PPC Landing Page Best Practices

Conducting PPC landing page best practices is something that a lot of businesses are familiar with. More than 7 million advertisers have put $10.01 billion into PPC campaigns, which once again confirms the effectiveness of this strategy to drive organic traffic.

Indeed, PPC ads are a great method for driving quality leads for online businesses, but there are a few things that must go right to generate value. One of these things is the landing page – a dedicated web page used in a paid campaign where people “land” after clicking through on a pay-per-click ad.

Any experienced digital marketer will tell you that the landing page is the most common problem why a good PPC account is not converting. As a result, these accounts waste tons of money because directing traffic to unengaging pages that can’t convince people to convert.

They find it out the hard way, pretty soon after they launch their campaigns.

In other words, marketers are failing to deliver on the fundamentals of PPC marketing. Implementing PPC landing page best practices, without a doubt, is an essential component of a campaign that makes money and doesn’t feel people feeling tricked.

In this article, we’re going to break down the fundamentals as well as the latest techniques of high-performing PPC landing pages.

 Essentials of PPC Landing Page Best Practices

To give a PPC campaign landing page the best shot at achieving its goal, you should provide the following elements:

• Your unique selling proposition (main + supporting headline)
• Benefits of the product or service promoted by the campaign
• Trust factors (customer reviews, logos, etc.)
• Gorgeous images and/or quality video
• Lead capture form to collect visitor data
• Call to action.

Now, we’re going to talk about each of these elements in more detail.

Unique Selling Proposition

This includes the main headline and a supporting deadline on the landing pages. They’re tremendously important in making the campaign work because they’re typically the first thing that a visitor sees after landing on the page. It takes about two seconds to decide whether to ignore the offer or spend a few more seconds and check out the rest of the page.

Writing headlines for landing pages is an art. To ensure that a headline has a chance to work, it needs to meet the following PPC landing page best practices:

Be connected with the headline in the PPC ad

One reason why PPC landing pages aren’t converting any visitors is a lack of connection between the ad and the page. In other words, there’s a message mismatch that creates a bit of confusion about what the advertiser is trying to propose or how the visitor can benefit from it.

Take the below ad from Art of Sport, a sports body and skincare products. The PPC ad’s headline says that a customer can try high-performance body care products for just $5, which is the offer that the customer keeps in mind when clicking on it.

The CTA button’s text – “Shop Now” – also supports this idea by taking the viewer to the page for some “shopping.” The largest headline on the landing page is the offer itself: “Trial Kit $5.”

As a result, there’s no confusion over what the visitor has come to the landing page for. The value proposition – in this case, “high-performance body care” for a pretty good price – is also pretty clear.

It should be clear

Just like with the example above, the headlines are pretty simple and convey the goal of the landing page. On the other hand, if the headline is too vague or ambiguous, chances are that visitors will be hesitating to convert, and no one should blame them.

It should focus on the benefit of the customer

The best way to write PPC landing pages headlines is to focus on a solution to the target customer’s problem. Earlier, many digital marketers were all about making sales, so they didn’t include any customer benefits in their ads, but doing so now is a sure-fire way to fail.

When you describe how a viewer can benefit from converting, you’re increasing the chance that they will stay and consider taking your offer. For example, on the landing page below, GreenGeeks describe that if the visitor converts, their website will be hosted on a faster, secure, and, most importantly, eco-friendly platform.

Since green hosting is one of the main value propositions of GreeGeeks, they mention it in the headline. The supporting headline also reinforces the offer by providing the visitor with a nice discount if they sign up ($2.95 per month is a good deal, indeed).

It should be error-free

All PPC landing page examples listed above wouldn’t be as good as they are if they had silly typos of spelling mistakes there. So, don’t hesitate to proofread your headlines – and the entire landing page’s content, for that matter – to avoid looking amateurish and untrustworthy.

Benefits of the Product or Service promoted by the PPC Campaign

PPC landing page best practices say that a good PPC landing page has a concise copy that’s also focused on the benefits for the user, and puts a special emphasis on the outcome that the customers will get for taking action. You can present them in a concise text or a bulleted list – the best choice depends on the design of the page, too – but feel free to create multiple versions with a landing page builder.

For example, here’s how Trello does it. The copy is fairly concise and is customer-focused, without pushy stuff.

Whether you’re going to use professional copywriters or do some writing in-house, keep in mind that you’re not selling your product/service, but a better life for your customers. To make sure that search engines can understand the text on a landing page for PPC, include research-backed keywords in a natural way.

If you need to translate your landing pages, make sure to research the keywords in the target languages. The volume of a keyword in one language can significantly differ from another. There are multiple services online, like Pick Writers that can help you with localizing your landing pages.

Trust Factors: Customers Reviews and Guarantees

These include customer endorsements, guarantees, and other promises that work to reassure the visitors that they have nothing to lose. For example, it’s a known fact that 84 percent of shoppers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends and family. Digital marketers often try to take advantage of that by including them on landing pages to encourage visitors to convert.

Indeed, it’s a smart move that can increase the credibility of the offer and make the visitors more confident in taking it.

According to PPC landing page best practices, there are a few trust factors that you can add to your PPC landing pages, customer reviews, and brand guarantees being some of the best ones.

For example, you can add customer reviews in two ways: the first would be the logo of an actual customer (this works especially well for B2B businesses), and the second is by displaying a textual review.

Screenscape and Pickcel, a digital signage platform, use both on their landing pages. The below image shows the logos of the company’s clients, which is a vital trust factor.

A little bit below on the same landing page, ScreenScape share mode detailed customer testimonials to provide that additional motivation to convert. They also come with a link to the independent review websites where the customers have left these reviews. Nice.

So, once you’ve made a promise to improve a customer’s life, use customer testimonials to earn their trust. In addition to the examples above, feel free to consider more trust factors:

• Case studies
• Awards and accomplishments
• Video testimonials
• Positive media mentions
• Social media feedback.

Media Files as PPC Landing Page Best Practices

Imagery is critical to communicating your offer’s benefits, so including an image or a video is one of the PPC landing page best practices. By demonstrating the context of the use of the product or service with visuals, you’re making the landing page more engaging and avoid the visitor leaving right away.

One important consideration here is the origin of the visuals. It goes without saying that they should be qualified to make your look good but make sure not to opt for royalty-free photos. Unfortunately, a lot of companies have already reused them, and chances are people can tell a stock photo, too. To avoid looking amateurish, invest in unique images.

In this regard, the below page from Wyzowl is one of the best PPC landing page examples. It features animated graphics created specifically for this purpose, and they look really cool.

If the offer you’re making to customers is a bit complex – for example, you need to explain some features of a product or service – images can help. You can use a trick in a landing page design: one image for a benefit. No, this doesn’t mean that your landing page will be a bunch of photos, but rather a structure driven by visuals.

Here’s what I mean by that.

The above-mentioned Wyzowl’s offer is quite complex; for example, they provide a wide range of video products that they need to let their potential customers know about. So they use graphics for each product, along with a dedicated CTA button.

Be sure to place these supporting images below the main one at the top of the page (keep in mind that you can also use a separate image to describe a benefit of your product or service).

A Lead Capture Form to collect Visitor Data

This is the heart of your landing page that engages visitors and helps them to complete the action you want them to take. It goes without saying that a lead form is of utmost importance, so following PPC landing page best practices here is critical.

First and foremost, the lead capture form should be placed above the fold so people see it without scrolling down. The below landing page from Nauto and Airbnb shows how it’s done.

According to experts, some websites follow a different technique by placing the lead capturing form at the bottom of the page. While this is a bit of a risky strategy, this is perceived as a good way to convince the visitor if the offer is not strong enough.

PPC Landing Page Best Practices: Call to Action

This is a button calling the visitors to convert on which they click to complete the action.

According to PPC landing page best practices here are the best practices of creating CTA buttons for PPC landing pages:

• Write action-oriented text, i.e. “Reserve my Spot,” “Sign me up,” “Get my eBook,” “Try it for Free”

• Make it stand out. A noticeable CTA button uses a color that’s contrasting to the background to attract the attention of viewers. This example from Bills.com shows how prominent this button could be to direct the visitors to the action.

• Use the first person when writing a CTA button copy. As you’ve probably noticed with CTA buttons examples above, writing in the first person and putting yourself in your clients’ shoes is the best practice.

PPC Landing Page Best Practices: One More Thing

Now that we’ve got the PPC landing pages best practices down, there’s one more thing left on the table: speed. Page speed has recently become a ranking factor with the so-called “Speed Update” from Google, so making your landing pages optimized for speed and mobile viewing is a must.

In fact, Google’s own guide to mobile page speed claims that even a 2-second increase in load time significantly increases bounce rates. Here is the complete data.

Okay, at this point, we’ve covered the basics of PPC landing pages, so you know how to avoid two major mistakes: making people feel tricked and not showing how they can benefit from the offer. Over to you now, feel free to take a look at different responsive landing page templates and make sure to implement the tips you’ve just read about.

Good luck!