How to tailor your ads and landing pages for better results

To create effective online ad campaigns, it’s important to tailor the content of each ad to specific segments of your potential customer base. Depending on what type of shoppers you’re looking to target, you may also want to tailor your landing pages, which are the pages that shoppers land on after clicking on your ads.

Learn how to provide clear and concise information that encourages your potential customers to take the actions you desire.

1. Why should I tailor my ads?

2. How should I tailor my ads and landing pages?

3. What information should I include in my ads?

When you tailor your ads to your target audience, this makes your ads more relevant to them. This, in turn, increases the chances of your audience clicking through to your landing page, and taking action.

How do you go about tailoring your ads? Don’t just state your product benefits in your ad – go one step further and communicate why a product is right for your potential customers.

Does this mean you’ll need to create hundreds or thousands of different ads, each targeted at a different type of shopper? Not necessarily. Instead, you may choose to create a few focused ad campaigns for specific groups of consumers, known as segments.

First, look at data from your past online ad campaigns to understand the characteristics of your most valuable customers. Next, divide your customers into segments according to their characteristics, then come up with a few versions of your ads to suit the different segments.

Shoppers are likely to be attracted by different messages depending on which stage of the buying process they are in. Bearing this in mind, you may tailor your ads and landing pages to different stages of that process — such as inspiration, research, or comparison.

To do this, use the tools in Google Ads and Google Analytics to find out what sort of shoppers are browsing your site. Once you’ve done that, tailor your ads and landing pages to be relevant to your shoppers.

At the beginning

You can tailor your ads to potential customers who have never visited you before—those at the beginning of their buying journey—by using the audience tools in Google Ads. These tools let you create lists of internet users grouped by a general interest such as sports, cars, or weddings.

The more specific you are when creating your lists, the higher the chance that your ads will perform well. Let's say a formal dress shop in New Delhi wants to reach wedding shoppers, so it includes the term "lehenga" in one of its ad campaigns.

Given that different ads appear to different users, these ads won't put off visitors who are seeking formal dresses for other occasions, because those users won't see them. The lehenga-oriented ads, however, could attract a new segment who might have previously dismissed the store as only offering dresses for proms or cocktail parties.

After clicking through

Tailored ads may bring more potential customers to your site, but they won't stay long if they don't find what they're looking for. For a successful online ad campaign, you need to tailor your landing pages—the URL your ad links to—as well as the ads themselves.

As a general rule of thumb, your landing page should not be your home page. It can be tempting to link to your home page, so potential customers may browse as they’d like. That said, keep in mind that visitors may leave a website quickly if they don’t immediately see the product or service featured in your ad.

For example, if a sporting goods store in Mumbai creates an ad focusing on running shoes, the landing page URL should take the shopper directly to a page that displays running shoes. This way, the brand will minimise the risk of potential customers leaving because they’re unable to find the product they’re interested in.

Bringing potential customers back

Not every shopper who clicks through on an ad will make a purchase on your site. To help you re-engage shoppers who have not made a purchase, Google Analytics collects useful information about them, such as the pages they viewed and the products they added to their basket.

With this data, you can identify the items your shoppers are interested in, and potentially entice them to return to your site. To do this, run a remarketing campaign to show highly relevant ads to past website visitors. For example, a potential customer browsing shoes on an eCommerce website may start seeing ads showing the shoes they previously viewed.

In a nutshell, include any information that is relevant to your potential customers, and may encourage them to purchase your product, call your company, or visit your retail store.

If you’ve just started to invest in online marketing, you might not have much information to work with. But as time passes and more people visit your site, you’ll amass more data about your website visitors using Google Analytics. This includes:

• Which pages they visit
• How long they stay on your website
• How they interact with your site (whether they add items to a shopping cart, download an ebook or whitepaper, etc.)

From here, use the information to tailor the content shown in your ads. For example, a marketing agency whose previous visitors spent a long time browsing pages related to SEO could create ads with the copy "Want to improve your company’s SEO?" to appeal to potential customers seeking relevant products.