A landing page for a campaign: one page, one goal

A landing page is the page someone lands on after clicking an ad or a link in a newsletter. It has one offer and one action: a booking, a quote request, a sign-up. Anything that doesn't help with that action comes off the page, often including the site's main menu.

Why you don't send the ad to your home page

Your home page talks to everyone: new customers, returning customers, suppliers, people looking for a phone number. The ad, on the other hand, promised one thing: "Mountain weekend package, breakfast included" or "Boiler service before winter."

If someone clicks and lands on a page where they have to hunt for the offer, most of the time they leave. A landing page picks up exactly where the ad left off. The headline says the same thing, in the same words, and the button does exactly what the ad promised.

Google Ads measures exactly this. A keyword's Quality Score has three components: expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience, meaning how relevant and useful the page is to the person who clicked.

What goes on the page, and in what order

There's no fixed formula, but an order that works for most campaigns looks like this:

1. The headline: the ad's promise, stated plainly.
2. One or two sentences about what the visitor gets and who the offer is for.
3. The button or form, visible on a phone without scrolling.
4. The details: what's included, how long it takes, the conditions, what to know beforehand.
5. The proof: real reviews, real photos, certifications if you have them.
6. FAQs that answer the reasons someone might hesitate.
7. The button again, at the end.

Google's advice for landing pages lines up with this: useful, original content about what you're promoting, a page that works well on phones and loads fast, and an action that's easy to take, with the key information near the top. On speed, we wrote about what Google measures starting March 2024.

The form: as few fields as possible

Every extra field is a reason to give up. For a quote request, you usually need a name, a phone number or email, and a free-text field for details. Date of birth, full address or company registration number can wait until the conversation actually starts.

After submitting, the visitor lands on a thank-you page that says what happens next: "We'll call you tomorrow before noon" beats "Your message has been sent." That page also helps with tracking, because every visit to it means a request came in.

How to tell if it worked

Without tracking, a campaign is just an opinion. Set up two things before launch:

• UTM parameters on links in newsletters, social posts and ads on other platforms. Google Analytics says three should always be used: utm_source (where the visitor came from), utm_medium (what kind of channel) and utm_campaign (which campaign). Without them, traffic shows up in reports unlabeled and you can't tell what brought in what.
• Conversions: the submitted form, the call from the button, the completed booking. Set them up in Google Analytics and, if you're paying for ads, in the ad platform too.

Then look at one report: how many people came from each source, and how many of them took the action. A page with lots of traffic and few requests has a problem on the page. A page with little traffic has a problem in the ad.

Mistakes we see often

• The page was built and checked on desktop, even though many people who click the ad open it on their phone.
• The headline says something different from the ad, because the page was reused from the last campaign.
• The button leads to a generic contact form on another page.
• The offer has expired, but the page and the ads are still running.
• Stock photos instead of real ones, when a real photo of the place or the team says more.

What to do with the page after the campaign

When the campaign ends, you have two options: update the page for the next offer if it's the same service, or redirect it to the service's permanent page. Don't leave it promising something that no longer exists.

We build campaign pages as part of a site or on their own; details are on our web services page.