We were working with a mid-sized service-based company that operated in all of Texas. Their website offered electrical work anywhere in the state, but didn’t focus on any one location.

The team realized that with Google Ads, it is pretty easy to create a campaign for the major metros. And then to talk about their services by metro in each ad. Once they set this up, they reviewed metrics for targeting the whole state versus each metro. The click-through rate had gone up, but their conversion rate was untouched.

The team assumed that by being specific in the ad, their conversion rates would increase. They did get more conversions as they got more clicks, but the experiment wasn’t done.

Next, they started making landing pages for the main cities. Suddenly, conversion rates increased. It took the combination of the ad and the landing page to boost CTR and conversion rates.

Later on, we were working with a company that connects nannies and families in Chicago. The Chicago metro area includes 24 cities with populations over 50,000 people. As nanny services are entirely local, they first created campaigns and ads for each city. Then, they worked on a landing page for each city.

When the company analyzed the data, they found a completely different trend than the first company. For them, just adding the city to the ad increased CTR and conversion rates. Including the city on the landing page had no impact on their data.

While these are geographic examples, you can repeat the same story for running offer tests in only the ads, only the landing page, or in both places. These offers could compare discounts, specials, trials, different calls to action, benefits, and so forth.

In today’s column, we’re going to look at how ads, landing pages, and ad landing page combinations affect your metrics and how you can set up your own tests.

The ad’s goal in PPC marketing

An ad has two specific tasks to accomplish when it’s seen by a searcher.

Draw attention to itself. This is often accomplished by having a headline 1 highly related to the keyword for relevance. Plus, an attractive headline 2 (and possibly a third compelling headline). This gets a user to read the ad.

Attract clicks from people likely to take your desired action.In B2B, this is often known as pre-qualifying an audience, so you are only talking to B2B buyers. However, the same goal applies to any type of advertising except purely awareness/brand buys.

This means that the ad can affect CTR, conversion rate, CPA, ROAS, and any other metric. The ability to draw attention will increase CTR as more people look at the ad. The ability to attract clicks of qualified users can affect your conversion rate, and metrics such as CPA, ROAS, and ROI.

Because ads can affect both CTR and conversion rates, we like to use conversion per impression for our ad testing.

The side effect: What marketers sometimes forget is that the ad sets expectations for the landing page. As the ad changes, the consumer will look for different information on the page. The ad and landing page don’t exist in vacuums from each other. As one changes, it can affect how someone views the other piece.

The landing page’s goal in PPC marketing

The landing page’s goal is quite simple: get those who visit the page to take action. For example, make a call, complete a lead gen form, or ecommerce buy. The page isn’t trying to attract a specific type of traffic; it just gets the traffic sent to it.

A landing page can’t affect your CTR.  Therefore, the page is talking to everyone who sees that page. The landing page is measured in conversion rates. Technically, conversion rates should be segmented for how traffic is sent. This could be by keyword/ad group or by channel, such as PPC, SEO, or social. Segmentation means you can see the difference in conversion rates by source to make the appropriate adjustments.

Creating multiple landing pages based on what users aim to achieve shows the offer is a good match for them. This helps to test several approaches.

Take, for example, a page that says we serve all of Texas. A user shouldn’t have to read that we serve Austin, Houston, Dallas, etc, because those are cities within our state. The reason we’d want to make a page per city is to show we really are a local company.

This can quickly get complex. If we serve 10 regions and we have 10 products, then we can make 10 region pages, 10 product pages, or 100 region/product combination pages.

These same principles work for ecommerce. If your ad says free shipping, should your landing page say that? If your ad says free returns, should your landing page say that? Between structured snippets, callout extensions, your headlines, your descriptions, there is a lot of text in your ad. When that text changes, does the page need to change to showcase that information as well?

Sequential vs simultaneous testing

A sequential test is when you first test one item and then you test another one. For PPC, a sequential test often looks like this when it involves both ads and landing pages:

• Step 1: Test multiple ads to find the best one
• Step 2: Pause the losers, examine the winners
• Step 3: Based on the winning ad data (or just something else you want to test) design multiple landing pages
• Step 4: Test the landing pages
• Step 5: Find the top landing page and use the top ad with the top landing page

The benefit of that testing is you are designing your landing page based on a known item, your top ad.

The downside is that you aren’t seeing how the losing ads would have worked with matching landing pages.

A simultaneous test is when you test the ads and landing pages in conjunction with each other. As the ads set expectations for the landing pages, changing the ad can affect the landing page’s conversion rate. Users may look for different information based on the ad or the ad may draw a different set of users to view the landing page offer.

Simultaneous tests look like this:

• Design two or three ads
• Design two or three landing pages
• Create an ad and landing page combination test to see how the ads and landing pages perform together

For example, if you have two ads and two landing pages, you have four tests:

• Test 1: ad 1 / landing page 1
• Test 2: ad 2 / landing page 1
• Test 3: ad 1 / landing page 2
• Test 4: ad 2 / landing page 2

To set up a test, you’ll just create four ads in the ad group, one for each test. You should use even ad rotation (the do not optimize setting) so all combinations receive equal exposure. The conversion data for the landing page is stored with the ad’s metrics in your PPC account. Simply compare the conversion per impression (or revenue per impression for variable sale amounts) to see which combination performs best for your account.

Wrap-up

Ads and landing pages affect each other. Changing one will often impact the metrics of the other. Creating a new offer in your ad might increase your CTR, but your conversion rate will decrease if that offer isn’t on the landing page. Putting a great offer on the landing page that wasn’t in the ad could increase conversion rates or cause no changes to your data.

For most marketers, it’s easiest to test ads over landing pages. After all, IT, designers, and other departments aren’t involved in ad creation like they are in landing page creation and deployment. Just remember that if you’re thinking about new website structures, changes to your account organization, or how multiple offers will convert, simultaneous testing with ads and landing pages often offers great insights you can use across all of your marketing efforts.