Landing Pages for Google Ads: 9 Must-Haves

Most advertisers who tell us their Google Ads are not working have healthy campaigns and a page that quietly loses everyone. The clicks arrive. The budget goes out. Nothing arrives back. And because the Google Ads interface reports so much about ads and so little about what happens after the click, the page is the last place anyone looks.

That is the wrong order. The auction decides whether someone visits you. The page decides whether they buy. Improving an ad on a page that cannot convert simply raises the price of the same disappointment.

This is a decision guide, not a design tutorial. Nine requirements, why each one earns its place, which of them you can defer, and how to tell whether the page or the campaign is actually costing you money. The video below walks through the same ideas with real page examples.

PART 1 · DIAGNOSE

The Click Is Bought. The Enquiry Is Earned.

IN BRIEFLanding pages for Google Ads sit outside the auction but inside the outcome. You pay for the visit either way. The page is the only place where that fixed cost turns into a variable return, which is why a properly managed Google Ads account treats the destination as part of the campaign rather than as someone else’s department.

Here is the arithmetic that makes people uncomfortable. Doubling your click-through rate doubles your traffic and roughly doubles your bill. Doubling your conversion rate doubles your enquiries at exactly the same bill. Both are worth doing. Only one of them is free.

The page also feeds back into the campaign. Google states that landing page experience is one of the three components behind Quality Score, alongside expected clickthrough rate and ad relevance. A weak page is not just a conversion problem, it is a diagnostic that shows up in the account.

• The page cannot be fixed by bidding. No bid strategy rescues a page that answers a different question from the ad.
• The page is testable cheaply. One paid campaign already sends it qualified, intent-heavy traffic.
• The page outlasts the campaign. Pause the ads and the improvements still serve organic and referral visitors.

BENCHMARK BRIEFING 1 OF 4

What Google Grades When It Grades Your Landing Page

IN BRIEFLanding page experience is one of three Quality Score components, and Google is specific about what it rewards: relevance to the search, useful and original content, transparency, and ease of navigation. Reading the components separately tells you which one to work on, the same way raising Quality Score by component beats treating it as one number.

Note where the third row sends you. Landing page experience is the only component you cannot fix inside the Google Ads interface, which is exactly why it is the one most accounts leave alone for years.

PART 2 · DESIGN

The Nine Must-Haves, in the Order They Pay Off

IN BRIEFNine requirements separate a landing page for Google Ads from an ordinary web page. They are ordered by payoff, not by effort, message match and a single action move the number most, and the later items only become measurable once the earlier ones hold. Treat the list as a build sequence for a website built to convert rather than to describe.

1. Message match above the fold. The exact promise from the ad appears in the first heading. A searcher who clicked “aircon service KL, same day” should read those words, not “Welcome to our company”.
2. One offer and one action. Paid traffic arrives with one question. A page offering a quote, a newsletter, a brochure and a showroom visit converts worse than one that offers a quote.
3. Proof a stranger can check. Company registration, a real address, real photos of real staff or work. Malaysian buyers are wary of pages that could belong to anyone.
4. A form that asks only what you will act on. Every field is a small tax. If nobody reads the “how did you hear about us” answer, delete the field.
5. A phone or WhatsApp path. A large share of local buyers will not fill a form at all but will send a message immediately. Making them choose your channel loses them.
6. A layout built for a thumb. Buttons reachable one-handed, text legible without pinching, no interstitial that hides the offer.
7. Load speed inside the published thresholds. Speed is the one requirement that silently deletes visitors before they can dislike anything.
8. Conversion tracking wired before launch. An untracked page is not a landing page, it is a guess. Fix this before the campaign starts, never after.
9. Honest pricing. A range, a starting figure, or a plain sentence explaining why a quote is needed. Silence reads as expensive.

Two of these are worth arguing about. Item 5 annoys designers who want a single clean call to action, and item 9 annoys owners who fear giving competitors information. Both objections are real. Both usually lose to the enquiry count.

BENCHMARK BRIEFING 2 OF 4

What Google Publishes About Slow Pages and Lost Visitors

IN BRIEFGoogle’s own advertiser guidance puts hard numbers on delay: more than half of mobile visits are abandoned past three seconds, and a one-second retail delay can cut mobile conversions by up to a fifth. Those figures reframe speed as a budget line, not a technical preference, the same reframing behind fixing slow pages before they cost rankings.

The third row is the one worth sitting with. If roughly half your paid mobile traffic never sees the page, then every conversion rate you have ever measured was measured on the survivors.

PART 3 · DESIGN

Do You Need a Dedicated Page, or Will an Existing One Do?

IN BRIEFNot every campaign earns a purpose-built page. Build one when the offer is specific, the spend is meaningful, or the existing page serves a different intent, otherwise point ads at your best existing service page and improve that. Deciding this before you brief a designer is the difference between a build and a rebuild.

One warning on duplication. Building a near-identical paid page beside a page that already ranks creates two thin versions of one idea, which helps neither. If you are unsure whether a page is carrying organic weight, that question belongs to a proper SEO audit of the site before a designer touches anything.

BENCHMARK BRIEFING 3 OF 4

The Speed Thresholds Your Paid Page Has to Clear

IN BRIEFGoogle publishes exact “good” thresholds for the three Core Web Vitals, measured at the 75th percentile of real page views. They give you a pass mark instead of an opinion, which is what a landing page brief needs, and they apply to every channel sending traffic to the page, not only paid.

The layout shift row matters more on paid pages than most people expect. A button that moves 200 milliseconds after the thumb commits does not just annoy, it registers as a misclick, and misclicks rarely get a second attempt.

PART 4 · DEPLOY

Measure the Page Before You Have an Opinion About It

IN BRIEFItem eight of the nine is the one people skip and regret. Form submissions, calls and WhatsApp taps each need their own conversion action before launch. A page without them produces arguments instead of answers, which is why conversion tracking wired properly with GA4 comes before any redesign discussion.

Three separate things get counted, and pages routinely track only the first. A visitor who taps your WhatsApp button and buys the next day is recorded as a bounce if nobody set that tap up as a conversion.

• Form submissions, the easy one, and usually the only one in place.
• Phone taps, a click-to-call on mobile is an enquiry, not a page view.
• WhatsApp taps, in Malaysia this is frequently the largest channel of the three.

Once those exist, resist the urge to judge for a fortnight. Paid landing pages accumulate meaningful data slowly at small budgets, and the temptation to redesign after nine visitors has ruined more pages than bad design ever did.

BENCHMARK BRIEFING 4 OF 4

A Four-Week Order of Work for the Nine Must-Haves

IN BRIEFFixing all nine at once tells you nothing about which one worked. This illustrative four-week sequence groups the must-haves so every week ends with a defensible conclusion. It is the staged logic that keeps a non-converting Google Ads account diagnosable while you work on it.

Week 0 is the one people negotiate away, and it is the only week that cannot be added retrospectively. Data you did not collect in week 1 is not available in week 4.

PART 5 · DRIVE

Is It the Page, or Is It the Campaign?

IN BRIEFCompare the same page across traffic sources. If organic and referral visitors convert reasonably and paid visitors do not, the campaign is buying the wrong searches, a targeting problem that no amount of page work fixes, and one IZI checks before recommending any spend.

The test is simple and most accounts already have the data for it. Segment conversion rate by source for the same URL, then read the split.

• All sources convert badly. The page is the constraint. Work the nine in order.
• Only paid converts badly. The keywords or match types are pulling in the wrong intent, not the page.
• Paid converts well but costs too much. Neither is broken. This is a bid and budget conversation.

The uncomfortable third case deserves naming. Sometimes the page is fine, the targeting is fine, and the offer simply is not competitive in that market at that price. That is a business decision, and it should be made deliberately rather than absorbed as ten more months of underperforming managed Google Ads spend.

COMMON QUESTIONS

Landing Pages for Google Ads: Common Questions

1. Can I send Google Ads traffic to my homepage?

You can, but it is the most expensive habit in most accounts. It depends on how specific your ad is, a broad brand campaign can survive a homepage, while a service-and-city ad cannot, because the visitor has to hunt for what the ad promised. Point the ad at the most specific page you already own instead.

2. How many form fields should a Google Ads landing page have?

As few as you will genuinely act on, which for most Malaysian service businesses means name, contact number and one line about the job. It depends on your sales process, a high-value quote may justify a longer form because it filters time-wasters. Every field you keep should have someone who reads it.

3. Does my landing page affect my Google Ads costs?

Indirectly, yes. Landing page experience is one of the three components Google documents behind Quality Score, alongside expected clickthrough rate and ad relevance. It depends on how far below average you sit, the practical effect is usually smaller than the effect of simply converting more of the visitors you already pay for.

4. Should I show prices on a landing page for Google Ads?

Show something, a range, a starting figure, or a plain explanation of what drives the quote. It depends on how variable your work is, but silence rarely reads as flexible. Visitors who cannot find any price signal usually assume the worst and check a competitor who published one.

5. How long before I can judge a new landing page?

Long enough to gather enough conversions to be more than noise, which at typical small-business budgets means weeks rather than days. It depends on your click volume, a page taking thirty clicks a week tells you almost nothing after three days. Fix the obvious defects immediately, then leave the page alone and let it accumulate data.