As an AdWords Manager, you know the problem: The success of your campaigns depends in large part on the quality of the landing pages. You can think of the best campaigns. When this ideal audience lands on irrelevant pages, the good conversion rate is gone.

Anyone who studies AdWords will learn just how important relevant landing pages are in the Basic AdWords Seminar. A / B tests are often referred to in this context to optimize landing pages. In practice, however, most of the time, know-how and resources are lacking.

AdWords Coach Amy Middleton Hebdon, founder of Paid Search Magic, has come up with some tips for Unbounce that we’ve taken a closer look at. In the following, we have extracted three techniques on how you can significantly increase the performance of your landing pages with relatively little effort.

1 Keyword Deep Dive

High cost keywords without conversions should be excluded, right? In large accounts, this is often automated with rules. If a keyword costs more than XX and does not make any conversions, it will be used (and excluded).

The principle is true, of course. Anything that does not bring the desired result can go away.

But: This rule assumes that ads and landing pages are relevant. If the landing page is irrelevant to this keyword, the statistics are not meaningful. Therefore, it is worthwhile to take a closer look first, if keywords cause noticeably high costs and, at first glance, hardly achieve any conversions.

AdWords landing page optimization

In this (fictional) example is about a holiday provider in the Netherlands, directly on the sea. Search volume and click through rates are very good, but in the conversion rate you can see significant differences.

Combinations with “dog” are much sought after and achieve a very good CTR. The conversion rate is terrible at 0.06 – 0.13%. An automatic or manual rule that automatically excludes keywords from certain costs / conversions would remove those keywords directly.

If there is no offer for tourists with dogs, this is of course the right way.

However, if visitors with dogs are an important target group and the keywords therefore very relevant, it is worth taking a look at the respective landing page, especially since the click rates are remarkably good and after all, some conversions have already emerged. However, dogs are not mentioned on the landing page.

In this case, the solution would be simple: The relevant keyword combinations with “dog” must be added to the landing page, if possible with appropriate photos and content for tourists with dogs.

In addition, these keyword combinations should be included in a separate ad group with specific ads, if that’s not already the case.

The above example barely occurs in the hands of experienced AdWords managers. Such concrete keyword combinations would always get their own ad groups and landing pages.

However, it is more common for these combinations to hide in the search terms for more general keywords. For example, in a general ad group ‘Holiday Holland by the sea’. As well as the keywords are not set exactly with the option exactly, the ad can also appear to combinations with dog (German Holland tourists like to take their dogs).

The keyword search report should be strictly controlled if more general keyword combinations are costly and performing poorly.

2. Mini Quiz Ads

AdWords ads are ideal for testing USPs that you can then use on the landing page and, of course, in other campaigns. So you can save yourself some A / B or even multivariate tests on the landing page.

This technique should be used on new websites and offers. You can also use it regularly later to further optimize your communication.

The ads act as a mini-quiz to find out which arguments convince your target audience. To get good results, you need different, concrete arguments in your ads. It would therefore not make sense to work with uppercase and lowercase letters, changed order or the like. At best, the framework of your ads is the same, only the main argument changes. This largely excludes other influences. The landing page must of course be the same.

Example

Variant A) Europe’s largest amusement park. 30% discount for families

Variant B) Europe’s largest amusement park. Pure thrill on 50.000qm

The point here is to find the main argument that turns visitors into customers. You can then use this argument to optimize your campaigns and landing pages accordingly.

The key USP does not necessarily have to be the one you or your client / boss is looking for. Which arguments are important to your end users, you can find out in different ways. In the best case, you ask them directly or colleagues from customer service or you look at reviews and reviews (including competitors).

Some of the most common topics for USPs:

• price
• Performance / Quality
• delivery times
• exclusivity
• Ratings / Awards
• results
• shortage

Ideally, the landing page should optimally connect to the ad text. If you have no control over the landing page, or if you need to prove your theses on the USP or specific audiences, it may be useful to first test them in ad texts with more general landing pages. This will help you understand why you need specific landing pages.]

3.The right amount of information on the landing page

You can only optimize this point if you can actually change the landing pages. If this is not the case, you can use these tips to at least check whether they are suitable at all.

Landing pages are often understood as independent, almost independent pages, on which as many as possible non-conversion-relevant elements such as navigation are removed. However, this myth can be expensive in AdWords campaigns.

Landing pages have exactly one goal: The visitor should carry out the desired conversion. He should not be distracted from this action.

Often, however, this leads to misunderstandings, specifically: to landing pages, which contain virtually no information. Imagine searching for a product through Google and landing directly in the webshop cart with the only option to buy the product now. That’s too much of a good thing. Optimal landing pages should contain exactly the information the visitor needs to decide on the offer, but nothing more. Unnecessary distractions such as ads or information about irrelevant other products may not appear here, of course.

Landing pages with too little information

Great examples of landing pages are common in lead campaigns. On the landing page, only the contact form can be found. No information about the company or the offer.

Such landing pages are suitable for visitors who are already very well informed about you and your offer, for example for newsletter subscribers who have already received all the important information via email and now only want to contact you.

For visitors who do not know you yet and have just clicked on an AdWords ad, such a landing page leaves all questions open and will achieve a correspondingly low conversion rate. Just as often, however, this error can be found in companies that only have a very narrow range of services, for example holiday parks. Often, landing pages are created for specific offers or audiences:

Usually, however, only the concrete offer is communicated on these pages, without information about the holiday park.

Visitors coming to the site through an AdWords ad for the keyword “Denmark Cottage with Dog” would probably like to know exactly where this vacation home is, what they can experience there and how the park is equipped.

Landing pages with too little options

The agony of choice. Too many choices mean that visitors will not decide at all; this is well-known marketing knowledge. Too few choices can also be negative. Especially for more generic queries, the visitor should not end up on a single product page. If someone is looking for running shoes, the product page of the Nike Air VaporMax Flyknit is not the optimal landing page.

Landing pages without call-to-action

This point is self-evident, but it is still too common in practice. Landing pages have a specific goal, and the call to action must not be missed.

Especially on longer landing pages, it happens regularly that the call-to-action can only be seen at the top of the page. If the interested visitor has read to the end, the direct reference to the next step is missing.

Conclusion

For good landing pages, you do not necessarily need A / B testing tools or design skills. With these techniques you will in many cases already be able to achieve a significant increase.