In our experienced opinion, the best thing you can do to improve your PPC ads does not even happen in AdWords or Microsoft Ads, it happens on your website.
It is of course landing page optimisation.
To explain let me tell you a story, a real-life story that without a doubt is repeated day after day.
You Can’t Touch This
Okay so before we created this monster Frankenstein Digital, your beloved and extremely handsome writer here worked in an SEO agency for a time.
I have over 13 years of experience in AdWords and still do not classify myself as a top PPC nerd. I know how to make money on it and set up profitable campaigns but AdWords is only half the battle.
Sometimes we would get a new PPC client and it would land on my desk. Usually, the business owner would be unhappy with how the campaigns were going and they were looking for a new agency to see if they could do any better.
I would look through the campaigns and find things to optimise, sometimes there would be a lot to optimise, and sometimes not so much.
You could have campaigns well targeted, they are getting clicks to the right places, the CPC is low, the click-through rate is high, and everything looks good, but the return on investment is poor overall.
In this scenario what can you do to make the campaign perform better? The answer my friends is to optimise your landing page.
By optimising your landing pages, you will convert more, and suddenly your ads as if by magic, start working great.
But there is a catch, many agencies say, to the PPC professionals they employ, “Oh no you can’t touch the website, the client does not pay for that”.
Talk about half a job.
PPC is Just a Step
All your PPC campaigns do is send people to your website. Once there it is up to the person to convert, if they do not convert your PPC campaigns look garbage. Assuming of course we are a selling company, an e-commerce company.
In fact, you may not even be a selling company, the objective could be to get people to submit a form and lead generation, but the same rule still applies. If they land on your site and it stinks the place out, they won’t convert.
Bit of a Pickle
So it seems at this point we are in a bit of a pickle. Who should we blame? No doubt the business owner will look at the PPC agency and say “Why am I spending all this money for no return?”. The agency could say “You need a new website or landing page design, we can do it for you x amount”. Could this have not been communicated earlier?
Our advice is to never do ads unless your landing pages convert.
Start here and work towards ads, not the other way around.
Read that last bit again and repeat after me, never do ads unless your landing pages convert.
Hopefully, that sunk in, it will save you some money.
The Selling Bit
Okay, we will keep this short and sweet, any clients we manage PPC ads for, we make landing page optimisation part of the package. It’s crucial. If you don’t let us work on your landing pages, we won’t take you on as a client. Now back to the post.
Why Landing Pages Matter
Even if your ads are perfectly targeted and written, a poorly optimised landing page can drastically reduce your chances of conversion. This is because a landing page needs to fulfil the promises made in the ad.
Not only that, but it also needs to give users confidence.
Sometimes when on holiday with the wife we go out for drinks. Occasionally we may be walking down the strip looking for a place to have a few drinks and some guy comes up to us “Come in this bar, here grab these tickets, 2 free drinks”. You know the routine.
You go in the bar and straight away you feel out of place, rather than it being a relaxing place to enjoy a bit of time with the wife, it’s full of drunken teenagers and a very sticky floor.
You see what has happened here is you have been enticed in (PPC) but once you arrived at your destination (landing page) it does not fulfil your expectations. We usually walk straight back out at this point.
Bonus Points
In Adwords, the quality of your landing page also directly influences your Quality Score, a metric that affects your ad rankings and cost-per-click (CPC).
The higher your Quality Score, the lower your costs and the better your ad placement. Therefore, landing page optimisation isn’t just about improving conversion rates; it’s also about making your PPC spending more efficient.
We Love A Takeaway
Okay, so some takeaways for you to digest at your leisure. These are all factually correct and formulated through years of experience, you don’t have to make the mistakes, just understand the advice.
- Optimising your landing pages will make your Ad’s perform better.
- Check if your agency will update landing pages and if not why. Can’t be doing half a job.
- Don’t spend on Ad’s until your landing pages are good. Not a penny.
- Better landing pages equal cheaper Ad’s
- Don’t be lured by free drinks on holiday