What you will learn.

Harnessing the power of PPC gives your business a real opportunity for growth – and your chosen PPC landing pages are pivotal to the success of your ad campaigns.

PPC landing pages sound simple in theory but, without the right information or intent, they can become less than ideal in reality. If you’re experiencing a lack of conversions for your Google Ad campaigns it could, in part, be due to your chosen landing pages.

If you’re going to get the best out of your PPC landing page, it’s time to get strategic.

Perfecting your landing page can help increase conversions and amplify the ROI of your pay-per-click campaigns, and minimise CPA. It’s a win-win for your business.

Here are our very own tried and tested PPC landing page tips to help you get the most out of your paid advertising.

What is a PPC landing page?

Before we get into the details, let’s quickly cover the basics of what a PPC landing page actually is.

While you’re probably already familiar with this, it’s handy to remind ourselves that a PPC landing page is a specific page that has been created for the purpose of paid ads. Ideally, this page should only be found when somebody actually clicks on an ad. PPC landing pages aren’t always discoverable via search and often aren’t indexed – especially if they are only intended to be used for a short-term campaign.

Common features of a PPC landing page include:

Focused messaging
Minimal distractions
No link back to the main website
No external links
Clear CTA

If you really want your Paid Search efforts to succeed, you need to ensure you are optimising your landing pages for the campaigns they are being used for.

Why you need dedicated PPC landing pages

When it comes to PPC, you get out what you put in. Whether you rely upon a talented in-house team or an experienced PPC agency, you’ll know that optimisation is key.

If you’re already optimising your Google Ad campaigns, it might be time for you to up the ante and take your campaign strategy to the next level. And this is where PPC landing pages come in.

By using specific PPC landing page tips and tricks, your business can focus on targeted messaging, which ensures your ads are seen by the right people, at the right time. This, in turn, boosts your conversion rates and ad quality scores, while decreasing that all-important cost-per-click.

The first thing to note is that relevance is key. Your PPC landing pages need to be hyper-focused and tailored to the search intent of the ad campaign.

If there’s a disconnect between the content of your ad campaign and the content on the related landing page, it’s going to negatively impact your conversion rates. The people clicking on your ads expect to see the exact information you promised them in your ad so don’t send them directly to your homepage or to a generic category page.

Instead, focus on creating dedicated PPC landing pages that have been specifically created and optimised for your ad campaign.

PPC landing page tips for increased ROI

To help you get started with creating show-stopping PPC landing pages that drive the ROI of your ad campaigns, we’re going to dive into three actionable PPC landing page tips.

The PPC landing page tips we’ll be focusing on include:

Having a clear and concise call-to-action
Featuring high quality and high converting copy
Perfecting your landing page formatting

With some simple tweaks or strategic optimisations, you’ll see how each of these three tips can have an immediate impact on your paid search conversion rates.

Have a clear and concise call-to-action (CTA)

Having a clear and concise call-to-action (CTA) will help your customers convert. Think of a CTA as the thing you want people to do after visiting your landing page.

Some examples of a CTA could be to encourage people to sign up for a newsletter, make a purchase, or download a brochure. The CTA of your landing page should be tailored to your advertising objectives and what you hope to achieve with that particular ad campaign.

Let’s look at this in more detail.

If you are creating a lead generation ad campaign, you should direct your ad audience to a page where they can easily submit a form and share their personal information, such as their name and email address. Make sure you are offering them something in return that will incentivise them to share their details with you. This lead magnet could be a free guide, an on-demand webinar or something else.

The above PPC landing page by EveryoneSocial is a great example of a landing page with a clear CTA and easy-to-use lead generation form that is free from distraction.

Whatever your ad objective may be, make sure your landing page CTA is clear and concise. It should make it as easy as possible for page visitors to complete the intended action.

When designing your PPC landing pages, take time to carefully consider what you specifically want to achieve with your ad campaign, and how your landing page can help you get there.

Remember that PPC landing pages should only ever feature one call-to-action. Adding more than one CTA causes confusion for your customers through multiple conversion funnel paths, and dilutes the power of your messaging. Focus on something that is clear, concise, and geared towards the conversion you need.

Your CTA should also work alongside the search intent of the associated PPC campaign. By reviewing the original search intent for each campaign, you can determine whether your landing page actually offers what users are looking for. If not, work on optimising that landing page CTA so it’s better aligned to the search intent of the ad.

The easiest way to do this is to match the intent of your CTA to the intent of the keywords that you are bidding on. Keep this process in mind during the creation of your PPC landing page, as it will help you drive a consistent message to your target audience.

Feature high quality and high converting ad copy

To get the most out of your PPC landing page, you will also need to focus on writing high quality and high converting ad copy.

When it comes to crafting your ad copy, keep it brief. The people visiting your landing page want solutions, and they want them now.

Instead of wasting time on detailed copy about your products and services, focus on key points that your target customer needs to know. Page visitors should be able to scan your landing page copy with ease while picking out the information that’s most important to them.

The chosen words on your landing page also need to showcase the benefits of your product or service rather than focusing on features. This will help you create an emotional pull for your customer, giving them a reason to choose your brand instead of a competitor.

To give an example; if your product saves customers time, sell that as the benefit. Simply stating that your product has smart software is just a feature, which will be less likely to create that emotional pull.

The above landing page by Moz makes great use of emotive language that demonstrates an understanding of the issues faced by landing page visitors (SEO is tricky) and the solutions they want (boost your rankings and search engine visibility) to achieve.

Your landing page copy should reflect your PPC ad copy for increased consistency, creating a seamless user experience. We know the user experience of your website can directly impact your conversion rates, so make sure you bear this in mind during the design process.

Once again, this copy should work in alignment with your search intent, in the same way as your call-to-action.

Perfect your landing page formatting

Finally, the format of your PPC landing page plays a crucial part in helping customers convert, so make sure your landing page is designed to impress. You want your landing page to be both functional and persuasive.

Simple techniques such as using bullet points instead of paragraphs can help with this, as it breaks down large walls of text into something much easier to read.

Customers only tend to read a few words of a paragraph before dropping down to the next one, so text needs to be concise. This allows users to read and skim your landing page quickly, which will therefore reduce the likelihood of customers clicking away from your PPC landing page.

As humans, we’re naturally quite image-focused. We have an impressive ability to remember pictures which far exceeds our memory for words. This is known as the picture superiority effect.

Keeping the picture superiority effect in mind, you will want to make use of compelling images and videos to support your landing page messaging. Be selective about which images and videos you decide to feature on your landing page, and focus your attention on those that can deliver the biggest impact for your intended audience and objective.

Remember that less is always more with page formatting, so learn to embrace negative space and keep things simple.

As part of this preference for simplicity, you may want to consider removing the navigation menu from your PPC landing pages. Every link in your navigation menu acts as an exit route for page visitors to leave without completing the page goal. Removing the navigation menu will help minimise the temptation for people to leave your landing page and, as a result, can help increase on-page conversions.

The above PPC landing page by Canva shows how a clean, minimal page format helps to keep page visitor focus on the landing page goal – in this case, to sign up for Canva.

Work image and video content throughout your landing page, along with your CTA. Your call-to-action should be featured on your page at regular intervals to encourage sign up, but be strategic about how and when you use it. If a user has to scroll in order to reach a CTA, there’s a higher chance that they won’t convert.

It’s worth bearing in mind that formatting shouldn’t contain any non-related or distracting information, nor should it feature difficult-to-use form fields. Make sure form fields are accessible and easy to complete to make the conversion process as smooth as possible for your customers. After all, the last thing you want to do is fall at the final hurdle.

Final thoughts on PPC Landing Pages

The key thing to remember when designing a PPC landing page is simplicity. These pages need to be created with audience search intent in mind, and should always work in alignment with your advertising goals and KPIs.

Paid search campaigns offer a chance for teams to get creative with landing pages. Whatever style you go for, consider conversion rate optimisation at every stage of your landing page design process. Aesthetics definitely play a part in today’s digital world, but you’ll need to create a purpose-driven PPC landing page if you really want to turbocharge the success of your paid ads.

Here at Common Ground, paid search optimisation is our speciality. Our performance-focused PPC framework allows us to deliver results quickly and consistently across any market – which can help your businesses thrive.