72% of Search Ad Landing Pages Keep the Full Website Navigation Menu

A business pays for a click on its search ad. The visitor lands on a page with a menu across the top: About, Services, Blog, Careers, Locations, Contact. The offer that made them click is somewhere below, but so are a dozen other places to go. They open the blog, read for a minute and close the tab. The business paid for a visit that never reached the offer.

A landing page is the page an ad sends people to. The standard advice for paid traffic is to build a page for the ad and remove the site menu, so the visitor has one thing to do: call, book, buy or fill in the form. Every extra link is a way off the page before the visitor acts, and on paid traffic each of those exits was bought.

Most advertisers do not follow the advice. 72% of search ad landing pages keep the full website menu, and one ad in seven points at a homepage. 16% of landing pages are stripped down to fewer than 5 links, which means most advertisers still have the simplest landing page test left to run.

In September 2026 we collected search ads shown on Microsoft Bing and visited the page each ad links to. We kept 832 landing pages that loaded and had more than 50 words of content. For each page we counted the internal links, recorded the word count and noted whether the ad pointed at the website's homepage or a page deeper in the site.

An internal link is a link to another page on the same website, such as the items in a navigation menu or footer. A page with 10 or more internal links counts as keeping its site navigation, because a standard menu and footer alone add that many. A page with fewer than 5 counts as stripped down. The median is the middle page: half have more links, half have fewer.

These are not lightly trimmed pages. The largest single group, 24.9% of landing pages, has 50 to 99 internal links, and 15.9% have 100 or more. The median landing page has 35 internal links and the average is 65. Pages like these are ordinary website pages with an ad pointed at them, not pages built for the ad.

At the other end, 5 landing pages have no internal links at all and 131 have between 1 and 4. Together they make up the 16% that look purpose-built: a headline, the offer, proof and one call to action, with nothing to wander off to. That is the format most landing page guides recommend, and it is the minority of what advertisers actually run.

124 ads, 15% of the total, send people straight to a homepage, the page with the most links on most websites. 79% of those homepages keep the full navigation, with a median of 43.5 internal links. A visitor who clicked an ad for one service arrives on a page built to introduce the whole business.

Sending traffic deeper into the site helps only a little. Of the 708 ads that point to an inner page, such as a service or product page, 71% still keep the menu, with a median of 33 internal links. The destination changes, but the page design stays the same as the rest of the site.

Longer pages carry more links: 81% of landing pages over 1,500 words have 10 or more internal links, with a median of 55. But even short pages keep the menu. 63% of landing pages with 300 words or fewer carry 10 or more internal links, with a median of 21.5, so a page with little to say still gives the visitor a full set of exits.

A short page is where the menu costs the most. With little content to hold attention, the links in the header and footer become a large share of what the visitor can click, and the offer competes with every other page on the site.

If your ads send traffic to your homepage or a standard service page, you are in the majority, and you are giving each paid visitor dozens of ways to leave. Build one landing page per main ad group, matched to the search and the ad's promise. Cut the header down to your logo and phone number, remove the footer menu, and keep one clear call to action repeated down the page.

Then test it. Split the same ads and budget between your current page and the stripped-down version, and compare leads or sales per click, not time on page. Most advertisers have not run this test, so the page that wins it gives you an edge over competitors bidding on the same searches.

If you run several ad groups, the work adds up quickly. Our landing page optimization services build focused pages for each ad group and test them against the pages you run today.

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