The opening eBook of the Paid Growth and Campaigns category. It assumes you've done the basic work on offer, website and search ranking, and shows you how to add paid ads as a controlled, measurable layer on top - without burning your first thousand pounds learning what a sensible test looks like.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 45 minute read
Chapter 5
Landing Pages and Follow-Up
Where the click lands and what happens after - the two parts of a paid campaign that decide whether the ad spend turns into customers or just into traffic.
Most small business paid ad money is wasted not by the ad, but by what happens after the click. The ad earns the visit. The visit lands on a page that doesn't pick up where the ad left off. The reader scrolls, gets confused, leaves, and the cost of that visit goes with them. Or the visit becomes an enquiry, the enquiry sits in an inbox for two days, the customer books someone else and the cost of that enquiry is gone too.
These two failure modes - the wrong landing page and the slow follow-up - account for most of the small business ad budgets we've seen burn quietly through. Both are fixable in an afternoon. Neither requires a new platform, a new agency or a bigger budget. Both happen because the owner spent all their attention on the ad and none on what happens after the click.
This chapter covers both. By the end you'll know what the landing page on the other end of your ad needs to do, what to leave off, and the simple follow-up routine that turns enquiries into customers before they cool off.
The full chapter walks through the seven things every ad landing page needs, the six things almost every small business landing page mistakenly includes, the response-time rule that doubles enquiry-to-customer rates and the follow-up sequence we'd put behind every campaign.
Why the homepage is the wrong landing page
Sending paid ad clicks to your homepage is the single most common mistake in small business advertising, and the most expensive. The homepage is built to introduce a business in general. It has navigation to everything you do. It has links to the about page, the blog, the contact form. It tries to serve every possible visitor. A paid ad has already done the introducing. The reader knows roughly who you are and what you offer. They clicked because the ad's promise spoke to them. Landing on a homepage now asks them to find that same promise again, somewhere in a menu, in competition with five other things on the page. Most won't bother.
A landing page does one job: continue the ad. Same offer. Same audience. Same outcome. Same proof. Same next step. The reader should land and immediately recognise that they're in the right place, with no scrolling required to find the bit the ad promised.
The seven things every ad landing page needs
Landing page checklist
A headline that matches the ad's promise, ideally using the same wording
A subheadline that names the reader ("For self-employed plumbers in West Yorkshire...")
One short paragraph or list saying exactly what the offer is and what's included
A real price or a clear pricing range, in plain sight
Two or three pieces of proof - a testimonial, a customer count, a recognisable client name
One single call to action, repeated near the top and again near the bottom
An honest answer to the two or three questions you know customers always ask before they buy
What to leave off
Leave off the full menu. Leave off the blog promotion. Leave off the about-us paragraph. Leave off the social-media icons in the header. Leave off any link that takes the reader away from the next step. Each one is a tiny exit door that some share of paid visitors will take, and you're paying for every visitor who walks out one of them. A focused landing page typically converts two to four times higher than a homepage on the same traffic, with no other change.
The page should match the ad word for word, where it can
If the ad headline says "Same-day plumber in Hackney, fixed-price callout from £75," the landing page headline should say something extremely close. "Hackney plumbers, same-day callout, fixed price from £75." The reader spent half a second deciding to click on a phrase. If the page they land on doesn't repeat that phrase, they spend another second deciding whether they're in the right place, and a meaningful share of them leave during that second. Matching the ad isn't lazy - it's continuity, and continuity is what keeps the visit alive.
Speed and phone-readiness are non-negotiable
Most paid ad clicks come from a phone. If your landing page takes more than three seconds to load on a typical phone connection, you lose roughly half the traffic before they see anything at all. If the page is hard to read on a phone - tiny text, buttons too close together, forms that don't fit the screen - you lose another large chunk of the half that stayed. Test your landing page on your own phone, on mobile data, before you spend a single pound on traffic to it. The earlier eBook Small Business Website covers the basics of phone-first design.
The response-time rule
An enquiry replied to within five minutes is roughly five times more likely to become a customer than an enquiry replied to within an hour, and roughly twenty times more likely than one replied to the next day. That's not a marketing platitude - it's the consistent finding of every study that's looked at it. For a small business with paid ad spend behind it, the response-time rule is the single highest-leverage habit you can build. Every minute the enquiry sits cooling, the cost of that enquiry inches up.
Match the ambition to your reality. If you're a one-person business, you don't need to reply within five minutes during the working day. You do need a clear rule - "all enquiries get a real reply within four working hours" - and you need to set up the notifications that make it possible. Push notifications from your enquiry form to your phone. A small auto-reply that says "thanks, you'll hear back within four hours" so the customer doesn't think their message vanished. A backup person if you'll be out of signal. The earlier eBook Lead Capture and Follow-Up goes deep on the routine, and it's worth reading before you start spending on traffic.
The follow-up sequence behind a campaign
Not every enquiry buys on the first reply. A working follow-up sequence catches the ones that hesitated. The smallest viable version is three touches, manual, over ten days. Touch one is the immediate reply with the answer to their question and the next step. Touch two, three days later, is a short message asking whether they had any other questions. Touch three, a week after that, is a short note saying you'll close their enquiry on file unless they want to pick it back up. Roughly one in four enquiries that didn't reply to the first message replies to one of the next two. That's pure profit on ad spend you've already paid for.
The minimum viable follow-up
Within four working hours: a real, personal first reply with the answer and a clear next step
Three days later: a short "any other questions?" follow-up
Seven days after that: a polite "closing on file unless you'd like to pick it back up" message
What to do this week
Build or fix one focused landing page for the campaign you scoped in chapter three. Match the headline to the ad. Strip out everything that isn't the offer, the proof or the next step. Test it on your phone. Then open the door at the other end - turn on the notification that puts new enquiries on your phone within seconds, write the four-hour auto-reply, and write the three-touch follow-up sequence somewhere you'll remember to use it. None of this requires a new tool. All of it can be done in a working morning.
In the next chapter we cover the four numbers that tell you whether the ads are working, and the dozen vanity numbers that quietly mislead small business owners. The earlier eBook Website Analytics covers the wider measurement habits.
The rest of this chapter walks through the practical steps, the templates and the checklists you need to put it into action. It includes worked examples, copy frameworks and the small decisions that make the difference between a plan that sits in a drive and one that gets used.
Inside you'll find a step-by-step playbook, a downloadable template, a checklist you can run this week and a short list of common mistakes to avoid before you start.
The full action plan, broken into weekly steps.
Ready-to-use scripts, templates and checklists.
Worked examples for different sized businesses.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them.
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