Most of the effort in a paid search campaign goes into the parts you can see in the Google Ads account: keywords, bids, ad text. The part that decides whether the money was well spent sits outside the account entirely. It is the page the click lands on.
A good ad sends someone to a page that picks up exactly where the ad left off. A common mistake is to send every ad to the homepage and hope the visitor finds their own way. They usually do not, and you have paid for the click either way.
The key idea
A landing page is the second half of the ad. It should answer the search that triggered the ad, keep the ad’s promise, and make one next step obvious.
What Google actually measures
Google reports a Quality Score from 1 to 10 for each keyword, built from three parts: expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience, which Google defines as how relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad.
It is worth being precise about what the score is. Google states that “Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction”; it is a diagnostic. The things it summarises, how relevant your ad and page are to the search, do matter to how your ads perform. So treat a low landing page rating as a pointer to the page, not as a number to chase for its own sake.
Why the homepage is usually the wrong destination
A homepage is written for everyone, which is exactly what makes it a poor landing page. Google’s own example is plain: if someone searches for flannel shirts and clicks an ad for flannel shirts, the page they land on should feature flannel shirts. It should not open with the whole shop.
The same applies to a service business. Someone who searches for “emergency boiler repair” at eight in the evening wants to know whether you can come tonight, where you cover and how to reach you. A homepage that opens with the company story and five services makes them do the searching again. We wrote about how much a homepage has to carry in what your homepage needs to say in the first five seconds; a landing page is the chance to carry one thing well.
One page for each thing people search for
Google recommends grouping your keywords into themes, and splitting ad groups that cover too much into smaller ones that match people’s searches more closely. Landing pages should follow the same lines. If “boiler servicing” and “emergency boiler repair” are separate ad groups, because the people searching them want different things, they deserve separate pages.
That does not mean dozens of thin pages. For most small businesses, the right number of landing pages is the number of distinct services they actually want to sell through search, usually a handful. Each one should be a proper page: what you do, for whom, where, what it costs or how pricing works, and what happens when they get in touch.
Keep the ad’s promise
Google’s guidance is to keep messaging consistent from ad to landing page and make sure the page follows through on the ad’s offer. If the ad says “fixed-price boiler service”, the price or the way it is fixed should be visible without scrolling. If the ad mentions a town, the page should confirm you cover it. When the page does not match the ad, the visitor starts to wonder whether they have landed in the right place, and many will simply go back.
The simplest test is to read the ad and the first screen of the landing page one after the other. They should read as one message.
Make the next step quick
Google suggests you put important information towards the top of the page and make it quick and easy to take the action you want, which on a landing page is usually a call or a short enquiry form. It also stresses mobile use and loading speed: “the speed at which your page loads can be the difference between someone bouncing or buying”.
In practice that means one primary action, visible on the first screen of a phone, with the same action repeated further down for people who read first. A phone number that can be tapped. A form with only the fields you need to reply. No pop-up asking them to join a newsletter before they have found what they came for.
The rules the page has to meet
Beyond performance, Google has firm requirements for where an ad can send people. Its destination policy rules out pages that do not function properly, return errors to Google’s ad crawler, cannot be crawled, or are unnecessarily difficult or frustrating to navigate. A landing page that is half-built, blocked from crawling or redirects to a different domain can stop the ads running altogether.
Measure an enquiry, not a visit
Finally, decide what success looks like before the campaign starts. A visit is not a result; a completed enquiry or a call is. Set up conversion measurement to count the thing you actually want, and make sure it respects the choices visitors make in your cookie banner. How to decide what is worth measuring, and in what order, is what our analytics and reporting work covers.
Before you spend another pound
Where to start
- List your ad groups. Does each one have its own landing page, or do several share the homepage?
- Read each ad and then the first screen of its landing page on a phone. Do they read as one message?
- Check that the offer, price or location in the ad is visible on the page without scrolling.
- Count the actions on the first screen. There should be one main one.
- Tap the phone number and submit the form. Do both work, and does the enquiry arrive?
- Confirm your conversion tracking counts completed enquiries or calls, not page views.
You pay for the click. The landing page decides whether you paid for anything else.
Where this fits
Landing pages are where paid media and web design meet, and the page is often the first thing worth fixing, before any bid changes. If you are deciding whether paid search is the right next move at all, strategy before tactics is a good place to start.
If your ads are running to the homepage, or to pages that do not match what people searched for, tell us what you are running and we can talk through where those clicks should land.
