You’ve set a budget, chosen sensible keywords and written decent ads. The clicks are coming in, but the phone isn’t ringing as often as you’d hoped. The natural reaction is to blame the campaign: pause some keywords, change the bids, rewrite an ad or two. Sometimes that’s the right call. Often, though, the ad has done its job and the enquiry is lost on the page it sent people to.
Google Ads can only get someone to your website. What happens next depends on the landing page, and that page also feeds back into how Google judges, and charges for, your ads. In account audits it’s one of the first things we look at.
How Google judges the page behind your ad
Once a keyword in a Search campaign has enough data, Google gives it a Quality Score from 1 to 10, built from three components: expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Google describes landing page experience as how relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad, and rates it “Above average”, “Average” or “Below average” compared with other advertisers whose ads showed for the same keyword over the last 90 days.
Quality Score is a diagnostic. Google says it isn’t an input in the ad auction; it’s there to show you how your ads and pages compare. What happens in the auction is decided by Ad Rank, and one of the factors in Ad Rank is the quality of your ads and landing page: how useful and relevant the page is, whether it matches what the ad led people to expect, and how easy it is to navigate. Google adds that higher quality ads can often lead to lower costs per click. So a weak landing page can mean paying more for a worse position, and the Quality Score column is where you’ll see the warning.
What about speed? Google doesn’t publish a separate speed score within landing page experience, but its own advice on improving it includes making the site mobile friendly and improving loading speed, which it says “can be the difference between someone bouncing or buying”.
Make the page answer the search
None of this needs a flashy redesign. Landing pages that convert well tend to get a few basics right:
- The headline matches the ad. If the ad promised same-day drain unblocking, the page should open with same-day drain unblocking, not the company history.
- Contact details are visible straight away. A phone number in the header that can be tapped to call, and a short enquiry form near the top rather than three scrolls down after a large photo.
- Proof sits near the top. A few genuine reviews, accreditations that mean something in your trade, and how long you’ve been trading.
A lot of sites have all of this somewhere, just too far down the page, below an introduction that doesn’t tell the visitor anything they came to find out. For the form itself, our guide to simple website changes that get more enquiries covers fields, mobile keyboards and what happens after someone presses submit.
Send each campaign to its own page
Pointing every ad at your homepage asks one page to do everything. Say you run a landscaping business that also puts up fencing. Your fencing ads will usually do better landing on a page about fencing, with fencing photos, fencing price guidance and reviews from fencing customers, than on a homepage that has to talk about patios, turfing and garden design as well.
This is where your Google Ads account structure and your website need planning together. If your site can’t easily support a page per service, that’s worth sorting before the budget goes live, not after a few months of disappointing results.
Speed: the clicks you pay for but never see
Speed is easy to overlook because a site that loads quickly on office wifi can crawl on a phone with a weak signal. You pay for the click whether or not the visitor waits for the page to appear.
Core Web Vitals in plain English
Google measures how real visitors experience a page using three Core Web Vitals:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how quickly the main content appears. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Good is 200 milliseconds or less. INP replaced the older First Input Delay measure in 2024.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the layout jumps around as it loads, which is why you sometimes tap the wrong button. Good is 0.1 or less.
Google’s target is to hit “good” for at least 75% of visits, measured separately on mobile and desktop.
The same measures matter for SEO. Google says Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems, but also that it will still show the most relevant page even if its page experience isn’t great. Speed won’t rescue a page that doesn’t answer the search, but it can cost you visitors on one that does.
Where the slowness usually comes from
A handful of causes turn up again and again, and none of them needs a rebuild:
- Oversized images. A photo straight off a modern phone can be several megabytes. Resizing images to the size they’re displayed at, compressing them and using modern formats such as WebP usually makes the biggest single difference. Images further down the page can load as the visitor scrolls, but the main image at the top shouldn’t be delayed, as that slows down LCP.
- Plugins and third-party scripts. Chat widgets, booking tools, tracking pixels, sliders and pop-ups each add code the browser has to load and run. Heavy scripts are a common reason for a poor INP. It’s easy to collect a dozen over the years, so remove anything that’s no longer earning its place.
- Hosting. A well-built site on cheap, overloaded shared hosting can still be slow to respond. It’s rarely the first thing to change, but worth asking about if everything else checks out.
How to check yours
Run your pages through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool. Where a page has enough traffic, it shows real data from Chrome users over the past 28 days, alongside a lab test that lists what’s slowing the page down. Smaller sites may only get the lab test, which is still useful.
Test your main Google Ads landing pages separately from your homepage. A page built quickly for a campaign is sometimes the slowest on the site. Then open it on your own phone, on mobile data, and see how long it takes before you could tap the phone number. If the report flags large images or heavy scripts, that’s usually a contained job, and exactly the kind of thing our onsite technical SEO work puts right.
Measure what happens after the click
Without conversion tracking, you’re judging campaigns on clicks and gut feeling. At a minimum, track form submissions and phone calls, both calls from your ads and calls from people who find your number on the website, so you can see which keywords and pages produce enquiries.
Once that’s in place, you’ll often find that some pages and keywords are doing far more of the work than others, even with the same offer and budget. That tells you where to focus. If your numbers already look odd, our post on conversion tracking mistakes that skew your data is worth a read.
Where to start
You don’t need to fix everything at once. Take the campaign that spends the most and look honestly at the page it sends people to:
- Does the headline match what people searched for?
- Can you see a phone number and a way to enquire without scrolling?
- Does it load quickly on a phone over mobile data?
- Are enquiries from that page being tracked?
Fixing those four things on your busiest landing page will usually do more than spreading a smaller effort across the whole site.
Get the account and the pages checked together
Our free Google Ads audit looks at your campaigns and the landing pages they send people to, and tells you plainly what we’d change first. Request one online or call 0330 223 0847.
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