Web Design Tips for a PPC Landing Page

PPC (pay per click) is one of the most common digital marketing strategies used by businesses across the world. What makes it so popular and sought after is that companies can pay whatever is within their budget to advertise on their chosen channels. 

The most popular and simplest platform for PPC advertising is by far Google’s own Google Ads which operates using a second-price auction model: top-bidding advertisers only pay £0.01 more than the second-highest bidder. 

Whilst you can’t choose where your ad appears there are some key factors that Google takes into consideration during their auctions to determine your ad rank and position your ad accordingly. The three key factors that makeup ad rank are: keyword relevance, ad relevance, and landing page quality. 

The most important thing when it comes to landing page quality is that the page you choose for your ad is relevant to what you’re advertising –  just like the ad copy and keywords.  In other words: message matching. Ensuring relevancy will not only improve your ad rank but most importantly it will mean that users who are looking for what you’re offering will be directed to your website. This should help keep irrelevant traffic at bay and maintain your bounce rate at a minimal rate, leading to more conversion-worthy visits. 

But apart from relevant content, there are other landing page quality factors that will affect the landing page experience for your potential customers. Whether you’re designing a landing page for its pure purpose or choosing an existing one for your campaign, these are the factors to consider:

Ensure optimisation & speed

Relevance alone won’t guarantee a good user experience on your landing page. The quality of the code and structure of your website can improve your positioning and ad rank. Furthermore, you may get points “deducted” if your website does not meet certain criteria. For instance, if it is not fat-finger-friendly, which can be due to your clickable elements being too close together or your text being too small. 

Think about other optimization factors too. Let’s say that your code is not minified and properly streamlined. This will mean that your webpage will take ages to load. Same goes for unoptimized images, wrong formats, or render-blocking code.  All these will increase the likelihood of users quickly giving up and leaving your page before it loads, increasing the bounce rate, and signalling to Google that your page is not worth visiting. 

There are several tools to test or track your page speed including PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, GTMetrix, and more. If you’re well versed in web design, you can view and apply recommendations yourself. Otherwise, leave this to your developer to take care of. 

Make it mobile-first and responsive

Apart from making your code efficient and streamlined, you should ensure that your pages are responsive so that the users can have an optimal experience no matter what device they’re accessing your page from. This includes everything from desktops to tablets to mobiles – and everything else in between!. You should pay special attention to optimizing for mobiles as this is one of the key factors for Google who favours sites that apply mobile-first recommendations to their websites. 

This includes ensuring that big graphics or images fit properly onto smaller screens or at least including an alternate image or layout for those smaller devices. 

Ensure transparency

Another factor to consider when designing a website is ensuring that contact information such as email address, telephone number and business location is clearly visible and accessible from your landing page. Or, if your landing page contains encourages a transaction, you must ensure that you include a visible link to privacy policies and purchase policies so that google knows you’ve cleared these with the user before taking their money. These are vital trust signals that Google uses to assess the level of transparency on your page. 

In this same way ensure that the structure of your page first offers the user the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the product and your brand before they are forced to convert or before any popups appear.

Contact Image Plus for PPC Services

If you need further assistance with advanced PPC advertising or other digital marketing services then speak to our friendly experts. We are based in Coventry, Warwickshire and are always ready to help. Please feel free to contact us and speak to one of our specialists.

Contact us on 024 7683 4780 or send us an email at info@image-plus.co.uk.