Pay-Per-Click advertising is a great strategy for driving targeted traffic to websites. However, the journey from a click to a customer involves more than just attracting visitors. Your PPC landing page serves as the pivotal moment where potential customers decide whether to engage further with your brand or click away.
In this article, I’ll walk you through the critical elements of a high-converting PPC landing page, design and UX best practices, optimization strategies, and the iterative process of analyzing and refining your pages for maximum effectiveness.
Understanding PPC Landing Pages
PPC landing pages are what makes or breaks most online advertising campaigns. These specialized web pages are designed with a singular goal in mind: to convert visitors arriving from pay-per-click ads into leads or customers.
Unlike regular web pages, which may serve various purposes, landing pages must focus on guiding visitors toward a specific action. This makes them crucial for maximizing the return on investment (ROI) in digital marketing efforts.
The Role of PPC Landing Pages
The primary role of a PPC landing page is to fulfill the promise made in the ad that the visitor clicked on. This alignment between the ad and the landing page content is vital for maintaining visitor trust and interest. A well-designed landing page delivers exactly what was advertised, whether it’s a product, a service or a piece of content, in a clear and compelling manner.
For example, this Instapage ad for an A/B testing guide:
Takes you to a landing page that matches exactly:
But imagine if you clicked on the ad expecting to get your free guide and it took you, instead, to their home page. If you’re patient you might dig around a little, but for most people, they’ll just get frustrated and bounce.
I can’t stress how much landing pages for your PPC ads play a pivotal role. They are the conversion engines that turn traffic into valuable actions, such as sales, sign-ups or downloads. A successful landing page goes beyond just capturing attention; it persuades the visitor to take a specific action, thereby directly impacting a business’s bottom line.
How PPC Landing Pages Differ from Other Web Pages
The difference between landing pages and other web pages lies in their focused nature. While a homepage might offer a general introduction to a company and its offerings, a PPC landing page is laser-focused on a single campaign goal. This focus is crucial for keeping potential customers from being distracted and for leading them toward the conversion goal with as little friction as possible.
A typical PPC landing page contains several key components, including:
- Headline: Immediately communicates the value proposition and matches the ad’s message.
- Subheadline: Provides additional details and reinforces the headline’s message.
- Visuals: Use high-quality images or videos that are relevant to the offer and engaging to the viewer.
- Copy: Concise, persuasive text that explains the offer’s benefits and what the visitor will gain by taking action.
- Call-to-Action: A clear, compelling button or link that makes it easy for visitors to take the next step, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for more information or downloading a resource.
The Impact of Well-Designed PPC Landing Pages
The effectiveness of a landing page is measured not just by its ability to attract clicks, but by its conversion rate — the percentage of visitors who take the desired action.
Well-designed landing pages can significantly increase conversion rates. Compare these numbers:
- The average conversion rate for a website is 2-5%
- The average conversion rate for landing pages is 9.7%
Understanding PPC landing pages and their role in digital marketing is the first step towards creating effective online advertising campaigns.
Key Elements of a High-Converting PPC Landing Page
Creating a landing page for your ad that effectively converts clicks into customers involves a careful balance of persuasive elements and design principles. Carefully implementing these key components can significantly enhance your landing page’s effectiveness.
- Headline
- Value proposition
- Ad copy
- Visuals
- Call-to-Action
- Simple form
- Trust signals
- Mobile-responsive
- Fast page load
- Social proof
- Clear benefits
- Minimal distractions
- Contact information
Let’s take a closer look at the elements that make a PPC landing page successful.
1) Compelling Headline and Subheadline
The headline is often the first thing visitors see upon arriving at your landing page. It should immediately grab their attention and clearly convey the value of your offer.
A strong headline is concise, benefits-focused and aligned with the ad that brought the visitor to the page.
The subheadline supports the headline by adding more detail or emphasizing a key point, further encouraging the visitor to stay and engage with your content.
2) A Clear and Concise Value Proposition
Your value proposition is the core reason a customer should choose you over competitors. It should highlight what makes your product or service unique and why it’s the best solution to their problem.
For example, if you’re selling an innovative fitness tracker, your value proposition might be: “Experience the next level of fitness tracking with our state-of-the-art device that monitors your health in real-time, ensuring a healthier, more active lifestyle.”
In our case, we actually cover this in a specific way:
3) Persuasive and Relevant Ad Copy
The copy on your PPC landing page needs to be clear, concise and persuasive. It should focus on benefits rather than features, explaining how your offer solves a problem or improves the visitor’s situation.
Bullet points can effectively highlight key benefits, making the information easy to scan.
The tone and language should resonate with your target audience, making them feel understood and motivated to take action.
4) High-Quality Images or Videos
Visuals play a crucial role in capturing interest and explaining your offer or product. Images, videos and infographics should be high-quality, relevant and help tell the story of your value proposition:
- For products, high-resolution images or videos showing the product in use can be particularly effective.
- For services, visuals that depict outcomes or benefits can help visitors visualize what they will gain.
In our case we provide a service, so we’ve included some short videos with great thumbnails.
5) Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)
Your CTA is the most critical element on the page — it’s what converts a visitor into a lead or customer.
The CTA button should be prominently displayed, use action-oriented language — like “Get Started,” “Download Now,” or “Sign Up Free” — and stand out from other elements on the page. The placement and design of the CTA should make it the natural next step after reading your page’s content.
We have a floating CTA button:
We have another bright orange CTAs at a key point midway through the landing page, and we have a final CTA at the bottom of the page. And they all say the same thing:
Keep in mind that you want just one CTA (one message or action, that is; it’s fine and even helpful to have one at the top and bottom of the page) because:
- Landing pages with 5+ CTAs got 10.5% conversions
- Landing pages with only one CTA got 13.5% conversions
Just want someone to do all the work for you? Single Grain’s PPC landing page experts can help!👇
6) A Simple, Intuitive Form (i.e. Conversion Pathway)
The key to converting visitors into leads or customers is a straightforward and easy-to-navigate form or conversion pathway.
If your conversion goal involves filling out a form, keep it as simple as possible. Request only the essential information you need to follow up with leads. Minimize the number of fields in a form, use clear labels and guide users through the process with instructions.
Each additional field can decrease the likelihood of form completion, so balance the need for information with the desire to maximize conversions.
In fact, eliminating just one field from your form can increase conversions by 50%.
For instance, a sign-up form for a newsletter might only ask for an email address and a first name to reduce friction and encourage submissions, like this:
But in our case, for a BOFU landing page to hire a CRO agency, the form does require a few more fields (this is so we can qualify the prospect immediately):
7) Trust Signals (Customer Testimonials, Trust Badges)
Trust signals, such as testimonials, reviews, certifications or trust badges, can significantly increase conversion rates they give the potential customer confidence that they can trust you with their credit card or other personal data:
Including a few select testimonials or reviews that speak to the quality of your offer can reassure visitors that they’re making the right decision. On our Conversion Rate Optimization landing page, we take this a step further: In addition to video testimonials, we include specific case studies that show prospects what we’ve done.
Certifications or awards can also lend authority and build trust in your brand, particularly for an agency where you really want to know that they are credentialed.
8) A Mobile-Responsive Design
With the majority of internet browsing happening on mobile devices, your landing page must look great and function flawlessly on smartphones and tablets. This includes touch-friendly navigation, readable text without zooming and images that scale to fit the screen.
9) Fast Page Load Speed
Users expect web pages to load quickly; even a few seconds’ delay can lead to lost conversions. You can check your page load time at PageSpeed Insights:
Optimize your PPC landing page’s load time by:
- compressing images
- minimizing code
- using a reliable web hosting service
Let’s drill down a bit on these three things.
A) Compressing Images
Large image files can significantly slow down your website’s load time because they require more data to be downloaded by the user’s browser. Compressing images reduces their file size without a noticeable loss in quality, which leads to faster load times.
- Use Image Compression Tools: There are many tools and services available online (like TinyPNG, ImageOptim, or Squoosh) that can compress your images efficiently.
- Choose the Right Format: Different image formats have different sizes and qualities. For example, WebP often provides better compression than PNG or JPEG without sacrificing quality.
- Implement Responsive Images: Use HTML’s srcset attribute to serve different image sizes based on the user’s screen size, ensuring that large images are not downloaded on devices with smaller screens.
B) Minimizing Code
Minimizing the code (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) on your website removes unnecessary characters (like whitespace, comments, and new line characters) from your code without changing its functionality. This results in smaller file sizes and faster loading times.
- Use Minification Tools: Tools such as UglifyJS for JavaScript, CSSNano for CSS, and HTMLMinifier for HTML can automate the minification process.
- Combine Files: Where possible, combine multiple CSS or JavaScript files into a single file to reduce the number of HTTP requests needed to load the page.
- Use CSS Sprites: Combine multiple images into a single image sprite to reduce HTTP requests and then use CSS to display only the relevant part of the image.
C) Using a Reliable Web Hosting Service
The performance of your web hosting service can have a significant impact on your website’s load time. A reliable and fast hosting service ensures that your website’s data is served to visitors quickly and efficiently.
- Choose the Right Type of Hosting: Depending on your website’s traffic and resource requirements, choose between shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, or cloud hosting.
- Look for Performance Features: Opt for hosting services that offer SSD storage, ample bandwidth, and low latency to ensure fast data access and transfer rates.
- Consider Server Location: Choose a hosting service with servers located near your target audience to reduce data travel time.
10) Social Proof
Social proof on landing pages is crucial because it builds trust and credibility with your audience. It does so by leveraging the psychological and social phenomenon where people look to the actions and behaviors of others to determine their own.
In the context of marketing and online conversions, social proof can significantly impact decision-making and user behavior, making it a powerful tool for businesses and marketers. In an era of heightened skepticism towards marketing claims and online scams, social proof is excellent for overcoming doubts among your target audience.
Highlighting social media shares and followers can also demonstrate the popularity and reliability of your product or service.
An example could be a software company displaying user testimonials that say, “This software revolutionized our workflow, increasing productivity by 40%.” In our case, we have a happy client saying we helped increase their revenue by 300%!
11) Minimal Distractions and a Focused Layout
Design your landing page with a single goal in mind and remove any elements that could distract from that goal. This means having a clean layout, using colors and fonts that enhance readability, and focusing on a single call-to-action.
In other words, don’t do this!:
For a landing page aiming to increase webinar registrations, everything on the page should lead to the registration form without offering links or options that could take visitors elsewhere.
On our CRO agency landing page, there’s nothing on it that doesn’t specifically have to do with conversion rate optimization and there’s nowhere else to go (all links – which are the CTA buttons – take you to the registration form). Even the podcast excerpt is embedded on the page.
12) Contact Information or a Chat Feature for Immediate Questions
Provide visitors with easy access to contact information or a live chat feature, so they can get immediate answers to their questions. This can be the final push needed for a conversion.
For example, an online retailer could include a live chat option that pops up with the message, “Have questions about our products? Chat with us now!” This approach makes potential customers feel supported and valued.
Here’s a simple example of a chatbot on GetGenie’s page:
Optimizing Your PPC Landing Page for Conversion
Getting your PPC landing pages up and running is the first step, but optimizing them for conversion is the next, critical step to maximize the effectiveness of your pay-per-click campaigns. Conversion optimization involves fine-tuning various elements of your landing page to increase the percentage of visitors who take the desired action.
Use Analytics Tools
To effectively analyze and iterate on your PPC landing pages, you must leverage analytics tools. Google Analytics, for instance, offers deep insights into how visitors interact with your page, including metrics like time on page, bounce rate and conversion rate. In GA, you can build your own behavior flow or path exploration chart:
These insights allow you to pinpoint areas for improvement and understand what resonates with your audience.
Monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Identify and monitor the KPIs most relevant to your PPC campaign goals. Conversion rate is typically the primary metric, but other indicators like click-through rate (CTR) from the ad to the landing page and the cost per conversion are also vital.
Google Analytics can help you measure most of the KPIs associated with your website performance, like:
- Total traffic
- New visitors
- Repeat visitors
- Session duration
- Bounce rate
- Exit rate
Keeping a close eye on these metrics helps gauge the effectiveness of your landing page and guide your optimization efforts.
Conduct Regular A/B Testing
A/B testing should be an ongoing effort, not a one-time task. Regularly test different elements of your landing page, from headlines and CTAs to images and layout.
To demonstrate the power of A/B testing, here are a few proof points:
- Moz generated a 52% increase in sales of its Pro membership.
- Lumineers increased conversions by 120% resulting in 1,200 more leads in one month.
- 71% of brands that had large sale increases tested multiple landing pages first.
Which page elements should you A/B test?
- Test Your Headline
- Test Your CTA
- Test Images vs. Video
- Test Your Form Fields
- Test Your Layout
You can test anything that you’re unsure of if you’re not getting the conversions you want (or think you should be getting with your awesome product/service), but starting with these five is great.
Gather and Act on User Feedback
User feedback is an invaluable resource for improving your PPC landing pages. Use surveys, feedback forms or user testing sessions to gather insights directly from your target audience. This feedback can reveal pain points, confusion or desires that analytics alone might not uncover.
Here are some of the best tools available for conducting these types of research.
Surveys and Feedback Forms:
- SurveyMonkey: One of the most popular survey tools, offering a wide range of question types and templates to design comprehensive surveys. It also provides powerful analytics to analyze the data.
- Google Forms: A free tool that allows for the creation of surveys and feedback forms quickly. It’s integrated with Google Sheets, making data analysis straightforward.
- Typeform: Known for its user-friendly interface and design, Typeform offers a more engaging way to ask questions and get responses. It’s great for creating surveys that feel more conversational.
- JotForm: Offers customizable forms, including surveys and feedback forms, with a focus on ease of use and integration with various platforms.
User Testing Sessions:
- UserTesting: Provides a platform for getting real-time feedback from users navigating your website or app. It allows you to watch recorded user testing sessions to see where users encounter issues or confusion.
- Lookback.io: Offers live and recorded user testing sessions with real users, providing insights into how users interact with your product. It’s useful for remote user testing.
- Hotjar: Beyond traditional user testing, Hotjar offers heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys, giving you a comprehensive view of how users behave on your site.
- UsabilityHub: A platform for running shorter user tests, including first-click tests, design surveys, and preference tests. It helps in making design decisions based on user feedback.
General Feedback Tools:
- Feedback Fish: Allows you to collect user feedback directly on your website with minimal disruption to the user experience.
- Qualaroo: Offers targeted surveys and feedback collection tools that you can deploy on specific pages or at specific points in the user journey.
Celebrate Wins and Learn from Losses
Not every change will result in improvement, but each test offers valuable lessons. Celebrate the wins, no matter how small, and learn from the losses! This positive, proactive approach to continuous improvement is what ultimately leads to success in PPC marketing, from the initial ad to the landing page to the conversion.
Remember, analyzing and iterating on your PPC landing pages is a critical process that demands attention and effort!
Last Word on PPC Landing Pages
The journey from clicks to customers is both an art and a science, demanding a blend of creativity, strategic planning and data-driven optimization. Crafting PPC landing pages that convert is not just about attracting visitors, but about creating a seamless, compelling experience that guides them toward taking the desired action.
From the importance of compelling headlines and persuasive copy to the nuances of design and UX best practices, every element of a PPC landing page plays a pivotal role in conversion.
In the end, the success of PPC landing pages hinges on understanding the customer journey and optimizing every touchpoint along the way. With dedication, creativity, and a data-driven approach, turning clicks into customers becomes not just a possibility but a reality.
If you’re ready to level up your PPC landing page, Single Grain’s PPC landing page experts can help!👇
