SESSION NOTES #008. Stop guessing where to send your Meta Ads.

This week I sought to answer the age-old question: where should we send people when they click on a Meta ad?

As advertisers we think in journeys. Campaign content goes to the collection page, new arrivals to the new arrivals page, and Dynamic Product Ads to the product page.

Logical, right?

But if you were to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and ask “where do you want to land?” I bet 8 out of 10 times they'll say “I want to see the product I just clicked on.”

I know this because I recently polled my Instagram followers. ~80% wanted to go straight to the product page. ~10% wanted to shop by category and ~10% wanted to shop by collection.

And whilst the answer seems obvious, there's still a resistance from advertisers to do it.

Maybe it's because the product page wasn't designed to be the start of a journey. Maybe we believe that putting more products in front of people means they'll buy more. Or maybe it’s just because it’s more work updating each ad to go to a specific product.

Whatever the reason, your data likely already has the answer on what works best.

The first instinct is to A/B test it. The problem is that if your Dynamic Product Ads sit in the same ad sets as your image or video assets, it gets messy fast. Often no winner is found and you just keep playing on with whatever you were already doing.

Do this instead. Go to Google Analytics, pull your landing pages report, and filter by Meta ads through source / medium. Export all of your landing page data with the full funnel - sessions, product page views, add-to-carts, checkouts, transactions, revenue.

From here you can actually see what's true.

Take the common assumption: if I send people to a category or collection page, they'll browse more and buy more. The data in this example tells a different story.

Product page sessions generate more product page views per session than category or collection pages - a wordy way of saying people who land straight on the product they clicked are more likely to keep shopping, not less.

The data will either blow up or cement your assumptions. Either way, you'll know what to do next.

I've clicked on enough Meta ads to know what a bad experience looks like. You see a product you like, you click it, and you scroll, scroll, scroll - unable to find the thing you came for. You leave pissed.

If you're not intentional about landing pages, you're playing the worst game in ecommerce - the “get people to the site and distract them with something else” game.

Your campaign will probably still generate some sales, but it won’t show you all the people who left in a huff.

So pull the report. Be intentional about where you're sending people and try to give them what they want. If they clicked on a multi-product image or video, send them to a category or collection page that has the products from the ad merched high on the page.

Still not sold on how the product page could possibly be the start of a journey? We'll get into that next issue.

Cheers,

Sarah Arvela Webb

_{Brought to you by power walking and a lot of voice-to-text messages.}