Case Study: Google AdWords – Optimized Pages Vs Splash Pages

Oftentimes, digital marketers have little control over the look and feel of the landing page they are given to serve prospective customers online. At Sundown Marketing we’re lucky enough to have complete control over the landing pages (with client consent of course), so we decided to test what works better for an AdWords campaign: the traditional “splash” landing page which usually consists of very few words, but tons of over-the-top calls to action, or a traditional optimized page, with SEO best practices in mind.

For this case study we used three ad groups:

1. For ad group A, our strategy was to send users to an SEO optimized landing page, without making any changes to the page.
2. For ad group B, our strategy was to send users to an SEO optimized landing page, but we added one call to action, a specialized contact form.
3. For ad group C, our strategy was to send users to a unique “splash” page created specifically for this ad campaign.

As you can see from above, we utilized two SEO optimized landing pages and just one splash page, but we felt it was important to study the impact of a high value call to action on an existing SEO optimized landing page.

After two weeks here are the results we saw from our three ad groups:

Ad performance:

The first two ad groups were the SEO landing pages, and they did fairly well in the first two weeks of existence. The first one produced 50 clicks, with a click-through-rate of almost 9%, while the second one produced 124 clicks with a click-through rate of just over 4%. At first glance, you might say that ad group C did not do well in comparison to the first two. Only 9 clicks. However, it did produce a very high click-through-rate at almost 14%.

Now, none of this tells us how the landing page performed, only how the ads performed, right? However, there is something we can deduce here that might be telling, and that is the number of impressions. If the splash landing page contributed to a low-quality score for the keywords, then the ads might have been served less frequently. However, the keywords in ad group C had quality scores of “8”. That is high quality score. Meanwhile, the quality score of the other ad groups were 7, 8, and 9. That’s pretty good too, so it seems the landing page has not affected the quality score of the keywords. The fact that ad group C had fewer impressions must simply be because it was searched for less frequently than the other two ad groups.

Now, let’s get into how the landing pages performed once users were there. Below is the Analytics data for the AdWords campaign that tells us a little bit about that: