PRACTICES TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LANDING PAGES

#1 - Focus on the relevance
to gain a good quality score

First of all, note that depending on your business, the type of landing page you work on will vary. There is not a single model that can be duplicated endlessly. It will all depend on your campaign’s objective (visibility, brand awareness, lead generation, remarketing…). Be flexible and adaptable!

Chances are that if you see an ad, click on it and see that it does not correspond to the core message that was displayed, you will leave the website within a short period of time.

According to Unbound, 30% of landing pages have too much copy, meaning that the core message is often diluted. If you want your landing page to be the most effective one, you have to clearly deliver your idea in a few essential words.

Keep in mind that your landing page should be relevant, trustworthy, reliable and easy to follow. To encourage customer’s interaction with your ad, here are some tips you should consider: 

• Send users to a landing page that contains relevant information.
  
  
• Customize your Calls to Action! Personalized CTAs perform on average 202% better than basic Calls to Action (Hubspot, 2018).
  
  
• Make sure that every element of your page is worth it. Eliminate any distraction or unnecessary message that could lose your visitor.

#2 - Strengthen your user experience
by improving your design and content

It can never be too much stressed. Your landing page should match your ad.

   
For instance, here is a Google ad of the Imperial College Business School of London. If you click on this ad, you know exactly what you will have access to: in this case, you will be able to download the MBA brochure. As you can see on the right screen, there is no bad surprise on the landing page. You find what you were looking for.

The design should never encroach on the ease of comprehension of your landing page… But still, you should try to make it engaging: 

• Use colors that make your background and your copy contrast
• Emphasize your CTA, it is your best asset to convert!  
  
  

Source: https://sudonull.com/post/82482-How-Hotjar-Service-Helps-Increase-Conversion-Service-Overview-and-3-Cases 

Thanks to Hotjar heatmap, you can see that CTAs are the area that people will click on most often (the most saturated area). Choose appealing fonts and right keywords to influence people’s behaviour on your page. Stay true to the style guide.

#3 - Keep tracking your Google Ads
landing page with analytics tool

To measure the performance of your landing page, Google provides you with two interesting tools that are worth trying: Google Optimize and Google Quality Score.

Google Optimize

This tool, included in Google Ads package, helps you experiment with different landing pages to test their effectiveness and eliminate every flaw that may drag your performance down. You can start now to test your landing pages.

Google Quality Score

To access your quality score that is also available to any Google Ads account, all you need to do is to: 

1. Sign in to your account
2. Access the “keyword” section of the left menu
3. Click the “column” icon on the right corner of the table
4. Open the “quality score” section right under “modify columns for keywords” 

It will give you access to detailed statistics regarding your quality score, landing page experience, CTR and ad relevance so that you can improve it easily. If you want to create your Google Ads account, here is “How to open a Google Ads account in 5 steps?”

5 TAKEAWAYS TO BUILD A POWERFUL LANDING PAGE

Now that you know that, designing engaging landing pages is almost as important as setting up your ads, here is what you should keep in mind:

• Match efficient call to action with a relevant landing page
• Highlight your CTA to influence your audience 
• Stick to the core information 
• Deliver the value proposition in a clear and engaging form
• Follow the trends (interactive landing pages are everywhere. It doesn’t cost anything to try!)  

Left hungry for more? Looking for advice? Contact our team.