How Your Website Design Makes (or Breaks) Your Google Ads Strategy

If 2020 taught us anything about marketing, it’s that a business’s digital presence is no longer optional. It’s your way of meeting customers where they are. While your website has been your employee of the year, you can’t “set it and forget it” as there are constant optimizations to be made. 

Now, as businesses that have weathered the storm look to further elevate their digital presence beyond organic website traffic, it’s important to consider how your website and its design can dictate the success of investing in new, paid channels like Google Ads.

Content Is (Still) King

Before investing in a Google Ads strategy, you need to reverse engineer the journey you want a user to take with your potential campaign. Starting with the end result — primarily referred to as the conversion in Google Ads — what do you want your user to do or achieve? Is it a form fill out for an estimate or event registration? A purchase of a good or service? A phone call for a quote? 

Starting at the end of your Google Ads campaign helps better put you in your potential customers’ shoes so you can understand their goals, questions, and frustrations. With your desired result in mind, you can now build out content that will resonate with the customer, which can include a full buyer persona with demographic information! Once you understand the who and the what to your campaign, it’s time to address the how.

If your Google Ads campaign will send users to the website, then your website design is critical to the campaign’s success. You want to move your potential customer through the buyer’s journey efficiently and effectively.   Depending on your campaign’s conversion goal and value, there are a couple of questions you can ask to help get you started as it relates to your website design.

Product or Service

• Should your ad landing page be direct to a product-specific page or a more generic landing page?
• Is your website designed to allow a user to buy the product or service from even a mobile device?
• Does the user need more information about you and your company before buying?
• Is there a clear way for a potential customer to contact you and your customer service team if they have more questions?
• Do you want to display the price upfront or have them get in touch first?
• Is your page headline eye-catching and informative of what they’ll read further on?
• Are the next steps for the user clear and actionable?

Form Fill Out

• Do you need to have users go to the website for your form, or can you use a tool like Google Ads’ Lead Form extension?
• Does your form work correctly on all devices?
• Is the form too long and will it lead to a higher dropoff rate on your website?
• Is your form integrated with our client relationship management (CRM) system?

There are countless website content questions that you should consider when devising a Google Ads strategy. Even if you decide your Google Ads strategy doesn’t drive users directly to the website, it’s still vital to have consistent language and information that resonates on your website if a user decides to do further research!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Considerations

Let’s say a user saw a display or video ad from your company running via Google Ads. They can’t remember the name of your company, but they can remember the catchy slogan to your rare betta fish store, “Can’t do betta than this in your tank!”

Wouldn’t it be nice if you ranked as the first result on Google if a user searched this slogan? This requires a website design backed by SEO best practices and continual efforts. SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) might seem like mixing oil and water, but they’re complementary strategies that can help your business grow in the short term and long term.

Security Considerations

When you hear the term “hacker,” you probably still envision a scene from The Matrix movies. Today, hackers look just like you and me but bring various sophisticated and even brute force attack methods. Once they find that entry point, it can be hard to entirely rid your website of their malicious coding. They’re a stain that you can’t wash out easily.

If your website has been compromised, it can jeopardize your entire Google Ads strategy. With each Google Ads campaign, you’re likely looking to bring in traffic to your website, whether that’s your homepage or a specific landing page. Google Ads continuously crawls your website to ensure the validity of the ad, its website routed to from the ad, and that these are matching the user’s intent. Google’s crawling data can be delayed in some cases, and if there are even traces of malicious coding or an external URL within the page’s code, your ad may be rejected.

From there, you open the lengthy appeals process for your ad campaign and even account status overall. Put it this way — once you’re outside of the circle of trust, it’s very hard to get back in. 

Laying a Solid Foundation

Don’t let the limitations of your website design hold you back from tapping into new customers with channels like Google Ads. Starting with a flexible website design should be at the heart of your business’ online presence. Our team of expert website designers can help you get the responsive design you need and build a website tailored to your use. 

If you’ve got a website that you’d like to start bringing in new customers to with Google Ads, our team of savvy digital marketers and developers can help get the best fit plan in place for you.