How to Improve Landing Page Experience in Google Ads

When a customer visits your website, their landing page experience is no less important than if they were visiting you in a bricks and mortar store.

Mel Gibbons
16 July, 2018

Is it neat? Is it easy to navigate? Does it connect and is it consistent with the ad they clicked on? Can they easily find what they are looking for? Is it on brand? Do they get pounced on the second they step foot in the door?

Even if they come looking for a product or service that you have, they will quickly leave if their first impression and the experience doesn’t fit the bill.

Take clicks to conversions

A landing page should be designed around its purpose, which is to generate leads and pull prospects further into the customer funnel.

A well-executed landing page will deliver a user experience that engages a qualified lead and offers them something that is relevant and naturally takes them to the next stage of the buying journey. For example, this could be a free webinar or free video how-to guides.

Although the purpose of a landing page is straight forward, designing a landing page that achieves it requires careful and detailed planning.

A positive landing page experience

Any good Google Ads agency or digital marketing agency in Adelaide will attest to the fact a positive landing page experience not only provides good service to your customers, but it can also:

Improve your landing page quality score
Improve your ad rank
Lower your advertising costs.

More than 90% of Australians turn to Google for their search because Google’s key focuses are to provide not only the most relevant results for its user’s search enquiries, but also a positive user experience.

Google uses a combination of human evaluation and automated systems and algorithms to evaluate landing page experiences.

If your landing page gives your visitors a poor experience, Google will show your ads less often — or in the worst case, not at all. On the other hand, if your landing page delivers an above average experience, it can result in more, higher ranking impressions and therefore potentially more google ads traffic for your website.

Tips to Improve Landing Page Experience

As a Google Partner agency, we’re often asked by our clients what they can do to improve landing page performance and experience. The underlying message to the following tips is that you must ultimately optimise for your customers — then the conversions will follow.

1. Content

Content is still king. Without quality, relevant content all the whizz bang features and product or service offerings won’t hold much value for prospective customers.

Make sure your content is relevant to and useful for your visitors.
Always try to use original content (unless you are going to cite your source).
Make sure your landing page is relevant to your ad text, keywords and imagery.
Make sure the information you provide is useful and relevant to what you are advertising.
Try to offer something that is unique to your site, whether it is a product or information.

2. Demonstrate that you are trustworthy

Many people that click on your ad and land on your website may not know who you are, and in a digital world it is important to verify your business and instil confidence in prospective clients.

Make sure your contact information is easy to find.
Be clear about how you will use any personal information you collect from your customers.
Make sure to clearly distinguish any ads or sponsored links on your site.
Be open about your business so customers know who you are and what you do.

3. Make it easy

Make it easy for your customers to find what they are looking for — nothing will put them off more than having to work hard to find what they’re looking for.

Make sure you take your customer directly to the product you are advertising, not your home page.
Make sure your customers can easily find product information.
Streamline your checkout so processing transactions is quick and easy.
Don’t distract customers with annoying pop-ups while they are trying to navigate your site.

4. Make it quick

According to Google, 53% of all mobile visitors abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. While there are a number of factors that will impact this, including some that are out of your control such as the device or connection, it’s an important contributing factor to a good page experience.

Make sure your landing page is quick to load.
Prioritise important content so it appears above-the-fold.
Optimise your landing page for mobile users.

What is a Good Landing Page Conversion Rate?

According to WordStream, the average landing page conversion rate is 2.35% across industries, with the top 25th percentile of landing pages hitting 5.31% or higher.

To calculate your landing page conversion rate, simply divide the number of conversions your landing page generates by the number of visitors to that page.

If you’re not quite hitting the mark, take a step back and review your landing page through the eyes of your prospective clients — better still, ask for feedback from your audience and make some changes using the above tips to improve landing page performance. And make sure the only content on your landing page is content that adds value!

Improve your Landing Page Experience

Google regularly scans websites for changes, so by improving your content quality and landing page experience you should quickly see improvement in your landing page performance and your landing page quality score performance. If you have Google Ads account that is under performing, contact us for free consultation.