Why You Should Run a Landing Page With Google Ads

So you’re looking to start advertising with Google Ads? Perhaps you have an existing website that you want to advertise to or just built a new website that you want to promote. Once you have a visual asset to direct your Google Ads traffic to, and can capture leads, you’re good to go.

Picture this: you’ve been running your Google Ads for a few months, using your website as your landing environment. However, you begin to notice that your cost per lead is relatively high, and not delivering the profit margins you were hoping to achieve.

So you dig a little deeper and start to analyze all the data. Most likely, you recognize that you’re click-through rate and impressions are high; however, your conversion rate is a little low.

You begin to analyze the keywords you bid on and quickly recognize that the quality score of many of your priority keywords is relatively low. This means your ad rank has dropped in certain auctions, causing you to bid more per keyword, and potentially a catalyst behind your high cost per lead.

A lower ad rank will affect your impression share, and Google will penalize the number of times that your ads show up when users search for any of the keywords you are bidding on.

With this in mind, you confirm your bidding strategy, check your location targeting, review search term results, analyze ads and extensions — everything seems fine. You take a look at Google Analytics and quickly recognize a high bounce rate and low average time on site.

To recap, a few things we have recognized to help us understand the problem at hand:

• Low conversion rate
• Low quality score of keywords
• Limited impression share
• Loss of impressions due to ad rank
• High bounce rate
• Low average time on site

Pushing Users Further Along the Sales Funnel

Your website often serves as a hub, that typically causes users to jump around to the rest of your website’s content. Usually, this keeps users in a consideration/awareness stage of the marketing funnel.

Your landing page is the destination. It’s where your efforts pay off, and you’re looking to close the deal immediately. Landing pages usually push users further along the marketing funnel into intent or purchase stages.

For example, let’s say you were looking to go on a trip and you call a travel agent, and he sends you to the airport (a website). You have so many options, and places to fly to, it’s impossible to make a decision, so you end up going home.

Later, you call another travel agent, and he sends you flight and hotel information for a week’s stay in Costa Rica — this is exactly how a landing page can work, being more specific to the user’s needs. 

This initial user’s had an idea of what they wanted, but being sent to a website didn’t convince them what product/service specifically they needed. Whereas, being sent to a landing page on a certain product/service helped to convince the user why they needed that specific product/service.
Landing pages that capitalize on a user’s “intent” can help push them to a “purchase.” This is effective in helping increase conversion rates and lowers your cost-per-lead.

Better Targeted and Effective Content

Most users who come to a landing page through paid ads are typically within the intent or purchase stage of a funnel.

This allows us to capitalize and write our ad copy with the goal of conversion. We can use the content on our landing page to quickly affirm the problem they may have, and why they should use our business to address their needs.

Whereas, the website is usually targeting users within all stages of the marketing funnel.

Moreover, sometimes your SEO goals can differentiate from your PPC objectives. Perhaps your SEO campaigns are focusing on different keywords, or you have slightly different opportunities targeting new keywords within a PPC campaign.

Utilizing a landing page is an effective way to help with the quality score of the keywords you bid on. If you have your campaign built, observe the ad groups you are managing and what keywords they contain.

This enables you to write content for your landing page that contains the keywords you are bidding on and allow for a better quality score. With a better quality score, our ad rank will improve, which will drive our CPC and CPL down. Moreover, it will help increase your impression share.

Higher Conversion Rates

Landing pages typically follow the Rule of One, and that means designing each page with one goal in mind.

For example, look at the landing page TechWyse built for SEO. It’s clear that we are sending the message to users who are looking for SEO that we’re experts, and we provide SEO services for their business.

Sending them to your website makes the user responsible for how they navigate and act within your website.

 When you send traffic to a landing page, a user has only two options. That’s either convert through a phone call, form or leave the page. Websites give users many more options, which is why conversion rates are typically lower on a website.

Landing pages are built with one clear goal in mind, conversion.

More Creative Control

Landings pages typically have a strong user experience. Since you are only managing one page, you will have all the data through analytics and Google Ads to help make the page perfect.

Expect bounce rate and average time on page metrics to improve.

You have the creative freedom to tweak your landing page to correlate with your ad copy. Perhaps you mention a specific promotion or discount in the headline of your ad. This allows us easily to edit our landing page and include that ad copy to help increase our quality score and page experience.
Moreover, most landing pages provide you with the ability to add in product features, your process, testimonials, case studies, clients, and more — all proven content blocks that act as effective sales tools on your landing page.

Also, since you are managing only one page, it’s easier to ensure that your landing page becomes both mobile and desktop friendly. It enables your developers the creative freedom to build an effective page on both mobile and desktop.

Improved Page Speeds

Page speed is just as crucial for PPC campaigns as it is for SEO.

As mentioned earlier, websites are typically built for users within all stages of our marketing funnel. 

Websites typically have more features such as menu bars, maps, links to other pages that slow down the page URL, compared to a landing page that serves as one page that has only one goal: conversions.

It is much easier to manage healthy page speed on a landing page.

In Conclusion

If you’re running paid search campaigns, make the most of your marketing budget with a landing page.

Landing pages from every angle can be tested, designed, and optimized to convert users clicking on your paid ads. Certain landing pages can help your business expect a 55% increase in leads and outperform generic pages by 115%.

Capitalize on what a landing page has to offer. By using a page that’s built to convert, and push users into the purchase stage of the funnel, will be your ultimate sales tool that enables you to hit your marketing and sales goals.

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