How to build a Google Ads landing page for B2B SaaS

Building Google Ads landing pages for B2B SaaS can be tedious.

Perhaps you lack the right tools, and creating pages for new ad campaigns is slow and expensive.

Or even if your tools are just fine, you don’t feel confident about your landing page performance. You might ask yourself if this is the highest possible conversion rate or if I am missing something. 

Those thoughts creep in, especially if you often see the Google Ads conversion rate go up and down in your ad campaign analytics.

Here, I’m hoping to remove some of that uncertainty by showing you how to build a high-converting Google Ads landing page for your B2B SaaS. Instead of focusing on the design details, I’ll walk you through the steps that increase your chances of crafting the optimal landing page for every campaign.

Start from search intent

The search intent reveals the website visitor’s stage of the buyer journey, and it should guide your landing page copy and structure from the start.

Let’s look at four search intents through a concrete example SaaS company.

Imagine you are running a B2B SaaS which helps companies create landing pages. In Google search, your leads might be using these search phrases:

• Google Ads examples

• How to build a landing page

• Landing page tools

• [Provider] landing page

Google’s most important goal is to get the search intent right. For each search phrase above, Google wants to show the best-matching landing pages to make sure people continue using their product in the future. They call it message match.

So, how do those four examples differ from each other? 

‘Google Ads examples’ is a search phrase for someone who’s not necessarily thinking about SaaS landing page components yet, but they will soon find out that just creating a spectacular ad copy won’t be enough to turn visits into conversions (Informational). 

Your fictional SaaS business could have a blog post highlighting the best ad copywriting examples – throwing in subtle cues that the reader needs a high-converting landing page soon after. Running ads targeting this broad search term might not be the best choice if you are on a shoestring budget, though.

‘How to create a landing page’ is a search phrase for a problem aware lead who already knows that a successful paid advertising campaign needs a landing page, but they are not sure how to implement one (Educational). The best possible landing page for this search phrase is probably a step-by-step blog post.

However, competition in SEO is fierce – you might need to build an educational landing page with case studies and spend a share of your ad budget to get visibility. 

Again, if you have a low budget, you might prioritize search intents that are very close to the conversion action. However, getting top-of-the-funnel leads to your website helps you increase conversions later. You can use Google’s remarketing tools to make sure your ad shows up when the same leads continue their journey and get closer to the purchasing decision.

The search intent of leads searching for ‘landing page tools’ reveals that they are on the cusp of becoming customers (Commercial). Your Google Ads landing page would definitely showcase why your tool is the best choice and what makes it different from others.

Finally, someone mentioning the name of a tool and a search keyword (‘[Provider] landing page’) is as ready to buy as a lead can be (Transactional). If they search for your competitor, you might use a comparison page in your Google Ads campaign to make sure leads are aware of the most critical differences between each tool.

Craft an effective copy text

I’m sure you can already tell that the optimal landing page copy depends on the search intent. 

That’s one of the main reasons why creating a high-converting landing page is so challenging. In addition to the target Google search keyword, which you might have found through Google’s keyword planner, you’ll need to understand the buyer journey, search intent, and what other alternatives are out there.

The alternative ways of solving a problem point you towards the second challenge – defining value proposition and writing an effective copy text.

The value proposition communicates why buyers should choose your product, and it can be unbelievably hard for SaaS companies to get it right. Instead of stuffing all features, you’ll need to come up with a flagship benefit that guides all your copywriting.

What makes a great value proposition, and how does it show on website copy texts?

Again, let’s take a look at a concrete example.

Penpot is an open-source design tool that helps designers and developers get rid of back-and-forth. I’m sure you’ve seen the challenge before: designers ship a pixel-perfect Figma file to developers, but the implemented landing page doesn’t necessarily match expectations.

Penpot’s hero highlights its key value proposition – instead of ‘back-and-forth’, it talks about bridging the gap between developers and designers and doing the work together.

Right after the hero, they make sure you are familiar with the problem and that you are the ideal customer profile. If you are not, this is the point when you hit the back button and never come back. It’s fine – Penpot is only looking for leads who have experienced this issue.

And then comes the solution – designs exported from Penpot already include the main building blocks for developers.

A job well done, and Penpot has a relatively high chance of converting their ideal customer profiles to sign ups.

If you spend time creating your value proposition, focusing on the flagship benefit and customers’ most critical pain point, the SaaS landing page copywriting turns from agony to breeze. 

Build a high-converting landing page

The high-converting Google Ads landing page structure would be educational for leads unaware of the problem and solution. But let’s focus on problem and solution aware leads – people who are likely to make a purchase decision in the near future.

You should not overthink the structure too much, as there are hundreds of studies showing what makes a great landing page. I’d encourage you to start with the minimum viable startup landing page:

• Minimal navigation with a logo and CTA button.

• A compelling hero element with a title, description, CTA button, and image/video.

• Social proof, such as customer logos, quotes, and ratings.

• The problem section highlighting the primary customer pain point.

• Key benefits and a few steps showing how to use your product.

• Pricing.

• FAQ.

• CTA element.

While your company might not be a startup any longer, the best Google Ads landing pages have a lot of things in common – just like an early stage startup should do, your landing page needs to focus on a single search phrase, problem, and flagship benefit. The more complex your page, the less likely conversions are.

Ensure message match

So far, we’ve discussed the Google Ads landing page in isolation from your Google Ads account and ad copy texts. 

While the landing page is important to get right, you won’t see any conversions coming in if your search terms and ad copy texts are not bringing in the right kind of traffic. 

That’s what marketers call a landing page message match. A perfect landing page fully matches the ad copy texts and keyword search intent, making sure that the visitor follows a cohesive narrative starting from the moment they discovered your product via Google all the way to the sign up. 

For inspiration, see how Bigin, a CRM by Zoho, has done fantastic work by matching the advertising copy to the landing page hero text.

Google has built an Ads Quality Score to make it easier for you to check if you’ve got all three components – search keyword, ad copy text, and landing page – optimized for high performance and conversions. The higher the score, the less you pay to show your ads.

Run A/B tests via Google Experiments

Even if you follow Google Ads’ best practices and the steps discussed in this blog post, you might not see the best results. 

Perhaps the flagship problem you’ve chosen doesn’t resonate as much as you like. Your copy texts might not describe the problem in customers’ words. Or the search intent is much more educational and informational than you thought. 

There are countless reasons why your landing page conversions tank.

That’s why you’ll need landing page tools that allow rapid testing and iterating. 

An A/B testing tool might be a good choice if you have thousands of visitors per month on each landing page and the budget to hire a conversion rate optimization team.

However, I recommend using heat mapping tools like Crazy Egg to analyze how your leads consume the page content and build multiple landing page versions based on your findings and insights.

With tools like LandingRabbit, new landing pages are fast and easy to build and publish on your existing website.

Once you’ve got a new version ready, you can easily run A/B tests with Google Ads Experiments.

Simply create a copy of the ad group and change the landing page URL. Google will run a test for you with a split budget.

Are you struggling to build new landing pages for your SaaS? Sign up for LandingRabbit’s waiting list today and be the first in line to publish new SaaS landing pages on your existing website – in minutes.