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Optimize Your Google Ads Landing Page Experience for Better Results

Two women collaborating on a laptop to optimize a Google ad landing page for better results.

We repeatedly talk about how Google Ads are great for small businesses. Their scaling budget, focused targeting, and clear metrics make them a versatile option. Once you’ve set up effective Google Ads, you’ll be able to direct users to a landing page on your business’ website. That landing page has just as important a job of ensuring potential customers continue on to purchase your products or services. We’ll explain how you can optimize your Google Ads landing pages for better results.

What is a Landing Page

A landing page is a page on your website where a user ends up when they click on a digital marketing campaign like a social media post or Google Ad. It’s where the user “lands” in their digital flight. The landing page ensures those who are interested in the marketing campaign maintain that interest and direct them to complete the desired actions. This could be to purchase a certain product, hire your business’ services, have them sign up for a newsletter, attend an event, etc. Your Google Ad’s job was to increase awareness about your business, its services, or its products and convert them to visit your website. The landing page continues that conversion process by providing a friendly and focused welcome with clear directions to keep going.

How to Optimize and Improve Your Landing Pages

Just like with any digital marketing, there are various strategies to consider when optimizing your landing pages to improve their performance. Here are some of the key strategies along with examples that represent these best practices.

The Right Page for the Right Ad

Unlike your home page, a landing page has a more precise job. It welcomes a user who has come for a specific reason through a specific Google Ad. Therefore, you don’t want an overly generic landing page that will leave users lost. Tailor the landing page to each ad or type of ad. For example, a Google Ad for a certain product or service should land the user on that product or service request page. If a user follows a link to sign up for a newsletter or event, the landing page should be the form to join. If users don’t arrive on a corresponding landing page, they are only likely to get confused, frustrated, and leave.

Concise and Effective Copy

Another way a landing page can potentially confuse any new arrivals is by being full of words. Users have come with a specific purpose, and a landing page should have clear and simple messaging that provides pertinent information. Keep copy concise to be the most effective. Wordiness or jargon could lead to confusion and distract a user from completing the conversion that’s your business’ goal. This landing page from FeminaHealth is a great example. Notice how the simple copy effectively communicates the information with distinct formatting that clearly directs the user to the next step.

Clear Call to Actions

Along with that direct and concise copy, you will want a clear and prominent call to action on any landing page. This will make it clear to a user how to proceed when they arrive on the page, optimizing its performance. On a product page, this will be a clear button like “Add to Cart”. On a newsletter or event signup, these calls to action could be a “Fill the Form” in prominent text with a clear “SUBMIT” button at the bottom. These clear calls to action help direct a user to continue from the landing to the next critical steps in the process. This landing page from Goldberg Centre Vision Correction for booking a consultation is a perfect example of a prominent call to action that directs any landing arrivals.

Cohesive Branding Between Google Ad and Landing Page

An important element of designing any optimized landing page is making sure it is consistent with the rest of your digital branding. When a user arrives at a landing page, they want the space to be familiar and expected. If they arrive at a page that doesn’t match the Google Ad visually and verbally, they’ll be confused or even worried they’ve been taken to the wrong place. That’s why it’s best practice that your landing page has cohesive branding. The space should seem familiar and right, and so should be custom-designed to match the visuals, tone, and style of your business. A great example of this strategy is this landing page from talkspace, where the branding is clear in the page’s logo, colours, and the tone of its copy.

The Best Landing Page is One They Don’t Walk Away From

Now you know some of the best practices for optimizing and improving your Google Ads landing pages. You want a landing page to provide a clear, directive, and familiar experience for any user arriving there. Its job is to keep users there and in contact with your business, not scare them off. If you want more tips for designing your landing pages or want some optimized pages designed for you, contact our advertising and web design teams at Rosewood, who are masters of sticking the landing. 

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Colour Accessibility in Web Design: Ensuring Sufficient Contrast

Pantone colour swatches with some that can't be differentiated for those with colour blindness

Accessibility is important for any website’s design. It allows the most possible people to access your business online. A key part of that is ensuring everything in your web design is clearly visible. Along with contrast and size, you also need to consider colour blindness for accessiblility in web design. If a web design doesn’t consider different levels of colour vision, certain elements of the site will become indistinguishable or even invisible. That creates a frustrating experience, and users will leave. We’ll explain why colour blindness matters for web design and some of the best practices for ensuring an accessible contrast on your website.

The Kinds of Colour Blindness or Colour Vision Deficiency

Colour blindness is often used as the general term for all colour vision deficiencies, but there are different kinds. The most common type that affects 8% of all males is “red-green” colour blindness. This is usually either from deuteranomaly or protanomaly and refers to their inability to see reds and greens as vividly. However, there are other less common types of colour blindness to also consider in your web design. There is blue-yellow colour vision deficiency, where blue and yellow are less visible. The other is monochromacy, where someone sees no colour at all and instead views the world in grayscale (black, grey, and white). An ideal web design should be accessible to all of types of colour blindness. 

How Colour Blindness Affects Sight or Visual Acuity

Skipping over the details of the biology, when someone has red-green colour blindness, they see greens and reds less strongly than those with normal colour vision. Most can still tell the difference between a red object and a green one, but each colour will be less vibrant. The difficulty comes in colours that have red and green in them. That is why someone with red-green colour blindness has difficulty differentiating purples from blues. They see less of the purple’s red, turning it blue. This is also something to consider in your web design. For example, if your design includes orange and neon green items next to each other, it will be difficult for someone with red-green colour vision deficiency to differentiate them. This is because they see the yellow in each colour more than the red and green. Depending on the strength of the deficiency, even something yellow will be difficult to pick out from the other two.

How to Accommodate Colour Blindness in Web Design

To be sure that everyone can see everything on your website, you need to be sure that even someone who can’t see colours can still differentiate text, images, or buttons. There are various techniques for colour accessibility, but here are some of the most essential for web design:

Don’t Rely Exclusively on Colour 

One of the staple practices in accessible visual design is to not use colour as the only differentiator. Those with colour deficiencies can still see shapes and other visual markers. For example, hyperlinked text shouldn’t just be blue or another colour. It should also be underlined to be recognizable to any level of colour vision. Bars in a graph with patterns inside along with colours are always distinguishable. This is the same design choice behind coloured tiles in a board game also having certain shapes.

High Contrast Colours 

Use colours that have high contrast to keep them distinguishable. For example, Rosewood’s web design primarily uses white and blue. No matter the kind of colour blindness, these can’t be confused. You can run a basic contrast test between two colours with a tool provided by Web Accessibility in Mind. The plug-in tota11y will check your entire website for various visual accessibility concerns, including contrast.

Keep it Bright 

Colour vision deficiencies have a harder time differentiating darker colours. Using brighter colours will help them stay visually distinguishable. 

Not All Complementary Colours Contrast Equally

Choosing two colours on the opposites of the colour spectrum, such as black and white, can typically provide good contrast. However, that isn’t true for all kinds of vision. Blue and yellow are complementary colours with a high contrast value, but they are less distinguishable to those with blue-yellow colour blindness. That is why blue and orange are often used instead. The red in the orange helps it stand out from the blue.

Using Greyscale 

Designing a site in greyscale (grey, white, and black) will ensure its visible to all colour vision deficiencies. However, your branding may include pops of colour. In this case, various web tools and screen filters built into MacOS and Windows will allow you to look at your site in greyscale. This simulates an extreme monochromatic experience and can help you see whether some colours in your web design might be confusing.

Web Design Everyone Can See

If you have full colour vision, it can be easy to forget not everyone sees the rainbow as vibrant as you. However, accessibility is a critical part of web design used to create a website that accommodates everyone’s abilities. An accessible website creates a welcoming digital space. If you make sure every part of your web design stands out, your business will too. If you want to be sure your web design accommodates different colour vision deficiencies, contact Rosewood’s web design team. They’ll make sure your colours shine.

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Personalizing for Relevance: How AI is Transforming Customer Experiences

Woman with gray hair having a personalized customer experience on her computer thanks to help from AI

We’re continuing to see the many powerful applications for AI. Along with potentially useful creative tools, AI excels at data collection and parsing. Now, we’re seeing that algorithmic power combine with marketing expertise to create a personalized and relevant customer experiences for small businesses. Rosewood will explain what personalization and relevance in marketing are, and how AI is a powerful tool for a marketing team to create personally relevant marketing for any customer or client experiences.

Personalization, Relevancy, and AI in Marketing

Personalization has been a major tool in marketing for over a decade. It emphasizes marketing that communicates personally to the individual members of your audience over broader, more general marketing campaigns that lack a specific target. While this might include one-off custom communications or exchanges, it can also be automated. For example, emails or messages can automatically address receivers by their first names. 

Overall, customers have come to expect personalized experiences that respect their individuality and interests. At least 71% of customers expect a personalized experience, and a greater 76% are frustrated when they don’t have one. Personalization has also demonstrated an average 10-15% revenue lift, which increases to 25% for direct to consumer businesses. These individualized experiences create stronger personal connections, which lead to more customers and clients returning for more purchases and services. This is where small businesses can excel over larger companies that typically provide more generalized customer experiences.

Thanks to AI, more complex and valuable data can be gathered from users to create even more personalized marketing that is relevant to customers’ interests and experiences. This is why relevancy has become an essential marketing criterion alongside personalization. These algorithms and AI automations can consider browsing history, page time, social media data, and more. Marketers can then use this information and tell these programs how to generate product recommendations, personalized notifications, curated packages, communications, and more. These AI help your business understand the true, individual interests of each of your customers so that any marketing that reaches them is relevant.  

Where AI Can Help with Personalization and Relevancy

As we’ve covered before, AI is a general term. It’s recently become the common title for various programs which can learn from data to accomplish more complex tasks. For personalized and relevant marketing, these AI can sift through an overwhelming amount of user information that would take far more time for a human. That’s why AI is a powerful tool for small businesses who usually won’t be able to dedicate a person to poring through this information. Instead, AI is a valuable tool for your marketing team to build effective strategies for relevant marketing campaigns. We’ll go over some of the most effective uses of AI in personalized marketing.

E-Commerce Tracking

When customers are on your website or digital store, AI software can track what they browse and for how long. It will also track any purchases, wishlisting, shares, etc. This tracking isn’t especially new, but more developments in machine learning allow AI to start grouping and interpreting the data. All that behavioral information from many customers, allows an AI to develop customer groups and profiles according to their interests and various other demographics like age and area. These can then be used for a plethora of personalized and relevant marketing strategies.

Relevant Email Marketing

With this detailed profile generation, AI can then begin to automatically message subscribed customers about product recommendations or send communications that are more relevant to their interests. This will still require a human to create and design the message and templates. However, the AI can take over the busy work of adding appropriate products and sending the emails off. 

Your marketing team can also use these AI-generated profiles to analyze your audience and segment your email recipients to start creating emails more relevant to each group’s interests. This will lead to more opens and clicks, since they will better grab your audience’s attention. Again, AI can’t quite handle the creation process itself. Human expertise is still necessary for effective personalized marketing.

Personalized Website Customer Experiences

By tracking their ecommerce behavior, AI incorporated into your site can start to tailor customers’ website experience to be more relevant. Products listed on the front page or recommended to them at other browsing stages can be specified to their personal interests. This keeps them in your store and more likely to purchase, since they will continue to see what is relevant to their interests in your business.

Personalized Chatbots

Customer service is an important part of your daily, individualized marketing, and instant messaging through your website, social media, and SMS has become a fundamental customer service tool. Those messages can also be overwhelming and chatbots can help manage the flood. However, they are also often robotic and simple. Current advances in AI famously happening with Chat-GPT and Google Bard are allowing chat bots to accomplish more complex tasks and communications. They can address the customer by name, and even potentially pull up their profile’s information. They aren’t quite at the level of replacing a human’s social finesse or able to handle more complex inquiries. However, they have made great strides where simple interactions can be accomplished entirely automatically for a pleasant and personalized customer experience.

Don’t Forget About Human Expertise

AI technology is currently surging in its development and it’s still hard to see where it will end up in the coming months and years. It’s already showing it’s a powerful tool for personalized marketing, but don’t let it completely override the human touch of your business either. Ultimately, personalized connections are human ones, and customers want that human connection with your business. Similarly, AI is still limited in its abilities. Analyzing information, writing messages, creating visual content, and more still require human ingenuity and expertise. If you want to talk more about how you can strategize and incorporate AI into your digital marketing, ecommerce, or web design, be sure to contact Rosewood Marketing.

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