| Your question | The short answer | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| What is a landing page? | The page people land on after clicking an ad, or any page built around one offer | Google Ads Help |
| What makes one good? | It matches the ad, answers the question at the top and makes the next step easy | Google Ads Help |
| Does it affect ad costs? | Yes. Landing page experience is part of ad quality, and Google says higher ad quality generally means lower cost | Google Ads Help |
| What is a good conversion rate? | Unbounce's 2024 median is 6.6%, but compare with your own past results | Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report |
| Must the keyword be in the headline? | No. Google says the word-for-word search doesn't need to be on the page | Google Ads Help |
| How do I measure it? | Enquiries as GA4 key events, cost per enquiry and the Quality Score status | Google Ads and Analytics Help |
What is a landing page?
Google defines it simply: “A landing page is the page on your website where customers land after clicking one of your ads.” In practice the term covers any page built around one offer and one action, whether visitors arrive from an ad, a search result, an email or a social post. The difference from a homepage is focus: a homepage introduces everything you do, while a landing page does one job.
That focus is what Google asks for in ads. In its words: “When someone clicks on your ad, they expect to land on a page that's relevant to what they saw in your ad. If they don't immediately find what they expect, they're more likely to leave.”
What makes a good landing page, according to Google?
Google's guide to ads and landing pages comes down to six things:
- It matches the ad and keywords: “Choose a landing page that closely matches your ad and keywords.”
- It repeats the ad's call to action: “Your landing page should also mirror the call-to-action in your ad text.”
- Important information sits near the top: “It's a good idea to put important information towards the top of the page.”
- It is easy to act on. Google asks you to make the action you want, an order, a call or an enquiry, quick and easy, and adds: “Don't make people hunt around for information they might need. Avoid cluttering your site with too many ads or pop-ups.”
- It says something useful: “Try to provide useful, original information on your landing page about whatever you're advertising.” Google suggests reviews “that show real opinions from other customers”.
- It works on a phone: quick, easy to contact you from and simple to navigate.
This matters for cost, not just conversions. Landing page experience is one of the three parts of Google's Quality Score, defined as “How relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad” and rated Above average, Average or Below average. Google's page on ad quality says: “Higher ad quality generally leads to better performance, including better ad positions and lower cost.”
One detail is often misread. Google says “Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction”: it is a diagnostic. Google does consider ad quality when it ranks ads, and the Quality Score statuses are your view of it.
How do you analyze a PPC landing page?
Read it the way Google Ads does, then the way a visitor does. Five steps:
- Check the landing page experience status for the keywords that send people to the page. In Google Ads, add the Quality Score columns to the keywords table, including “Landing Page Exp.”
- Open the Landing pages report (Campaigns, then Insights & reports, then Landing pages) to see each page's clicks and its Mobile-friendly click rate.
- Compare conversion rate by landing page, which Google suggests “as a proxy for good landing page experience”.
- Put the ad next to the page and check they make the same promise and ask for the same action.
- Open the page on a phone, on mobile data, and time how long the headline and the form take to appear.
What should a landing page have? A nine-point checklist
Here is the landing page checklist we use: the best practices in Google's guidance, applied to a service landing page. Test your page against each line:
One page at a time. Fill in the last column, then fix the first check that fails.
| Check | How to test it | Your page |
|---|---|---|
| 1. It matches the ad or search | The headline repeats the promise people clicked on | Not supplied |
| 2. One offer | One page, one thing to do, ideally with a price or a from-price | Not supplied |
| 3. The answer at the top | What it is, who it's for and what happens next, visible on a phone without scrolling | Not supplied |
| 4. Proof near the action | Reviews, photos of real work or dated results beside the form | Not supplied |
| 5. A short form that qualifies | Few fields, mostly multiple choice, asking what decides whether you can help | Not supplied |
| 6. A second way to ask | A WhatsApp button or a phone number for people who won't fill in a form | Not supplied |
| 7. Fast on a phone | Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds in real visitors' data | Not supplied |
| 8. No clutter | No pop-ups, menus or links that pull people away from the action | Not supplied |
| 9. Counted | Each enquiry recorded as a key event in Google Analytics 4 | Not supplied |
For the form, our guide to the lead generation funnel covers which questions to ask and how many. For check 7, our guide to page speed and SEO explains real visitors' data and how to test it, and the button itself is covered in how to write a call to action. For phones, see our mobile CRO checklist.
What is a hero section?
The hero section is the first screen of a page: the headline, one line that explains it, the main call to action and often an image. On a landing page it has to carry checks 1 to 3 on its own, matching the ad, stating the offer and answering the main question before anyone scrolls. Our own homepage hero keeps to two calls to action, “Contact us” and “Get a free audit”.
What does a better service landing page look like?
Here is a fictional example. A house-cleaning company in Austin sends Google Ads traffic for deep house cleaning to its homepage. The fixes are the nine checks, applied in order:
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Headline | “Welcome to BrightPath” | “Deep house cleaning in Austin”, the ad's own promise |
| First screen | An image slider | A from-price, what's included and how it works |
| Navigation | Five menu links | No menu: one thing to do |
| Form | Nine fields, mostly typing | Four fields, two of them choices |
| Second route | None |
The business, prices and pages are invented to show the method. No result is claimed for either version; the only way to know is to test against your own enquiries.
What is a good landing page conversion rate?
There's no single number. Unbounce's 2024 Conversion Benchmark Report, covering over 41,000 landing pages and 464 million visitors, puts the median at 6.6% across all industries and 6.1% for commercial and professional services. It counts landing page visitors who converted on pages built with Unbounce, so treat it as a rough guide.
The more useful comparison is your page against its own past, by traffic source: paid search, paid social and organic visitors convert differently. Our guide to website traffic but no leads sets four benchmarks side by side and explains why they disagree. Google suggests the same habit for ads: “Try using conversion rate as a proxy for good landing page experience.”
How do you split test a landing page?
Change one thing, send half the traffic to each version, and wait for enough enquiries to tell them apart. For Google Ads traffic, a custom experiment “shares your original campaign's traffic (and budget) and lets you test changes to your campaigns”, and for Search campaigns you can split it “by a cookie-based split or a search-based split”. A new landing page is one such change: point the experiment's ads at it and keep everything else the same.
Two warnings. Google Optimize, the free testing tool many older guides still recommend, has been unavailable since 30 September 2023, so you need a different tool for on-page tests. And judge the winner on enquiries your team accepts, not on clicks: a version that brings more forms but fewer real leads is the loser.
Do you need a landing page, or will an instant form do?
For Facebook and Instagram ads, an instant form is often enough: it opens inside the app and does the capture step for you. You need a landing page for Google search ads without a lead form, for organic visitors, and whenever people need prices, proof or detail before they enquire. Our lead generation funnel guide compares the routes.
What about SEO landing pages?
A landing page meant to rank in Google is also a search result, so it has to be indexable, genuinely helpful and clearly about one topic. Google says its ranking systems “are designed to prioritize helpful, reliable information that's created to benefit people”. Three habits keep ad, local and SEO landing pages from getting in each other's way:
- Give each search topic one page. Our own service pages are our search landing pages: each has one main phrase, set in our keyword map, so no two of them target the same search.
- Keep near-copies out of search. If you run several campaign versions of one page, add noindex to the copies, which tells Google “Do not show this page, media, or resource in search results”, or point them at the main page with a canonical tag, which helps Google consolidate their signals into one preferred URL.
- Make local pages genuinely local. A page for each area you really serve is fine, with that area's details, prices and proof. Google's spam policies list as doorway abuse “multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page”.
Which landing page metrics should you track?
- Conversion rate and cost per enquiry, by traffic source.
- Engagement rate in Google Analytics 4. Google counts a session as engaged when it “Lasts longer than 10 seconds”, “Has a key event” or “Has 2 or more screen or page views”; bounce rate is the share of sessions that weren't engaged.
- The landing page experience status in Google Ads, for the keywords that send people to the page.
- Google Ads' Landing pages report (Campaigns, then Insights & reports, then Landing pages), which shows each page's clicks and its Mobile-friendly click rate.
- Largest Contentful Paint for real visitors, from Search Console's Core Web Vitals report or PageSpeed Insights.
- Form completion: how many people who start the form finish it, if your form tool reports it.
Count the enquiry itself as a key event in GA4, so every other number has something to divide by. The free Cost Per Lead Calculator turns spend and enquiries into cost per lead and cost per customer.
Which landing page statistics can you trust?
Only the ones with a named source, a method and a date. These three pass:
| Statistic | Source and method | Date |
|---|---|---|
| 6.6% median landing page conversion rate; 6.1% for commercial and professional services | Unbounce: over 41,000 landing pages and 464 million visitors on its own platform | 23 July 2023 to 23 July 2024 |
| A 31% better LCP led to 8% more sales and a 15% better lead to visit rate | web.dev: Vodafone's A/B test on a landing page | Published 17 March 2021 |
| In retail, “a 1-second delay in mobile can impact mobile conversions by up to 20 percent” | Google Ads Help; Google's own claim, with no method on the page | Read 20 October 2026 |
Left out on purpose: figures we could only find on vendor blogs without a source, such as an “eight-second attention span”.
Landing page myths, and the facts
| Myth | Fact |
|---|---|
| The search keyword must be in the headline. | Google: “the word-for-word phrase from a search term doesn't need to be on your landing page.” |
| Your homepage works as a landing page. | A homepage introduces everything; Google asks for a page that closely matches the ad and keywords. |
| A longer form always gets better leads. | Typing puts people off. Use a few multiple choice questions that qualify, and test the length. |
| Quality Score decides the ad auction. | Google: “Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction.” Google considers ad quality, and Quality Score is how you see it. |
| Landing pages only affect conversions. | Google says higher ad quality, which includes landing page experience, generally means better positions and lower cost. |
Questions people ask about landing pages
What makes a good landing page?
It matches the ad or search that brought the visitor, answers their question at the top, shows proof and makes one next step easy on a phone. Google's own advice adds no clutter, useful original information and a fast page.
What is a high-converting landing page?
One that turns an unusually large share of the right visitors into enquiries or sales. In Unbounce's 2024 data the median was 6.6%, but a high-converting page is best judged against your own past results for the same traffic.
What is a good landing page conversion rate?
There's no universal figure. Unbounce's 2024 median across over 41,000 landing pages was 6.6%, and 6.1% for commercial and professional services, so compare your page with its own history, by traffic source.
What is landing page optimization?
It is improving a landing page so more of the right visitors take its one action: matching the ad, putting the answer first, adding proof, shortening the form and speeding up the page, then measuring each change against enquiries.
What metrics should you track on a landing page?
Conversion rate and cost per enquiry by traffic source, engagement rate in Google Analytics 4, the landing page experience status in Google Ads, Largest Contentful Paint for real visitors and how many people finish the form.
What is an SEO landing page?
A page built to rank in search for one topic and turn those visitors into enquiries. It has to be indexable and genuinely helpful, and near-copies made for campaigns should be kept out of search with noindex or a canonical tag.
How much does a landing page cost?
It depends on who builds it and what comes with it. Ours is part of the Growth plan, from $2,500 a month, which includes one campaign landing page built inside your website with an enquiry form; extra landing pages and larger redesigns are quoted separately.
Do you need a website for a landing page?
No. A landing page can live on a page builder's own address, and a Meta instant form needs no page at all. Building it inside your own website keeps your reviews, tracking and search value in one place, which is why the landing page in our Growth plan sits inside your existing site.
What counts as a landing page conversion?
The one action the page exists for: usually an enquiry form sent, a call, a WhatsApp message or a booking. Count it as a key event in Google Analytics 4, and judge the page by how many of those enquiries your team accepts.
| Question | Short answer |
|---|---|
| What makes a good landing page? | Matches the ad, answers first, easy next step |
| What is a high-converting page? | One that beats its own past results |
| Good conversion rate? | Unbounce's 2024 median: 6.6% |
| What is landing page optimization? | Changing one thing at a time, measured |
| Which metrics? | Conversion rate, cost per enquiry, LCP |
| What is an SEO landing page? | One page per search topic, indexable |
| How much does a landing page cost? | Ours: part of Growth, from $2,500 a month |
| Need a website for one? | No, but your own site keeps it all together |
| What counts as a conversion? | The page's one action, such as an enquiry |
Run your page through the nine checks first. If you'd rather we build or fix it, conversion optimization includes a campaign landing page in our Growth plan, and our Google Ads and Meta Ads work covers the pages your ads send people to.
About this article
Google's guidance is quoted from Google Ads Help, Google Analytics Help and Google Search Central, read on 20 October 2026. The benchmark is Unbounce's 2024 report and the test result is Vodafone's, as published by web.dev. The before-and-after example is fictional. We have no landing page test results of our own to publish, so this article claims none. For the path that leads to the page, see our guide to the lead generation funnel.