In this increasingly competitive digital landscape, it’s getting harder and harder to stand out. Even after diligently establishing your search engine optimization (SEO), it may still take an extended period of time before you reap its benefits. This is not the ideal scenario if you’re trying to generate awareness around a specific product, service, or campaign. As a result, many businesses and marketers are turning to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising with its ability to yield immediate returns. In essence, once you agree to the PPC’s fees, you are then guaranteed a top spot in the search engines, thus substantially increasing a potential customer’s awareness of your product.
However, paying for these clicks is only half the work. While it is a shortcut to gaining visibility and increasing your reach online, it’s not enough to actually convert visitors into paying customers. You still have to make sure that you have a user-friendly and functional website to generate a visitor’s full conversion to your product.
Now website design and PPC may belong in different facets of your strategy, but they ultimately go hand in hand in your overall campaign. As an example, if a user clicks on your PPC ad, they are automatically forwarded straight to your website. Once this happens you then owe the search engine a fee for helping you clinch that visit. However, what happens after that click is just as crucial to your success. If visitors don’t end up liking what they see, then your PPC campaign will have been wasted.
Outlined below are three key elements of website design that directly affect the effectiveness of your PPC advertising campaign. Be sure to take note of them before kick-starting your first campaign.
Elements of Website Design That Directly Impact PPC Effectiveness
1 – Website responsiveness
These days it’s rare to find a person who would choose a computer over their mobile device to perform a search engine query. As a business, it’s always safe to assume that your customers are using their smartphones and tablets to both search for and purchase a product. It is thereby essential to ensure your website accommodates the different screen sizes these devices use. The content of your website has to have the capacity to reposition, or resize itself regardless of the device being utilized. This is called a “Responsive” website. If your site is responsive, users will find the site much easier and more fluid to navigate. If not then their inclination will be to move on to a site that is more visually agreeable.
2 – User interface (UI) design
You might ask yourself; do you have the patience to browse through a slow, clunky site for more than a few moments? Your answer is, probably not and your customers won’t, either. Whether real life or online, the design of a store is a major factor in a customers purchasing decision. It is critical then to insure your website is aesthetically pleasing—not something slipshod or thrown together by the inexperienced. It must be professional as it reflects your brand identity, is equipped with solid navigation, and appears pleasing to the eyes.
3 – Page speed
Another factor that can make or break the efficacy of your PPC campaign is page speed. Remember that time when you had dial-up internet and it took minutes to load a single page? Users today don’t want the same experience, so don’t disappoint them with poor page loading times. In fact, according to some studies, consumers are likely to leave a page if they’re forced to wait more than three seconds to see the page. Your site could have a great design and valuable content, but if it doesn’t load as quickly as the user expects it to, then you’ve lost a potential customer.
Wrapping up
Don’t waste your PPC campaign by maintaining a poorly-designed and slow-loading website. If you need assistance with creating a digital experience that will delight the eye and entice the buy in your customers, get in touch with our web design agency in Anchorage today! We’re happy to help.
