Product Page or Dedicated Landing Page, the Test to Run Before Black Friday

There's a trap I fell into myself on an account this year, and I'd rather walk you through it before it bites you during Black Friday. We'd built dedicated landing pages for acquisition. The conversion rate had gone from -40% to -20% vs last year. On paper, great news. We'd clawed back 20 points. Everybody was happy.

Except when I looked closer, there was a big drop on the add-to-cart rate, both on the campaign side and in the back office. And that's when I thought, wait, maybe we got a little carried away with these landing pages.

Landing page conversion rates are naturally skewed

Conversion rate by page is misleading, and I'll explain why. When you look at conversion rate by page in GA4, you'll see your category pages and homepage have the best rates. Makes sense. Because that's where people convert directly. They already know the brand, they came back, they buy.

Your acquisition-specific landing page, on the other hand, takes cold traffic. People discovering you. So naturally its conversion rate is lower. It's mechanical. Its rate is just lower because you're comparing two things that have nothing to do with each other.

So if you rely solely on the conversion rate of your dedicated LP to decide whether it's good or not, you're making your decision based on a biased metric. And that's exactly how you end up walking into Black Friday with garbage conversion rates while thinking you're doing things right.

What the numbers showed over 14 days

I went and looked over 14 days, campaign by campaign. And the gap was double between the DPA campaign and the test campaign.

The scaling campaign, the one pushing the most acquisition-specific landing page and no product page, was running at about 0.3% conversion rate. The account-wide figure was at 1.32%. Same setup for both campaigns. The only difference is the destination.

The DPA, meanwhile, was running closer to the account-wide figure, around 1.2-1.3%. And the DPA is a catalog pointing to product pages. Not to a purpose-built landing page.

Now, careful, I'm not saying the DPA is magic and the landing page is useless. Performance happens on the landing page too, it's not that binary. But there's one factor at play that we always underestimate.

Why sending traffic to the product page improves your overall rate

When you send your ads to a product page, the guy sees the product, leaves, thinks about it. And two days later he types in your brand, lands back on that same page he's already seen. And then he buys directly.

That direct conversion comes and inflates your overall conversion rate. Whereas if you sent him to an acquisition landing page he'll never see again, you lose that return path.

It's a bit like a brick-and-mortar store. The guy walks by, looks at a product, leaves. If he comes back, he goes straight to the aisle where he saw it. If in the meantime you've moved everything into a pop-up display that no longer exists, he's lost.

So look at what actually brings you revenue across the board, not just the session attributed to the page.

The test to launch now, before Black Friday

Here's what I decided to do, and what I'd advise you to do if you're in this situation. You duplicate the creatives that are already performing well, the ones pointing to your best-seller page or your specific LP. And you create a version that sends traffic to product pages, in parallel. Same creative, different destination.

You let both run at the same time as your promo. And you measure.

But don't measure the GA4 conversion rate of the page. That, forget it, it's skewed as we just saw. You look at the overall impact, blended ROAS across all channels, CAC on new customers, and the volume of direct conversions that comes in behind it.

The idea is to know for sure before the big period. Because this is not the moment to discover that your ad destination is tanking your conversion when you're sending 10,000 sessions a day during Black Friday.

If you're building your Black Friday in tiers with multiple phases, it's even more important to know where you're sending traffic at each step. You can't afford a gap in the funnel from a bad destination page.

The test costs almost nothing

The nice thing about this test is that it's easy to run. You don't need to develop anything, you don't need to design anything. You duplicate existing creatives, change the destination URL, and launch.

In two weeks you've already got enough to make a call. And unlike big product page overhauls that take you weeks, here you just have to compare two paths.

If you want to go deeper on how you build the pages themselves, there's a whole topic on how you structure your product variants on Shopify, because depending on how you organize that, your conversion path changes completely.

Bonus, this test helps you elsewhere too

Something that comes to mind late but matters. Once you know which destination converts best, you can apply it everywhere.

The links in your newsletters. The links in your abandoned cart emails. Right now everyone sends their abandoned cart email to a product page by default, but if your test shows that a category page or a specific LP does better on your warm list, you change it.

So one test on your ads serves your entire CRM. For something that takes you two weeks and zero development, that's pretty profitable.

What you do this week

Before you throw yourself into a landing page overhaul for Black Friday because you saw a "good" conversion rate somewhere, check that the rate actually means something. Most of the time it's biased by direct traffic.

Launch the destination test now. Product page vs dedicated LP, same creative, 14 days, and you look at blended ROAS and CAC, not the GA4 rate of the page. You'll have your answer before it becomes critical. And you'll go into Black Friday with numbers in hand rather than running on gut feeling.