Landing pages are one of the best ways to increase conversions and decrease the cost per conversion for your paid advertising campaigns. They direct potential customers to content that directly matches what they were looking for or what they saw in your ad. 

For paid search campaigns, having a landing page with the keywords directly reflected in the page copy can boost your keyword and ad quality scores, which leads to a higher placement on the search results page and a lower cost per click. For paid display campaigns, matching the ad creative, CTA, and messaging to the landing page leads to a smoother conversion process for customers: increasing their trust and keeping them on task.

General landing page best practices

• Single, clear call to action
• Limit links, direct the users’ focus on the conversion action
• Keep it brief and get to the point/value proposition
• Include trust indicators like reviews and testimonials
• Use minimal form fields unless you need to qualify customers
• Make sure the page loads quickly - if it takes too long, people will bounce
• Use video as a hero image if it won’t slow down the page too much

Paid Search Landing Page

While a major benefit of landing pages is serving the user a singular, specific call to action and reducing distractions from completing the conversion, with paid search, Landing pages are even more important.

Quality score and your keyword bid price together determine your Ad Rank, which is where your ad position falls on a search engine results page. Quality score is a combination of ad relevance, keyword relevance, and landing page relevance. Instead of directing paid search ads to your general homepage, creating a landing page with the exact keywords in your campaigns or ad groups will improve your ad’s landing page relevance significantly. Additionally, by improving your quality score, you may reduce the bid price necessary to rank in the first position. 

Things to consider when building a PPC landing page

• Align your ad call to action with the page call to action
• Lead with keywords in the headlines
• Include keywords in the copy, but don’t keyword stuff - aim for about 1 keyword per 100 words
• Build different landing pages for different campaigns or ad groups

Paid Display & Social Landing Page

For paid display and paid social campaigns, matching the ad creative and call to action to the landing page’s copy can improve a user’s trust and experience. With this, you are meeting the customer’s expectations and matching their intent to what you offer. Especially if you’re advertising for a specific service or product, bringing the user who clicks that ad to a page whose content is entirely focused on that segment will improve conversions.

Things to consider when building a Display landing page

• Keep the landing page’s creative elements similar to the ads’
• Match the ad CTA with the landing page CTA
• Build different landing pages for different ad messaging

Cool things you can do with landing pages

Many landing page providers offer additional customization opportunities that you may not be able to use on your normal web provider. We’ve seen success with Dynamic Text Insertion and A/B testing landing pages through these services. Dynamic Text Insertion takes the paid search keyword that matches a user’s search query, or from a UTM parameter on your display ad’s URL, and inserts that text directly into the landing page. This can be helpful when you have ad groups with many keywords that you would be unable to fit into the landing page. 

A/B testing allows you to test a different call to action, value proposition, color scheme, or photo on your landing page to find out which drives more conversions. Many landing page providers will automatically send traffic to your variations, which provides actionable, pure data rather than having one ad direct to one page and another ad to another page. 

Our Marketing and Strategy team can help you make the most of your digital ads and landing pages. Connect with us to get started.