7 Best Practices for Optimizing a Landing Page for Google Ads

Imagine you are walking by the road. Suddenly your eyes are caught on a stunningly designed and decorated window of a store. It is showcasing all the newest arrivals, neatly organized and to put a cherry on top you see a sale is going on.

You feel the rush and you head inside the store to check out more. Now compare this window with the landing page of your website. You can draw in more visitors and make them take actions on your page if your landing page is up to the mark.

Even if you spend tons of money on Google Ads, but your landing page is not optimized properly, then the money might be going in vain. By taking specific steps and measures, you can easily optimize your landing page for Google Ads.

With that note, in this article we will shed light on the 7 best practices for optimizing a landing page for Google Ads.

Mobile Friendly Landing Page

According to a study done by Statista, almost half of website traffic comes from mobile devices. Be assured that in case of your website landing page, the majority of the traffic will be coming from mobile as well. Thus, it is a must to keep your landing page mobile friendly.

The overall design, layout, text, link everything has to be retina ready from mobile devices as well. Just like a neatly decorated window, all the elements of your landing page has to be strategically designed and placed.

The landing page should be equally visible and accessible from not only mobile but also from any form of devices such as tablets, laptops and what not.  If you have your website up and running, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to cross check your website’s performance on a mobile device. If your website is mobile friendly, that’s great. If not, then start working on it to make it mobile friendly. Consider redesigning your website or bring the necessary changes by tweaking the existing design. 

Fast Speed

According to Think with Google, 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than 3 seconds to load. If your site takes longer to load, you are most likely to lose visitors. Therefore, one of the best practices for optimizing a landing page for Google Ads is to focus on the loading speed of the website. You can check how your site is doing in terms of speed from Google’s very own PageSpeed Insights.

It will show how your website is doing in terms of loading time and overall speed of the website. If you score good, then you are good to go but if your score is lower, you might have to take few actions. In order to make your site faster you can consider the overall design of your page. Go through the images you are using, the overall content, numbers of video that are in your site, pixel tracking and so on. There are many tools you can use to speed up your website. If you are using WordPress on your website, you can gear up the speed by using some tools and plugins.

Apart from that, you can create AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) versions of your landing page. These AMP pages are specially designed to increase the loading speed of your website. If you have a basic understanding of AMP, you can easily start creating AMP versions of your landing page.

You can go through this detailed step by step guide of creating AMP versions of your landing page. Ensuring faster loading time should be a top priority to ensure your website is optimized for Google Ads. 

Data Driven Design

The next best practice for optimizing a landing page for Google Ads is to ensure your design is up to the mark. Remember the store window example we gave earlier? The beauty of the store window is in its design. Similarly, one of the key attractions to your website is the overall design of it.

The website design will determine the user experience your visitors are having. According to a study, 52% of the users described website aesthetics as the reason for not going back to a certain website. If the design of your website is topnotch, it is most likely to bring in more visitors and repeat visitors.

A poorly designed website will not bring any feasible outcome. Your investment on the Google Ads will be worth it if it is backed by a creatively crafted website. In order to ensure your design is optimized you need to make a data driven design. Take the help of tools like Google Analytics to comprehend what design is most likely to get more visitor engagement.

The materials being used, typography, color, customer journey, checkout process, widget placements, placement of banners etc. everything is crucial when it comes to designing an optimized website. Use Google Analytics to justify the design and content of your website.

It will increase the overall quality of your site. If you already have a running site that requires tweaking, do not delay and get started with redesigning the website. And if you are starting from scratch, make sure you are dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s when it comes to designing your website.  

Test and Improve

Testing and improving your landing page is a continuous process. Remember Doc Brown from Back to the Future? He constantly tested and improved his time machine until he gave Marty a ride of a lifetime. When it comes to your website, be like Doc Brown.

Keep on trialing, testing and updating your landing page until you have a foolproof design that is guaranteed to drive more conversion and ensure higher return on your ad spend. Try with different messages, design interface, call to action and more to see which brings the better outcome.

Based on your outcome determine which strategy you will be following. And if that strategy keeps generating required results, keep on doing it and improving on it.  There are certain tools that can ease the process of testing and improving your website. You can utilize the Google Optimize tool to integrate it with Google Ads and design a robust website design.

With the help of Google Optimize, you can easily do target experiments and bespoke personalized experiences to specify keywords and ads. This is one of the best practices for optimizing a landing page for Google Ads that will generate outcome.

With constant tweaking and trial, you will understand what works best for you in the long run.

Connect with Necessary Tools

To get the most out of your Google Ad campaigns, integrate your website with the necessary tools. To begin with, Google Analytics should be at the top of the list. Connect your website with Google Analytics to get in-depth and detailed insights on your website.

It will showcase the major information you need to know to understand your website’s performance. To get the most out of your ad campaigns, integrate Google Analytics with your Google Ad account. It will provide more information specific to the ad campaigns you are running.

Along with that, you can use tools such as Google Optimize to get the most out of your ad campaigns. By ensuring connectivity with the proper tools, you can ensure proper utilization of your ad budget and ad campaigns.
 

Social Proof

Among the best practices for optimizing landing pages for Google Ads, social proof is a nontechnical best practice. Adding social proof to your landing page will not technically make it optimized, but it has a long term impact.

You can include testimonials, customer reviews and social media actions about your page. It will create credibility on the mind of  the visitor. Try to be as authentic as possible when it comes to sharing customer reviews and testimonials.

Think of yourself as a customer. If you are visiting a website for the first time, what will it take to gain your trust? When you will see there are more people who have availed the product or service, it will help you to be confident of that particular website.

Same goes for a visiting customer on your website. Whenever a customer comes to your website, he/she should have a sense of trust from your end. It is most likely to increase your conversion rate in the long run. So, including social proof on your landing page is also among the best practices for optimizing a landing page for Google Ads. 

Proper Call to Action

A call to action inside your website is an important design element. It is similar to the road signs that you will guide your user through a journey on your website. In simple words, call to actions are the phrases and words that direct the reader to take a specific action.

Phrases and words such as:

• Book Now
• Subscribe Here
• Register Now
• Get Your Free Copy
• etc.

are a few common examples of call to action.

Integrating proper call to action on your website will have a positive effect on the overall user experience of your visitors. By using the correct message and strategic placement of your call to action on the landing page, you can have a higher conversion rate. If you know how to use call to action on the landing page of your website, you will start to see better results from Google Ads.

However, it is also very important to ensure you are not using too many call to actions that render the visitors confused. While developing the call to action it is important to focus on the content too. Content and call to action goes hand in hand. Your content or copy should build up to the call to action. Have a look at the following copy and call to action examples:

• Wrong approach: 
  • Copy: Free course for our newsletter subscribers!
  • CTA (Call to action): Enroll Now!
    
• Right approach: 
  • Copy: Free course for our newsletter subscribers!
  • CTA (Call to action): Subscribe & Get Free Course 

This is a very basic example of how copy and call to action should complement each other. Properly using call to action is one of the best practices for optimizing a landing page for Google Ads. 

These are the common best practices you can apply to make your landing page optimized for Google Ads. Be consistent with the strategies and keep on working on them to get a result in the long run. 

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