The ad makes a promise, and the page has to keep it. That holds for any paid click, including one from a social ad.
How to tell whether your PPC landing page is the problem
You can find out by sending a test inquiry through the form on the page your ad sends people to. You should see a thank-you message, the inquiry should reach whoever handles your inquiries, and it should be counted as a conversion under its own name. If you sell online, a test purchase should show up twice, once as an order and once as a conversion.
If the inquiry arrives and no conversion was recorded, your numbers are missing an inquiry the page did produce. If the form never delivers, you've found a fault to fix before another paid visitor arrives. Calls get the same test. The button should dial the right number, and the call should show up in your call tracking.
Once the test inquiry reaches you and is counted as a conversion, you can judge the page by its results. Google suggests using conversion rate as a way to measure landing page experience, and says it doesn't change your landing page status. If people click and few of them inquire or buy, check whether the page delivers what the ad offered.
Your Google Ads account also gives you a reading on the page. Google says, "Quality Score is a diagnostic tool meant to give you a sense of how well your ad quality compares to other advertisers." Its three parts are expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience, and each one is rated above average, average or below average. The landing page experience rating is about how relevant and useful the page is to the people who click your ad.
A below average rating on landing page experience tells you to look at the page. It doesn't prove the page is the whole explanation. Google also says, "Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction."
A monthly report should answer the same question for each page. Our monthly PPC report includes how each landing page performed, what the ad tests showed and what is being tested next. We test ads against each other month after month, and we adjust ads and landing pages once there is enough data to decide.
How the landing page affects where your ad shows
The page is part of how Google decides where your ad appears. Among its Ad Rank factors, Google lists: "The quality of your ads and landing page: Google Ads aims to provide users with high quality results by assessing several factors, including the usefulness and relevance of your ad and landing page, the expectations users have about your landing page based on the clicked ad creative, ease of landing page navigation, as well as other Search Quality signals." Our PPC page explains how ad position is decided.
When to send your ad to your homepage, an existing page or a dedicated landing page
A page you already have can be the right place to send the ad. Google's advice covers this: "Even if you have no control over your site, you can still experiment to find the most useful existing pages." The test is the same for any page. The person finds the offer they clicked on, and can do what the ad invited them to do.
Hold your homepage to that test. One problem we see is a single ad pointed at every search and landing on the homepage. If the ad offers one service and the page opens with the business as a whole, the visitor still has to find that service.
A dedicated landing page makes sense when none of your existing pages says what the ad says. Before you have one built, put the ad next to the existing page's headline and main button. If the offer and the action match in all three, you may already have your page.
How many landing pages your ads need
The number of pages depends on how many different promises your ads make. Ads that make the same offer and ask for the same action can share a page. When one headline has to stretch across several offers and stops naming any of them, those offers need their own pages. A plumbing company advertising drain cleaning and water heater installs needs a page for each, and we cover the rest in marketing built for plumbers.
Different wording in the search doesn't call for another page. Google says, "Keep in mind, the word-for-word phrase from a search term doesn't need to be on your landing page." Build pages around what the person expects to find after the click.
What the first screen of a Google Ads landing page has to say
The first screen of a Google Ads landing page names the offer from the ad and puts the next step in view. The headline and the main button both carry the same phrase as the ad. Google's guidance says, "Your landing page should also mirror the call-to-action in your ad text."
Picture an accounting firm advertising payroll services for restaurants. Its page opens with "Payroll services for restaurants" and the button reads "Get my payroll quote." If the same ad led to a general accounting page, the restaurant owner would still have to go looking for payroll.
Now picture a store advertising a standing desk with free shipping. The page shows that desk, states the free shipping and gives the shopper a clear way to buy it. A general furniture page leaves the shopper to find the desk the ad already showed them.
If the ad named a place, a product or an offer, the page names that same one all the way down.
Why a dedicated paid landing page has no site menu
A site menu gives someone arriving from your ad a list of other pages to visit. On a dedicated inquiry page, the form is on the page itself, and the only links are the call button, the privacy policy and the terms. A store's page keeps the path to purchase.
Google mentions links in its description of landing page experience: "The experience of a landing page is represented by things like the usefulness and relevance of information provided on the page, ease of navigation for the user, the number of links on the page, and the expectations users have based on the ad they clicked." It doesn't say that removing a menu earns a better ad position.
What someone on a phone sees before they scroll
On an inquiry page, someone on a phone should see the call button and the whole short form before they scroll. The phone number sits on a button they can tap, and a call bar stays in view as they read. On a store's page, that first screen holds the advertised product and the button to buy.
The whole form means down to the submit button, with the consent box included. When you open the page's real address on your phone, you should be able to complete the form without scrolling.
Some people read further before they decide. On a longer paid page, the next step should appear again partway down and at the end of each section. When we check a landing page, we look for a next step that is obvious: call or book in one tap.
What the form asks for, and where the consent box goes
The inquiry form on a paid page should have three or four required fields. Before you make another field mandatory, ask yourself whether you need that answer to reply to someone who came from this ad.
The consent checkbox sits inside the form, above the submit button. It starts unchecked, and the form sends whether or not the person checks it. The privacy policy and terms links go directly under it, where the person filling out the form can open them before they send it.
What proof belongs on a paid landing page
A review on a paid landing page should help someone judge the product or service in the ad. Google's suggestion is, "you might consider adding reviews that show real opinions from other customers." Every review, claim and number on the page needs to be real, and you should be able to say where each one came from.
Urgency gets the same standard. If the ad says the offer ends Friday, the page says Friday and the offer ends on Friday. Countdown clocks, invented deadlines and made-up "only a few left" lines stay off the page.
How fast a paid landing page has to load
Google's guidance says, "Improve loading speed. The speed at which your page loads can be the difference between someone bouncing or buying." The time to measure is before launch, on a phone, at the address your ad uses, with the main image kept light.
The measuring stick is Core Web Vitals. They are three measurements, and Google says what each one measures and publishes a threshold for it in its guidance for Search:
- "Measures loading performance." That is Largest Contentful Paint, and the threshold is "within the first 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load."
- "Measures responsiveness." That is Interaction To Next Paint, and the threshold is "less than 200 milliseconds."
- "Measures visual stability." That is Cumulative Layout Shift, and the threshold is "less than 0.1."
PPC landing pages and SEO pages have different jobs
A dedicated paid page answers one advertised offer. The page you want people to find in Google's regular results is a different page, and it belongs to your SEO work.
A dedicated paid page carries a noindex rule, and the place to check for it is the live page at its real address. Google explains, "noindex is a rule set with either a <meta> tag or HTTP response header and is used to prevent indexing content by search engines that support the noindex rule, such as Google." The same page says that when Google finds the rule, it "will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it."
An existing service or product page that also takes paid clicks is a separate decision. Sending an ad to it doesn't make it a dedicated paid page. Decide which job that page has before anyone adds noindex to it.
What to check on PPC landing pages before the ads go live
A finished design still has to be tested at its real address. The proof you want is one completed action, whether that is an inquiry, a call or an order, followed all the way to where it gets recorded. These checks come before a new ad goes live.
| # | Check | What you should see |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Put the ad next to the first screen | The headline names the offer in the ad, and the main button says the action the ad promised. |
| 2 | Look at the links on a dedicated paid page | The page has no site menu. On an inquiry page, the only links are the call button, the privacy policy and the terms. A store's page keeps its path to purchase. |
| 3 | Open the page on a phone | The call button and the form are in view before you scroll. For a store, the advertised product and the button to buy are in view. |
| 4 | Look at the consent box and its links | The box sits above the submit button and starts unchecked. The privacy policy and terms links under it open real pages. |
| 5 | Send the form with the consent box left unchecked, or place a test order | The form sends and shows a thank-you message, and the inquiry reaches the person who handles inquiries. For a store, the purchase arrives as an order. |
| 6 | Look for the conversion | The test inquiry is counted as a conversion under its own name. For a store, the completed purchase is counted as the conversion. |
| 7 | Tap the call button, if the page has one | It dials the right number, and the test call shows up in call tracking. |
| 8 | Read the speed result | The finished page was measured on a phone, with its main image in place, and the result is read against Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds. |
| 9 | Look for noindex on a dedicated paid page | The live page, at its real address, carries the noindex rule. |
If your page buries the phone number and the form, fix that first. We put tracking in place before spend grows, so the inquiries can be counted when it's time to decide on budget.
What decides how much landing page work your ads need
The amount of work depends on your market and your competition, how many landing pages your ads need, and whether the pages your ads point to need work first. Our PPC page goes through what shapes a PPC plan, and our web design and development page covers how the pages get built.
See where your business stands in search before you spend more on ads
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