Time to reset how we land traffic.

A/B tests can be highly revealing. In this best practices article our CCO Lindsay Moore reveals what we know, but choose to ignore: landing traffic from paid social on home, category or product pages is a really bad idea. In a recent merchant survey we found that almost three quarters of brands and retailers do this routinely.

Lindsay's tests results show that the home page is a really, really bad place to land social traffic. The Product Detail Page (PDP) is the most popular choice, its pretty bad too - suffering from very high bounce rates (we've seen up to 90% or more of the traffic bouncing straight off). This is for paid traffic - we're paying for traffic and almost all of it bounces off immediately. Really? Just think about it. The impact is significant: this alone is doubling Customer Acquisition Costs. Brands and retailers know this is a problem yet continue to send traffic to these pages.

Why?

The reality is that despite a wide variety of tools, its just too hard and it takes too long to build something more relevant. With social there are too many campaigns running, which change too frequently to keep up. There's also an organizational issue as well: the ad team / agency typically doesn't own the landing experience - it's owned by the ecommerce team. As a result no one is taking an end to end view, and traffic gets thrown over the fence.

There is a better way.

Lindsay's test data shows that a campaign microsite drove 303% more revenue than landing traffic on a home page, and 50% more than landing on a PDP.

Intriguingly, in a separate test she ran a campaign microsite showed a 49.7% lift over the custom landing page.

So what's going on here to generate such enormous lift?

This is a combination of automation and AI. In these tests the campaign microsites were not built by hand (like a custom landing page) but generated from the advertisement, creating a highly engaging campaign microsite almost automatically. Within a few minutes a brand or retailer can turn any social ad into a campaign microsite.

What the microsite delivers to shoppers is relevance, encouraging top of funnel traffic to explore and engage with the brand. AI continuously adapts the microsite pages to maximize engagement, ensuring that the most engaging content is always shown. The results are spectacular: higher add to cart rates, higher conversion rates, higher order values and more new customer orders.

End this conversion myopia

It's time to stop overfocusing on the 1% that might buy now, at the expense of the 99% that won't. Focusing on increasing the propensity to purchase for all of the traffic is where there is a huge opportunity for all social advertisers, especially those that need to grow by acquiring new customers.