Morning Team Content,
You may have read previous posts from fellow One Further members; Chris (on measuring content in GA4) and Louise (on her favourite content examples from her time at Royal Academy).
Today we’ve got a post from Simon Jones, who heads up One Further’s Digital Marketing service, which includes managing Google Ads (including Google Ad Grants) and Meta/Facebook Ads for a range of culture sector clients.
Simon’s talking about digital ads that link through to a page on your website. For example, if you’re promoting your upcoming panto, it’s likely that your digital ad will click through to a page on your website. Or – similarly – if you’re promoting a whole season of events, that ad will likely click through to a page of filtered event listings on your website.
But what should those pages look like? You may be investing budget into ads, but without sorting the pages those ads link to, you could be killing any potential your ad has to convert.
Here’s a 101 on optimising landing pages on your website for digital ads.
Over to Simon…
Georgina has touched upon landing pages previously on Cultural Content, from various angles including content strategy for online collections and how to build webpages for shows. Today it’s all about how you can build landing pages for use with ads.
Whether you’re running paid ads or a Google Ad Grant, getting your landing pages right is critical. The ad itself is only the first step, after all: once someone has seen and clicked the ad, they’re going to land on your website. That’s when the landing page has to convince the visitor to take an action.
Landing pages for ad campaigns have to work especially hard, because visitors from ad clicks won’t have the context of your regular visitors.
Direct vs paid visitor journeys
When a visitor chooses to visit your site they will most likely arrive at the home page. They already know something about the organisation, otherwise they wouldn’t have found your website. Their journey might go something like this:
They glance at your carefully curated home page
They go to the most relevant next page – perhaps the ‘what’s on’ listings
From there, they find the show they want and visit its details page
They buy a ticket
The point here is that they have a lot of surrounding context in this user journey to help them navigate and make decisions.
Arriving on a website after clicking an ad is a very different experience. This might be the first time this user has interacted with you – they might not have even heard of the organisation before they were shown the ad.
The ad intrigued them enough to prompt a click, which is a good start, but the crucial moment is when they arrive on the landing page. They make a rapid decision: is it worth continuing to explore, or was clicking on that ad a mistake?
If the landing page doesn’t immediately provide an answer, your ad campaign is in trouble.
Who are your ads targeting?
Your ads will be pointing people straight to the page where you want them to take an action. This might mean buying a ticket to a show or exhibition, signing up to a newsletter or downloading a resource.
The trick to a good landing page is to see it from the point of view of the person who clicked on the ad. This will vary depending on the type of campaign you’re running:
Retargeting: these people have already engaged with you in some way, whether through visiting your website, following you on social media or even purchasing an item. As such, they already have at least some knowledge of the organisation.
Interests & affinity: when you’re targeting people based on things they like, you’re talking about seeking out new, prospective audiences. People who have a general interest in museums, or performing arts. There’s a good chance that they haven’t heard of your organisation before and they’re also quite high funnel leads, who might not be ready to dive straight into a purchase.
In-market: these are people who are actively researching something with high intent. For example, somebody searching on Google for local Christmas pantomimes. They may or may not have heard of you before, but they’re very interested in what you have to offer.
The landing page requirements are going to be slightly different for each of these groups. A retargeting audience already has some understanding of you, so you can jump straight into what you want them to do. An affinity audience, on the other hand, is going to be confused and lost if you don’t bring them up to speed.
Where are you sending them?
Ideally you’d have custom landing pages for each of those audiences, containing the exact right amount and type of information. That’s not always practical or possible from a resource perspective and sometimes you have to work with a single page.
Often this will be a ‘product page’ of some sort. A details page for an exhibition or show, for example. If your campaign is trying to promote a specific event, it makes sense to send people directly to that event.
There are some key considerations about the page:
Does it make sense if someone lands on it without having seen other pages on the site first?
Is enough context included to help a new visitor who hasn’t encountered the organisation before understand what is going on?
Is it clear what the visitor should do next?
If it’s a product page, are there clear ticket purchasing buttons on the page?
If it’s more of an informational page, are there obvious routes to other interesting areas of the website?
If it’s editorial content, do the text and images link internally to related areas of the site?
On Search Ads & Ad Grants
Paid social and display ads tend to be targeted towards specific audiences, one way or another. What about search ads - in particular, Google Ad Grant accounts?
Search ads target keywords rather than audiences. Somebody searches on Google, their search matches your keywords and if you win the auction your ad appears at the top of the search results.
Search ads rely on relevance as well as budget. Combine the two together and you’ve got your ‘ad rank’1, which ultimately determines whether your ad shows.
In terms of what we’re talking about today on the newsletter, the key aspect to that diagram is the landing page. Google is continually evaluating the quality of your keywords, ad copy and landing page content in an attempt to assess relevance. This is where an underpeforming landing page can impact negatively on a campaign’s success.
When somebody performs a search, they’re looking for information. They may even be asking a direct question. If your search ad gets shown and clicked, you’d better make sure that your landing page delivers.
Is the most important information at the top of the page?
Do they have to scroll past a large image and other non-pertinent information before finding their ‘answer’?
Does the landing page include the ad’s keywords naturally within its copy?
As before, is it obvious what the visitor should do next?
Optimising a landing page to perform better doesn’t always require a major redesign or rewrite - it could be as simple as rearranging the order of existing paragraphs and making sure that headings are clear.
Custom landing pages
Sometimes the obvious destination for an ad won’t make for a great landing page.
For example: if you’re running a campaign about your summer exhibitions, you might want to point the ads at a filtered version of your What’s On section that shows the relevant summer events. The challenge is that What’s On listings tend to be quite sparse in terms of actual content: they tend to be long lists of event thumbnails without much in the way of surrounding context. To a new visitor unfamiliar with your venue this is like jumping in at the deep end, and Google won’t have much to pick up on when assessing the landing page experience.
The solution might be to create a custom landing page for the campaign. This can exist as a hidden page on the website, such that only people clicking the ad will land there. This way you can load it up with key information that is absent from the normal What’s On, such as your location, ticket prices and so on. If you’re promoting a collection of seasonal events it’s a space to really promote that overall experience, without clogging up your regular pages.
Arts centre and cinema Rich Mix create regular landing pages for the month’s film line-up and live events. These editorial pages are intended to provide a more welcoming experience for search and search ads traffic. Depending on the context, this can be more effective than sending people to What’s On pages or trying to compete on individual films:
Think empathically
All of this is about connecting with your visitors and better understanding your audiences. The more you’re able to consider their point of view, the easier it will be to build effective landing pages.
Pages that work effectively for paid campaigns will likely also have SEO benefits. Raising the overall clarity of pages and better signposting what people are supposed to do or where they should go helps to improve the experience for everyone.
Thanks for reading! You can find more about this on the One Further resources page.
Google details ad rank in this article. It’s how they decide which ads show and in what order, and is continuously re-evaluated. As with everything else Google-related, ad rank is highly contextual and therefore sometimes tricky to properly assess. Primarily it’s derived from a combination of your bid, the quality of your ads and landing pages and the context of the users’s search.