PPC and Web Design: What do they have to do with each other?

A website is a critical milestone in your company’s roadmap, especially in today’s digital era.

It is supported by several investments in earned and paid media to fulfill its objective of generating sales. In this guide, we will examine the relationship between PPC and web design to help you build a better future for your website.

You can think of PPC as the train and your website as a tourist destination. PPC brings in the traffic (visitors) and it’s then up to the website or the landing page to attract and convince the visitors to stay and spend.

And more often than not, this is purely driven by design.

Marketers who explore this connection will unlock a treasure that will significantly contribute to the effectiveness of their campaigns.

High-converting Landing Page Designs

Important Design Elements That Contribute To Effective PPC

Building a bespoke website design takes time and effort.: You will need to first understand buyer personas, analyze their preferences, and then develop a customer experience journey. However, a smart investment of your time and effort can yield incredible results post-optimization of your website. Take a look at how different aspects of your website design can affect your PPC campaigns:

1. Aesthetics:

   Many companies point their ad to their homepage without revamping it first - and that’s a big mistake. They run the risk of visitors viewing outdated information or unnecessary content that turns them off. Did you know that a typical user takes just 6-8 seconds to form an impression of your website? If the website is dull or the visitor isn’t impressed, your investment in the PPC campaign goes down the drain. Here is a rundown of the factors that influence the aesthetics of a website:

   • Color
   • Typography
   • Layout Design
   • Images and Animations
   • Content
   • Whitespace
   • Information flow/ structure of content on the website
   • Navigation and scrolling

   If your website is not grabbing the attention of the user, your PPC metrics will suffer. While click-throughs may remain the same, it affects how many people actually complete the call to action. And remember - even if you have ensured that the quality and relevance of your ad is high but your landing page is not optimized for the ad, then the campaign’s Ad Rank gets penalized. That means you will end up paying up to 64% more per conversion than normal.

   Graphic Designs For High PPC Conversions

2. Page Speed:

   Web performance lies at the core of a campaign’s success. It decides whether a lead who has clicked your ad stays on your website or not. Because online users care about how fast they can access data online. A majority (70%) of consumers say that a slow website impacts their experience. And actual user behavior as reported by Google indicates that they will bounce after just 3 seconds! If you want to conduct a quick check of your website’s speed, head over to the free Google tool Page Speed Insights or locate Page Speed in your Google Analytics report. Once you have this, you can dive deeper into other speed metrics such as:

   • First Contentful Paint
   • First Meaningful Paint
   • Time to Interactive
   • First Input Delay

   Optimizing your website for speed while taking into consideration these factors can make a huge difference in the conversion rate of your PPC campaign.

3. Content:

   Your PPC ad may have a great tagline, snappy copy, and a very appealing offer. But if the content on your website or landing page is dry, the user is going to just head back. A good landing page reinforces the key messages used in the PPC ad. In fact, it’s a best practice to copy the same language and content of the ad onto your landing page. This results in higher quality scores for your PPC campaigns.
   Best practices for improving your content for PPC include:

   • Keeping a consistent Tone of Voice
   • A/B testing your titles and taglines
   • Utilizing the given character limits to their fullest
   • Addressing the target audience and their pain points
   • Incorporating the same keywords used in the ad
   • Simplifying the information flow and wireframe
   • Content marketing with webinars, podcasts, and ebooks
   • Adding relevant data points and numbers
   • Adding visual content such as infographics and graphs

   Perfect Wireframes for PPC Campaigns

4. Targeted Design/Multiple Landing Pages:

   Over time, websites can get clunky. You keep adding more content, product categories, pages, webinars, and videos. But your PPC ad is targeted - shouldn’t your website be, too? If you aren’t using a targeted design, you are not going to receive any tangible business benefits from your PPC campaign. Let’s discuss why.
   Targeted design is about making your website appeal to a specific consumer base, by knowing what they need from it and what functionality they will use on it. Its strength is in its minimalistic, distraction-free design that has just one purpose - to convert the visitor into a buyer.
   
   Another way to implement a targeted design is to create a new landing page for each campaign. It’s proven very effective for companies that want high conversion rates. In fact, having 10-15 landing pages can increase your lead generation by 55%. And targeted design can deliver a 3x boost in your conversions. That means more effective PPC campaigns and overall revenues.

   
   

   Targeted Web Designs That Convert

5. Responsiveness:

   Responsive web design is an approach towards web development that optimizes your website/app for viewing on any screen - a tablet, a laptop, a smartphone, etc - while keeping it easy to navigate and read.

   In 2022, having a responsive website/ landing page has become a hygiene factor. It’s a result of changing consumer trends, which we have summarised here. The past few years have seen consumers adopting mobile as their primary device for browsing the Internet. To attract these users quickly, companies have shifted their spending from organic listings to paid ads (such as PPC). As a result, search engines such as Google are adapting by dedicating more space to ads. If you see the top search results for any service, you will see at least 3-4 ads before the search list begins. Meaning, the majority of the traffic heading to a website is going to be from mobiles and routed via PPC ads. This essentially means that it makes sense to get your website responsive and ready for them. It’s not just websites though - if you are following an app-based strategy, it becomes even more critical to implement responsive design both for your ads and your app.

How PPC Contributes to Improving Your Website Design

Lead generation via PPC campaigns is a systematic approach to grow your business. The objective is the same - to convert visitors into buyers. We can establish the cause and effect relationship better when we understand how they affect each other. Below, we examine how running a PPC campaign will evolve your website design project:

1. Diversification of Traffic:

   Companies invest in PPC to generate traffic and this can lead to a change in the demographics of your customer base. Some of it can be controlled by smart targeting of your ads. But good marketers will welcome diversity. They will want a good mix in the audience to grab the most impressions, especially if it’s not a niche service, product, or solution. Businesses can use this opportunity to rebuild and improve their landing page or website design to better capture the attention of new visitors. After all, website design is an iterative process. Taking inputs from the PPC ads that work and learning from those that don’t can inspire a purpose-led website redesign. Some of the design questions that will sprout up as a result of running a PPC campaign include:

   • Should we build a new landing page?
   • Is our website capable of scaling up?
   • Is our hosting, technology stack, and content management system ready?
   • Is it still relevant and contextual for visitors?
   • Does the website need a spring clean?

   Purpose and Results-driven Website Redesigns

2. New Keywords:

   As PPC marketing progressively scales up, you will come across a variety of keywords with different levels of user intent. These could be based on your brand name or competitive keywords or long-tail phrases that are more unique and relevant to your business. Such keyword research can also be plugged into your website to improve its general effectiveness. This typically falls under another bucket called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. There are two broadly defined types of SEO - on-page and off-page - and both benefit from the keywords researched via your PPC campaign. While designing for SEO, we focus on integrating keywords into these elements:

   • Title & Subheading Tags
   • Meta Descriptions
   • Internal Links & Backlinks
   • Image and ALT tags
   • Social media engagement
3. Data-backed Improvements:

   Running a PPC campaign accelerates your website’s journey by bringing in critical information about your users. An analysis of the data that streams in will enable you to fine-tune your website and even your overall marketing strategy for greater success. Consider the most relevant data that a targeted advertisement delivers to you:

   • Granular data on real buyers
   • Demographics of potential customers
   • Buyer intent
   • Time on site
   • Cart abandonment/ Form abandonment
   • Heat maps and reading patterns
   • Engagement/ interactions
   • Navigational feedback
   • Browsers and devices used to access
   • Social data of users

   Designs That Live and Breathe Data

   Based on this data, the most important questions your agency/designer will have for you become easier to answer. These include:

   • What is the mix of the target audience?
   • What elements of the website are working best?
   • What needs to be fixed urgently?
   • Is the content performing well with the target audience?
   • How can we improve the customer experience on the website?
4. Retargeting Campaigns:Retargeting is a type of PPC campaign that is aimed at people who have already visited your website. The goal of such an ad is to capture those that got away. There are multiple reasons for bounces and abandonments. Maybe a user forgot to finish a form, or got distracted and closed the tab. But a retargeting ad will continue to track those who have visited a page on your website and send a reminder in a bid to attract them again. Retargeting not only bridges the gap in your marketing strategy but has been observed to improve conversion rates by 150%.

   
   How does this affect design? Conversion rates for first-time visitors to most websites are pretty low - an average of just 2%. It does not necessarily mean that your website design is not working and retargeting campaigns help in proving that it. By bringing back the user, websites get a second chance at observing their behavior. With a stronger buyer intent the second time around, this data is more powerful and useful. A website revamp project will be able to use results from retargeting campaign users to effectively build more purposeful and tailored websites for the right customer.

5. Easier to Scale:A landing page depends on PPC campaigns to bring in the traffic. Of course, organic traffic will continue to stream in, but not with as high a rate as a well-defined and powerful PPC campaign. When you are confident about your landing page’s readiness, investing in PPC will help you scale at lightning speed.

Comparison & Correlation

Compared to website design, PPC campaign management has a very structured approach. Its targeting methods are highly rigid as against the flexible and intuitive approach followed by website designers. Exploring PPC can form the basis for a highly targeted website design and the knowledge gained from the experience is used to select visitors, set priorities, frame the objectives, and ask important questions. Website design implements these learnings to serve your customers and create meaningful customer experiences.

To ensure that your investment in PPC is well spent, you have to pay attention to design as well. This is especially true if you are outsourcing it to experts. At Wow.Design, our experience with building digital marketing-ready landing pages and websites can help you strengthen these connections and form a harmonious relationship between design and advertising.