Deciding where to send your traffic is one of the first big decisions you must make when setting up your Google Ad campaign.

Should you send them to your main website or should you create dedicated landing pages for your Google Ad campaign?

Note: When I say "dedicated landing page", I'm referring to those landing pages that have zero navigation and are essentially a "squeeze page".

I'll typically start all campaigns with the main website because even if I end up using a dedicated landing page, a good percentage of visitors to the landing page will go to main website and convert there.

This means that if you're NOT tracking conversions on the main website and ONLY tracking conversions on a landing page, you're likely missing a good 20-30% of conversions that aren't being attributed to the Google Ad Campaign.

It's important we're able to attribute those conversions to Google Ads so we can make better business decisions.

After starting the campaign, if I feel like a dedicated landing page is worth testing, I'll then work on setting that up to test by the end of month 1.

This isn't always the case however. Sometimes the main website is great and converts just fine. In this case, your efforts are better spent optimizing the campaign in other areas than it is creating and testing dedicated landing pages.

A business should always strive to make the main website as high converting as possible and not rely on creating these dedicated landing pages. This is because a customer's journey isn't always linear, meaning they don't always buy on first visit.

If they come back to your main website days later, it's best if they can easily find the high converting version of your product's sale pitch.

This isn't the case if your main website converts very poorly and you're sending your Google Ad traffic to a dedicated landing page that's optimized for conversions. In this scenario, when they come back to your website days later, they're not likely to find that high converting landing page they originally landed on.

‍