Tips for Designing a Rock Star PPC Landing Page

There are many facets to a successful PPC marketing campaign. The copy one uses to advertise in Google undoubtedly has a powerful effect on users’ choices to visit your site, it doesn’t necessarily have the most power to increase conversions. Once a user clicks on your ad, you need to direct them to a highly functioning and thoughtfully designed landing page.

But designing a landing page for PPC campaigns isn’t as easy as you may think: there are many ways to fail, but only a few ways to succeed. It would be a crying shame if your PPC ad campaign flopped because you simply didn’t create a landing page that converts.

Today, we’re going to take a closer look at the key elements you need to focus on to design a rock star landing page.

K-I-S-S Principles for a Clean Page

When it comes to designing your landing page, your chief goal should be to keep things as simple as possible. Widgets, crazy design elements, flashy colors, and other distractions end up confusing your leads, and make it harder for them to take action. Your landing page should have the singular mission of getting a lead to take a specific action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a free trial, etc.

Anything that doesn’t augment your landing page’s ability to convert leads is superfluous and counterproductive. Now, I’m not saying you need to completely gut every element of your landing page until you only have a couple input fields on a white background, but you do need be intentional about creating a minimalist experience. Not only does slimming down your landing page help leads take action, it also helps pages load faster, which brings me to my next point.

Speed Is Absolutely Crucial

I imagine you’ve heard people claim that the speed with which a web page loads is important whether its a landing page or not. But don’t underestimate speed’s heightened importance with landing pages, where it’s orders of magnitude more important. Why? Well, while it is desirable to have fast loading pages to engage as much organic traffic as possible, a missed opportunity with an organic lead doesn’t eat up your marketing budget.

PPC campaigns, on the other hand, need to be optimized as much as possible to ensure your precious marketing budget isn’t wasted. The last thing you want is a paid lead to bounce because your web page loaded too slowly. Additionally, depending on the size of your campaign, your web server may be more burdened than usual because of the surge of paid traffic. Making sure your pages load as fast and efficiently as possible is paramount to a successful campaign.

Drill Down for Precise Testing

Testing is a crucial part of any PPC ad campaign, but far too often, people don’t realize how many staggeringly numerous elements there are to be tested. Some people may only toy around with a background color or an image. Elements to test include, but are not limited to, the following: images, font (everything matters!), button colors, button copy, content length (is it too long to be engaging?), form and field layout, title tags, headlines, call-to-action copy, testimonials, credibility icons, social media sharing buttons (more isn’t always better), and more. An element may seem too small to make a difference, but every little bit helps.

Mobile Optimization and Testing

Mobile, mobile, mobile…it can’t be said enough! You absolutely must design and optimize your landing page for mobile devices – and test it on a mobile device as well. If you didn’t already know, Google receives more queries from mobile devices than desktop devices, a trend that doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Each year, the number of mobile queries increases as desktop queries shrink and shrink. As such, it is absolutely imperative that you design your pages to cater to mobile-first indexing.

Write Your Copy Using Your Target Audience’s Voice

Sometimes it’s tough to precisely nail down what voice means in ad copy. The truth is that its a combination of things, including your sentence structure and length, vocabulary, colloquial phrases, tone (professional vs. conversational) and many other factors. Together, they come together to shape the voice the reader hears in their head when digesting your content, and help communicate your attitude and personality.

Naturally, if your audience is very homogeneous, then it’s ideal to write in a voice shared with your audience. If your audience is very diverse, its better to adopt a voice that’s more neutral and easy to understand – one that doesn’t use metaphors or jargon specific to one group. For instance, if you’re writing a technology blog centered around network engineering for network engineers, incorporating industry jargon into your content perfectly acceptable. If, on the other hand, you’re writing a technology blog for the average Joe, it’s best to omit jargon from your landing page copy.

Make Sure Claims Between PPC Ads and Landing Pages Match

You may have noticed that one strategy often employed by PPC marketing professionals is to advertise savings opportunities in the headline or description to entice users to take action. However, savings opportunities and promotions are inherently temporal events, and change over time. You need to make sure that you update your landing page copy to reflect changes in the headline and description.

The idea here is to keep everything consistent to eliminate confusion and frustration – two emotions that can nullify action taking – for the visitor. Imagine how frustrated you’d be if you saw ad for a pair of shoes you were hunting at 50% off, only to get to the landing page and see a mere 10% savings coupon? I know I would feel taken advantage of.

Final Thoughts

Designing PPC ad campaigns and landing pages is deceptively difficult, and matter a great deal because they can add to – or detract from – your bottom line. If you want to grow your audience and funnel traffic to your website with PPC ads but don’t feel confident running your own campaign, I highly encourage you to reach out for the help of a professional.