Matching Your Ad to Your Landing Page

You’re hungry, and you would like a burrito. You leave your office and take a stroll down the street to find a place to eat a burrito.

“Mmm, burritos,” you think to yourself.

You see a sign with a burrito on it, with the words, “Delicious!” and “50% off!!” on it.

“Oh yes, burrito time!” you say, rubbing your hands in glee. You walk inside, only to find…

…It’s a sushi place.

“But…” you stammer, upset. “There was a burrito on the sign!”

No deal. They don’t do burritos. Only sushi.

Nightmare, isn’t it?

Scenarios like this harrowing offline experience can play out online, too. When your customer’s experience doesn’t match the expectation you set, there’s sad faces all around.

This is why ads and landing pages are best when they match. Creating a seamless, congruent (or at least non-jarring) experience for your customer is essential for a lot of reasons besides looking nice.

Before we dive in, let’s define what we mean by “message match” and “ad congruence” and such. When a landing page matches an ad, it might use the same colours, logo, tone of voice, or whole bits of copy. The landing page shouldn’t be a clone of the ad, but the message needs to match: visually, emotionally, and on subject. It has to reassure the viewer that what they clicked on is directly related to what they’re seeing.

Why match ads to landing pages?

You have a great idea for an ad, and a great idea for a landing page. Both are great – but they’re very different. Unfortunately, in this situation, two rights make a wrong – or rather, they have to be the same to be good.

But why is this? There are several reasons. One of the most important is that if the customer isn’t immediately sure the page they’re seeing directly correlates with the ad they clicked on, their spam-senses will be tingling. Back in the Wild West days of the internet (and maybe even now, if you use an old browser), it was all too common to click on a link you were interested in only to be bombarded with huge red text, flashing highlights and a big unwanted ad for something you’d never be interested in. Usually these were cases of popups or adware hijacking a legitimate link, but those bad memories linger. And besides, we click on things for a reason: if that reason isn’t met, then we end up frustrated.

A second, and very important, factor is that multiple networks now use landing page experience as a factor in whether your ad gets approved and how much it gets shown. Your Google ads quality score as well as your Facebook ad relevance score depends in part on your message match – in other words, your ad congruence – and how well they mesh. Put another way, if Facebook or Google don’t think your landing page matches your ad, they won’t like it – and that could impact your profits.

Common message matching mistakes

Advertisers can fall short when it comes to message match, for a variety of reasons. If you suspect your ad to landing page continuity is badly calibrated, one of the following may be happening:

You’re directing people to just your homepage.

Thing is, a landing page is designed to appeal to a particular audience interested in a specific offer you’re promoting in your ad. Your homepage is there for everyone. One of the biggest differences is that landing pages don’t usually contain a navigation bar, whereas homepages do – so by giving your prospects more options to click on could be harming your conversions.

You’re doing the ol’ bait and switch.

That’s just mean. Maybe you’re advertising a once-in-a-lifetime offer just to hook a visitor into clicking, but on the landing page they discover the offer isn’t quite as good, or there’s a massive catch, or that you just plain lied. If you’re doing it trying to be funny, no one’s laughing. And if you genuinely think the click is enough to keep them engaging, you’re sadly wrong. Think of your interactions with your audience as a mutual agreement of trust. If a visitor is feeling mislead, that commitment (and thus the “contract”) will become null and void in their mind. They won’t trust your offer – and worse, they won’t ever trust your name if it comes up again.

You assume they see what you see.

When you’re creating an ad and landing page combo, it’s easy to get message-blind. In other words, you can’t see the wood for the trees. In other words, in an effort to create congruence and nuance, you miss something important. You’ve been staring at it for the last twelve hours – but your audience will be coming in brand new.

They also might not react the same as you do to colours, imagery, or wording. There’s a reason most corporate art is incredibly neutral: it’s good to rock the boat when qualifying your customer, as in declaring your stance on a hot-button issue, but to do so successfully takes a skilful hand.

Take a look at the below example:

All in all, it’s a pretty poor match. It’s not the worst – and it’s certainly not deliberately misleading – but it could have been done better.

What they did right:

• Logo matches
• Same colour red throughout
• Similar fonts

What they did wrong:

• Cartoon vs real life imagery
• Businessman vs superhero imagery
• What the software actually does is in very small text in the ad
• The landing page has extra navigation – so more opportunities for the prospect to click away
• The ad has a small CTA (Sign Up Free), but it’s missing on the landing page

How to message match your ad and landing page

If you’re a fairly intuitive or visual person, you might be able to improve your ad to landing page continuity by how well you know your audience and your offer. That’s great! But for the rest of us, there’s a simple checklist we can use to make things a little more scientific: all we need to do is follow the SCENT:

Single Offer
Clarity
Emotion
Need
Thank You Page

In other words, these are all the elements you need to make sure are the same – or very similar – throughout your messaging.

First, you need to make sure you’re promoting just one offer. This is what happens when landing ads lead to homepages: if someone clicks an ad for a specific product, the homepage might have no mention of it. If you’re promoting 20% off, for example, use this in the copy of the ad as well as the landing page – and don’t try and promote multiple offers at once.

Secondly, make sure everything is clear and concise. If it takes more than 5 seconds to understand, it ain’t working. Don’t have too much text on your ads, and don’t have more than one call to action on your landing page. It should be clear what you expect them to do next.

Also, the emotional tone should match from the ad to the landing page. Take a look at this ad from Legoland Toronto:

Awesome! Yeah! Play! Rides! Fun! Build! Now take a look at the page you see when you click on it:

Boring. Text. Small print. Terms and conditions. Woo.

Make sure that if you’re hyping them up in the ad, you don’t fall flat on the landing. And if you have a calm, orderly ad, don’t get all in your face in the landing page.

Otherwise known as urgency, need takes care of why they need to act now. This isn’t so much as creating fake urgency as keeping the urgency consistent. This ties in with giving the user too many options on the landing page – all you need to include is what do you want them to do, how, and when? If there are extra options, you can explain it to them while they’re filling out the form. A countdown timer on your landing page is a great way to remind them of real urgency, such as a limited time offer.

And finally, thank you page. Truth be told, staying on-message isn’t just about your ad and landing page – although they are the most important. Ad congruence is also good to have when going from your landing page or checkout to your thank you page. Why? This reinforces trust, and reassures them they didn’t just send their money or their email to a spammer – you are who you say you are. Your thank you needs to tell your customer that their form submission worked, and what will happen next. (Giving them another offer won’t hurt, either.)

Message matching is simple, and essential. But it’s easily overlooked. Now you know how, take a look at your ads and landing pages, and see if you can make any improvements – and as always, test, test, test!