Ads Don't Always Have To Go To A Landing Page

The landing page is a core component to a paid media campaign. It could even be argued that a well-crafted landing page is more important than the ad itself. After all, people are only looking at an ad for a few seconds, but if you can get someone to stay on your landing page for a few minutes you’ve improved your opportunity to drive action.

While I think the above is true and valid, not every “landing page” needs to be optimized to drive some sort of form submission. This approach does have its time and place, but in the B2B world not every site visitor is ready to raise their hand.

I’ve found this to be particularly true for audiences who aren’t as familiar with a brand. In these cases, sending them to a conversion focused landing page could be an uphill battle.

For example, I’ve been running a few Reddit campaigns for one client and sending all of these ads to blog posts. Some people might consider this to be a waste of marketing dollars because where is the ROI here??

Let me explain…

In my experience, Redditors can be fairly particular about the content in specific subreddits. Creating a product focused ad aiming to drive a direct response lead doesn’t always go over well. Instead, the goal of this campaign was to deliver value to a new audience without any ask. The hypothesis was that this interaction would be a good introduction to this client’s brand, and we could build on these new audience members from here.

I used GA4 data to determine which blog posts were already seeing some relatively strong engagement, and selected a handful of top performing posts that aligned well with individual subreddits. From there, we created the ads and launched the campaigns.

No, we’re not seeing any direct response conversions, but that was never the goal. Instead, we’re seeing that when people click on these Reddit ads they’re actually reading through this Reddit content (based on average engagement time). This tells me this audience is finding value here!

Delivering value upfront was always the goal of this campaign, and now that we’ve been developing a new cohort of people familiar with this client’s brand, we can start to retargeting these Reddit users with different messages that are more product related.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.