What is a PPC Landing Page?

PPC is “Pay Per Click” advertising, where advertisers bid on keywords via Adwords, Bing Ads or similar, and pay a fee whenever their ad is clicked.

A PPC landing page is a standalone page on your website that you use as part of an online paid advertising campaign. It’s a dedicated, highly focused page where visitors ‘land’ after clicking through on a pay-per-click ad.

Why do you need a PPC landing page?

The most common mistake we see in PPC Ads, is people being sent to a Home Page when they click on an Ad. Sometimes this is OK, but normally, a Home Page is designed to navigate you through the whole site, so may divert a visitor from getting quickly to the answer to the query they put into the search bar.

As an example, say WSI Digital Advisors create a Google Ad to promote our Paid Search Services. Someone Googles “Paid Search Agency near me”, and we come up as a sponsored Ad on the first page of Google. The searcher clicks and lands on our Home Page as the landing page :

It’s clear that we are a Digital Marketing Agency, but the visitor now needs to work out where to go to find out about Paid Search in particular. (Hopefully we haven’t made that too challenging to figure out, but we are asking the potential client to do that piece of thinking rather than helping them along the way).

If, however, when they clicked on the Ad, we took them to a page that opens something like this …

They instantly know they are in the right place, can find out more about the specific topic they searched for, and we can direct them more quickly to contact us.

Is a PPC landing page worth the effort?

Yes, you often have to create the landing page on your website (sometimes you have a service page that will do the do, but always validate any assumptions you make through the eyes of a customer). You may also need different landing pages for different Ad campaigns.

However, the good news is that WSI insights tell us that a lead magnet placed on a well-crafted landing page will usually yield 8%-20% conversion rates, compared to just 1%-3% when the same lead magnet is placed on a home page.

10 elements of a great PPC landing page

#1 Focus – A PPC Landing Page should match the search intent of the Ad  – it should continue the specific conversation that you started in a given Ad, persuading your customer towards the goal you have set for that Ad. It. Don’t be tempted with generic messaging, or introducing your other services. Stick to answering the question.

#2 Target – You will have spent thinking and research crafting your Ad and targeting it to a specific audience. If your Ad is being presented to 20-30 year old parents in the Greater Manchester area, don’t use keywords, tone of voice or content aimed at retired people living in the Cotswolds.

#3 Simple  – The objective of a landing page is to answer the search question and to move the reader along to the next step of your sales process, so don’t overdesign your landing page. In this case, less is most definitely more. Use a single column layout and lots of white space and contrast to get your message across.

Check that your landing page looks great and works effectively on mobile – over 50% of website traffic is on a mobile device today, so make sure the page is easy to view and navigate on a mobile device.

#4 Brand –  Use your branding, tone of voice, colour scheme and value proposition to drive your brand personality home as part of your messaging.

#5 Impact – Invest in quality visuals – either photography or video. They say a picture speaks a thousand words for a reason. Make sure that your Calls to Action are prominent, clear and well positioned on the page.

#6 Urgency – Why now? Craft an exciting headline to grab attention. Play (subtly) on the visitor’s fear of missing out with time limited offers or phraseology that infers “get going now to get the best deal”.

#7 Progress – You want your PPC landing page to encourage your prospect to move to the next stage of your sales process, so if your prospect may want to “Buy Now” or alternatively “Find out More”, it’s perfectly OK to present both Calls to Action on the landing page.

Also, make your lead capture form as minimal as possible – you can always collect more data at the next step of the process. Multi-step forms get up to 300% more conversions, so they are certainly a great tactic to use.

#8 Distractions – Disable any pop-ups or links on your PPC Landing Page – they only serve to distract the user from their search focus. Similarly, you may want to hide your navigation bar so that your prospect isn’t tempted to have a look around the site rather than moving to the next step of your sales process.

#9 Trust – Use a testimonial, awards, certifications, PR or a guarantee at the bottom of the landing page to build trust and remove fear factors. Make sure that the page loads quickly to prevent people exiting before you’ve got your message across.

#10 Measure – The KPI for Landing Pages is Conversion, so check your goals are correctly set up in your Google Analytics so you can measure how each landing page works for you. You can always trial landing page set-ups once you can measure them effectively.

Summary

It’s really hard to find great examples of landing page designs…which means the bar is low, and PPC landing pages are a great way to beat your competitors!

If you’d like to chat about how to maximise your Paid Search campaign, please just contact us.