Your Landing Page Doesn’t Match Your Ad
I’m
big on the concept of congruence, which is a fancy way of saying that
your ad and your landing page need to make sense together. A landing
page is your opportunity to expand upon the copy in your ad. Rather
than thinking of your ad and your landing page as two separate pieces,
think of your ad as the synopsis or introduction to the landing page on
your site.
If
you own a furniture store and you’re creating an ad for bunk beds, but
your landing page goes to a category page for all beds, it’s
frustrating for your customer. They want to click the ad and see
exactly what they came to your site for. The more they have to poke
around your website to find what they need, the more likely you are to
lose them in the process.
It’s
also important to note that Google also wants your landing page to
match your ad — they give higher quality scores to landing pages with
text that is relevant to the text in the ad.
This
leads us to our next mistake…
Your Homepage Is Your Landing Page
Repeat
after me, "My homepage is not a good landing page. My homepage is
not a good landing page. My homepage is not a good landing page."
I've
reviewed countless Google Ads accounts that were making this mistake
and it was costing them hundreds to even thousands per month. If you’re
advertising a service, your ad should go directly to a landing page
focusing on that particular service; if you’re advertising a special
deal or promo code, your ad should go directly to a landing page explaining
how customers can take advantage of it.
To
further expand on a point from above, you simply can’t expect potential
customers or clients to find what they need. People are busy,
impatient, and they don’t want to do the work. Hold their hands and
guide them to the actions you want them to take. Create unique landing
pages customized to all of your ads. Is it a bit of work? Yes. Is it
worth it? Also yes.
Visitors Are Met With a Wall of Text
There
are some boilerplate landing pages out there that are heavy on text,
with a “Buy Now” button placed between every other paragraph. These are
old school, but you still see them around occasionally and even
businesses that don’t use these templates often borrow from the
concept.
People
aren’t interested in reading a dissertation about your product,
service, or offer. That’s not how you make a sale. Instead, use bullet
points, headings, and short paragraphs. Incorporate images and graphics
and have a good headline that is congruent with your ad copy.
Your
copy should be clear and concise—your landing page isn’t the place to
write bloated SEO-style text that uses a lot of words to say very
little. Keep it snappy and include calls to action.
It Loads Slowly
This
one is self-explanatory so there’s not much more to add here. Google
hates slow sites and so do consumers. Audit your site speed and replace
or eliminate any code or plugins that are causing lags. People aren’t
going to sit around waiting for your site to load — they’ll just click
the back button and try another site instead. This is especially true
for mobile, which leads to…
Your Site Isn’t Optimized for Mobile
It’s
2020. Smartphones have been around for a long time now. There’s no
excuse not to have a site that’s optimized for mobile. These days,
there are people who do virtually all of their internet searches on
their phones. If your site requires a lot of pinching, zooming in,
scrolling to the side to read long lines of text that don’t fit on the
screen, etc., not only are people not going to bother, it also sends a
message that your business is behind the times.
(This
article was originally published on my Search Made Simple
blog on TargetMarketingMag.com.)
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