Custom Designed Landing Pages
Google Ads traffic can be sent to your homepage, service pages or to custom designed landing pages.
Custom designed landing pages are often used to remove friction in the visitor’s journey. They make the path from clicking on the ad to finding the specific information they are after a lot smoother. Often bespoke landing pages remove the need to navigate your website in search of information that may or may not be available.
A custom designed landing page is a page built explicitly for conversion. It has no other purpose than to convert your Google Ads traffic into conversions e.g. downloads, enquiries and sales. The entire landing page layout is designed to generate conversions.
It isn’t designed to look pretty or win a design award. Its sole purpose is to generate more conversions from your Google Ads
Key attributes of a landing page are as follows:
Easy to understand, competitive offer.
List of unique selling points, benefits and features.
Prominent phone number.
Clear, simple enquiry form.
Mobile responsive.
Engaging, relatable testimonials with real photos.
Credentials, awards and trustmarks.
A landing page containing all of these attributes is likely to convert more paid visitors into prospects than a homepage or a service page. Take a look at your homepage and service pages. Do they engage the visitor? Would you trust the information on your pages if you pretended you had never visited the page before? Do your phone number and enquiry form stand out?
Furthermore, consider if all the enquiry form fields are required. Fewer fields equate to more enquiries. Too few and the enquiry quality suffers. It's important to continually test what works for your business.
A landing page also allows you to continually A/B split test. Testing different headlines on a landing page allows us to grab someone's attention quicker than relying on one homepage with the same headline for everything.
A landing page allows us to have multiple calls to action on the one page and minimise the number of clicks required to generate an enquiry. We typically find homepages have ineffective compelling call to actions; often it involves someone scrolling down the page to view an enquiry form. Ensure there are call to actions above the fold. The top of the page is a far more effective position for generating conversions.
Google Ad Quality Scores Affect How Much You Spend
The landing page needs to be relevant to the words people search on in Google. If they aren’t Google will penalise an account with lower quality scores, resulting in higher bids. Higher Google Ad quality scores equate to lower cost per clicks. Landing pages give you the opportunity to improve your keyword quality scores by using specific keywords in the page content. Google rewards ad accounts with higher quality scores when the landing page is deemed highly relevant to the phrase searched in Google.
Win Your Prospects Over With Social Proof
Generally, homepages and services pages do not contain powerful social proof, such as testimonials, quotes and photos of happy clients. Let your past customers tell your paid visitors how good you are in the form of testimonials. It’s reassuring for them to know others have trusted you. This is the best way for you to prove your marketing claims. Furthermore embedding reviews from trusted third parties into your landing page improves your credibility.
Using Better Copy To Gain Attention
Can the visitor easily review the unique selling points of your service or products? On a homepage and service pages, key marketing copy can for all intent and purposes be lost with the wrong formatting, font and size. Another drawback to using homepage and service pages is when all too often the headline is the business name. The headline is there to stop the visitor in their tracks.
How To Set Up A Customised Landing Page
Third party companies like Unbounce, Leadpages, Instapage, Convertri and Clickfunnels offer efficient ways to set up landing pages.
Set up includes creating a custom domain name (CNAME record). You will need to make a small change to the dashboard supplied by the provider hosting your business domain, not with the provider you used to purchase the domain. This ensures the landing page is on the same domain as your website. The CNAME record is created within your DNS settings. It can take approximately a day for changes to your CNAME record to propagate across the internet.
Customised Landing Page vs Homepage / Service Pages
Implementing landing pages means there is no need to make changes to your website.
Landing pages can be designed around one specific search keyword, rather than having a generic page for everything. Even if in the main you stick to one landing page, you can continually A/B split test it to make improvements.
Remember the goal is to create a friction-free journey from the ad to the landing page to contact form or phone call. Ultimately you need to make it easy for your paid visitors to contact you. Otherwise, you are wasting your valuable ad spend.
A successful advertising campaign requires a highly effective landing page. Often this is best is achieved by looking beyond your homepage and service pages and designing bespoke landing pages.