Landing Page Experience: How to Improve It

• What does this metric mean?
• Initial Recommendations
• Tip #1: Relationship with the search term
• Tip #2: Usability
• Tip #3: Responsiveness
• Tip #4: Page load time
• Tip #5: Engaging content
• Final thoughts

What does this metric mean?

Landing page experience is how Google Ads estimates how relevant and useful your page is to users when they click your ad.

This metric is one of the three components of Quality Score, which directly influences your cost per click. The other two are expected CTR and ad relevance.

You can analyze landing page experience for each of your keywords. To do that, just add it as one of your columns in your Google Ads reports. It will be rated “below average”, “average”, or “above average”.

Use that status to spot which pages may be hurting your chances of converting, whether your goal is a lead or an online sale. In this article, we will explain which factors Google considers and how you can improve your scores.

Initial Recommendations

Before you start reworking your entire site and your ads, remember how important it is to measure what happens on your site. Only then can you optimize landing page experience based on data.

After all, if you make changes, you will want to know their impact as soon as possible. That is only possible if you have conversion tracking set up that lets you compare the two versions, as in an A/B test.

Great! Now that you have reviewed your tracking and can follow every important event with Google Analytics 4 (GA4), let's get to the tips:

Tip #1: Relationship with the search term

Obviously, nobody wants to search for something, click the result shown, and land on a page that has nothing to do with it. If that happened, people would stop using Google, right?

So we need to make sure the page the ad points to is highly related to the term searched. The best way to do that is to make sure the copy on your site contains the terms users typed to get there (preferably mentioned more than once).

Google's crawlers run this kind of check automatically, so this is how we show them the page is relevant to the search term.

Tip #2: Usability

Few things are more annoying than those inconvenient pop-ups covering the whole screen right after you land on a site, right?

Well, Google's crawlers hate them too! Your site should be easy to navigate. It should be designed to please your audience, so that people want to stay on it as long as possible.

Use internal links, have a well-functioning menu, and stay organized. That improves the landing page experience for your target audience, who will consume more content.

Tip #3: Responsiveness

In Brazil, most visits already come from mobile. In some segments, that share is even higher.

So it is extremely important that your landing pages also work well on phones. In fact, we would say mobile should already be the priority, following the “mobile first” philosophy.

Try not to make the still-too-common mistake of testing only on desktop. Always pick up your phone and put yourself in the user's shoes to spot potential issues: simulate a purchase on your site, look up a relevant piece of information, or try to get in touch.

If you struggle to complete any of these actions, it is a sign you need to fix that flow urgently.

Tip #4: Page load time

Picture this: you studied your market, planned everything to launch the best products and/or services, built a beautiful site, and created the perfect ad.

But when people search and find you, they give up before seeing any of it because your site will not load… We cannot let that happen! How quickly your site's basic functions become available is a critical point for landing page experience.

With increasingly impatient behavior, most people no longer tolerate waiting long to see what you have to offer.

In fact, some studies indicate that a delay of just one second can cause a loss of roughly 11% of your visits.

To avoid that risk, keep images light, use asynchronous scripts, among other measures. Oh, and do not forget that a large share of visitors will be on their phones, often with a shaky connection!

To see where you stand, it is worth running your page through PageSpeed Insights: it shows your Core Web Vitals scores, the speed and stability metrics Google uses today, and points out what to fix.

Tip #5: Engaging content

An easy-to-use site will not be enough if what you offer does not appeal. For an online store, for example, there should be a variety of good-quality photos presenting the products, complete descriptions covering every feature, and competitive prices.

If the site's purpose is to present your services, you could also feature testimonials from happy customers or videos showing the more technical details.

Final thoughts

Learning to do all of this on your own is very hard and takes far too much time. That is why we try to share as much knowledge as possible with those who are getting started.

Keep following our content and share it with others who might be interested. If you need more hands-on support, we also provide specialized consulting.