A lot of the advice you’ll find out there on creating landing pages assumes something about your traffic. Namely that they’re interested. They found you through search. They punched in a keyword. They’re half-convinced before they even reach your page. Pop and push traffic is a different beast. These people didn’t seek you out. They were interrupted with you, and you have about one second to make that interruption seem like a welcomed one. Landing page psychology doesn’t hold up well here. You’re going to need a fresh way of thinking.
Why Generic Landing Pages Fail With Cheap Traffic
Quality traffic is willing to take their time. For example, a potential consumer who has browsing for your product might take some time to read your catchy headline, benefits, and perhaps even scroll through your page. On the other hand, low-quality traffic won’t. When a user is directed to your site through a popunder ad or a push notification, they are landing right in the middle of their browsing session, and probably have no cognitive energy left to spend on your product.
The landing page we are used to seeing, featuring a hero image, three different highlights of the product, a testimonial area, and a form to fill with five fields, was designed for people who are visiting the site with the intention of being convinced. High-quantity traffic is already there because of an impulsion or leaving because you weren’t what they expected you to be.
Moreover, every extra second that your site takes to load from the internet is another potential customer leaving your site. It has been proven that a site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3 times higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds. With low-quality traffic, that difference is even bigger and more noticeable.
Use a Pre-Lander to do the Heavy Lifting
Even the fastest page won’t convert if it’s all sell, sell, sell. A pre-lander is a low-pressure, low-commitment taste-of-the-offer before the visitor ever reaches your main landing page. It sets the context. Gives people a reason to care. Without a moment of engagement, anyone who was on the fence stays there.
The flip side of this is that a landing page that works well with good traffic can become an abject failure if the visitors are poor quality. Choosing the best advertising platform influences your choice of ads and where they’re shown in ways that can be as important as the landing page itself, bot traffic and the end of an ad network’s relevance will make your best-performing pre-landers look like they’re failing.
Speed Isn’t a Feature, it’s the Foundation
First and foremost, ensure that your load time does not exceed one second. To achieve this, you must remove heavy JavaScript, aggressively compress images, and utilize a global CDN. For mobile, design for a mid-range Android device on a 4G connection, not the latest flagship phone on Wi-Fi.
Test your pages on real devices, not just in Chrome DevTools. Pages that may seem fast on your computer may be slow on the actual devices used by your visitors.
Eliminate every element that does not contribute to conversion directly. Video backgrounds, parallax effects, extensive font collections, all of these increase load time. If you cannot easily justify an element’s presence based on the desired user action, get rid of it.
Mobile-First Isn’t a Preference, it’s the Audience
The vast majority of pop and push traffic is on mobile. Not a reason to make your desktop page “also work on mobile”. A reason to build mobile-first and treat desktop as secondary.
Buttons need to be large enough for thumbs, not mouse cursors. Forms should ask for as little as possible, single field email captures, one-tap social logins, or pre-filled options wherever the platform allows. Multi-step forms kill conversion rates on high volume campaigns. If you need more information from the user, collect it after the initial conversion, not before.
Assume your user is doing something else while your page loads. They’re on a commute, in a waiting room, half watching something. Your page needs to communicate its core value in the above the fold view, without any scrolling required.
Match the Page to the Creative That Sent Them There
When someone sees an ad, they have an expectation. That expectation is set by the creative: the image, the headline, the other ads they’ve seen that are like your ad. If the pre-lander doesn’t immediately reflect reality, the creative from the ad, they feel like they’ve been had and they’re gone.
Dynamic keyword insertion is a way to take the specific headline, or angle, that directly caused a person to visit your page, often the exact words they read that made them decide to visit your page, and insert that directly into the copy on your landing page.
Even a static version of this, building a unique pre-lander for several distinct major creative angles you’re running, will dramatically improve continuity between the ad and the page. Test to see how well the page matches what the person was originally shown, with both the ad and the pre-lander in concert.
To hone in on the best headline, remember you’re not selling, yet. You are only selling the click. And the best way to sell the click is to speak to the exact experience the person has had right before they arrive at your page. There is only one variable you can test with a pre-lander: the headline.
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