Doctor Google Ads – Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Landing Pages
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 8:52 am
Ok, you opened this article attracted by its title, but you are still not sure if it will be worth reading. I will save you from the crazy scrolling in search of titles and bold . In this story based on real experiences you will find:
Data and statistics on the business impact of a non-optimized landing page;
Tips on how to structure a Google Ads-proof landing page;
A real case demonstrating the performance of the same advertising campaigns before and after landing optimization.
If you also manage advertising campaigns and don't understand why they don't perform, you're in the right place: make yourself comfortable.
Put yourself in the user's shoes
More or less, we are all children of the Internet nowadays : regardless of our professional role, we are all end customers of someone else , and for this very reason I find it particularly successful to always start from the other side of the fence in our reasoning, even better if we take inspiration from real events.
A couple of weeks ago, my big dog Paco showed small physical problems that could somehow also be related to his diet. Armed with good intentions and eager to improve the quality of his food, I did what my generation has been doing since school: I asked San Google . What I found confused me as a user and made me shudder as a digital marketing professional . I found myself inside a landing page with:
kilometre-long texts and practically non-existent formatting;
videos over 20 minutes long with nothing to show and no way to fast forward playback;
dozens of different offers , with very little information about the difference between one solution and another;
dozens of hyperlinks that redirected to other pages on the site, which in turn contained other hyperlinks that in turn...
After a few minutes in this dark forest, I closed the search, opened the email and wrote to my trusted veterinarian. This banal experience already contains two fundamental elements for understanding the behavior of users on Google:
I actually clicked on some ads that appeared on the search network. This means that, on that front, a good job had been done: apparently, those ads met my needs. What made me run away were the landing pages;
not giving me the answer I was looking for, they pushed me to write to someone else. Looking at it from a business point of view, those bad landing pages actually pushed me to turn to a competitor.
Let's now abandon the role of users and put on those of advertising professionals: what changes between one landing page and another? But above all, how do you realize you have a bad landing page in your hands?
Alarm bells and data
First of all, when is it “the landing page’s fault”? Let’s go back to the previous experience for a second: in my search for the right food for Paco, I clicked on some ads. This means that they attracted me , apparently answering my question. So if you also notice high levels of traffic in your Google Ads campaigns, but few conversions, you are probably in the same situation: unless you are bidding on “cute kittens” to position a CRM, then the problem does not lie at the source, but in the landing of your ads.
At this point, we need to understand what is not working in france whatsapp number data 5 million our landing pages. In my testimony, I have indicated some factors that often compromise the quality of these pages: let's analyze them using some supporting data.
Excessively long texts
When creating a landing page for a product or service, one of the main concerns is: is everything clear to an external person? A legitimate doubt, but one that sometimes leads to overloading the texts , obtaining the opposite effect and scaring away potential customers. According to a survey by Unbounce , in fact , the more text a page contains, the lower the conversion rate , with a 50% gap between landing pages containing less than 100 words and pages of over 500.
“Bazaar effect”
I finally got a prospect to click on my ad, I brought him into my home: what better time to bombard him with all the offers and products at my disposal, right? Wrong! The user who arrives on a landing page most likely has an extremely specific need , which he expressed in his Google search: showing him too much information on different products only risks confusing him , and a confused user is a user who does not convert.
Data and statistics on the business impact of a non-optimized landing page;
Tips on how to structure a Google Ads-proof landing page;
A real case demonstrating the performance of the same advertising campaigns before and after landing optimization.
If you also manage advertising campaigns and don't understand why they don't perform, you're in the right place: make yourself comfortable.
Put yourself in the user's shoes
More or less, we are all children of the Internet nowadays : regardless of our professional role, we are all end customers of someone else , and for this very reason I find it particularly successful to always start from the other side of the fence in our reasoning, even better if we take inspiration from real events.
A couple of weeks ago, my big dog Paco showed small physical problems that could somehow also be related to his diet. Armed with good intentions and eager to improve the quality of his food, I did what my generation has been doing since school: I asked San Google . What I found confused me as a user and made me shudder as a digital marketing professional . I found myself inside a landing page with:
kilometre-long texts and practically non-existent formatting;
videos over 20 minutes long with nothing to show and no way to fast forward playback;
dozens of different offers , with very little information about the difference between one solution and another;
dozens of hyperlinks that redirected to other pages on the site, which in turn contained other hyperlinks that in turn...
After a few minutes in this dark forest, I closed the search, opened the email and wrote to my trusted veterinarian. This banal experience already contains two fundamental elements for understanding the behavior of users on Google:
I actually clicked on some ads that appeared on the search network. This means that, on that front, a good job had been done: apparently, those ads met my needs. What made me run away were the landing pages;
not giving me the answer I was looking for, they pushed me to write to someone else. Looking at it from a business point of view, those bad landing pages actually pushed me to turn to a competitor.
Let's now abandon the role of users and put on those of advertising professionals: what changes between one landing page and another? But above all, how do you realize you have a bad landing page in your hands?
Alarm bells and data
First of all, when is it “the landing page’s fault”? Let’s go back to the previous experience for a second: in my search for the right food for Paco, I clicked on some ads. This means that they attracted me , apparently answering my question. So if you also notice high levels of traffic in your Google Ads campaigns, but few conversions, you are probably in the same situation: unless you are bidding on “cute kittens” to position a CRM, then the problem does not lie at the source, but in the landing of your ads.
At this point, we need to understand what is not working in france whatsapp number data 5 million our landing pages. In my testimony, I have indicated some factors that often compromise the quality of these pages: let's analyze them using some supporting data.
Excessively long texts
When creating a landing page for a product or service, one of the main concerns is: is everything clear to an external person? A legitimate doubt, but one that sometimes leads to overloading the texts , obtaining the opposite effect and scaring away potential customers. According to a survey by Unbounce , in fact , the more text a page contains, the lower the conversion rate , with a 50% gap between landing pages containing less than 100 words and pages of over 500.
“Bazaar effect”
I finally got a prospect to click on my ad, I brought him into my home: what better time to bombard him with all the offers and products at my disposal, right? Wrong! The user who arrives on a landing page most likely has an extremely specific need , which he expressed in his Google search: showing him too much information on different products only risks confusing him , and a confused user is a user who does not convert.