Do You Need A Landing Page For Google Ads?

If you are planning to run Google Ads or a Facebook Ad campaign you might need a landing page for your campaign.

However, if you are an e-commerce website, you should not make a landing page unless you want the users to buy from the landing page and not from your website.

Let’s assume that you own a food catering business in Toronto and your target audience is anyone who lives in Toronto, Brampton, Mississauga, or Richmond Hill.

During the summer season, you want to target people in Toronto with a special offer.

Offer – “Get a 30% discount when you order catering for more than 25 people. Offer valid for orders placed between 1st June to 31st July.”

– The offer is seasonal.
– The offer is only for people living in Toronto and not for any other location.

Your website has regular pricing on it, but you get traffic from everywhere. Also, you want to only show this offer to people coming from Toronto.

Now we will compare the two options to see if you need a landing page or not.

Option 1 – Update the website with this offer

Firstly, if you run this offer on your website, you have no control over the visibility.

Everyone who visits your website can see this offer, including people from Toronto and other locations.

To show this offer, you would update the website page, action button, pricing page, and maybe other few areas on your website pages to get maximum conversions.

Since this offer is only for the Toronto location, you may bounce the users from other locations who are not eligible for this offer.

After the offer is expired, you would have to update all the pages again.

If you get more profit from this campaign, you may want to run such offers multiple times. This would add more hours of work for your marketing teams.

Option 2 – Design a Landing Page for this offer

You can control the visibility of this page by publishing this page on a unique URL. Then promote this URL through your Toronto campaign only.

You can also have a unique phone number on this page to track call conversions.

Most importantly, when the offer is expired, you can just pause the campaign and control this page’s online visibility.

Keeping this separate would save you hours and can make your promotions scalable.

Next time, when you want to run a new offer, just duplicate this page and edit the content to match the new offer.

Other factors to consider for Google Ads:

Quality Score – The cost per click is determined by various factors. However, the most important factor is the Quality Score for your keywords.

If you create a landing page for your campaign, you might be able to modify the content of this page, unlimited times, to increase your quality score regularly. You can edit the content to make this page relevant to your ad copy and experiment with this page until you get the best ROI. On the other side, updating the website might not be that easy.

A/B Tests – If you want to run two offers at the same time to see which one gets you the most conversions, the landing page is an efficient way to test this.

You can change pricing, offers, or other information to target the local audience and easily calculate the ROI from each landing page.

Can I run a campaign on my website?

Of course, you can! If your website has an excellent conversion, you might want to consider using your website for the promotion. However, remember the following to get the maximum conversions

1. A buying decision is taken in less than 10 seconds. A long page with multiple action buttons might distract the user who came to get just that one offer you were promoting in your ad. So you should already have a page relevant to this offer with all the information.

2. Do not have multiple offers on your website that might confuse your buyers. Make sure you have a local office location and phone numbers if you are targeting a specific location.

To summarize:

1. A landing page is the cheapest solution to test an offer.
2. Landing page gives you control over visibility.
3. Optimizing a landing page is more effective compared to website pages.
4. An average cost of designing a landing page is usually one-tenth of an average website cost.