Landing pages that earn their ad spend

If you are paying for clicks and sending them to your homepage, you are paying full price for a page that was designed to serve everybody — existing customers, job applicants, people looking for your phone number — and therefore serves your advertisement badly.

A landing page exists to continue one specific conversation that an advert started. That constraint is what makes it work.

Message match: the thing that matters most

Whatever your advert promised, the landing page must repeat in roughly the same words, visible without scrolling.

If the ad says “Emergency plumber, Ballard, 30-minute response”, the page headline should be about emergency plumbing in Ballard — not “Welcome to Lee Plumbing”. The visitor is checking, in about a second, whether they landed in the right place. Make the answer obvious.

This has a second benefit: message match raises Google Ads' Quality Score, and a higher Quality Score lowers what you pay per click. The same change that converts better also costs less.

What belongs on the page

1. A headline that repeats the ad's promise.
2. One sentence saying what happens next — “Tell us what broke and we will call you back within the hour.”
3. The form, or the phone number, above the fold on mobile as well as desktop.
4. Three to five reasons to believe — specific ones, not adjectives.
5. Proof. A named review, a photograph of real work, a number you can stand behind.
6. The same call to action again at the bottom, for people who scrolled.

What must not be on it

• Your main navigation. Every nav link is an invitation to leave the page you paid to send them to. Remove it, or reduce it to a logo that does not link anywhere.
• A second, competing offer. Pick one.
• A carousel. Visitors do not wait for slide three.
• A long form. Name, phone, and what they need. That is enough to call someone back.
• A cookie wall that covers the call to action on a 375px screen.

Speed is not optional on paid traffic

On organic traffic a slow page costs you some visitors. On paid traffic it costs you money you have already spent — every visitor who leaves before the page renders was a click you paid for.

Landing pages should be the fastest pages you own: no page builder, no unnecessary scripts, images sized to what they render at. If the page takes more than about two seconds to show its main content on a phone, fix that before touching the copy. Images are usually the whole problem is where most of it lives.

One page per campaign, not one page for all of them

If you run three campaigns — emergency callouts, bathroom installations, commercial contracts — that is three landing pages. They can share a template; they must not share a headline.

This is also the honest reason landing pages are quoted separately from a website build: the work is not the design, which is reused, it is the per-campaign thinking about what that specific visitor was promised.

How to tell whether it is working

1. Give it enough clicks. Under a couple of hundred visits, any difference you see is noise.
2. Compare like with like. Same campaign, same audience, same budget, one variable changed.
3. Watch cost per enquiry, not conversion rate. A page that converts at 8% on traffic that costs four times as much is the worse page.
4. Read the enquiries. If the volume went up and the quality collapsed, the page is promising something you do not sell.

We build these as part of landing page design, usually alongside the campaign rather than before it, because the page and the advert have to be written to match each other. If the wider problem is that your whole site is not converting, why visitors leave without enquiring is the better starting point.