By Ken Chase, Content Specialist for Fintech & Business
Last Updated: March 18, 2025
Do you own a small to medium-sized business that isn’t enjoying the website conversion results you need for online business success? If so, there’s a good chance that your landing page may not be optimized to deliver the best return on your Google Ads investment.
Statistics suggest that Google Ads account efforts should expect to earn $2 for every dollar spent. Is your website providing those kinds of results for your company? If not, then it may be time to take a fresh look at your landing page!
Your website’s landing page is what prospective customers see when they click on your online ads or the URL in a Google search result. This page is typically the most vital component of these types of campaigns, since it provides you with your first and best opportunity to begin the process of converting visitors to customers.
In fact, when PPC Google Ads campaigns struggle to achieve their desired conversion rates, it’s almost always the result of problematic landing pages. As PPC expert Brad Geddes has noted, “If you look at a good PPC account and it’s not converting, in 99% of cases, the landing page is the problem.”
In this guide, we’ll provide the signs and essential tips you need to know when and how to revamp your landing page to improve your website’s performance.
Key takeaways:
One of the most obvious signs that you need a dedicated Google Ads landing page is when you’re still using your site’s homepage as a landing page. Homepages can be an important part of any website, but they are far too broad and unfocused to serve as an effective landing page.
A good landing page needs to capture a visitor’s attention and provide a clear call-to-action. Homepages are information repositories; they’re an inefficient way to inspire your site’s visitors to take action that can convert them into customers.
Another common problem occurs when your landing page fails to live up to your Google Ad’s promise. Visitors may be inspired by the ad only to be disappointed with the message they encounter on your landing page. Similar signs can include a high click-through-rate (CTR) without a good conversion rate and any material differences between your ad copy and website offers. Focus on consistent branding.
You should also examine your page’s effectiveness any time you’re seeing high page traffic numbers with low customer conversion rates. According to data from Unbounce, a typical conversion rate should be between 2% and 5%, depending on your industry. The average PPC conversion rate for businesses using Google Ads is 2.85%
It’s also important to identify any potential bounce rate issues. Your site’s bounce rate is simply the overall percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing just one page of content. For example, if a visitor lands on your site and abandons it without checking out anything other than your landing page, that’s considered a bounce.
The experts at Semrush consider a bounce rate of 40% or less a success. On the other hand, bounce rates that exceed 60% are clear signs that something is amiss. Those high rates could be caused by slow-loading pages, unengaging content, poor design, or inconsistent messaging.
The speed at which your page loads can also have an impact on the user experience. That’s especially true when it comes to website visitors who access your site via mobile devices.
According to Google’s research, retail customers who access sites on their mobile devices are less likely to spend time on sites that suffer from even a one-second delay in load times. In fact, that delay can reduce potential conversions by as much as twenty percent!
Your Google Ads Quality Score can provide helpful clues about how your advertising efforts compare with your rivals. This quality score diagnostic tool can provide insight into the relevance of your Google Ads quality score components in your ad and landing page. You can use that insight to identify areas for improvement in your website campaign.
For example, the Quality Score tool can help you see how certain keywords might impact customer behavior, or how your ad’s relevance aligns with your target audience’s search intent.
Another potential sign of trouble is when your page is not properly optimized for mobile devices. According to recent data from Hubspot, 63% of today’s consumers have expressed a preference for using mobile devices to access news and information about companies, products, and brands.
To meet those customers’ expectations, your landing page needs to be designed for use on those smaller screens. A well-optimized landing page should be easy to navigate, responsive, relevant, and free of pop-ups and other distractions.
The good news is that there is a solution that can solve any of these disruptive landing page problems. You can improve your Google ads results by focusing on the creation of well-optimized, targeted pages that are designed to maximize your PPC efforts. Read on to learn how to implement solutions that will boost your online campaign performance.
The most effective online advertising copy is precisely tailored to align with a customer’s search intent. Once you know what customers are trying to achieve with their search efforts, you can tailor your ad message to match that intent – and then create a landing page that’s in perfect alignment with your ad. Then, when customers reach your page, they’ll see messaging and a call to action that speaks to their needs.
By focusing on ad relevance and an aligned landing page experience, you can create landing pages that inspire customer action. That ability to translate customer searches into buying decisions is just one of the many benefits that make focused landing pages better than traditional homepages.
It’s vital to create landing pages with transparent and compelling copy. Indeed, Google Ads is now using AI technology to ensure that landing pages provide content that matches user expectations, reports Search Engine Journal. As a result, deceptive ads and landing pages are more likely to be penalized by being demoted in searches.
Of course, that presents an opportunity for businesses that rely on honest, transparent approaches to their Google Ads strategies. By focusing on your customers’ pain points and being clear about what they can expect to see when they click through to your landing pages, you can improve their landing page experience and boost your ability to convert visitors to customers.
Your call-to-action needs to be clearly visible to ensure that it captures your visitors’ attention. For the best results, it’s important to understand how users spend their time when they’re viewing your site.
Studies for NN Group confirm that 57% of user viewing time is focused on so-called “above the fold” content – the part of the page that is visible before the viewer engages in any scrolling. You can optimize your CTA’s effectiveness by placing your call-to-action above the fold.
That CTA needs to be highly focused if you want it to stand out for your visitors. That means that you need to focus on only one specific call-to-action for any given landing page. You can leverage the power of psychology by repeating that CTA throughout the page, using language designed to create a sense of urgency, and focusing on how your offer can benefit customers.
Other psychological appeals recommended by Search Engine Journal include using different color schemes to subconsciously appeal to users’ emotions – green to inspire action, royal colors like purple to create a sense of luxury, and warm colors like orange and yellow to create energy.
Above all else, remember to keep your CTA as simple as possible. Giving users a simple and singular choice can reduce decision paralysis and boost conversion rates.
A well-optimized landing page should be designed to focus on conversions by reducing user friction. Keep navigation to a minimum, avoid the use of popups, and use short forms to create a simpler and speedier customer experience.
Customers expect your site to be mobile-friendly. The good news is that you can use Google Ads and similar tools to track the mobile metrics that matter most – things like your site’s speed score, click rate, and conversion values. Tools like Google’s Performance Max can help you customize your mobile advertising strategy.
Social proof statements can add even more value to an optimized landing page. Your offer and CTA can benefit from recommendations that increase customer trust. Social proof can include customer testimonials on your page and/or 5-star reviews from third party sites.
Given the important role that load speed plays in your page’s bounce rate, it’s important to take advantage of performance tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. You can use it to diagnose your Google Ads landing page’s performance, identify page speed issues, and find the best ways to boost speed.
Solutions can include image compression, improving browser cashing, and minifying code. Your goal should be to obtain desktop load speeds of 0 to 1.3 seconds and mobile speeds of 0 to 3.4 seconds, per Google’s latest recommendations.
Your landing page needs to be accessible to as many users as possible – including users with visual impairments – a group that accounts for 8% of the US population. There are many different tools that can help you with this part of your optimization efforts, including Audioeye’s color contrast checker and e-readers.
Make sure that you check your site’s visibility when users zoom in, and how well it works with tools that read its content out loud for users.
As noted earlier, psychology-based strategies can be a great way to boost your landing page’s effectiveness. To improve user engagement and landing page experience, you can rely on CTAs that create a sense of urgency in the customer’s mind. For example, phrases like “sale ends tomorrow” or “limited time only” can generate so-called Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO.
Google ranks websites using a variety of factors, including how well the content contributes to a positive user landing page experience. Fortunately, the company provides advice and tools that you can use to assess and improve your overall landing page experience.
Use Google Search Console to track key Core Web Vitals metrics and gain even more insight into your users’ landing page experience. These metrics track factors like page visual stability, loading speed, and site responsiveness.
You can learn more about this important tool and how it can benefit your landing page at Google Search Central.
Depending on how well your landing pages are performing, you may want to use A/B testing to make sure that you’re getting the best possible results. A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a method that allows you to compare two different versions of a landing page.
To use A/B testing, you should:
It’s helpful to focus your A/B testing on elements like your Google Ads landing page CTA, page layout, trust signals, hero image, form length, colors, and headline copy. The key is to test one factor at a time so that you can focus comparisons on easily identifiable differences in your control and variation pages.
In addition, Crazy Egg blog writer Peter Lowe suggests that this type of testing is best reserved for Google Ads landing pages that receive 10,000 or more visits each month. He recommends using heatmap testing for Google Ads landing pages that receive lower amounts of traffic.
If your website traffic is lower than 10,000 visits per month, heat map testing may be a great way to gain more insight into how visitors are using your Google Ads landing page. This testing will identify user behavior patterns to show you what users are paying attention to when they visit your page.
Tools like Hotjar and Crazy Egg can track how people scroll and move their cursors around the page, and where they click. That information can help you to assess potential areas that might benefit from further optimization.
Now that we’ve reviewed what makes a good landing page, let’s look over three examples of Google Ads and their corresponding landing pages.
Google ad for Headspace app
This landing page example prompts people to try Headspace for free
This landing page’s effectiveness is due to its simple approach to connecting with the user. It starts with an easy-to-use on-click free trial, doesn’t rely on forms, and offers little friction to slow the conversion process. However, there are some potential changes that could help it compete with other high converting landing pages.
Some expert A/B test suggestions that might improve conversion include changing the 14-day free trial to 10 days, to better align with the search link’s ad promise, or change that 10-day ad promise to 14 days. Either option would eliminate that mismatch.
The landing page content could also benefit from the inclusion of social proof. For example, potential customers could be further motivated by landing page content that cited the number of users who have signed up this year, or testimonials from satisfied customers.
Headspace for business Google Ad example
Headspace asks its business audience to request a demo on this landing page
This example offers a different take on the company’s approach to landing page experience. In this case, the company is targeting a different audience and uses a different CTA and offer. The entire landing page experience feels different, with a more polished message. Note that the audience is no longer “you” but now encompasses “your team.”
Any attempt to improve Google Ads performance and boost the landing page experience could focus on A/B testing that assesses different ways to meet user expectations.
One test could focus on a variation page that reduces the number of fields on the sign-up form so that a demo could be requested with less input from the target audience. Visitors who are simply curious about the offer may not want to provide key details like their job title and phone number.
A separate A/B test could compare the original page with a variation that includes social proof – highlighting companies that have purchased the offering to boost key trust signals and enhance the company’s credibility with its target audience.
Example of a Google Ad for Jot coffee concentrate
Jot’s landing page is their homepage
This site’s landing page experience relies on several powerful elements. It features a large image that highlights the use of the products – effectively illustrating the company’s claim that its product is easy. The landing page serves as the site’s home page but still aligns well with the Google search ad.
That alignment with the search intent helps to ensure that the customer’s landing page experience is appropriate for where they are on their buying journey. They’re ready to purchase coffee that’s easy to use, and the landing page perfectly matches those expectations.
Of course, there are still some potential improvements that merit a solid A/B test. For example, the company could create a test that compares this landing page and ad to a dedicated landing page that uses a short video to further illustrate just how easy it is to use this coffee concentrate. That short, simple video could simply show someone using the product, from the moment the bottle is opened to the first sip.
Here is a real-life example of a landing page redesign. What major differences do you see between the before version and the update?
Screenshot of ZipJob’s resume review landing page from 2019
Landing page example: ZipJob’s free resume review redesigned
This landing page experience is effective because it uses a dedicated page containing an above-the-fold CTA, a simple drag-and-drop file option to limit friction, and great testimonials that provide powerful social proof. It also removed the email requirement and focused more attention on the user.
The revamped landing page design was intended to provide a polished, updated look that supported the company’s brand revitalization. Multiple hero copy options were tested to determine which landing page provided the best experience and customer conversion. Despite the highly competitive ad space, the new landing page enjoyed high organic ranking results.
Ultimately, the changes resulted in a 128.25% boost in paid advertising results for all web page traffic over the prior landing page. Most of that traffic was the direct result of the new landing page. Over a two-year period, the page enjoyed a 26.14% conversion rate.
Put the advice from this article into action on your website with this checklist.
☐ Make sure that the landing page content aligns with the ad’s offer, headline, and CTA.
☐ Instead of using a homepage, focus on using a dedicated landing page.
☐ Increase customer engagement by matching landing page content to users’ search intent.
☐ Use one clear CTA and place it above the fold.
☐ Make the conversion process simple with a clear step-by-step process and short forms.
☐ Use A/B tests to assess elements like CTAs, headlines, and offers.
☐ Include some form of social proof – studies, testimonials, customer brands
☐ Always use online tools to test page loading speeds and optimize for mobile.
☐ Speed up loading times by using minified codes, compressed images, and caching.
☐ Use heatmaps to assess user page interactions and other behaviors.
☐ Assess your Google Quality Score to improve ad relevance, page loading speed, and user experience.
☐ Consistently monitor, test, and update to leverage performance data and improve your page results.
When it comes to providing your website visitors with the best possible customer experience, few things are more important than using a powerful and optimized Google Ads landing page. The guidance and tips we’ve provided in this guide can help you begin the process of making the most out of your landing page investment.
Still not sure where to start? Grab your free marketing plan from the experts at ZenUp to audit your site.
Yes, you can run a Google Ads campaign with nothing more than your homepage – though you may not get the results you’re looking for. Note that you cannot run any ad on Google without some type of website, since Google’s search process requires an actual page destination for the search result link.
Companies that have no specific offer other than their general services can often rely on nothing more than their homepages for a successful PPC campaign.
During Ken's two decades as a freelance writer, he has covered everything from banking and fintech to business management and the entertainment industry. Throughout his career, he’s been dedicated to helping individuals and companies market themselves, by providing the quality content needed to achieve their career and business goals. When he's not working, Ken can usually be found adventuring with family and friends or playing fetch with his demanding German Shepherd.
Last Updated: March 18, 2025
Last Updated: March 11, 2025
Last Updated: March 11, 2025
