The page to which you send the traffic of an ad, also known as your landing page, can have a huge impact on the effectiveness and the budget of your campaigns (a 404 error will not help you, of course).
Effective and structured campaigns don’t just start with the right bidding strategy, keywords and attractive ad texts. They start by making sure your campaigns have a good Quality Score.
But what does a good Quality Score have to do with a strong landing page? To answer this question, it is good to know what the Quality Score exactly means.
Google’s Quality Score takes into account the following 3 factors:
- The expected click-through rate (CTR)
- The relevance of your ads
- The landing page experience
In this blog we focus on improving the landing page and therefore the landing page experience.
What is the landing page experience?
A “landing page experience” is a metric Google uses to estimate how relevant and useful your landing page is to the people who click on the ad. Google calculates the landing page experience by looking at aspects such as the usability and relevance of the information on the page, ease of navigation, number of links on the page and user expectations based on the ad clicked.
The landing page experience is so important that it influences your ad position and therefore the average cost per click. Google attaches great importance to showing relevant information to their users, no matter what you spend; without a good landing page, your ad will hardly be shown, so your campaigns will hardly be effective.
5 tips to improve your landing page experience
1. Improve the speed of your page
The bounce rate (the percentage of users that visit your website and leave it without any further action) is one of the metrics Google uses to assess the user experience on your page. A page that loads slowly, generally has a higher bounce rate, a lower average session duration, and therefore a lower conversion rate. All of this results in a bad landing page experience in Google’s eyes.
Google’s mission is to “organise all information in the world and make it universally accessible”. Accessible here refers to the user experience and speed is an important factor.
With Google Pagespeed Insights you can view various aspects in which area you can improve your website.
2. Increase the relevance of your page
The information on your landing page must also be relevant to the ad and search query. It would be strange if someone lands on a vacancy page while searching for “Hire online marketing agency”. This is of course an extreme example, but it is important that your targeted keyword is also mentioned on the page.
3. Optimise your page for mobile users
The optimization of websites for mobile users is becoming increasingly important. Older websites are often built with the desktop user in mind, but this is an old-fashioned idea these days. Most searches are now done on mobile devices. Not surprising since we always have our mobile device with us.
In addition to the predominance in searches on mobile devices, it is also important to know that Google now indexes your page based on the mobile structure. This does not mean that they will stop indexing the desktop version, but that the priority will shift to mobile-first. This also directly affects your Google ads campaign because if your page is not optimised for mobile, it will also get a lower quality score and therefore a lower Ad ranking.
4. Make sure your visitors can easily navigate on your website
After clicking on the ad and landing on your landing page, you naturally want to ensure that visitors can achieve their goal(s) as easily as possible; good navigation can help.
Of course, this has not only to do with improving your landing page experience, but also with the performance of your website as a whole. There are a number of things you can do to improve landing page navigation: add a search bar, breadcrumb path, and use internal links (like in the beginning of this blog).
5. Ensure transparency and increase your credibility
Credibility and transparency are important to improve your landing page experience. By removing questions and uncertainties from the visitor, you can ensure that the visitors leave their details earlier or complete other goals.
Elements that you could add to ensure transparency & credibility:
- Add a link to your Privacy Policy
- Provide your Business contact information
- Adding Social proof to your page (see picture)
How do you ensure that the landing page will perform better and convert?
In this blog we mainly focused on how you can improve your landing page experience and your campaigns. However it is also interesting to know how you can make your page convert better and thus bring in more transactions/leads. We will discuss this topic in a follow-up article so keep following us and you will see the article about optimising your conversion ratio appear automatically.
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