High bounce rates and low conversions: The landing page solution

At the Partnership for Public Service, we are grateful to have an account with Google Grants that provides us up to $10,000 worth of Google Ads space per month. When we started using this platform in mid-2020, we were spending about $8,000 per month, which generated us about 4,000 clicks to our content and about 40,000 impressions, resulting in almost 50,000 clicks and 500,000 impressions annually.

Lia Collen, our associate marketing manager who runs our Google Ads work, did a great job creating the ads and generating high optimization scores (the score Google uses to tell you if your Ads are optimized).

For some reason, about two months I noticed that the amount of our daily spending had decreased significantly.

Our total daily spend rate from January 1 to March 14

Lia and I looked further and noticed that our cost-per-click hadn’t changed.

Our cost-per-click from January 1 to March 14

What was going on? Our cost hadn’t changed, but our spending was down. The only thing we could determine is that Google was, in a sense, penalizing us and not displaying our ads as much as it used to. Why? We assessed it all came down to analytics: we had high bounce rates and our conversion rates were low. We knew we needed to act, and that action was simple: we needed landing pages that converted visitors into subscribers.

I asked Lia to design a landing page implementation plan, using best practices in landing page design and focusing on the most important initiatives the Partnership wanted to promote. I’m happy to say that we’re in the process of designing these new landing pages and look forward to seeing the impact they have on our display rate (and hopefully getting us back to our previously high spend rate and display rate).

Keep your eyes out for these new landing pages in the next few months. They’ll be linked to our Google Ads and social media posts.

In the meantime, check out the Partnership’s newly designed website (on which the new landing pages will be based!).