How Crucial Is Your Website To Your PPC Campaign?

Your website is your online hub. It houses your products, services, and brand on the internet. It is absolutely critical that your website is optimized for user experience when considering PPC, in order to get maximum results.

What kinds of things might you consider when optimizing your website?

Quick Article Summary:

• Page Speed
• Mobile Optimization
• Webpage Layout
• Clear Call-To-Actions (CTA's)
• Cleary Displayed Contact Information
• Separate "Thank You" Pages For Form Submissions
• Have Google Analytics Installed
• Quality Content

Page Speed

Page speed is the biggest factor when it comes to optimizing your website. If there was 1 thing that you focused on as far as website optimization, it's page speed.

Basically what page speed is just as it sounds. It's how long it takes for your website to load when users click onto any of its pages.

Here's a cool tool called PageSpeed Insights by Google that you can use to test how long it takes for your website to load. It will also give you insights into what you can do to reduce the time it takes for your website's pages to load.

Mobile Optimization

Does your website show up nicely formatted when someone searches for it on a mobile phone or tablet? Or does it look like someone zoomed in to the page, with text flowing off the screen and not wrapping lower to fit the size of the screen?

If you fall into the second category, you might want to take a closer look as to what might be causing this.

In the modern age of instant gratification, if your website is not perfect (or as close as possible) people will leave your website without given it a second chance or a second thought. It's a big issue if your website is not mobile optimized, because you're still paying for those ad clicks.

Imagine the difference in your bottom line in these 2 scenarios:

• Scenario 1 - Your website is not mobile optimized. A user on their phone sees your ad on Google and clicks. The website takes too long to load, but they're patient. Finally the page loads, and it displays some obtuse, zoomed in portion of the page. As soon as they see this they get frustrated and move on to a different website, costing you the price of the click and the missed opportunity to sell them on your amazing offer.
• Scenario 2 - Your website is lightening fast and mobile optimized. A user on their phone clicks on your ad, the page loads instantly, and it's a nicely formatted version of your normal website. The user is amazed at the visual quality of your site and spend a few minutes searching through what you have to offer. They're loving it.

In which scenario do you think a potential customer is going to make a purchase?

You're exactly right! The great thing too is that most website platforms (especially if you're on WordPress) have preloaded mobile optimized themes.

Webpage Layout

Webpage layout follows the same theme as mobile optimization. Having your webpages (i.e. homepage, blog, sales pages, etc.) formatted for "ease of access" is key.

In other words, you want to make it easy for users to navigate your site. A few benchmark questions you can ask yourself are:

• Are my pages too "busy", or are they clear and clean?
• Are my pages relevant to what people are looking for?

Clear Call-To-Actions (CTA's)

A call-to-action is essentially a button or a link that tells people what they should do on your website. Here's some examples of CTA's:

• A button that says "Buy Now".
• A callout in your blog text that asks a user to do something.
• Hyperlinked text that prompts a user to click through.

It's important that these things are clearly displayed on your website. One of the worst things that could happen is to have a bunch of people on your website not knowing what to do next. The website should help guide them through their customer journey, and CTA's one of the biggest ways to do that.

It's also important to note that you shouldn't overdo it with CTA's on any single webpage. You do not want to ask your users to do 100 things on one page. In fact, the standard recommendation is that you have less than 3 CTA's, and ideally just 1.

Cleary Displayed Contact Information

Sometimes users want to reach out to your business via email or telephone. They might have a sales or technical question, and it's important that they have a way of contacting you.

Having your contact information clearly displayed at the top and/or bottom of the page is common practice, and what most users are used to.

Google will also disapprove any ads that are running to websites without contact information displayed.

Separate "Thank You" Pages For Form Submissions

The benefits of configuring might not be obvious at first, but setting up separate "thank you" pages for form submissions can add a new dimension of data. Here's the reasoning.

If you were to have all your forms direct to 1 "thank you" page, you'll be able to track your conversions. No problem there. The issue is that you won't know which page those conversions were made on.

By setting up an individual "thank you" page for every form, you can track which forms are getting conversions and which are not.

Have Google Analytics Installed

Google Analytics is a free tool by Google that allows you to track your users as they use your website. This is absolutely critical to the success of your campaign.

Just like brick & mortar stores have associates and clerks that can physically see what actions customers take in the store, Google Analytics allows you to do this digitally on your website.

We also set up certain goals in Google Analytics that are counted as conversions to be imported into AdWords.

Lastly, PPC Campaigns can NOT run remarketing campaigns, unless they are tied to an active Google Analytics account.

Quality Content

This is a no-brainer. Quality content is what attracts and keeps users engaged. Without quality content, users will get frustrated with your brand for its lack of helpfulness and flee to your competitors. It might sound like an exaggeration, but would you really want to chance that?

In Summary...

That wraps up this article. Hopefully, you have a better understanding of why your website is important to PPC campaigns. It really all comes down to user experience.

If you have any other comments, questions, or concerns, please feel free to click on the chat button in the bottom-right corner of this screen and reach out!