Landing Page Experience – WBE
Background
Search Engine Marketing SEM is almost one third of the spending (millions of GBP per month) compared to other marketing channels MVF uses. It has been one of the successful channels but lately quite susceptible to Google’s algorithm changes.
Google wants to make its search engine user friendly and hence tightening up UX for the Pay Per Click PPC landing pages. Therefore, UX has become one of the business requirements to improve the quality score of the landing page. In summary, quality score is calculated based on three criteria:- expected clickthrough rate (CTR), ad relevance and landing page experience.
WBE Landing Page Experience (LPE) project was one of the key projects we worked on during COVID pandemic. The success of this project means we can bring back more people who are on furlough back to work.
Challenges
The timing and complexity of WBE PPC initiative demands masterful project management to make it a success.
Biddable, CRO, Marketing Operations, Design and Dev teams have a vast amount of insights on WBE PPC Page. The challenge was to make it accessible on demand to all team members.
Adopting research informed bidding strategy was a new concept but an important factor to improve the expected CTR and the Ad relevance to the users.
WBE PPC page always has been business centric. To influence project team mates to wear empathy hat and turn the page into a user centric one was crucial and perhaps the only way to improve the Landing page experience.
Rising CPC & Declining Margin
Landing Pages with low quality score has to bid higher PPC on Google. MVF landing pages not being built for a great user experience, became quite susceptible to Google's algorithm change.
EAT of Landing Page
Since the landing page only had a form with minimal content, it did not convey an idea of Expertise, Authority & Trust (EAT) for the user. And causing users to bounce quickly with a minimal time on site.
Mobile Compliance
The PPC pages are mostly desktop focused and not catered for mobile devices. It is a big issue if the page needs to attain higher page score.
Value Alignment
Due to the teams like sales, biddable, publishing, CRO & Dev all working in isolation to improve the KPI they won, the value proposition between the ads and the landing pages are not usually aligned.
Silo Behind Poor Page Score
Different teams working in silo and trying to improve narrow KPI causing poor Quality Score and not so great landing page experience.
WBE PPC Page - 2018/2019
Based on Google’s industry report and the stats from SEM Rush, the opportunity landscape for website builders is huge (100M+). MVF attempt to exploit the opportunity has been an epic fail so far.
Below is the screenshot of how the WBE PPC page looks like along with some of the key issues mentioned on the left hand side of the image.
Inside Out Thinking
We want to have higher level of conversion on the affiliate click out rate. Let's put more website builder blocks.
Silo Process
Biddable, CRO & MOps all working on their own to improve their team level KPIs, as per the image attached at the top of the page.
Poor Research
Lack of competitor analysis, surveys, pools, user interviews, keyword analysis, heatmap analysis for the page.
Poor Content Strategy
The page targets both general & e-commerce users who have very different requirements. This general target costs more for bidding as MVF has pay for the expensive elephant keywords.
Poor Funnel Alignment
The page only caters needs for high intent users who want to click out to the affiliate brands.
No Mobile Compatibility
The page is not optimised for performance and lacks mobile compatibility.

WBE PPC Page - 2020
Let’s explore what we are doing differntly this time to makeWBE PPC page success.
Project Management
After forming the project team, we created a project plan. A RACI matrix was assigned to the plan so that all the project team members are clear about their role in the project. (sample plan below)
Defining Communication
New slack channel was created for the project and we defined the frequency and type of communications like daily/weekly slack updates on KPI and bi-weekly stand up.

Research Work
We conducted surveys, competitor analysis, heat-map analysis, heuristic evaluation, usability testing, SEM campaign analysis. Details found in my Google Drive portfolio shared with the recruiters.
Shared Ownership
As seen in the screenshot below, most of the project artifacts including journey map, competitor analysis, product strategy, content strategy, design artifacts are accessible in one place.

Content Strategy
We conducted surveys, competitor analysis, heat-map analysis, heuristic evaluation, usability testing, SEM campaign analysis. Details found in my Google Drive portfolio shared with the recruiters.
Funnel Alignment
After gathering insights from research work, I led the content workshop with the key stakeholders. The outcome was a content strategy that caters for different stages of the marketing funnel.

Expertise, Authority, Trust - EAT
We made the new landing page more relatable by bringing our experts front and center. We focused on communicating both pros and cons about the product to be more trust worthy. We tried to be more transparent by sharing our process for rating and review with our users.
Mobile First Design
We designed the PPC page to be mobile first approach. Having performance in mind, both mobile and desktop pages score A grade for GTMatrix perforamance testing. It also caters for device specific interactions like tooltip for extra information on desktop and slide up for mobile.


Learnings & Outcomes
Forming a great team around the project helped us deliver the WBE PPC page in time.
Involving the development team early in the project helped us address some of the performance issues on design stage.
SEM pages are susceptible to algorithm changes. Focusing on landing page experience for the users can not only rank the page high on SEM algorithm but also make the product relatable and trustworthy.
User Experience is responsibility of everyone. If we create a collaborative environment and shared ownerships of UX artifacts, people contribute in a very interesting way.
Ambitious tests can bring incredible innovation and 10x outcomes. If it does not produce the desiered commercial outcome, continue to iterate until it does. 😉