Running a Google Ads campaign is one of the best and fastest ways to generate traffic and conversions for your online business.
But one of the gripes against this tactic is you need to pay to play. In other words, you must dedicate a reasonable budget to launch a campaign guaranteed to turn in a profit.
Once the campaign concludes, you can use the profits to run a new and improved campaign for even better results.
However, the key to maximizing earnings from your campaigns is to lower Google Ads costs. This way, you can increase your ad’s Quality Score and generate more revenue to help your business grow and flourish.
To do this, you must optimize your landing page by following the tips shared below:
In this article
1. Target the Right Search Queries
Your landing page will be the first thing most people see about your website. And as their main introduction to your business, you want to put your best foot forward and make a good first impression on your target audience.
At this point, we’re not even referring to how your landing page looks. We’ll discuss that later.
What’s even more crucial now is choosing the right keywords and search terms for which to bid. With the right keywords for your ad campaign, you can get people to click on your page from search results.
Regarding keyword selection, bidding for generic keywords or those with high search volumes won’t be enough. There are other variables to consider that will help you determine which will produce the best results for your campaign.
First, you want to bid for keywords with the intent that match the messaging on your landing page.
If your landing page’s goal is to generate more signups for a free trial of your software, below are a few search query ideas to use:
- X alternatives (“X” being your competitor)
- better/cheaper than x (assuming that this statement is true)
- Best y tool (“y” refers to what your software does, i.e., social monitoring, time management, etc.)
The queries above are examples of keywords with commercial intent. Their goal is to help users make informed decisions about a product or service.
Since your landing page provides users with information that will help you decide whether to sign up for your software, you want to bid for these keyword types for your ad campaign.
The synergy between the keywords and your landing page should increase conversion rates.
For this very reason, you must bid for long-tail keywords since they have a much clearer intent than generic keywords.
Although the latter has more search volume, what you want for an ad campaign is the chance of converting people who view your landing page into sign-ups or customers. Unfortunately, generic keywords won’t be able to achieve that due to their vague intent.
To help you find long-tail keyword ideas that match the intent of your landing page, Google Keyword Planner is an excellent place to start.
After entering your topic keyword, you can choose which among the suggestions you should find even more ideas to narrow down your suggestions.
2. Write Effective Copy
Next, we need to improve your landing page’s conversion rates to maximize the budget spent for your chosen keywords.
A huge part of a landing page that works is how its words make readers feel.
This reason is why copywriting is still a sought-after skill among business owners. The ability to turn words into stories that make visitors care about the business is crucial in building trust with them while turning them into brand advocates.
Even if you’re not a copywriter, you should still be able to create copy that cuts through the noise and goes straight to the point, resulting in better ad campaign performance.
One of the tried-and-true copywriting tactics is the P-A-S formula, which stands for Pain, Agitation, and Solution.
This formula helps you get in touch with your audience’s problem about your business (pain) and how it could worsen their lives (agitation). And to prevent this from happening, your brand has a product and service that alleviate this problem (solution).
Let’s say you have a project management tool you want to generate more sign-ups to for your ad campaign. Here’s a possible P-A-S framework you can use for your copy:
- Pain – It’s getting more challenging to keep track of remote employees—you don’t know if they saw your message or worked on their assigned tasks.
- Agitation – Without a proper system to manage remote workers, you don’t get to deliver work on time, resulting in angry clients and lost revenue.
- Solution – A project management tool should help you communicate with remote workers more effectively to collaborate on projects together.
You can tweak the P-A-S above to your liking. But the point here is for the formula to help you fashion your landing page copy based on your intent.
The formula also puts a spotlight on your target audience. What matters is resonating with what your readers are feeling and helping them find a solution for it to unburden their lives and become happier as a result.
3. Design a High-Converting Landing Page
Once you have your web copy ready, it’s time to bring it to life on your landing page.
The great thing about creating landing pages is that designing these pages has gotten all too easy—even if you don’t have design experience—thanks to the tools available.
By simply choosing a landing page builder that’s right for you, you can create and design the landing page for your ad campaign in a few minutes.
Most builders have pre-made templates for various goals you wish to achieve with your page.
Woorise is one of those tools that make designing landing pages painless with its selection of templates.
Select the template from the list and copy and paste your landing page elements on the template’s placeholders.
When featuring images on your landing page, make sure they’re free commercial-use images unless you own the images. The last thing you want to worry about with your ad campaign is getting hit by owners of the photos over copyright laws.
If possible, use videos to make a compelling case to your audience regarding your business. They help explain what your landing page offer is all about much faster than text and images can say.
When featuring videos on your landing pages, use YouTube alternatives when hosting them.
As popular and widely used as the platform has become, it has also become wildly inconsistent regarding its policies and guidelines. You don’t want to risk getting your account banned and all your videos deleted for no reason.
4. Focus on a Single Call to Action
One of the biggest mistakes you could make on a landing page is putting in more than one call to action (CTA).
For instance, you have a button on the page asking visitors to click on it to go to another page on your site and a form asking people to sign up so they can get a free trial of your software.
Because both CTAs have different purposes, they distract visitors from performing the intended goal of the page. So, instead of getting more people to sign up or click on your CTA, they might do neither.
To prevent this confusion, only include a single call to action on the landing page.
You could feature the same CTA on different parts of the page. Since they all share a common goal, you can expect to increase conversions this way.
The best places to include your CTA are:
- above the fold or the screen that loads first when they visit your page,
- in the middle of the page
- at the bottom.
It would even be better if you have a sticky button for your CTA so people can see and click on it regardless of which part of the page they are.
At the same time, you need to make CTAs jump out of the screen and impossible to ignore. Below are simple ways you can do this:
- Make the colors of your CTAs the exact opposite of your page’s design theme. For example, if your page is predominantly blue, use orange for your button. Refer to the color wheel to see the complementary colors of your landing page’s theme.
- Use action words that grab readers’ attention and highlight the benefit of signing up or clicking on the button.
- Make the calls to action as big as possible so visitors will surely take notice.
5. Add Social Proof
It’s one thing to tell visitors about how awesome your business is on your landing page. It’s another to your actual customers to say to them that your products and service work.
User-generated content such as customer reviews is a great source of indirect referral sales. This is because their words come from an objective place and are not tainted by the company’s bias. Because of this, people lean more toward them than what the brand says about their products.
On your landing page, feature positive customer reviews for visitors to see. The reviews should ideally share with people who they are, why they reached out to you, and how your business helped them.
By touching on these points, visitors would resonate with them because they are in the same situation as your customers were before. This could convince them to sign up to your form or click on the button, whichever your CTA is.
When choosing which reviews to feature, prioritize those with lots of online followers. Having them say great things about your business carries more weight than regular customers who don’t have an online presence.
If you don’t have these reviews for your business, launch an email campaign asking for honest reviews about the product or service they ordered from you. To make it worth their time, throw in a discount offer for those who send their reviews.
Even better, feature badges your business received from award-giving bodies through the years. They help people look at your brand with more trust and confidence.
6. Run A/B Tests
After setting all the above up, don’t think for a second that your job is complete. In fact, the real work has only begun.
Even after observing the best practices of designing a landing page dedicated to launching a winning ad campaign, you’ll never know the results until they’re done.
And once you see how your campaign performed, you’d see that there’s a lot of room for improvement across the board.
In fact, there are specific elements on your landing page that need work to help you maximize the number of people signing up and clicking on your CTA.
A/B testing helps in this regard. It allows you to create variants for landing page elements that directly affect your conversion rates.
By running a campaign over a period, you can identify which variant generated the most clicks or sign-ups.
You can then go with the winning variant and run another variant against it. Or you can run a new campaign testing variations for a different element on your page.
The goal is to constantly find ways how you can get more visitors to perform the desired action for your page.
First things first, you need to identify which elements to test.
Depending on your landing page builder, you can integrate it with your Google Analytics account and track the conversions on the page. Ensure that this integration aligns with Google Analytics GDPR compliance to maintain data protection standards
It will then track how many people clicked or signed up on the page to help you determine whether the page is a success.
From here, you can identify the factors that could have affected how your landing page performed over time and create A/B tests for each.
When testing, make sure to run tests on one element at a time.
Aside from Google Analytics, refer to other analytics tools to help you make sense of your landing page’s performance. If the goal of your ad campaign is to drive more sales to your Amazon store, you need to use a sales analytics tool to see how the campaign impacted your Amazon revenue,
Conclusion
As you can see, reducing Google ads costs ultimately depends on how many leads and sales you can generate from your landing page.
Bidding for the right keywords to jumpstart your ad campaign is just the beginning. The remainder of the battle rests on how good the page’s copy and design are.
Not to mention, you should always keep testing different elements on your page to help make significant improvements to your conversion rates.
Following the steps above, you can make the most out of your landing page and generate more profit that you can use to keep launching more ad campaigns in the future.
