Many marketers may focus heavily on split testing and optimizing their ads to produce the best performance, but it can be easy to forget how landing pages factor into a campaign’s success.

A landing page is where a renter’s journey with your property often begins. It’s a standalone web page that potential customers are first brought to after clicking your ad.

It’s where a renter may fill out a guest card or request a tour. It’s also where they could bounce, or leave your website and head to a competitor’s site.

Simply put, optimizing your landing page helps you generate more renter leads at a lower cost. We’ll go over a few key areas you’ll want to examine so you can drive more leads while making the most of your ad budget.

Increase Quality Score to reduce ad spend

If pay-per-click (PPC) ads are part of your strategy to drive renters to your landing page, you’ll want to pay close attention to your Quality Score.

Quality Score is a metric that search engines use to measure your PPC ads’ quality and relevance. Google evaluates your ads, keywords, and landing pages to arrive at a number from one to ten. When your ad has a high Quality Score, Google is letting you know that your PPC ad is relevant and meeting your customers’ needs. The more you meet their needs, the less Google charges you for clicks.

The score is calculated based on three components:

1. Expected clickthrough rate – Google’s estimation of the rate at which ad viewers will click through to your ads
2. Ad relevance – How closely an ad matches the user’s search query
3. Landing page experience – How relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ads

To improve the Quality Score, let’s look at why the landing page experience is so crucial.

Designing the optimal landing page experience

When a renter is conducting a search online, they want the shortest path to the answer. So when they click from the search result to your landing page, you have limited time to hook the renter and lead them to a conversion. An effective landing page ensures that you don’t miss that shot.

Landing page experience assesses the quality of the experience and amount of time that a user has on your website. Renters want a landing page that is relevant to the ad they just clicked, easy to navigate, and provides accurate information.

So – let’s optimize those landing pages. Here are a few things to remember…

Speed matters

The faster your page loads, the happier your site visitors will be, and the more likely they will be to convert into a lead. Website load time–how long it takes for a web page to fully load or appear on screen–directly affects conversion rate. According to HubSpot, website conversion rates decrease by an average of 4.42% with each extra second that a site’s content takes to load.

One way to ensure your site is not loading sluggishly is to optimize the images on your landing page. In the rental space, successful landing pages typically highlight a few key features of a unit, such as a bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen, as well as your most attractive property amenities. These photos are relevant, important information to show the user. By utilizing photo editing software to resize these images, you can ensure your load time won’t be weighed down as well.

You can test your site’s speed with PageSpeed Insights. It’s a tool that provides an overview of your mobile and desktop performance, and it gives you tips to make your page faster. Did we mention it’s free to use?

Focus on conversion rate optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action, or conversion, on a site. Oftentimes, the goal is to encourage a person to get in touch, whether that be through a form submission, phone call or online chat.

For instance, RentSearch. clients aim for users to fill out the ‘Contact us’ submission form, or ‘Click to call’ the property through their site’s phone number or a call tracking number. These two actions are considered conversions. In order to convert more visitors, it’s important to make it easy to locate and take action on the conversion elements.

Any extra time that a visitor must take to find the contact form or phone number, the less likely it is that they will follow through with a conversion. For optimal results, the phone number should be in both the header and footer of the landing page, and the contact submission form should be a clear, large call-to-action.

Effective landing page experience, when paired with a relevant audience, is the perfect formula for paid search conversion rate optimization. Rent. is committed to helping its clients reach this high-intent audience through its network of listing sites: Apartment Guide, Rent.com and Redfin. Our proprietary, first-party audience data ensures your marketing dollars are put to their best use. When you run your PPC campaigns through Rent., your ads are shown to the renters that are right for your community.

Landing page performance is one of the most important indicators of the success of a paid search campaign, and ultimately, your ability to convert leads into renters. Optimizing your conversion rate can lead to Google awarding you a higher Quality Score, increased Ad Position, and a lower cost-per-click. Optimize your landing pages and you may just improve the ROI of your marketing budget.