The ad and the landing page are one job

These are usually treated as two jobs owned by two people. They are one job: somebody typed something, and everything they see next should be visibly about that thing. Where the ad and the page disagree, the money leaks.

The ad

An advert on a results page is competing with several others that all claim roughly the same thing. The one that gets clicked is usually the one that most obviously matches what was typed.

• Put the search in the headline. Not as a trick, but because it is proof the page is about that and not something adjacent.
• Say the specific thing. A price, a timeframe, a place, a constraint. Vague superlatives read as noise because every competitor is using them.
• Answer the obvious objection in the second line. Free delivery, no contract, cancel any time, whatever the hesitation is for your thing.
• Give one action. An advert offering four things is an advert nobody remembers.

A worked advert

For the search how to count stock in a small restaurant. Three headlines and a description, which is the shape the format wants.

What each part is doing. The first headline repeats the outcome in the searcher's terms and contains a number, so it is concrete rather than a claim. The second names the buyer, so the wrong reader leaves before costing you a click. The third removes the two questions that otherwise require a click to answer: how long, and how much. The description answers the next objection, which is whether this means buying software.

What is absent: the company name, the words leading or trusted, and any sentence that would be equally true of a competitor.

The page

The most common and most expensive mistake in paid search is sending every click to the home page. A home page is built to serve everybody, which means it answers nobody who arrived with a specific question.

The visitor arrives with a sentence in their head. The top of the page should repeat that sentence back, close enough that they relax. If they have to search your page for what they just searched for, a meaningful share of them leave, and you paid for every one.

1. 01The headline repeats the promise from the advert, in the same words where possible.
2. 02The next paragraph says what it is and who it is for, in plain terms.
3. 03Then the reason to believe it: the proof, the specifics, the thing that makes it credible.
4. 04Then one action, repeated down the page but never competing with a second different action.

The message match audit

Ten minutes, no tools, and it finds more waste than most optimisation work. Make three columns for your five highest spending keywords.

• Column one: the keyword, exactly as it appears in the account.
• Column two: the first headline a searcher sees for it.
• Column three: the first line of the page they land on.
• Then read each row aloud. If a stranger would not say all three are about the same thing, you have found the leak.

The failures this exposes are almost always one of three: the keyword points at the home page, the advert is generic because the group is mixed, or the page was written for a different search and reused because it was there.

One page, several searches

Sometimes you genuinely have one page and three quite different keyword groups pointing at it, and writing three pages is more than you can do this week. Two honest options, in order.

• Write the extra pages. It is the real fix and it is usually an afternoon each, because the offer already exists and only the framing changes.
• Narrow the account to the keywords the one page actually answers, and pause the rest until their pages exist. Spending on searches your page does not address is worse than not spending at all, because you also pay to teach the system that your page disappoints people.

What is not on the list is making one page vaguer so it covers everything. That produces a page that matches nothing, and it will lose to three specific pages from somebody who did the work.