Running PPC without preparing your website first is like pouring water into a leaky bucket. You can keep adding more budget, more keywords, and more clever targeting - but the results will usually disappoint.

And yet, this is one of the most common mistakes we see.

Businesses come to us wanting to “improve performance in Google Ads” or “scale Meta”, when the real problem isn’t in the ad account at all.

It’s the website they’re sending the traffic to.

With well set up PPC campaigns, you’re sending high-intent traffic to your site.

These aren’t casual browsers. These are people actively searching, comparing, and deciding. That makes PPC incredibly powerful. But also very unforgiving.

If your website is slow, unclear, hard to use, lacking reasons to trust it, or even just slightly confusing, you don’t get “slightly worse performance”.

You burn money. Quickly and quietly.

So let’s look at what you should be focusing on to make your website truly PPC-ready.

1. Message Match: Are You Keeping the Promise of the Ad?

This is the number one silent killer of PPC performance.

If someone clicks an ad that promises:

“Industrial Floor Paint | Available For Next Day Delivery”

…and lands on:

A generic category page with 47 different paint products and no mention of delivery

You’ve already lost them.

Your landing pages should immediately confirm: “Yes, you’re in the right place.” The user shouldn’t have to hunt for the thing they clicked for.

Above the fold, your page should answer four questions immediately:

• What are you selling?
• Who is it for?
• Why should I trust you?
• What should I do next?

Your page should mirror the language and offers in your ads. If you’re promoting a discount or special offer, it should be clearly visible on the page you’re sending traffic to.

Your content should be written in a way that’s going to be clear for your target audience. Avoid using complex industry jargon that could be confusing.

It should also match the intent of the search. If you’re targeting broader, higher-funnel terms, you may need to educate first, not just drop people straight onto a purchase page.

Confusion is the most expensive thing you can put on a landing page.

2. Make the Next Step Obvious

The most important element on any PPC landing page isn’t the headline, the imagery, or even the copy.

It’s the call to action.

Because no matter how good everything else is, if the user doesn’t know what to do next, they won’t move forward.

Your page should make the next step obvious, simple and frictionless.

Whether it’s “Get a Quote”, “Add to Cart”, “Book a Demo”, or “Check Availability”, a user should never have to think about what they’re supposed to do next.

Your page should be built around one clear action, with one dominant CTA and one obvious outcome.

Too often we see pages with multiple competing buttons, buried CTAs, or too many “next steps” to choose from. Having too much choice creates hesitation. And hesitation kills conversion rates.

Your call to action should be clearly visible without scrolling, reinforced logically throughout the page, and directly tied to the intent of the ad. If your ad offers a free consultation but your page pushes a different action, you’re creating unnecessary friction.

Clever wording and subtle design might look nice.

But clarity converts.

3. Trust, Proof & Friction Removal

Remember: PPC traffic is often cold.

They don’t know you. They didn’t specifically seek you out (excluding branded search). You possibly even interrupted them.

So your site needs to do the heavy lifting to build trust. You can do this by including.

• Reviews and testimonials
• Client logos or accreditations
• Case studies
• Clear returns, delivery, or guarantees
• Clear contact details and company information

Don’t hide these away on a single page. Include social proof directly on the pages you use as landing pages.

At the same time, remove unnecessary friction that might prevent someone from converting. This often includes things like forcing account creation, asking for too much information, or hiding key details such as delivery costs until the last step.

Every extra doubt is a conversion you don’t get.

4. Tracking & Measurement: If You Can’t See It, You Can’t Scale It

This is the unsexy bit. It’s also the bit that separates businesses who are serious about their advertising from those who are not.

Before spending any money on ads, you should be confidently tracking how your website is performing. At a minimum, that means knowing how many people complete your core actions (orders, quote requests, enquiries...etc.) so you understand your baseline conversion rate and can forecast growth.

Beyond this, tracking key intent signals like add-to-baskets or form starts helps you spot where people drop out and where small improvements can unlock big gains.

Most web platforms offer basic stats, but you need proper tools like Google Analytics that allow you to track those micro-conversions and also to segment performance by channel and source. And if phone calls are important to your business, a lead tracking platform like WhatConverts is likely going to be a worthwhile investment.

But accuracy is important, so invest in getting this properly set up first.

If your tracking is wrong, platforms and ad managers will optimise for the wrong things, decisions will be made on bad data, and you’ll scale what looks good - not what actually is.

If you can’t measure performance properly, you can’t grow it predictably.

5. Make Sure You’re Allowed to Track It

There’s an important reality underneath all of this: you can’t just track everything by default anymore.

If you want to collect meaningful, usable data, your legal and consent setup needs to be in place first. At a minimum, that means:

• A clear, up-to-date privacy policy
• A properly implemented cookie consent banner
• A setup that respects user consent choices

This isn’t just a legal box-ticking exercise. If consent isn’t handled properly, large parts of your traffic won’t be tracked, your data will be incomplete, and ad platforms will optimise on misleading signals, putting you straight back into making decisions on bad data.

Modern setups (including Google’s Consent Mode) are designed to work within these constraints, but only if they’re implemented properly.

In practical terms, this means your PPC and analytics setup should be built with privacy in mind from day one, not bolted on as an afterthought.

Good tracking isn’t just about technology, it’s also about trust, transparency, and doing things properly.

6. Speed & Technical Hygiene: The Hidden Budget Drain

PPC traffic is impatient, especially on mobile.

If your page takes more than a couple of seconds to load, your bounce rate goes up, your conversion rate goes down, and your cost per lead or sale goes up, often without you realising the true cause.

Beyond speed, we constantly see things like broken forms, dead links, and navigation bugs. These are silent performance killers.

There’s also a direct cost implication here. In Google Ads, the quality of your landing page experience is a component of your Quality Score, which feeds into Ad Rank. In simple terms, a slow, frustrating, or poorly matched landing page doesn’t just reduce your conversion rate - it can also mean you pay more per click and show less often than competitors with better pages.

So even before a user decides whether to convert, your website may already be making your PPC more expensive than it needs to be.

Companies like Amazon obsess over milliseconds because they know speed affects revenue. For most businesses, even a few seconds can make a huge difference.

7. Mobile-First (Not “Also Works on Mobile”)

For most accounts, the majority of PPC traffic is mobile. Yet many sites are still built for desktop first and then “squeezed down” to work on mobile.

Your mobile PPC pages should:

• Be fast
• Be simple
• Have big, obvious buttons
• Have short, easy forms
• Avoid intrusive popups

If it’s annoying on your phone, it’s not going to set you up for success with your ads.

8. Build for Testing, Not Perfection

The best websites are never “finished”. They’re designed to evolve as you learn how your audience actually uses them.

The goal should not be to guess the perfect page. It’s to create a page you can improve, continuously.

PPC makes it easy to A/B test different landing pages and see what really works. We’d also recommend using behaviour tools like Microsoft Clarity, which show you how real people interact with your site through session recordings and heatmaps.

Small improvements in conversion rate often outperform months of bidding or targeting tweaks.

The Real Lever for PPC Growth

The fastest way to improve PPC performance is often not inside Google Ads, Meta, or Microsoft Ads.

It’s on your website.

Before you spend more budget, add more campaigns, or chase more clicks, ask a simpler question:

Is my website actually ready to convert the traffic I’m going to be paying for?

Because great PPC doesn’t start in the ad account.

It starts on the landing page.

At Digital Gearbox, this is exactly how we think about PPC: not simply as a traffic problem, but as a commercial performance system.

If you’re serious about scaling paid media, the first question shouldn’t be “how do we get more traffic?”, it should be “is our website actually ready for it?”.