Why Are My Ads Getting Clicks but No Leads? 4 Landing Page Fixes

Running Google ads feels like the solution to get more leads, but is it working? While you’re pouring thousands of dollars into your ad budget, you’re not guaranteed results. Google will call you and tell you all that you can fix within the ads themselves, but there’s often a problem you haven’t considered yet. Your landing pages.

If people are clicking on your ads, going to your landing page, but not converting? You know you have a problem with your website. No matter how great your ad is, if your customers get to a page that doesn’t sell you, they won’t buy.

What’s stopping those clicks from becoming conversions? In this blog, we’re going to break down 4 common problems with ad landing pages and how to fix them.

Before we get to the most common issues, let’s review what makes a good landing page.

People coming to your website through your ads are in two potential stages of the buyer’s journey. Either they’ve never seen you and your organization before, so they have no information about you. Or, they’ve been researching you a lot and the ad may be that last push they need to make a buying decision.

When you’re reaching those colder leads (say with display or search ads), you need to send them to a landing page that answers their questions. If you’re retargeting past visitors and showing them ads to push them over the edge, they don’t need as much to make that final choice.

If you mix these up, cold leads won’t trust you and warm leads will get annoyed with you.

If you’re showing up as an ad to someone who’s never seen you before, they don’t know you. This means they don’t trust you either. One of the most important things we can do with our marketing is to build that trust online with our audience. And yes, you can do that in one landing page with cold traffic.

When you’re selling to colder traffic, you’ll want to send them to a longer landing page. This page should present your points in different ways and provide the evidence they need to trust you. A good landing page for colder leads needs to include:

• Lots of social proof: Include reviews or testimonials, “As seen in” or client logos, or case study snippets.
• Problem hook: Make sure they understand that you know what they’re going through up front so they keep reading and believe in your solution.
• FAQs: Your colder leads will have more questions. Address those to keep them from hitting the back button.
• Multiple CTAs: On a longer page, use multiple calls to action so they can make that decision as soon as they’re ready.

Are you doing a retargeting campaign and reaching mostly warmer leads? Send them to a shorter landing page. They know about you and potentially have built trust with you. This page needs to give them enough to push them over the edge from looking to conversion.

With warmer leads, you still need to offer some social proof, but you don’t need to repeat yourself. Longer pages can actually be a barrier to those who have almost made up their minds. Instead, a warm-leads landing page should have:

• Clear, straight-to-the-point header: Your H1 should tell them immediately what the offer is, so there’s no confusion.
• Easy forms: Place your lead form high on the page and reduce the number of required fields. Every field you ask for reduces their chances of converting.
• Reinforce, don’t educate: They already know something about you. Remind them why they’ve been researching you with a few quick, big wins if they convert.
• Add scarcity or urgency: If you’re trying to get someone to sign up after they’ve been researching you for a while, it helps to create a sense of urgency to give them the final push.

No matter how great and accurate your ad is, if the page you’re sending people to doesn’t match, they’re not going to convert. Often, we spend so much time writing the ad copy that we forget to match it to the landing page.

If your landing page feels generic (or you’re sending people to the homepage), potential leads can get confused about what you’re actually helping with. Remember: if your user has to think for more than a few seconds to confirm they’ve clicked the right thing, they’re gone.

One quick way to fix this issue? Match your H1 and H2s with the ad copy. Your landing page should use the same verbiage throughout. After all, that content is what got people to click on an ad; use it to reinforce that you have the solution to their problems.

Putting the ad copy in headings helps it stand out and get their attention. Plus, mirror that promise in buttons. Instead of “submit” or “buy now,” reuse some of that benefit content like “Claim My Discount.”

Is this the same sort of problem as a message mismatch? Absolutely. When you set up your ads, you’re telling Google and other platforms what search terms you want to appear under. If you aren’t using those same terms throughout your landing page copy, you’re causing confusion to your leads.

It’s more than human confusion, though. Google, in particular, will raise or lower your ad costs based on how well the landing page matches searcher intent. Not optimizing the page for SEO and matching it to your ads makes Google think they’ve sent someone to a page that isn’t an answer to their problems.

Low quality scores drive up your costs.

Thankfully, the days of repeating the same keyword or keyphrase over and over are gone. Google can now recognize search intent beyond that repetition. Make sure the entire page’s copy semantically aligns with what people were looking for when they clicked on your ads in the first place.

On your landing page, ensure your main keyword is in the H1, then use synonyms in the H2s down the page. Make sure you’re answering their questions and mirroring the promise of your ad.

You also want to ensure the page’s technical SEO is taken care of.

Are you using the language your client uses, or targeting keywords that match your technical jargon? This is perhaps the biggest issue I see in SEO campaigns in general, but it applies to ads as well.

We cannot reach our customers if we’re not talking how they talk. We need to use their language, keep them the hero of the story, and avoid talking above them. No one will convert on a landing page when they don’t understand exactly what it is you do or what problem you’re helping them solve.

You also won’t reach the right audience if you’re targeting the wrong keywords to begin with. No one wants to show up to competitors, who may be the only people using your technical jargon.

Not sure you’re using your customers’ lingo? Ask them. Set up meetings with 5 of your favorite clients, and dig into how they talk about their problems and your solution. If this isn’t an option, I recommend reading through the comment sections where your ideal audience might be spending time and see how they talk about things.

Then, on the landing page, make sure you’re not only using their lingo, but also ask yourself, “So what?” Your message needs to be clear about the benefit for them to hand over their email or phone number or make a purchase. Keep the content focused on those benefits and avoid spending too much time talking about the features.

No one really cares how you solve their problems; they just want you to fix it.

Pro tip: Make your content super easy to skim through by using bulleted lists, bolding important sections, and writing short, digestible sections.

All the great copy in the world won’t help if not everyone can read it. Perhaps the biggest problems I see with ad landing pages (beyond the message not aligning) are that they don’t follow web accessibility best practices.

Without following basic WCAG standards, you can be excluding up to 27% of your target audience from using the page. Poor color contrast, tiny fonts, and hard-to-use forms mean people leave your site. No one wants to work that hard to give you money.

Web accessibility requires several steps, but you can get quick wins with simple checks and improvements.

First, look for missing ALT text and avoid putting text in any images. You want the text to be text, so Google and AI can read your page as well as individuals using assistive technology.

Second, check for color contrast issues with WebAim’s contrast checker. Low contrast makes your text hard for color-blind people to see, and it makes it difficult to read for anyone with vision issues.

Third, make sure your font size is at least 16px. We want to ensure everyone can read what’s on our page.

Fourth, use the correct heading sizes throughout your content. Not only the semantic HTML tags, but the visual sizes will help orient people with the importance of your content.

And fifth, run through your landing page with a keyboard only. Can they get to the form or the conversion page without using a mouse? If not, you’re preventing people from converting.

When you hear people brag about their high conversion rates, it’s not magic. All they’re doing is removing the friction to go from click to conversion.

Landing pages that perform well are aligned with the ads that brought people to the website in the first place and then built to be super easy to use. We want to ensure that we’re also giving people enough information to decide whether to convert.

If someone clicks on your ad and gets to your landing page, they could decide that you’re not the right fit for them. But make sure they’re making that choice based on all of the information they need and ensure they know exactly how you can help them.

Start with your message. Make it super simple for people to see what it is you do to help and that you understand their problems. Then work through the other solutions in this blog. Watch the right leads start trickling in.