Designing the Right Ad – Landing Pages

Jul
24

When you are running an AdWords campaign it is vitally important that the ‘ads’ you create are highly relevant and focused to the search term. Rather than linking your ad to click through to your home page you should ensure it clicks through to a page that exactly matches the ad’s description so that visitors will see a page that mirrors the ad in terms of content, product, service.

For example – if you are a Law Firm and you are advertising a Will Writing service and your key search phrase is – Will Writing Service, the a words should be about will writing service and when you click through, the landing page should specifically be about Will Writing service and not about your company or home page.

This is to ensure that visitors only click on ‘Ad’s’ that best match their search and the landing page displays the precise product or service they expect to see. This normally requires the creation of specific landing pages that exactly match the word in the ad.

For example – If you are advertising a free online quote for life insurance the landing page should ideally have a form to enable visitors to complete and get a free quotation for life insurance. With landing pages you should still have navigation to other pages on the site. This may sound very simplistic and common sense but amazingly many advertisers on AdWords still havent got it and still waste money on ads that don’t deliver the customers to a page that meets their expectations.

Experiment by clicking on the ads and see if they exactly match your expectations of what the ad said and takes you to a page that mirrors the ad, you will be amazed that many do not and some simply link through to the home page and you then have to use the navigation to get to the page you expected to be delivered to in the first place.

Google applies a ‘Quality Score’ to your ads.

Quality Score Explained

Google applies a quality ad score to your ad. This is best explained on Google’s own Adwords Help page

Example

Suppose Sam is looking for a pair of striped socks. And let’s say you own a website that specializes in socks. Wouldn’t it be great if Sam types “striped socks” into Google search, sees your ad about striped socks, clicks your ad, and then lands on your webpage where he buys some spiffy new striped socks?

Example

In this example, Sam searches and finds exactly what he’s looking for. That’s what we consider a great user experience, and that’s what can earn you a high Quality Score.

Common Mistakes

  1. Too many keywords and phrases added to your campaign within 1 ad group with only one generic ad.
  2. Sending all the clicks through to your home page instead of creating specifically designed and highly focused landing pages that best match the ad and search terms with a ‘call to action’ to ensure they do something when they land on the page.
  3. Testing – Testing and more testing, not doing enough testing of ads, copy and different landing pages and small changes to monitor the reation, customer experience and results. Split testing is a way to trial different ideas and analysing the results and not making assumptions, it’s wise to try and make subtle small changes which could be the difference of a higher conversion.