A Google Ads landing page is a separate page built for one ad group. One offer, one action and no sending traffic to the homepage. You pay for every click, so the person coming from the ad should see what they were looking for right away. Not a menu with ten paths. Below I go through what such a page has to include, how Google rates it and how to check whether it works at all.
Table of contents
Why doesn’t the homepage work as a campaign landing page?
Because the homepage talks about the whole company. And the person coming from the ad is looking for one thing, the one they typed into the search engine a second ago. A real-life example: the ad promises air conditioning servicing in a specific city, and after the click you are greeted by a slider with five services and have to dig out the offer yourself. On top of that there is a menu, news, a blog and a few buttons. Plenty of exits, and none of them answers their question. So the rule is simple: one service or ad group means one landing page. A page like that simply carries on the conversation the ad started.
How Google rates a landing page: Quality Score and landing page experience
Google Ads Quality Score is a rating from 1 to 10 assigned to a keyword. One of its components is landing page experience, meaning how relevant and useful the page is to someone who clicked the ad. According to the Google Ads Quality Score help page, it is made up of three things: expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience itself.
Each one gets a status of “Above average”, “Average” or “Below average”. The benchmark is other advertisers whose ads were shown for the same search over the last 90 days. Oh, and one thing a lot of people forget: Google states outright that Quality Score is not an input in the auction. It is a diagnostic tool. It shows what to improve, and that’s it.
Where do you find it? In the keywords report, after adding the Quality Score and Landing page experience columns. There are also historical versions of these columns (very useful), which show how the rating changed over time once you segment the table by day.
What does a Google Ads landing page have to include?
A headline that repeats the promise from the ad. A specific offer. Reasons to trust you. And one clear call to action. In practice it comes down to a few fixed building blocks:
- a headline that matches the search phrase and the ad copy, so the user knows straight away they are in the right place,
- a short description of the benefits and who the service is for,
- the scope of the offer: what exactly you do, where and how,
- proof of credibility, real only: company details, completed projects, certificates,
- answers to typical concerns, e.g. about deadlines, warranty or how the cooperation works,
- contact details and a form.
The order? In my opinion it is best to arrange it the way you run a conversation with a client. What you offer, why you, what they should do now. The same logic is behind a sales funnel on a website, with the difference that here the whole path fits on a single subpage.
The landing page form: how many fields and where to put it
Few fields. The form should collect only what you need for the first contact and be visible without searching. Name, phone or email, a short field for describing the need. You will settle the rest in the conversation anyway, so why wear people out with twelve boxes? Put the call to action on the first screen and repeat it below the content. On phones add a clickable number, because some people prefer to call rather than write. After the form is submitted, show a separate thank-you page. That will be your conversion tracking point in Google Ads. And next to the form goes the GDPR privacy notice about data processing, there is no way around it.
Speed and the mobile version of the landing page
A slow page, or one that falls apart on a phone, loses the person from the ad before they even see the offer. And the click is already paid for. The culprits are usually the same: heavy images and video on the first screen, unnecessary scripts, plugins loaded on every subpage. On a small screen check two more things. Can the text be read without zooming in? Are the buttons easy to hit with a finger? If the site runs on WordPress, we described the order of work in our article on improving Core Web Vitals. And from the ground up we build websites that load fast with exactly this kind of traffic in mind.
How to check whether the landing page works, and what to fix first
Look at two things: the landing page experience rating in Google Ads and the number of enquiries from the form. Change one element at a time. Otherwise you won’t know what worked (and that is a common mistake when someone rebuilds half the page in one evening). The order I stick to:
- Turn on the Quality Score columns in the keywords report.
- Find the keywords where landing page experience is below average.
- Compare the page content with the ad and the phrase it is shown for.
- Fix the headline, the offer or the form, starting with the biggest mismatch.
- Track the historical values segmented by day.
No time to dig through reports regularly? You can hand over Google Ads campaign management to specialists, and when rebuilding, order a website designed for the campaign.
All in all, the whole philosophy of an effective Google Ads landing page fits into a few rules: the ad and the page say the same thing, there is one offer, the form is simple and the page loads fast. You don’t have to rebuild all your campaigns at once. Take your most important ad group today and set a dedicated landing page in it instead of the homepage. That is where it starts.
Frequently asked questions
Does every ad group need its own landing page?
A separate page is needed for each service or clearly different search intent. Similar phrases, e.g. different variants of the name of the same service, can easily point to one page. As long as the headline and the offer fit each of them.
Will a better landing page lower the cost per click?
No honest person will promise a specific amount. Quality Score is a diagnostic tool and, according to Google, it does not go into the auction. You improve the page first and foremost so that paid clicks turn into enquiries.
Can a landing page run on the same WordPress as the company website?
Yes, as a separate subpage without a distracting menu. On one condition: it has to load fast and have its own form and a thank-you page for conversion tracking.
