11 Tips To Improve Your Google Ads Landing Page For Conversions And Mobile

Mobile continues to grow and most people now search online using their mobile devices. When you run Google Ads PPC ads on the Google network, it is important to optimize the landing page on your website for mobile devices as well as desktops.

Google Ads is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising service offered by Google. It was previously called Google AdWords. It enables businesses to run paid search and display ads on the Google network and partner websites. While the Google Ads PPC ads can send visitors to your website, the landing page that the visitor “lands on” after clicking on the PPC ad is a crucial factor in determining customer conversions.

How does the PPC ad lead the visitor to the landing page on your website? The process works like this:

• When a person conducts an online search on Google for a product or service, he types in keywords to describe what he is searching for.
• The qualified Google Ads PPC ads that are relevant to these keywords are displayed to the searcher.
• When the searcher clicks on the PPC ad they see on the Google search pages, they will be taken to the landing page on your website.

The page on your website that the visitor “lands on” after clicking on the Google Ads PPC ad in the Google search results is the landing page.

Your Google Ads PPC marketing efforts are focused on attracting your target customers to your website. You spend a lot of time and money setting up your campaigns and showing your PPC ads to the right people at the right time and in the right locations.

Once your target customer sees your PPC ad and clicks on it, the landing page they are directed to will determine whether they convert to a lead or customer. The landing page must be optimized to increase conversions. It must also perform well on mobile devices.

The main purpose of your landing page is to convert visitors to leads or customers.

Your landing page needs to be optimized to provide a positive user experience to the visitor and be successful in customer conversions. This is referred to as landing page optimization.

A well-optimized landing page can increase customer conversions, sales and return on investment. It is also evaluated by the Google Ads system and can improve your ad rank and how much you pay per click for your PPC ads on Google.

When you run Google Ads PPC ads on Google, the Google Ads system regularly visits your website and evaluates your landing pages and website. The Google Ads system will evaluate if people who click on the PPC ads are finding what they are looking for on your landing page quickly and easily.

According to Google, the landing page experience that you provide to customers can affect your ad rank, CPC (cost per click) and your position in the ad auction for your Google Ads PPC ads. It can also impact how often your ads are shown to customers.

A website that provides a poor landing page experience can end up with their PPC ads shown less often on Google or stopped completely.

It is therefore important to ensure that your landing page provides a positive user experience to customers who have clicked through to your website from the PPC ads.

Google recommends these 5 steps to improve the landing page experience on your website:

1. Offer content that is relevant, useful and specific to the PPC ad.
2. Share your business information and build customer trust.
3. Make navigation simple for both mobile and computer users.
4. Ensure that your landing page loads quickly.
5. Make sure that your site is mobile-friendly.

Here are 11 additional tips to optimize the Google Ads landing page experience for mobile devices and to increase customer conversions.

1. Design your Landing Page to be specific to the Google Ads PPC Ad

When a visitor lands on your landing page after clicking on your Google Ads PPC ad, the landing page information must be specific to the PPC Ad.

You must send visitors to a specific landing page that has been designed to provide useful information about the product or service in the PPC ad. Your landing page content must be specific to the ad text and keywords in your PPC ad.

A lot of businesses send visitors to their home page when they click on a PPC ad. The home page provides an overview of your products or services; it is not specific to the item advertised in your PPC ad. When a visitor ends up on the home page, it only ends up confusing them with too many options and they will leave your site.

A PPC ad should take your visitor directly to the landing page that provides specific and useful information about the advertised product or service in the ad.

For example, if the customer is looking for boots and clicks on an ad that promises a sale on boots, the landing page he is directed to must be about the boots featured in the ad, not sandals.

2. Have a compelling headline

The headline of the landing page must be specific to the text and keywords in the PPC Ad. It must also be optimized for SEO with relevant keywords.

The headline must be compelling and focused on the benefits of the product or service. It has to interest the visitor to stay and learn more about the product or service and spend the time to read the rest of the content.

3. Display relevant images that load fast

The images on the landing page must be of high quality and relevant to the product or service advertised in the PPC ad.

The images must be visually interesting and optimized so that they load quickly on both mobile phones and computers.

While big, beautiful images look great; they will take a long time to load. Your visitor will not wait around for large images to load.

Remember that the majority of online searches are now taking place on mobile phones. Your images must load fast and look great on a mobile phone as well as a desktop.

According to a Google report,
• 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load
• As page load time increases from 1s to 3s, the bounce rate increases by 32%
• As page load time goes from 1s to 10s, the bounce rate increases to 123%

Your landing page and all its images must load within 3 seconds.

4. Provide useful content that is specific to the ad

Your landing page content must provide specific and useful information about the product or service that is advertised in the PPC ad.

The content must provide the information that the customer is looking for. He should not have to hunt around for information.

The content should be focused on the benefits of the product or service.

The content should also be optimized for SEO with relevant keywords.

The content should provide essential information but it should be concise and short. The goal is to convert the visitor in to a lead or customer, not to overwhelm them with too much information.

5. Provide a Simple Form on the landing page

The landing page must have a simple form for the customer to fill out and submit. This could be a contact form or a purchase form.

The form must be simple with only a few fields. It should ask for essential information only. The form should load well on a mobile device as well as a desktop.

Contact forms that request only names and email addresses have been shown to have a higher conversion rate than longer forms. So it’s best to limit the number of fields on your contact forms and request the minimum information from your visitors.

6. Have a compelling Call To Action (CTA)

The landing page must have a compelling call to action. This should be focused on the single action that you want the visitor to take.

Do you want your visitor to Contact You or Make a Purchase?

Focus your Call To Action on one action that you want your visitor to take to convert to a customer.

The Call to Action should be displayed in large font on a large button. The button should be in a contrasting color that stands out against the colors of your web page.

7. Display Testimonials

The landing page has to establish trust with the visitor. The visitor may not know much about your business before he clicked on your PPC ad.

You can display testimonials from your customers on your landing page. You can also display trust symbols like awards, business memberships or leading publications that you have been featured in.

You can also ensure that your business details and contact information are easy to find on your website if the visitor wants to research your business more before they contact you.

8. Ensure that your landing page and website are Mobile-Friendly

Mobile is growing tremendously. According to a Google report in 2015, a majority of users are searching online using mobile devices not desktops.

Your landing page and website must be mobile-friendly with easy navigation.

Your landing page content, images and form should load quickly on a smartphone and be easy to read and navigate. Your website must be responsive so that the landing page looks good and performs well on any device that the customer uses to access it- mobile phone, laptop or desktop.

Here are some interesting statistics from Google about mobile usage

• In 2015, the number of search queries on mobile devices on Google in the USA exceeded those on desktops.
• In 2012, 50% of people said they will use a business less often if its website is not mobile-friendly.
• 94% of people in the USA who own smartphones use their smartphones to search for local information.
• 77% of mobile searches will occur at home or at work where desktop computers are also available.
• 82% of smartphone users search online to find local businesses.

As the statistics show, most of your visitors will visit your website and landing page on a mobile phone. Your website must be mobile friendly, responsive and easy to navigate.

To read more about why mobile friendly websites are essential for online marketing, read our article on 7 Reasons Why Mobile Friendly Websites are Essential for Online Marketing

9. Make sure that your landing page loads fast

Because mobile devices are being used for most online searches, your landing page must load fast on both mobile phones and desktops.

Most visitors will not wait longer than 3 seconds for the landing page to load.

As we saw earlier, the bounce rate increases by 32% as page load time increases from 1 sec to 3 sec.

A Google report stated that,
53% of mobile site visitors will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load

For your page to load fast, you must keep your image sizes small and avoid annoying pop-ups.

Website page speed and page size have to be kept low for optimum mobile web experiences.

The values recommended by Google are:
• Average page speed should be 3 seconds or less.
• Web page size should be 500KB or less.

To test how your website performs for mobile friendliness and mobile page speed, check out the Mobile Website Testing Tool
from Google at https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com

10. Optimize your landing page for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Your landing page must be optimized for SEO to attract organic traffic from the search engines. Optimizing for SEO will bring your site additional traffic in addition to the traffic from the PPC ads. To optimize for SEO, make sure that you

• Use your main keywords in the url of the landing page
• Use your main keywords in the headline
• Use your main keywords in the content
• Optimize your meta tags for SEO including the title tag, description tag and keywords tag
• Use alt descriptions with keywords for the images

11. Perform regular A/B testing of your landing page

A/B testing means testing different variations of your landing page to determine which one is most successful in converting visitors to customers.

You can perform A/B testing of your landing page by changing the headlines, content, images, call to action (CTA) and form. You can also test a completely different version of the landing page to see if that works better.

You can send some of your visitors from the PPC ads to version A of the landing page. Others can be directed to version B. You can then decide which version of the landing page is most successful in converting customers and then work on improving that even more.

Testing different variations of your landing page can help you decide which landing page provides the best user experience and is most successful for customer conversion.

Conclusion

A Google Ads PPC advertising campaign can enable a small or medium business to reach targeted customers at the right time in the right locations. It can help you use paid search marketing to get your products and services advertised to potential customers on Google and its partner network of websites.

While the PPC ads can attract visitors to your website, the landing page experience is essential to making the sale. Optimizing your landing page to provide a positive user experience can convert your visitors to leads and customers and increase sales and ROI.

Improving your landing page experience can also help you earn points with Google’s Ads system. This can help improve your ad rank, CPC (cost per click) and your position in the ad auction for your PPC ads. This can lead to your PPC ads being shown more often at a lower cost.

We hope you found this article useful. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter for more articles on digital marketing. If you need help with Google Ads PPC, SEO or Web design services, contact us at Gold Mango Design LLC. in Dallas.

First Published: April 10, 2017. Updated: January 11, 2019.

References

1. Google, Understanding landing page experience
2. Google, Find out how you stack up to new industry benchmarks for mobile page speed, https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks.html
3. Google, What users want most from mobile sites today, https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/research-studies/what-users-want-most-from-mobile-sites-today.html
4. Pew Research Center, Mobile Fact Sheet, January 2017, http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/
5. Pew Research Center, Demographics of social media users in 2016, November 2016, http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-2016/

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Gold Mango Design LLC. in Dallas helps small and medium businesses build a strong online marketing presence. Our digital marketing services include Responsive or Mobile Friendly Web Design, WordPress Web Design, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Google Ads Pay-Per-Click marketing. Contact us at Gold Mango Design LLC.