In almost all cases of a PPC campaign, a conversion targetted landing page should be utilised. A good landing page can both decrease your PPC costs as well as increase your conversions. I’ll explain how:
Google makes most of its money by pay per click advertising on its search engine. Concurrently, Google also wants to display only the most relevant and helpful ads to users. This means that in some cases, Google will show more relevant ads above less relevant ones, even if the more relevant one is paying less. This does depend on the budget as Google would not show an advert with too low a budget at the top.
To determine the relevance of an advert Google uses a ‘Quality Score’. The Quality Score takes a few factors into account:
Landing Page User Experience
If users are finding the page hard to navigate or not responsive (not adjusting the content to display on mobile properly) then Google will be more likely to place you under an advert that is more optimised for the users. This can also include the page speed
Content
The content on the landing page has to include the keywords that the searcher may be using to trigger the ads. Providing the content is relevant to the searcher’s query then the ad’s quality score will increase. Using h1’s are useful in the content as well as placing keyword rich titles above the fold of the page.
Positive Behavior Signals
If users are landing on the page and then exiting immediately with very little engagement, this will send bad signals back to Google and can damage the quality score.
Conversion Rate Optimised Design
Landing pages tend to lead to increased conversions due to their design. In dental terms, we would create a landing page focussing the users on the pricing of the specific treatment, testimonials (including before and after images), any special offers and most importantly, an enquiry method – this can be a contact form or a phone number. Naturally, with all of these bits of information, we see an increase in conversions.
Focus the user on the call to action
PPC landing pages focus the user on the conversion by showing only the most relevant information to get the conversion. A normal website page has a navigation and various other pages that can distract the user from the conversion task. A landing page keeps them focussed to convert by restricting their ‘movement’ around the website.