Running a PPC campaign is only half the job. If the landing page you direct your audiences towards doesn’t match the promise you make in your ads, that’s a recipe for a high bounce rate and traffic leaving as fast as it arrives.
Unifying your PPC campaigns and your landing page strategy is the difference between a campaign that burns through your marketing budget and one that actually converts.
The main ways businesses break the landing page-PPC connection
Before we dive into what a good strategy looks like, let’s take a look at some of the most common mistakes people make with their campaigns (you might even be guilty of a few of these).
- * Sending all your traffic to a homepage instead of a dedicated landing page
- * Ad copy making promises the landing page doesn’t deliver
- * Complicated forms creating friction at the point of conversion
- * No single, clear call to action (on the ad copy or the landing page)
- * Uploading a landing page and never testing or updating it
- * Not segmenting pages by campaign, keyword group or audience
- * Skipping the trust signals, e.g., reviews, case studies or guarantees
Any of these sound familiar? If so, there’s a good chance you’re wasting a lot of ad spend on a bad landing page-PPC strategy. Here’s how to fix that.
Why PPC and landing pages need to work as one
Annoyingly, in a lot of businesses, these two tasks are handled by two different people or are treated as entirely separate. Never forget, for the user, moving from an ad to a landing page takes one click. If the people or strategies behind these two things aren’t aligned, something looks off to the user, trust drops, and they bounce. Misalignment will ruin your conversion rate.
On the platform side of things, low trust and high bounce rate will signal that your content is low-quality, which will push up your cost-per-click. Treating PPC and landing pages as one, connected thing will protect your budget and improve your results.
However, staying aligned across a business is sometimes easier said than done, especially if you’re going through busy times or your team is at capacity. In these situations, working with a specialist in pay-per-click advertising in London can help.
Hitting the same message across ad copy and page copy
If your ad says “20% off your first order”, your landing page better say the same thing. Matching your message means that the headline, offer, and tone a person sees in the ad are accurately reflected in the landing page copy. Repetition and reinforcement are what keep audiences locked in from the first click, right the way through to conversion. Continuity reassures the viewer that they’ve landed in the right place and that they’ll get what they came for.
Mapping campaigns to dedicated landing pages
A common, and costly, habit is sending PPC audiences to a general homepage. This is bad practice because homepages are built to serve many different users with a wide array of intents. PPC audiences have one specific goal in mind, so the page you send them to needs to address that goal. PPC audiences are primed and ready to take action, while home pages are bad at converting. See the problem? Building a dedicated landing page for each campaign, or even each ad group, keeps your messaging tightly focused and makes it easier to track which campaigns are actually performing.
Using keywords and search intent to shape page content
The keywords you bid on tell you what your audience is searching for: informational, navigational, commercial or transactional. Your landing page needs to reflect that intent directly. Just think, someone searching in highly transactional terms is ready to make a purchase, not looking for an introduction to a product. Misaligning on intent and content is a sure-fire way to let customers who are ready to convert slip through your fingers. Auditing your top-performing keywords against the page they go to is a simple and effective way to keep your alignment on point.
Testing and iterating
Once the fundamentals are in place, testing is what pushes your ad performance further. Here are some things worth prioritising:
- * Headline variations
- * CTA wording and placement
- * Form length
- * Trust signals
- * Hero images and videos vs a static layout
Consistent testing compounds over time into a better conversion rate.
How a joined-up PPC and CRO strategy can improve ROI
Businesses that get the most out of PPC recognise that when ad copy, targeting, and landing page experience work together, cost per acquisition decreases and ad results become more reliable over time.
