Google Ads landing page refers to where your customers end up after they click through any of your Google ads. This means that the page has enormous effects on your advertising campaign in terms of efficiency, cost, conversions and your brand equity.
Creating a SEO-optimized, picture-perfect ad copy is only half the journey. Designing and optimizing Google ads landing page copy turns your ad clicks to conversions. But which is a best practice for optimizing a landing page for Google Ads? The simple answer is to make your site easy to navigate for your target audience.
After taking all the effort to build an effective Google Ads campaign, it’s essential to provide your customers with an attractive Google ads landing page. Design, ease-of-use, site speed and improving user experience are important considerations when it comes to creating best Google Ads landing pages.
Read on to learn all about Google ads landing page optimization best practices.
Outline
- What Is A Landing Page And Landing Page Optimization
- Why Is Important to Optimize Landing Page For Google Ads
- What Is A Decent Conversion Rate For Landing Page?
- Landing Page Optimization Best Practices
- Enable sharing of content of your landing page
- Give your contact details
- Incorporate scarcity strategies
- Increase the landing page loading speed
- Make the call-to-action visible and above the fold
- Make use of social proof (Use testimonials)
- Match the language and style you use on your landing page with that used on Google ads
- Show your product or service in use
- Test different variations of your landing page
- Use clear and attractive copy
- Use SEO
- Use video to deliver your message
- Conclusion
What Is A Landing Page And Landing Page Optimization?
A landing page is a page on your website designed purposely for conversion. It is the destination that customers get to, when they click on your links, ads, emails or from other locations such as social media. It is so called because that is where your customers “land” when coming from wherever you’ve set your ads.
Once your customers land, the page encourages them to take a particular action such as buying your products, or signing up for a service. When the customers take the action that the page was designed for, then your landing page is converting.
Take note that landing pages are different from homepages and other generic web pages. A homepage is made to encourage your customers to take a tour in order to get information about your brand, your contacts, products and product recommendations, services, and values etc.
When you improve every element and aspect of your landing page, to make it easy for your customers to take action and encourage conversions, this is what is called landing page optimization. Optimization makes a high converting landing page.
For example if advertising for a webinar and people sign up, that’s success. Here is an inspiration for a good webinar landing page.
Why Is Important to Optimize Landing Page For Google Ads
What do you do if you realize that your customers aren’t making any purchases or aren’t moving past the first page? Look at your landing page experience. This refers to the quality of experience that your customers enjoy when in your store.
If you make it easy for customers to move to the shopping cart, they are more likely to make purchases and come back for more. When they purchase, remember to thank them using these customer thank you tricks.
A high quality site experience means a higher Google ranking position and higher ad quality score for your campaign. When your customers aren’t making any purchases, Google makes your ad show less frequently. It may also fail to get displayed at all.
Optimization also affects the performance and cost of your ads in the following detailed ways;
- Increased link and link authority. High quality, relevant, interesting and informative content on your landing page means that your customers are able to enjoy and are likely to share this with their friends, relatives and the rest of their circles.
This is free brand exposure that you can’t afford to ignore.
- Improved ad position. Google is happy when it realizes that customers are enjoying more when on your landing page than when they are on your competitor’s. It rewards you with ranking your ad higher.
- High quality score. When you have a highly relevant landing page (highly relevant to the keywords you choose), Google gets excited. It rewards your efforts with a high quality score and rank position for your ad. Can it get better? You pay less per click.
Do you want a dedicated PPC landing page? Here are the best PPC examples and industry secrets.
- Reduced bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the rate at which customers leave your site. When you tailor your landing page to a specific audience they are less likely to click away or leave.
This is why you should design your landing page such that it is highly targeted to a specific audience and purpose. This way you’re going to maximize your conversions and revenue. What more? Google again gets enthusiastic. It rewards you with less cost per click.
Landing page optimization makes search engines happy. When Google gets excited, the rewards are enormous. Why would you want search engines to get angry and penalize your advertising campaign efforts?
What Is A Decent Conversion Rate For Landing Page?
UnBounce analyzed landing pages in 10 different industries with 75 million visitors. The average landing page conversion rate was 4.02%. The lowest performing industry was education (2.6%) while the highest was vocational training and job training (6.1%).
Note that landing page conversion rates vary greatly in different industries. The average landing page conversion rates for all industries is not a good yardstick against which you can compare conversion rates for your industry. For example, conversion rates for a landing page in the manufacturing industry can look very different from that in the legal industry.
If you want to up your game, do not ask “what is the average conversion rate for a landing page?” Instead, seek “What is the average conversion rate for landing pages by industry?”
A conversion rate of 12% for lead generation pages is awesome. This means that you’re among the top 10 in your industry.
Landing Page Optimization Best Practices
To up your conversion rates, you have to use Google ads landing page best practices and rock-solid data to optimize your Google ads landing page. The moment you start developing your landing or sales page, the optimization process starts. It continues even after publication of the page.
Have you ever created a new product? How many prototypes did you make before you got satisfied with the final result? 10? 100? The same case applies to landing page optimization for Google ads. You have to make quite a few before you get the best landing page for Google ads.
Google ads landing page must speak to the needs of your customers and surpass their expectations. So, without wasting any time, let us go straight to landing page optimization best practices for Google ads.
01. Enable sharing of content of your landing page
Ensure that your content is unique and informative. Note that all your customers have their friends, relatives and other people they are connected to. These people may also be interested in your products. Other experts think social buttons on your landing page may be a distraction.
Sharing can capitalize on customer networks. In addition to driving more customers to your page, this additional traffic makes your landing page rank higher in search engines. This is good for all advertising campaigns including Google ads and Facebook campaigns.
02. Give your contact details
When you give your customers the option to contact you when they have questions or other concerns, they will feel more confident and at ease. This includes even those who will not actually contact you. Why will this boost their confidence?
Giving contact information is a good sign that your business is legitimate and tells your customers that you’re available and ready to assist in case they have any help.
03. Incorporate scarcity strategies
Like a good marketer, use popular scarcity techniques such as “one day left”, “valid while stocks last”, “limited period” and “limited quantity”. This coerces your customers to make purchases because if they wait, they risk missing or losing out. This involves creating artificial scarcity for your products.
04. Increase the landing page loading speed
According to research, 70% of customers say that page loading time influences their decision to make a purchase. There is nothing as frustrating as a lazy-loading page. Do you want to make more purchases from your leads? Make sure that your Google ads landing page does not take longer than 3 minutes to load, even on a mobile device. Check your landing page loading speed here.
05. Make the call-to-action visible and above the fold
The upper section of a newspaper’s first page is called the fold. The call to action should be in this section. Avoid a call to action that can confuse your customers. Your product offer should be simple, straight to the point and obvious. The call to action buttons should be large and conspicuous enough to attract the eyes of your customers. It should also target a single product as the entire landing page also should.
Note that you should use directional cues that lead your customers to the call to action. A good example is to use arrows pointing to it or pictures of a person staring towards the CTA. This will encourage and boost conversion. You should also repeat your CTA at different positions and intervals.
If you still have space above the fold, insert trust signals. Give your customers another reason to trust you by inserting logos of prominent and authority publications that have previously featured your product or service. Use short phrases to describe this feature or use a five star rating.
06. Make use of social proof (Use testimonials)
Customers are more interested in a product that has been used by others. Do you have such past and happy customers? Ask them for testimonials and include in your Google ads landing page. If you have many such customers, include these statistics in your page too. Social proof encourages customers to purchase and test your products for themselves too.
07. Match the language and style you use on your landing page with that used on Google ads.
Ensure that the language and style you use on your landing page is the same as that you used on your Google ads. For example, H1 on your landing page should match with the meta title used on your ads.
Doing this communicates to the customers that they clicked the right link. Another strategy is to use dynamic landing pages for Google ads when you’re running multiple ads with many and different H1.
Note that both customers and search engines consider a mismatch as misleading and deceptive ruining your reputation. Avoid this to build trust with your leads and boost search engine ranking.
08. Show your product or service in use
Is your product unique or uncommon? People may need more than just a CTA to purchase. Show them how your product is used using a demo or a short video. This is informative and makes your customers visualize themselves using your product.
09. Test different variations of your landing page
Different copies, product descriptions, contact forms, headlines, images, lengths, CTA, keywords and others can produce very different results. What serves you best? To determine this, use the power of A/B tests to experiment different variations of your landing pages.
Settle for the variation that brings maximum performance. This is a good technique to get the best landing page for google ads.
10. Use clear and attractive copy
Have you ever looked at the back of a cereal box? Your copy should be like that. Keep it simple and easy for your customers to understand. While some products require longer copy and therefore longer landing pages, best google ads landing pages go around this by keeping it simple.
Use few and short paragraphs and a substantial number of bullet list points. Avoid cluttered copy by making it clear, attractive and appealing to your customers.
11. Use SEO
In itself, search engine optimization is an industry. However, you build a SEO-friendly landing page by using the following landing page optimization best practices;
Use long-tail keywords
These are highly targeted keywords of phrases that contain more than 4 words. For example, “dynamic landing pages for google ads” is a better long-tail key phrase compared to the short “landing pages”. Better because it’s much easier to rank and fits naturally in highly specific CTA, required of good landing pages.
Use enticing and catchy headlines
This will help your customers find what they are looking for faster. Your content should be customer-centric. Do you know why being customer-centric is important? Customer centricity refers to the act of delivering a strong value proposition that speaks to the ever-dynamic needs of customers in order to build strong customer relationships that promote trust and loyalty.
Seek for backlinks
These are links that point to your landing page from other websites. When they send traffic to your landing page especially from high-quality sources, they boost confidence in search engines. They also tell search engines that what is on your page or site is valuable. Backlinks make your search engine ranking and Google ads quality score go up.
Segment your traffic
In most cases, your target customers have different personalities. For example, when selling recyclable water bottles, your site visitors include hikers, gym enthusiasts, bikers, travelers, among others. All these have different personalities.
What do you do? Segment! Offer different landing pages for each persona. Research the kind of keywords each group uses to find your water bottles. Segmenting your traffic helps you to use the kind of message that is most suitable to each persona. This also works towards your search engine visibility.
Optimize your landing page for all devices
Different potential customers use different devices to access your landing page. Make sure that your device is all-device-friendly. This means that in addition to PCs, your page should also be mobile-friendly. Create high converting mobile landing page with these 7 tips.
12. Use video to deliver your message
In this modern and busy time, not all customers have the time to read through your product offering, details or specifications. This is why the popularity of video is rising day by day. Using both text and video is a surer way of capturing and retaining customers’ attention
What more? Your video should have subtitles because not all customers turn on their device sound.
Conclusion
Landing pages for Google ads need to serve the purposes that your customers expect when they click on your Google ads. Due to the fact that landing pages are the destinations that your leads get to from where your Google ads are posted, they need to capture the attention of both your customers and search engines.
This article provides answers to the question “which is a best practice for optimizing a landing page for Google Ads?” by giving Google ads landing page optimization best practices. Best landing pages for google ads employ great landing page techniques to increase conversion rates and business revenue.
If you’re looking for a good Google ads landing page, use these practices to be one of the best google ads landing page examples. Are you running your store on Shopify? These are the best tips and Shopify landing page examples to inspire you.
