Five PPC Landing Page Mistakes

The landing pages used in your PPC campaigns play a pivotal part in whether your marketing efforts are successful or not. Having the right keywords and fantastic ad text will be rendered useless if your landing page does not hit the mark. Instead, a poor landing page will see people making their way to the back button and you’ll be left without the sale.

Avoid making any of the following five mistakes to get the most from your PPC landing page:

Not Matching The Query to the Landing Page

There are few reasons if any for someone to end up on a landing page irrelevant to their search query. I searched on leaf blowers, clicked on a PPC ad and wound up on a well-known brand’s home page. The landing page contained no reference to my search query whatsoever, leaving me to find what I want on the site myself. More annoyingly, the PPC ad specifically referenced my query, and even told me how cheap I could get the products from them; cue disgruntled shopper!

Unclear Call to Action

Yes, another obvious one, but it’s still common to see a call to action hidden, unclear or below a page fold. A good call to action should stand out; it’s likely to use contrasting colours and strong “action” text.

I performed a search on London MOTs, clicked on a PPC ad and landed on the page below. I’ve been sent to a home page which sadly has no clear call to action. There is a weak one, written in a light blue font, on a dark blue background saying: “Click here to book online”. This faint text is not even underlined to make it look like a clickable link. Ideally, this page would have a much stronger, more obvious call to action in a clear button form using contrasting colours saying “Book Your MOT Online Now”.

Lack Of Focus

It’s tempting to show your great offers on multiple pages of your website, but this can do more harm than good. If people searched on red kettles offering visitors these along with bread bins, chopping boards and 25% off bed linen may see them wandering off never to be seen again. There’s a fine line between cross-selling/increasing the value of a shopping cart and distracting someone to the point of no return.

Wordy Page Copy

It is common practice to not read every single word on a web page. Many of us are in a rush and having endless pages of text is undesirable. Use bullet points to make the text easier to scan and have separate pages for subcategories if necessary.

I came across a solicitor’s website where there were 1,400 words on the PPC landing page used. The content on the page in question could have been placed on multiple pages and bullet points could have been used to break the text down. If the page had made use of anchor tags it would have been even easier to use.

Failing To Create Confidence in Your Brand

Whether confidence is instilled in the buyer from the brand itself with clear USPs or whether it’s instilled by other customers in the form of testimonials, you have to make some kind of effort! You must create or reinforce confidence in your brand on your PPC landing page. 

If you’d like some help on improving your PPC landing pages, contact SilverDisc today.