We consistently hear from our clients and prospects that PPC landing pages are a struggle. There's so much at stake on the landing page – that's where your visitor either converts or doesn't. But you don't get much help from Google when it comes to landing page optimization. A poor landing page experience affects your Quality Scores as well as your ROI, but it's tricky to actually figure out what the problem with your page is in AdWords alone.
Given this common pain point, I'm excited to announce the release of WordStream's brand new landing page tool, the AdWords Landing Page Grader. This tool, now in beta, is the newest addition to the family of free tools WordStream offers small businesses to help them assess and improve PPC performance. And today, I'd like to tell you a little bit about how this landing page tool can help you, and invite you to try it out while it's in beta, so your early feedback can improve the tool.
Before we get started, here's a little bit more about me: I'm the director of product management at WordStream. While I've only been with WordStream for 6 months, I've been in a product role for more than 7 years and spent about half of that time working in the PPC space. I've been overseeing the evolution of WordStream's Landing Pages and Leads tool, and saw an opportunity to build a free tool to help highlight some of the landing page best practices we're working to make easy for small businesses. I've been working with engineering for the past 2 months to arrive at the first version of our new Landing Page Grader, and as we collect feedback from our user community, we'll continue to evolve the tool to help businesses derive deep insights about their PPC and landing pages.
Benefits of the AdWords Landing Page Grader Tool
Our goal in creating the AdWords Landing Page Grader was to offer a free tool to SMBs that will help them assess how their PPC landing pages are performing when analyzed against industry-established best practices. There are three reasons this tool will offer huge value to PPC advertisers and agencies trying to optimize their AdWords campaigns all the way through to the last step, the landing page:
- It's fast, easy, and free – Your landing page report offers the kind of insight you'd get from a professional PPC audit, but without the time or expense required to hire a consultant. This is the simplest way to find out how your landing pages are performing and how you can improve them.
- It's designed to help you increase your AdWords conversion rate, Quality Score, and ROI – The landing page tool focuses on PPC-specific best practices. It checks to make sure your page, form, settings, and more are optimized for conversions, and our benchmarks help you determine how your landing pages compare to your competitors'.
- You can't get this insight anywhere else – We created the first free AdWords analysis tool, and this is the first free landing page analysis tool. There's no equivalent in AdWords. Our AdWords Performance Grader has analyzed over $3 billion in total PPC spend, and we know a ton about what goes into a successful AdWords account.
We believe this new tool will help remove some of the mystery about what it takes to achieve the best possible bang for each buck spent on PPC.
How the WordStream Landing Page Tool Works
Unlike other website graders, our new landing page tool takes a PPC-centric approach to assessing how well a landing page is performing. Rather than looking at a single webpage in isolation, we're taking a novel approach by connecting AdWords search performance and the websites those search campaigns point to.
The landing page tool works similar to WordStream's AdWords Grader by first connecting to a user's AdWords account through a 100% secure, one-time OAuth connection. From there, it can assess your account history over the last 90 days and identify which landing pages you have spent the most money driving traffic to. It then crawls those landing pages looking for marketing best practices and content relevant to the user's AdWords campaigns.
The top section of your report provides you with an overall score as well as an overview of how much you spent, how many clicks you drove, how many landing pages you're sending those clicks to, and how many conversions you able to get out of that spend:
You'll also seen individual conversion rates and performance scores for each of your top five landing pages (by spend).
The conversion rate section shows you your landing page conversion rate over the past several months compared to our benchmarks for your industry. This will let you know if your conversion rate is going up or down as well as how you're doing compared to similar advertisers in your vertical. As you can see, this advertiser isn't measuring up to the benchmark in his industry:
The content relevance section checks to make sure that your top keywords appear in the content on your page. This signal of relevance to both users and Google can have a big impact on both your conversion rates and Quality Score.
Finally, drawing on WordStream's industry expertise and wealth of data, we're able to compare performance against recommended benchmarks and best practices to provide an overall assessment of landing page health, and make suggestions that may help increase over performance. The best practices section of the report checks to make sure you're:
- Using a lead form (and not asking for too much information)
- Using proper header tags
- Not using the same landing page for multiple campaigns
- Optimizing your landing pages for mobile
- Including a clickable phone number on your page
We're optimistic that the end result will give businesses better insight into what happens to their potential customers after the click. Our goal at WordStream is to help advertisers squeeze the greatest possible return out of their PPC investments, and we recognize that optimizing PPC campaigns is only half of the story. A supercharged PPC campaign won't convince an advertiser about the power of PPC if it points to a poorly constructed landing page.
Try the Landing Page Grader & Tell Me What You Think!
We've already identified a number of features for future versions of the Landing Page Grader, which will help SMB's gain even deeper insights into their PPC landing page performance. And during the beta phase, I'd love to get as much feedback as possible. Please try out the landing page tool today and let me know, in the comments below or in an email, what you think and how we can make it better.
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.
No comments:
Post a Comment