All too often, marketers get caught up in creating the perfect paid advertisement that is bound to score the most clicks. However, even though getting a click represents an essential component of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, it’s only half the battle. There’s a critical connection between the quality of landing pages, paid advertising return on investment (ROI), and your ability to convert quality leads into loyal customers. If you want your paid ads to perform well with your target audience consistently, you need optimized landing pages.
On that note, below is everything you need to know about landing pages and paid advertising and how to leverage the two to create high-converting campaigns.
Landing Pages, Paid Advertising, and Conversion Basics
Running Google Ads can make your brand more visible on the search engine, which can help drive quality traffic to your web page. Many businesses favor Google Ads and other PPC platforms because they only need to pay for each click they receive. As such, they enjoy precise control over their marketing budgets and ad spending.
However, if you want that control to translate into a solid ROI, you must impress audiences with great landing pages. It’s best to think of the paid ad as a tool for introducing consumers to your brand and the landing page as the means of prompting them to take that next step.
At the same time, remember that earning a sale doesn’t have to be the goal of every ad campaign and landing page. If your products or services are on the pricier side, it may take multiple interactions for someone to become a customer. And even if your offerings are moderately priced, many consumers aren’t going to make the leap during their first exposure to your brand.
Therefore, setting non-sales-related conversion goals can be a great way of optimizing your landing pages and making calls-to-action (CTAs) a little easier to digest. For instance, creating a Google Ads campaign to build out your mailing list would involve creating an information capture landing page. While you won’t see an immediate revenue return on that activity, it can help drive long-term business growth.
What Are Good Conversion Rates for Paid Search?
Now that we’ve recapped the basics of landing pages, paid advertising, and conversions, it’s time to address the elephant in the room: what actually counts as a “good” conversion rate. According to HubSpot, landing pages across all industries have an average conversion rate of 5.89%1. But as it turns out, 10% is considered the standard. Your landing pages will produce a strong ROI if you hit that mark or higher.
Nailing landing page design and layout can be tricky, which makes that goal easier said than done. You’ll probably have to go through a little bit of trial and error, but that’s okay. With a semblance of a reasonable baseline conversion rate, you’ll be able to analyze your performance and make adjustments to move closer to that milestone in the future.
Landing Page Best Practices
Whether you are entirely new to Google Ads or simply aren’t achieving the sort of ROI you’d like to see, the following best practices will help you up your landing page quality and engagement:
Choose a Great Layout
The success of your landing pages hinges on their layout and basic design. While you might be excited to share information about your products or services, you must avoid cluttering your landing page and feeling pressured to fill every pixel with content.
Aim for a clean, straightforward design that directs the user’s attention to your value proposition and CTA. Give your content room to breathe and ensure each image or chunk of text naturally flows into the next. If the page’s structure is confusing or overwhelming, many visitors will bounce back to the search engine results page (SERP), which means you’ve just wasted their clicks and diminished your ROI.
Ensure the Content Is Optimized for Mobile
According to Statista, over 54% of global website traffic originated from mobile devices in Q4 of 20232. With that in mind, your content must be mobile-friendly, lest you essentially ignore over half of your target audience.
Make sure that your landing pages load quickly, the text is readable without the need to zoom, and the buttons are easy to tap on. If you aren’t sure whether your landing pages are optimized for mobile, visit a few of them with your smartphone. Ask a couple of your team members to do the same and gather feedback.
Include Strong Headlines
The title of a landing page is one of the first things visitors will see once your site loads up, so it needs to be effective at instantly grabbing their attention. It should clearly convey the benefit of your offer and be aligned with the ad that brought the user to the page. For example, if someone searches for the “best vacuum for pet hair,” they should see imagery and a headline highlighting your vacuum cleaner. They will probably bounce if the title doesn’t match their search intent.
Make the Content Relevant and Skimmable
After perfecting your title, shift your attention to the body of your landing page. Its content should address a user’s pain points, highlight your value proposition, and sell them on your offer. Accomplishing all of that on a single landing page without being too wordy can be tricky. But you must resist the urge to pile on long stretches of text.
The best landing pages are skimmable, featuring multiple subheaders that help users quickly find what they want. While you should briefly highlight the features of your offering, focus more on its benefits. Directly link those benefits to the aforementioned pain points to position your product as the solution to the reader’s problem.
Use Compelling Visuals
High-quality copy and engaging headlines will help you grab users’ attention. But if you want them to stick around long enough to take in your content, you’ll need to pair your copy with compelling visuals. Use high-quality images, infographics, and videos in your landing pages. Not only are these engaging, but they also allow users to digest more information faster.
Seal the Deal With CTAs
Whereas blogs need to be light on sales-y language, landing pages offer a prime opportunity to incorporate direct CTAs. It’s best to include a few strategic CTAs throughout the landing page as a whole and a quick one above the fold, the area just below your headline and opening statement.
Of course, you’ll want to close out your content with a final prompt to purchase or perform a specified action. Be concise and tell the reader precisely what you want them to do next, whether that’s “Buy now!” or “Sign up for our newsletter.”
Conduct A/B Testing
The concept of A/B testing involves creating two or more versions of a landing page with one varying element. You’ll run small campaigns with each and gauge their performance. The content that achieves better results will move forward to the next phase of testing, while the other asset will be taken out of circulation or optimized.
You can test all sorts of elements with A/B cycles, including headlines, CTAs, layouts, or images. However, you must manipulate only one aspect of each page during your testing cycle. Otherwise, you won’t know what element affected the page’s performance.
Improve and Adapt
Applying each of the best practices above will help you create better landing pages and more impactful PPC campaigns. But even then, consumer preferences and PPC trends are continuously evolving, which means you need to change with them.
Gather performance insights from each campaign and list what worked and what you can do better next time. Make targeted improvements to increase ad efficacy. Repeat the process until you consistently meet or exceed the 10% conversion rate threshold.
Elevate Your PPC Campaigns With Full Circle SEM
At Full Circle SEM, we offer a holistic suite of services designed to get you noticed. One of our most popular offerings is our selection of website design and development services, with which you can create dynamic pay-per-click landing pages that resonate with your target audience. They’ll capture your brand’s voice, appeal to consumers, and align with the intent of the user’s search.
You can learn more by scheduling a consultation with Full Circle SEM today. Let’s work together to transform your PPC landing pages.
Sources:
[1] https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/landing-page-stats
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-traffic-coming-from-mobile-devices/
