Conversations will save your PPC Landing Page

Picture this.

You are looking for a car insurance policy. You Google “car insurance” and a whole bunch of Google Ads show up. The first link is from a huge company whose ads you’ve seen on TV, so it must be trustworthy. You click on it and the landing page is exactly what you’d expect. There is a picture of a smiling insurance agent staring lifelessly into your soul, promising that if you provide your zip code in the single input box below, you’ll get quick and easy quote. It isn’t particularly engaging but it’s car insurance. How exciting could it really be? A few key taps later, you’ve entered your zip code and hit submit.

Everything from here on out is a slow moving train wreck.

Hitting submit causes your screen to go blank. The page is loading. While waiting for it to finish, you look up at the ceiling of your bedroom and notice a weird spot. That’s odd! You were staring at your ceiling the night before while candy crush was loading, and the spot wasn’t there. Or was it? Your mind is probably playing tricks on you. You look back at your screen.

The UI elements have started to appear. There is clearly a form you are going to have to fill, asking for your name, address, etc. But, as is often the case with mobile websites, the page keeps jerking around as new elements are rendered on screen. You go back to staring at the spot on your ceiling. Is it bigger since the last time you saw it? Is it mold?! Holy shit! It’s probably mold! You have to find out. You open a new tab, and look up what a mold spot looks like. Google has you covered with an article (from ABC news of all places), which you start reading. Apparently mold can make you really sick! You had a headache yesterday! Was it mold related? New tab, new google search: “Mold sickness.” Things are not looking promising. It turns out mold sickness can kill you.

It’s now been 20 minutes and you have completely forgotten about your car insurance search. Instead you have somehow ended up on the Wikipedia page of famed civil rights activist and academic W.E.B du Bois. From the perspective of the company whose Ad you clicked, you are 50 bucks down the drain.

This sort of interaction is not uncommon in the PPC industry and is reflective of a bigger problem in the industry.

The way we think about PPC landing pages is broken.

Good quality images, videos, testimonials and CTAs are all considerations you are told to keep in mind while creating a post-click experience. But no matter how many of these best practices you incorporate in your landing page, the end result is un-engaging and yields abysmally low conversion rates. It is no accident that the average landing page conversion rate across industries for Google Search Ads is 2.35%.

We believe that Conversational Landing Pages are the solution to low conversion rates on traditional static pages. And we have written a detailed post around why we conversational bots are going to change how the post-click experience from paid campaigns looks like.

Check it out.