How to Personalize Landing Pages to Match PPC Ads?

Personalization in VWO allows you to modify your website and display it to a target group of visitors. You can target different types of segments like mobile traffic, social media traffic, and so on. Even the geo-targeting becomes easier with Personalization.

Custom Targeting

Using the Custom Targeting in VWO, you can target specific query parameters appended to a URL after the ‘?’ separator. For example, when you click a Google Adwords ad, you might notice that it looks like this: http://yoursite.com?gclid=zai249fx.

Here, ‘gclid’ is the query parameter and ‘zai249fx’ is its value. The Adwords auto-tag all ads pass critical information to Google Analytics. Google discourages users from manually adding UTM parameters as this might conflict with the Adwords data, but you can manually add custom parameters for other purposes. To know more about auto-tagging, refer to Tag your Google Ads final URLs.

You can add the query parameters to the landing page link of any ad, and VWO can use that information to display the targeted variation. For example, VWO sets up an AdWord campaign focused on two sets of keywords: A/B testing and conversion rate optimization. The headline on the landing page says, “Try out the world’s easiest A/B testing software”, which connects well with users coming from the ‘A/B test’ ads but not so much with ‘conversion rate optimization’ ads.

Here, we can set the click URL of the ‘Conversion Rate Optimization’ ads in Adwords to http://vwo.com/try-out?vwo=convo (Adwords appends a unique gclid automatically to the URL so the final URL when the ad is clicked will show http://vwo.com/try-out?vwo=convo&gclid=ajke5gdC).

Custom Targeting in a Personalization campaign enables you to show the variation of the landing page with the headline ‘Try out the world’s easiest Conversion Rate Optimization software’ only to the users clicking on the ‘Conversion Rate Optimization’ ads, by checking if the ‘vwo’ query parameter is equal to ‘convo’.

Preparing for Personalization

Before personalizing your test pages, you need to prepare a small table that groups ads to match a relevant landing page variation and the parameter you will use and the link. For the above example, we could have the following table.

Creating a similar table for your ads helps you to plan your changes for each variation as well. Once you have this table ready, you can Personalize the page. Once you are comfortable with personalizing landing pages, you can A/B test different content variations for a specific ad to see the impact on your conversions.