The less a clicker knows about you, the more the page has to explain before it sells. The advertorial tells the story of a problem and leads to the product, the listicle gives reasons to choose, the collection page lets people pick among several products, and the product page closes the sale.
The rule of thumb
| What the visitor already knows | The page |
|---|---|
| Nothing about the problem, nothing about the brand | Advertorial |
| That several solutions exist and they're comparing them | Listicle |
| What they want, but not which model | Collection page |
| The product, which they've already seen | Product page |
The rule
One page type per campaign goal. A page that tries to tell a story, compare options and sell all at once does none of the three well, and you won't know which of the three failed.
The steps
- Sort. Go through your active campaigns and note, for each one, what the audience already knows about you: nothing, the problem, the category or the product.
- Template. Assign each campaign a single page type, then build one reusable template per type, so you don't start from a blank page with every new ad.
- Compare. Measure the revenue per visit of each type with an equal audience, meaning you split the traffic of a single campaign between two pages, for two full weeks.
- The sentence for your leadership:
"With the same campaign and the same audience, page A earns this much per visit and page B earns that much, which is why we're keeping A."
The trap
The costliest trap hides in your reports. Each page type attracts its own audience, so comparing their raw rates often amounts to comparing people.
We lived it during the audit of a clothing brand that the authors work with, whose ads led to four destinations: a landing page, two collection pages and a product page. The collection pages got about 5% of their visits to add to cart.
The home page, which received less than 1% of the traffic, topped 16%. In our audit notes, we wrote: "The home page sells well but nobody lands on it."
Our first temptation was to send the ads there. On closer inspection, that rate came mostly from the profile of the visits: people who land on a home page often already know the brand, and a cold audience coming from an ad doesn't look like them.
The other trap is the advertorial dressed up as a news article, with a fake newspaper name and a fake byline. The French law on trust in the digital economy requires that any online advertising be "clearly identifiable as such."
The French Consumer Code also classes as deceptive practices editorial content paid for by the advertiser without clearly disclosing that funding.
The format works very well without the disguise, and someone who feels tricked doesn't become a customer. Finally, watch the weight of these pages: long and heavy with images, they get opened on phones by people who leave fast when nothing shows up.
Sometimes, none of the three
In the audit mentioned above, the attention maps of the landing pages showed that visits stopped mostly on the FAQ, at the very bottom. People were coming to find answers to their doubts.
So our recommendation went against the rule above: for this cold mobile traffic, an intermediate page added one more step, and we advised moving the brand reassurance directly into the product page.
At another brand the authors work with, whose paid traffic lands mostly on the home page and collections, we put the opposite test on the roadmap, with a landing page dedicated to the campaign.
The table tells you where to start, and revenue per visit, measured with an equal audience, will tell you when to stop.
