If you’re paying for every click, the page the click lands on has one job: turn that person into an enquiry. A homepage has ten jobs. That’s why so many of the ad accounts we review are sending traffic to the wrong place, and why a dedicated landing page is usually the cheapest improvement you can make to a campaign. We explain the reasoning in landing pages vs your homepage for paid ads.
This article is the practical half: how we build one in Elementor, using a worked example of a plumber running a search campaign for blocked drains.
Start from a blank canvas
In the page settings, set the Page Layout to Elementor Canvas. It removes your site’s header, footer and sidebar, leaving an empty page. Elementor’s Canvas documentation shows where the setting lives.
Removing the main menu is deliberate. Every link out of the page is a way to leave without enquiring. Keep:
- your logo (not linked, or linked to the homepage if you must)
- a click-to-call phone number at the top
- the form
- a slim footer with your ABN, licence number if relevant, and a privacy policy link
If you build a lot of landing pages, make a small Theme Builder header and footer just for them (“Header: landing”) and apply it to those pages only, instead of using Canvas. That way your phone number lives in one place.
Write the headline to match the ad
Message match means the page repeats what the ad promised, in close to the same words. The person searched for something, your ad said you had it, and the page needs to confirm that within a second or two.
Take the plumber example.
The search: “blocked drain plumber ballina”
The ad headline: “Blocked Drain? Ballina Plumber Today”
A homepage hero (poor match):
Quality plumbing solutions for the Northern Rivers since 2008
A landing page hero (good match):
Blocked drains cleared in Ballina, same day
Licensed local plumber. Upfront pricing before we start. Call or book online.
The second one answers “Am I in the right place?” before the visitor has scrolled. If you run separate ad groups for blocked drains, hot water and leaks, each gets its own landing page, or at least its own headline. Duplicate the page in Elementor and change the hero; it takes minutes.
If you use Elementor’s AI to draft variations, check them hard. It’s handy for alternative headlines, but Elementor AI won’t know your licence details, service area or pricing, and it will invent confident claims if you let it.
What goes on the page
Keep the structure tight. For a local service business, this order works:
- Hero: matching headline, one line of supporting detail, a call button and either the form or a button that jumps to it.
- Why you: three or four specific reasons. “Licensed and insured” with your actual licence number beside it beats “Professional and reliable”.
- Proof: a few genuine reviews with names (with permission), and a photo of you or your van. Real photos outperform stock for local work, in our experience, and a half-day commercial photography shoot covers the landing page and the rest of the site.
- How it works: three steps, so the visitor knows what happens after they enquire.
- The form, again, with the phone number beside it.
- A short FAQ: price ranges if you can give them, response times, areas covered.
Leave out the company history, the full service list and the blog feed. They belong on the main site.
Keep it fast
Ad traffic is mostly mobile, and Google’s ad quality assessment considers landing page experience. A slow page costs you twice: in lost visitors and in what you pay per click.
On an Elementor landing page, the usual culprits are easy to avoid:
- Hero image: resize to around 1920px wide at most, compress it, and use WebP. Better still, use a real photo cropped tight.
- No sliders or video backgrounds. They’re heavy and nobody waits for slide three.
- Two fonts at most, ideally the ones already loaded by the rest of the site.
- No add-on widgets that load a whole library of scripts for one effect.
- Exclude the page from heavy plugins you don’t need there, such as chat widgets and popups, unless they serve the page’s goal.
Test on a phone using mobile data, not your office wifi.
Make the form short
Name, phone, suburb and a short message. Email is optional for most trades because you’ll call them back anyway. Every extra field loses people.
In the Elementor Form widget, keep labels visible, set the button text to something specific (“Book my drain clearing”), and set up the email notification to go to an inbox someone checks during working hours. Send a test before the ads go live.
Track form submissions as conversions
Without this, you’re paying for clicks and guessing which ones turned into work. The simplest reliable approach with Elementor Forms:
- Create a thank-you page, for example /thanks-drains/, with a short message (“Got it. We’ll call you within the hour during business hours.”) and the phone number. Set it to noindex in your SEO plugin.
- In the Form widget, under Actions After Submit, add Redirect and point it to the thank-you page.
- In Google Ads, create a website conversion action for the lead, and fire it when the thank-you page loads. You can do that with the Google tag directly or through Google Tag Manager with a page view trigger on that URL.
- Test it. Submit the form yourself, then check Google Tag Manager’s Preview mode or the Google Ads conversion status.
The redirect method is easy to understand and survives most updates. Its weakness is that anyone who visits the thank-you URL directly counts as a conversion, which is rare but worth knowing.
Google also offers enhanced conversions for leads, which matches submitted form details (hashed) to Google accounts to improve measurement, and can later link a lead to an actual sale. Setup involves accepting Google’s customer data terms and configuring tags carefully; Google’s guide to enhanced conversions for leads with Tag Manager walks through it. For most small campaigns, start with the thank-you page and add this once the basics are working.
Track calls too. A tradie website or landing page often produces more calls than forms, and if you only count forms you’ll undervalue the campaign.
Before you switch the ads on
- Headline matches each ad group
- Phone number is tappable and correct
- Form sends, email arrives, redirect works
- Conversion fires once per submission
- Page loads quickly on a phone on mobile data
- Privacy policy linked in the footer
- Page excluded from your sitemap and menus if you don’t want it found organically
We build landing pages like this as part of our Elementor web design work, often alongside the Google Ads campaign setup and management itself. If your ads are running to your homepage right now, talk to us before you spend another month’s budget.