Modern website design and Google Ads

[Byzantium]

We are planning a simple and clean new website for a retail business which will sell one particular item only with a couple of variations.

Our existing website is far too convoluted and has a number of specific landing pages which relate to various Google Ads searches but which don't really convert into sales.

When planning the new website, we have an effective "buy it now" button which goes through to a short scrolling order form and thus we don't have lots of pages to direct adverts to. We are thinking whether we can really get away with directing ads only to the home page ?

I have zero desire for this to turn into an outsourced project requiring mega maintenance and I really want to just be able to self manage it and have one or two of the staff learn how to manage it, though I want to get the logic set up fairly decently.

Is this a decent idea, practical, etc. ?

 

[fisicx]

Relying on a single landing page for a new ad campaign isn’t a good idea.

You could start with the homepage of the site and have a number of different landing pages for testing to see which best converts.

The landing page needs to focus totally on the product and include the order form.

Each landing page should then have loads of advert variations which you use to test which get the most clicks.

It’s really a numbers game with Google. The more variations of advert and landing page the better. Within a couple of days you will have binned those that aren’t performing.

 

[antropy]

I have zero desire for this to turn into an outsourced project requiring mega maintenance and I really want to just be able to self manage it and have one or two of the staff learn how to manage it, though I want to get the logic set up fairly decently.

Is this a decent idea, practical, etc. ?

Depends what kind of changes you think you'll need to make on an on-going basis?

Paul.

 

[Paul Carmen]

Not enough info for any sensible answers, what type of Ads are you running, shopping, search pmax etc, what does your site sell?

The homepage is usually a terrible idea for any ecommerce style ads; for search the pages/copy needs to be relevant for Quality Score, for shopping the product text should be the driver, so again the homepage is bad, pmax needs really detailed on page info, so again the homepage is bad.

From a customer journey/usability perspective, if I clicked on a product or a search advert and landed on the homepage I'd wonder why I was there, and may well leave rather than navigate to what I actually expected to land on (the product).

This post says more about not understanding the issues that faced your old setup. While you shouldn't need lots of landing pages, you will need some. finding out why the old setup, keywords and marketing didn't work, then improving it should be the basis of the new setup.

 

[Byzantium]

Relying on a single landing page for a new ad campaign isn’t a good idea.

You could start with the homepage of the site and have a number of different landing pages for testing to see which best converts.

The landing page needs to focus totally on the product and include the order form.

Each landing page should then have loads of advert variations which you use to test which get the most clicks.

It’s really a numbers game with Google. The more variations of advert and landing page the better. Within a couple of days you will have binned those that aren’t performing.

I saw your response to another thread advising doing hundreds of adverts and so forth and as I said "I have zero desire for this to turn into an outsourced project requiring mega maintenance" which is exactly what your suggestion would involve.

Can you step back from this convoluted approach and consider a website which is selling a product without variations and where the only option is the speed of delivery.

The home / landing page is "Do you want to buy this shit ?" and if you do, you click the button.

There are no descriptive pages, no need for them, it is a known product and has no variations.

So if there cannot be an alternative to the home page, why do you feel the need to overcomplicate things and have this desire to create stuff that isn't required ?

 

[Byzantium]

Depends what kind of changes you think you'll need to make on an on-going basis?

Paul.

Change a price, change a photo, change the text perhaps or update a delivery option.

 

[Byzantium]

Not enough info for any sensible answers, what type of Ads are you running, shopping, search pmax etc, what does your site sell?

The homepage is usually a terrible idea for any ecommerce style ads; for search the pages/copy needs to be relevant for Quality Score, for shopping the product text should be the driver, so again the homepage is bad, pmax needs really detailed on page info, so again the homepage is bad.

From a customer journey/usability perspective, if I clicked on a product or a search advert and landed on the homepage I'd wonder why I was there, and may well leave rather than navigate to what I actually expected to land on (the product).

This post says more about not understanding the issues that faced your old setup. While you shouldn't need lots of landing pages, you will need some. finding out why the old setup, keywords and marketing didn't work, then improving it should be the basis of the new setup.

Why would you wonder why you were there if the button says "Click here to buy this shit" ? You are exactly where you need to be, right on the button, no need for more pages, redirection or waffle, just a clean, to the point, buy it now call to action.

Why would I need any additional landing pages ? Why is everyone so obsessed with more pages, more crap to maintain, etc. ? The concept is to get away from that idea and create something so simple that the logic of needing additional pages goes away.

 

[fisicx]

You create different landing pages to test their effectiveness. Colours, images, CTA, positions, with and without headers etc. Once you find the best version you bin the rest.

 

[Paul Carmen]

Why would you wonder why you were there if the button says "Click here to buy this ****" ? You are exactly where you need to be, right on the button, no need for more pages, redirection or waffle, just a clean, to the point, buy it now call to action.

Why would I need any additional landing pages ? Why is everyone so obsessed with more pages, more crap to maintain, etc. ? The concept is to get away from that idea and create something so simple that the logic of needing additional pages goes away.

What you describe is not a home page, that's a product page. If you have only one product it's doable, but still may be seen as odd by customers. Many customers want to know about the business etc before they buy, which is why a homepage is generally not a product page.

It sounds like you're effectively talking about a one page website, these were all the rage 5+ years ago, but have dwindled away, as they are not that effective from a conversion point of view.

The other point is what you want is largely irrelevant, that's not how you sell or build high converting sales/lead gen processes.

You sound like you don't understand why your old site and marketing didn't convert well, that's one of the key reasons you need to test and have multiple landing pages. As @fisicx says, you need to build and test what is needed to get the best sales performance. There are several factors at play here, A/B or multivariate testing of different page designs and layouts (as described above) will allow you to understands and hone better converting processes.

Plus, if you're running PPC search campaigns, then different text (landing pages) are often needed to get a good Quality Score for the landing page experience, and not pay double the cost per click because you've not optimised this.

You want to build a one page site for ease of build and maintenance, but you're looking at it the wrong way around, as it's not the best way to run and optimise a marketing ecommerce campaign. Online marketing and sales aren't set and forget processes. The first version is just the start, the people who win online are always iterating, testing and putting customers first.

 

[Byzantium]

Thanks for the responses.

When I searched this forum for similar topics, the answers were almost identical - you have to overcomplicate it, set up endless testing, fiddle around constantly and generate a load more work than the proposal requires.

I understand folk are touting and pitching for work on this website and that is fine but let me give you some advice. You need more than one plan.

You need to consider what the individual wants, not what you want to sell and if your advice is only about an overly complex idea that works for your bottom line then perhaps have one bite and then sit down.

I wanted a kebab the other night. I knew my favourite local kebab shop was on a Deliveroo or similar but I like to collect it and I wanted to see their menu and perhaps order ahead. I might have needed a "contact us" page, if I wanted their address or telephone number but that aside, I just wanted the kebabs.

I didn't need a home page and then have to work out how to navigate to other pages telling me how they made kebabs or what their history was or whether they were from Turkey, Germany or from South London. No, I just wanted the menu on the home page or as near to simple as that can be.

You say my thinking is out of date but I consider your ideas out of date. You are living in the age of tablets and desktops when this is the era of the mobile phone and when was the last time you stepped sequentially through webpage after webpage on Facebook, Instagram, X, etc. ? Never. You scroll.

So in my mind, the idea of a single page where whatever simple adverts you create land makes sense. I appreciate someone with a million dollar budget can do better but we don't have that level of cash to burn right now.

I was taking a leaf out of James Sinclair's purchase of Party Pieces and his move to putting it on Shopify. Sure, he has the resources to create adverts and such but as I don't have tens of thousands to waste, I came here for some help. He's selling £5m online and £40m offline.

He has multiple product lines of course but how do you get to them ? You scroll down and when you want to buy, you click.

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[fisicx]

It’s not about complication. It’s about testing the market. You won’t know what works until you test. You could build a simple one page site and run a single ad campaign. You could get some sales. But if you had a range of different landing pages and a larger range of ads you would sell a lot more.

The ads and pages that weren’t working would be deleted leaving you with a small set of highly converting pages.

Or you can just do it your way.

 

[zomex]

I've never really bought into the A/B/multiple landing pages/testing idea. I think for 90% of businesses the budget/time/resources/traffic/income are all too small to justify that. If you're Google/Amazon with millions on the line comparing 2 landing pages then of course it makes sense. If you're running a small store there is really no need to waist resources. Not to mention testing with tiny numbers will not give you true results.

I believe the best thing to do is:

- check your competition - the leading companies in your industry and try to replicate or outdo what they are doing successfully. This is tried and tested

- make sure your website supports all devices

- focus on following the best principles in terms of web design/conversion/colour scheme. Once again looking at your competitors will show what's working for them. Don't reinvent the wheel. Such as keeping your website clean/easy to navigate, lots of white space, good contrast, easy checkout experience.

PS: I'm a big fan of James Sinclair. I think Dragons' Den need to hurry up and bring him in as a new dragon.

 

[fisicx]

Even with tiny numbers, you almost always need to test different landing pages.

And you always need to try different adverts. You will never know which exact combination of keywords will convert.

As an example. I was promoting a niche plugin and started out with around 50 different adverts leading to 4 different landing pages. Initial conversions were around 10%. After dropping the non-performing adverts and some wording adjustments conversions increased to 20%. I then focused on the landing pages and got conversions up to about 40%.

If you just had a single ad group and landing page the likelihood your conversions would never get much past the low numbers.

 

[fufuda]

Even with tiny numbers, you almost always need to test different landing pages.

And you always need to try different adverts. You will never know which exact combination of keywords will convert.

As an example. I was promoting a niche plugin and started out with around 50 different adverts leading to 4 different landing pages. Initial conversions were around 10%. After dropping the non-performing adverts and some wording adjustments conversions increased to 20%. I then focused on the landing pages and got conversions up to about 40%.

If you just had a single ad group and landing page the likelihood your conversions would never get much past the low numbers.

with 40% convert rate, it is quite good!

 

[zomex]

with 40% convert rate, it is quite good!

The amount of people is what matters when looking at a conversion rate.

A 40% conversion rate on say 100 people is not accurate compared to 100,000. There's a reason why shampoo companies have small print such as *96% of 194 people agree. Data is not accurate when in small numbers and it can say whatever you want when you prod it enough.

The reason it's not accurate is there's 1000s of different factors that could effect it the biggest being luck. Time of the ads, what the weather is like etc etc. The more people tested, the more accurate the data becomes.

 

[fisicx]

In my case the 40% was an excellent result. Total cash investment was around £200. Income generated was around £5000. And because of the type of plugin it’s still earning me money even without the adverts.

So yes it is about numbers @zomex but sometimes you only need a small number to earn a lot. A plumber for example only needs one good lead each day.

 

[zomex]

In my case the 40% was an excellent result. Total cash investment was around £200. Income generated was around £5000. And because of the type of plugin it’s still earning me money even without the adverts.

So yes it is about numbers @zomex but sometimes you only need a small number to earn a lot. A plumber for example only needs one good lead each day.

That is amazing I am happy for you. £5000 is a lot of money to me, and maybe to you but once again it's a small scale example of a big conversion rate. No big company is seeing that conversion rate on a large scale for a sustained period.

As you scale to a bigger size, over every industry, every size business you get to the average conversion rate which is somewhere between 1-3%.

 

[fisicx]

PPC tends to result in much higher conversions because it’s very targeted. With normal organic ranking you get a lot of tyre kickers.

 

[zomex]

PPC tends to result in much higher conversions because it’s very targeted. With normal organic ranking you get a lot of tyre kickers.

This includes PPC:

Your 40% is on a tiny scale in 1 industry for 1 period of time. I am not hating, I am impressed with it and would be more than happy with that for my businesses. But it is not a realistic value to throw out there for the OP.

Organic is actually slighter higher. Because when products are ranked organically they are much more targeted. That's why Google doesn't simply plaster their site with paid ads. If there was no organic search no one would use Google because they would not always get the best result for their search.

 

[zomex]

Paid ads are Google accepting that the user will not receive the most relevant result in return for money. Companies paying money and competing to display their ad will never be able to complete with Google's 20+ year algorithm in terms of being the most relevant result.

That's why paid ads vs organic search is a critical balance for Google. They need organic search to provide the user with the most relevant result thus ensuring they continue to use the service (data, data, data) while also making money from paid ads. If they get that balance wrong and the user stars to see too many irrelavent ads there becomes a chance for a new company to provide a better search experience (easier said than done happened to many companies).