Making the most of your landing pages

Adwords has become a necessity for many businesses, but few understand the benefit of creating the “landing page experience” for those hitting the site. If the searcher isn’t engaged, the dreaded high bounce rate becomes inevitable. We have been working closely with our clients to try and improve their landing pages, making sure that when potential customers hit the site, they stay there.Imagine the person searching for your product/brand/service as a dog following a scent, once they lose the scent they retrace and start again. In this metaphor, if they don’t find your product, they look elsewhere. The web user is following a scent, a solution to a problem or a product, when they hit your landing page the scent will continue or it will come to a sudden end, causing them to go back and look elsewhere.

Putting this theory into practice should encourage you to match your Page Title to your Ad Headline, which ought to match the Keyword that was searched.

When we create tailored landing pages, we do so for each Adgroup and follow a few simple rules:

1.)    We make sure the keywords we have targeted are visible within the H1, or H2 tag on the page.

2.)    We include a form or a signup to try and generate conversions. This is more important if the site you are promoting doesn’t sell online, ROI is much easier to determine if you can gain customer information.

3.)    We highlight what benefit the customer will gain through using the product or service; we usually do this in a numbered list.

4.)    Include some engaging content; a video is a great route, or a show reel of your products.

The landing page will be successful if the user finds enough to do whilst they’re on it. If they spend too long looking for the aforementioned “scent”, then unfortunately they will soon go elsewhere. Google clearly states in its guidelines for writing ads that “every aspect of your landing page must provide relevant information that informs your customers about what you’re selling.” – ensuring this will help to improve your quality score.

Those involved with Adwords management will know about the Holy Grail that is the quality score. A tailored landing page will help you improve this score and this will help reduce your spend as max CPC is multiplied by your quality to score to give your overall bid.

In summary, make sure your page features terms surrounding the product or service that searches were looking for in the first place. Remember, don’t forget that scent, and don’t let your user lose it!

 

Here are a few landing pages that have impressed us:

 

Hootsuite

Salesforce

Wrike