Landing page or website: which one should your ads point at
The difference is not design. It is how much you know about why the visitor is there.
A website serves everyone. Existing customers, job applicants, someone comparing three vendors, someone who typed your name after a recommendation. It has navigation because you do not know what any given visitor wants.
A landing page serves one visitor with one known question, and gives them one next step. It usually has no navigation, on purpose.
Paid traffic is nearly always the second case. You know the query, the audience, and the ad they clicked. Sending them somewhere general throws that away.
What a landing page should do
Match the ad. The headline should echo the promise that was clicked. A visitor should recognise within a second that they are in the right place, and if the ad said one thing and the page says another, the back button is the natural response.
Answer the specific question. Not everything your business does. The thing they searched for.
Make the next step obvious. One primary action, visible without scrolling, repeated further down. Two competing calls to action produce fewer of both.
Handle the obvious objection. Price, timeline, location, whether you serve their situation. If the visitor has to hunt for it, they will leave to find it.
Load fast on a phone. Most of this traffic is mobile and most of the loss is here rather than in the copy.
When the homepage is genuinely fine
Not every campaign needs a bespoke page, and building one for every ad group is a real cost.
Brand search. Someone who typed your company name wants your website. Send them there.
Retargeting people who already visited. They have context. The site is fine.
Very small budgets. If the whole test is a few hundred dollars, spend it on traffic and learn something, rather than on a page for a campaign you may not continue.
The version most businesses actually need
Not a single landing page. A small set of intent pages that live on the site.
One page per service, per market you serve. They sit in the normal site structure, so they can also rank in organic search, and they are specific enough that paid traffic lands on something relevant.
This is usually a better investment than a standalone landing page, because it works for both channels and it compounds. The one-off page stops earning the moment the campaign stops.
The test to run first
Take your best-spending ad group. Look at where it lands.
If the page does not contain the words that were searched, does not answer that question in the first screen, and does not show a next step without scrolling, you have found the cheapest improvement in the account.