Best Practices for Increasing Google AdWords ROI: Optimizing Landing Pages

The previous posts in this series covered optimizing your ad text and utilizing various keyword match types in order to increase CTR and relevance. Today, we are going to focus on optimizing your landing pages in order to further increase your quality scores.

Even though landing pages are a vital part of increasing the ROI of an AdWords campaign, over 40% of B2B companies still drive visitors to their homepage, and those that do utilize landing pages typically only use a few pages.

Your landing page should be directly related to the content in the ad that people will click on to get there. The more targeted you can make your landing page content, the better! Consider creating at least one landing page for each ad group. Also, if you vary the call-to-action in your ad, it is a good idea to direct the ad to a landing page that reflects that call-to-action.

Utilize a Clear Call-to-Action
Visitors to your landing page should be able to easily determine which action you wish them to take, and it should be as easy as possible for them to complete the action. Use only one call-to-action per page. Keep your call-to-actions consistent throughout your ad and landing page. Another best practice is to keep your call-to-action above the fold. And be sure to tell your visitors why they should complete the action!

Keep the Content Simple
Don’t overwhelm visitors with too much information. If your product is complicated enough that it needs more information, consider utilizing a secondary “more information” page that visitors can click on if they wish.

Test
Just like testing your ad copy, testing various iterations of your landing pages can prove to be very useful in increasing the ROI of your campaign. While this is a very important way to improve your landing pages, only about 40% of marketers are using this method. Use multiple versions of your landing pages with various layouts and copy. If you use Google Analytics, you can see which landing pages delivered the best results based on your campaign’s goals. Google recently introduced a tool within Analytics called Context Experiments which allows marketers to conduct experiments with various versions of content. Analytics will automatically rotate the content and provide users with detailed metrics concerning user activity on the different pages.

Need help increasing the Google AdWords ROI? Contact Launch today!

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