Important step of optimization when you are doing PPC and CRO is to make sure that your strategies align with a congruence analysis. Congruence is a great way to achieve the converting efforts for user be natural way forward by reducing the amount of decision making on their part. For example, if a user clicks on your ad looking for some specific product and you take them to a homepage instead of specific page it is more likely you will see a bounce from homepage becouse they don’t want to search again for that specific page or product. The whole journey from click to conversion should be as smooth as possible. Here are a couple of different areas to review to make sure your user experience is as easy as possible.

Visual Congruence

If your landing page is very different from your ad, it will likely make users to distrust and question the brand, and potentially abandon their search also. So the first area to check for congruence is visual one. This is how congruent the imagery is from your ads with the landing page users are taken to. This is an easy thing to check, but also important step in your analysis. Check your social and display ads with their landing pages. You want to make sure imagery, colors and fonts match visually.

Lingual Congruence

To improve the trustworthiness of your brand you need to ensure your message matches across landing pages and ads. So the next thing to check is the language. You need to pay attention to your headlines, sub-headlines and especially call-to-action copy. Like before we don’t want users to think about what their next steps should be because they should not be surprised where they land when they click on the ad. The ad needs to take them where they need to be. This can also help with your brand recognition. If you repeat the message from your ad copy onto your landing page, it will help users remember the message and remember your brand if your message was clear and consistent.

User Intent

Ensure that the intent of the user matches the goal of the landing page will be important to keep them engaged with the content. So you need to look at your landing pages and think about the intent of the user based on the ad they clicked because the intent is a key element to making sure you are providing users with a congruent experience and can connect both visual and lingual based congruence. Check out if users are clicking on a very specific ad that promises a discount and then land to a general shopping page or does your ad copy ask users to “Learn More” and then take them to a page to fill out a form to request a demo – you need to fix that.

Congruence analysis can be easily overlooked and it is important to check out your ads and landing pages. Look at both the imagery and language, and especially remember user intent is key to congruence.