Ep 573: Where Should That Click Go? Landing Pages, Homepages, and PDPs (TWBERP)

0:00It's all killer, no filler. I'm Eric here with an episode of the D2C podcast that we are digging up from our archive. Episode 62 of Jordan Gordon's email and retention podcast, the world's best email and retention marketing podcast. If you're not listening to it, make sure you go and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. For this episode, we're going back to episode number 62, which is all about where should that click go, trying to decide how you should parse your traffic from your homepage, your landing pages, your PDPs, and on and on. A lot of times we obsess over exactly what to do about how to drive a click with your ad, but we're not always as cognizant about where we should send that traffic after the fact.

0:39This podcast dives deep and I hope you enjoy Jordan Gordon and Taylor Cain breaking it all down for you. We will be back with our regular scheduled programming next week. And until then, have a happy new year and a great 2026 and on with the show.

1:09When is it a good time to build a landing page rather than just driving to somewhere on the site? What are the things you think about when you're thinking about where to insert it in the ecosystem and who you might be speaking to? It's a chance to really refine the first impression and the message you want someone to walk away with after they drive that click off your ad. Prices are rising everywhere. There's likely a lot more consideration happening in general. So more and more, there's becoming a use case to really make sure that you're hitting that key message that you want. We have all these theories and hypotheses, but only when you run it do you know.

1:51This episode is brought to you by Contentful. Marketers, you know that feeling when your creative clicks, when that social post sends engagement through the roof, when your outside of the box campaign hits ROI positive, when a personalized homepage turns prospects into customers, it's utter marketing bliss. Contentful helps you create tailored omni-channel experiences without working overtime. No stress, no limits, only possibilities. Get the feels at contentful.com. It's the world's best email and retention podcast, and I'm your host, Jordan Gordon. We are a member of the DTC network of podcasts and the philosophical home of the Pilothouse email and customer retention team.

2:34If you want to make the sweet nectar of low cost revenue, a large part of your digital ecosystem, then follow us on your favorite podcast app today. This time I am joined by Taylor Kane, who is a, an e-comm strategist here at Pilothouse. He also has a bunch of other roles he's done here. He's a veteran, and we are going to discuss landing pages broadly. So before we jump into it, hey, Taylor, great to have you on the pod, and why don't you tell us a little bit about your path that brought you to Pilot House and introduce yourself to the audience? Yeah, thanks for having me, Jordan. It's great to be here.

3:08I've been in marketing about a decade. I got my start in the affiliate space, doing a lot of fun app advertising type stuff, and then wanted to get into the fun world of e-com and DTC and jumped over to the pilot house team back in our early days. And since then held a number of roles. My main background has been on the media side, the performance delivery and media buying side of things. But I've also been pretty heavily involved in a lot of our CRO philosophy and understanding a lot of different technical type roles too, and being involved in supporting our team when it comes to that. as far as driving growth for the brands we work with?

3:48There are actually a lot of people around here who got kind of that start doing kind of app affiliate stuff. It's like maybe a Victoria, BC kind of thing. But yeah, lots of guys I'd say, you know, in your kind of age group. I remember some time ago, I was an affiliate manager for a year or something like that long in my career. It just fell in my lap, but certainly not really my thing at all. But I do recall when there was a little chat going around at a party when someone said, hey, someone made a million dollars selling the Make It Rain app, where you hold your phone up and you go like that.

4:21And if you go like that fast enough, you make it rain. And they sold a million dollars worth of apps. That's crazy. I mean, I still remember one of my formative experiences in tech as a kid or in middle high school was when early iPhone days, with the beer app, just drinking that thing with my friends. That's hilarious. I love that someone profited that heavily off that. Oh, there's so much garbage online, right? Anyway, the reason that I had you on here, I guess let me just intro a bit out there in audience land. As everyone knows here, recently our team kind of merged together with the existing CRO team at Pilothouse.

4:59And what do I bring to that? I've been working on websites in one way or another for 25 years, but we got some people on the team who've been grinding very specifically at Pilothouse. And as I was kind of getting abreast of all this, of course I noticed that we've got a team that has been just quietly and steadfastly producing hundreds of landing pages a year and also you know Taylor I mean just even from a recent meeting we were on people were exemplifying you as as someone you and your team are just great at at kind of briefing for that and figuring out where you know it can go fit into a digital ecosystem who you'd be talking to and uh I don't bring too many pallet house people on the show because I don't want to I already talked my own book enough, but in this case, it'd be nice to bring you on here to help our audience think about when is it a good time to build a landing page rather than just driving to somewhere on the site?

5:54And beyond just when is it the right time, what are the things you think about when you're thinking about where to insert it in the ecosystem and maybe who you might be speaking to? So a really broad question, when and why would you start building a landing page? I think it's nice to start with the who, because a lot of my background comes from paid social specifically, where you are at the heart of it, disrupting someone's journey, and then bringing them into your brand experience, trying to make them understand why they should really engage with you and purchase from you ultimately, especially if they had no idea who you were from a prospecting perspective.

6:33So a landing page, it's a chance to really refine the first impression and the message you want someone to walk away with after they drive that click off your ad. Because your ad is going to engage them in some way or another. When they go to the next step, they want to understand a little bit more. And there are cases where it makes sense to go to the website and give them a broad shopping experience directly and try to capture them there. But there are also cases where you might have a message that it's harder to have that come across super clearly unless you direct them through it and then you want to guide them through a very sequenced or designed flow.

7:08That to me is really what is at the crux of it when you go from who you're speaking to and kind of where you go there. So that's the challenge with it. There's a lot of different places people come from, right? Like it might be their second touch point. It might be their fourth touch point. You might have a really high consideration product. You might have like a very quick buy, quick fire decision product. And that's when there's a lot of nuance that comes into this and understanding what is the checklist you should go through to determine if a landing page makes sense to test given the investment in building it as well.

7:41Yeah. And you said this phrase there that I noticed, disrupting their journey. And so ultimately, this is like saying we're going to add a click before they get to the PDP or the category page or whatever it is. The conventional wisdom is remove all the clicks. That's what one click shopping is. One click shopping is remove all the clicks and get them to buy in a click. And so in some cases, it's a quick buy. In some cases, it's a lot of consideration. My guess is if it's a lot of consideration, that's probably where you'd be more likely to use a landing page. Is that right? Correct. Yeah. And I think when you think of the ecosystem for the broad consumer nowadays, too, prices are rising everywhere.

8:18When you think of purchasing power and how that's changing for people, there's likely a lot more consideration happening in general. brands also typically want to run at higher prices because it gives you more flexibility with your margins and whatnot too so more and more there's becoming a use case to really make sure that you're hitting that key message that you want right away the nice thing about a landing page is it provides you with that level of flexibility to be able to say hey here's my home page here's the message on my home page it's kind of our like it might be our brand identity or something but i want to be a little bit more direct response when i'm coming off that disruptive ad journey.

8:52So I'm going to take that and tweak it and massage that messaging to be a little bit more direct, knowing that I need to really get this key point across, or I want to test this key point relative to it to see if that resonates. And so that's usually where that starts to come into play. Yeah. So you mentioned the homepage there, and this is actually everybody out in audience land. There's something I've been putting together that I want to bring to you, a model for this, Similar to like around that episode 40 area where I was talking about really modeling out email as part of the digital ecosystem.

9:24So this is a little piece of that that's coming to you. But let's just talk about homepage for a second. And let's say that two very core functions of homepage were to maybe one's above the fold and one's below the fold, right? But show the key product and drive to the PDP. And then the next one would be like maybe something like show, explain the brand promise, maybe more lifestyle imagery and drive to a top category page. And so, you know, on that one, you're letting themselves select on one. We know we want them to buy this product. That would be like the simplest, most basic kind of journey that you'd be doing off homepage that above the fold on the homepage, you're really only getting like a headline.

10:06Maybe you're going to squeeze in a subhead. Maybe it gets a lot of traffic though. tons of traffic to the homepage. So when you've got scarce resources, is there a way that you're going to, because there's so much free traffic to that homepage, is there a way that you think about, hey, when is it actually, should we be kind of refurbishing what we already got, you know, rather than doing this separate path? Yeah. And I think the easiest way to look at it is I'm a numbers guy, like coming from a media buying background. So I always start with what are my core kpis looking like and what can i influence so you know your standard ones like your traffic cost your conversion rate and your aov because like when you're thinking about like what you're what you're getting out of that those are the ones to combine in a lot of cases like it's that conversion rate where you're seeing it just not live up to what what you want and like sure you can go after like lower cost traffic on one end but what's that going to do the other side of it.

11:05And then AOV is typically pretty long tail and involves product or other complex zero processes coming into play too. So often if you look and you're like, okay, I think what's really holding me back from being able to scale up with the numbers I need, usually it's going to be somewhere in that conversion rate zone. And that's when you feel like there's something being left on the table in that regard, that's typically when you start to go into what's missing from the message, right? Because it might very well be that you can change something pretty quickly on the homepage, you could test something quickly on the homepage.

11:38But to your point, you there's not a lot of real estate, that's also where you want that core brand message to be. So if you do want to play a bit outside the lines and that and test some things, it's tough to do it there. Especially as you're for anybody working with like the, you know, bigger brands with more team members involved in all the processes behind it. So landing pages are a really nice intermediary for that when it comes to being able to refine your messaging and make it more direct. Also, when we think about that, we just talked about using the landing page as opposed to homepage and driving to that same top PDP, for instance, super common play.

12:15Well, what about actually just testing a new PDP, right? You know what I mean? Like, I mean, we can really remake any page. So is there a time when you're like, hey, actually, I think what we need is to run a PDP against this PDP? Yeah, 100%. So typically, it is different brand to brand and based on a lot of nuances. But often what the example with a landing page, I love this example because early on working with a brand that was trying to find its identity and how it showed up in ads and then converted all the way through to drive the results it wanted. we learned pretty quickly that there was a lot of value in communicating the message around cross-selling and upselling before someone saw the price.

13:01So that was a really interesting psychological and messaging kind of learning that we gained because it was basically saying like, hey, if people land and they see the price right away, they get scared, especially if we're upselling it immediately out of the gate. but there was more power in the message when we told them how the product worked why it would benefit them and why they should consider getting the complementary ones with it to get the most value out of it even though the price or cost is higher and that ended up converting better when we unlocked that but we couldn't scare people off with the price right away we had to make sure they knew that they were pausing they were taking the moment to understand that and so like that's one really powerful example of it i think and you can kind of start to imagine like what brands tend to benefit more from that kind of messaging based on what they're offering to customers.

13:48That's really interesting. And did you then, did you show them the bundle price? Let's call it a bundle price, whatever it was. Did you show them the bundle price afterwards or did you show them the individual unit price afterwards? We would then go into the bundle price afterwards, but we would pair it off with all your classic, like, here's what you get. Like, here's how much you're saving. Here's like why it's better to do this. You know, all the classic messaging. I invite anybody in the audience to go back and check out the Dynamite episode we ran on cognitive biases. We've ran a couple of episodes like that.

14:20Also, when the Aves was on that we discussed human psychology, consumer psychology. But interestingly, anchoring, you just described anchoring. The second you show the price, that's the price. It's in their head. Hey, I'm paying 300 bucks and that's it. And then you want to convince them to spend five? It's just a really big uphill battle. So great, classic play that fits right into how the world's best email retention podcast has presented a lot of our stuff. So like, for example, if I guess to take that a little bit further, like if you're evaluating conversion rate and you're like, oh, my PDP has a better conversion rate at a comparable amount of traffic.

14:53So it's stats sig relative to the data I have. But I think I could take it further. And you look at it and you're like, that might be why people are maybe getting scared off because they don't understand the value before they see the cost. We've seen a lot of success in the past from doing direct A-B testing of PDPs with and without the price and the price shows up at checkout. And that's like getting into more, I feel like old school stuff you don't see as commonly now, but it can be really powerful. And like, that's a simple A-B test where I would argue that that PDP without the price is in fact a landing page because you're trying to drive a certain message that's different than your standard website flow.

15:29Although, could you add directly to cart from that? Not PDP, PDP? or do you have to go to the PDP afterwards? You could add to cart from it. It's like a, it's a thin PDP, right? It's got everything but the price. Exactly. And there could be a negative to that too, depending, right? Like then consumers might be like, you know, maybe there's a trust component. So like there are a lot of considerations at all times. So this is why landing pages are great for giving you that flexibility to test. Yeah, and also that's important is like an important point of all this, maybe we can move into is how iterative we must be because we have all these theories and hypotheses, but only when you run it do you know.

16:06And you know what? This happens all the time. I have people from my team, maybe they're kind of fresher out of college, and they're like, oh, yeah, but this works like this, because they read it somewhere. And it's like, yeah, you know what? That worked like that for whoever that guy tested it on. And then he won an ex-formerly Twitter and said, this is how it works. And you read that. And it's like, now it's etched in your brain. Like, that's how this works. And it's like, the variance is crazy. So how, maybe just have a little, I mean, we actually use a custom tool, by the way, everybody out there, we use a tool that helps us iterate faster on landing pages.

16:42But everybody else in the audience who's listening and maybe trying to think about, hey, I want to add a couple of landing pages into my ecosystem. Like any advice you have to just save them time and just get them so that they're in a good situation as quickly as possible for testing and iteration wise. Yeah, definitely. Like when it comes to what tool you're choosing, if you're starting fresh and trying to figure out what to look at, anything that integrates really seamlessly with your store and where you can focus on whatever the top objective of your landing page is. If it, for example, is to refine, like figure out what message converts following an ad.

17:17If you choose a tool that integrates with your Shopify store really cleanly, can integrate products fast, and you can really, and has like readily available templates or anything like that, that can be a really quick way to start getting some insights and seeing, is this justified? And should I keep going down this path? Is it going to drive a big enough difference to performance? I think eventually, as you go forward, there's a lot more you can do. And as brands continue to get bigger and bigger, they tend to dive into those crazy customizations, lots of different cool features, which can be powerful at the right time and place.

17:47But really, my POV, it all starts with what your core objective is and what your why is for creating it. And you can ask yourself that by reviewing it and going through the standard process to look at why you think things are working or they aren't and then go from there. And if you're looking for like a quick landing page message kind of starting point, a lot of the time, like the types of messages you hear about in CGC video or UGC video, they can translate to landing pages too. And you can turn it into a, like a very clean reading experience or someone goes down the page. So like a certain number of reasons why kind of landing page.

18:25I've seen that consistently beat home pages out from a conversion rate perspective. Which one is that? Like saying like three reasons, three reasons why you should choose this brand or buy our products, basically. And just run that as a page. Yeah. And it, you know, it benefits you in other ways too, right? Because if you find you can always A-B test the reasons, you can A-B test the headline, you can understand what is it and verify your hypotheses on like what brings someone in and how that performance comes about. Because to your point, Jordan, there's so much we like to think we know as marketers and we can root it all in best practices.

19:00But time and time again, I will find that like running an ad for a certain product that then links out to, like you run an ad for a certain product, it might be like a really fun color of the product or a really fun like new product. And then people go and they buy a different product and you see the sales spike for something else. And you're like, okay, we just learned something really interesting and it was not what I thought or intended. Like it's an ego check every day. Right. It's especially one of the things that I enjoy about this podcast is really trying to boil down what we do in, in theory.

19:33One, because this podcast, we, we talk quite openly. I said this, we talk openly about a lot of the stuff that we do. There's that we do hold some things like some key insights to ourselves because it's our alpha, but most of the stuff we just give away. And if there's anybody out there in audience land who's like trying to figure out how to do this for themselves, the first thing you need is a theoretical framework, or you're just taking shots in the dark, you need to have some map of where you're getting, right. But in practice, theory doesn't matter. Right? You know, right. So be ready for some to drive around some weird things on that path.

20:09Just a couple of things that came up when I was thinking through this. One, we had Abby as well on the pod and she talked about how she working with some of our email players, they'll take good emails and turn them into landing pages. They'll be like, well, that email rocked. Let's just take that email, turn it into a landing page because part of our process is we think at least a high intent email is a shoppable landing page. So they just convert into landing pages. So any other really, And you mentioned a really scrappy thing you can do there. And hey, you know what? Scrappy is the name of the game.

20:41So can I possibly pull another scrappy idea out from you? Ooh, I like that. A scrappy idea. One of the big wins that people probably miss quite a bit. And I think a lot of brands don't pay as much attention to this as they should. And I'm going a little bit down a rabbit hole. So stop me if you need me to. But when you mentioned email as well, I think one of the biggest things that people tend to overlook is how valuable driving signups for your brand are from channels like paid social. If you can get enough interest to get someone to sign up and you can play around with making sure that you...

21:23I think it's not really scrappy, but one of the biggest things is making sure you've got your top performing pop-up and email signup option on your landing page. That is a huge checklist component because you can track in meta the number of leads you're getting from your ads, and then you can triangulate that with how that triggered revenue is playing out in when you send the campaign or they go through your flows. So that is one big thing that I think is really powerful and all that. It's low-hanging fruit, right? Right. Are there ever any kind of landing page tools that you find it's difficult to get that pop up to pop?

21:59Or is it usually out there, it's pretty damn easy to get it to pop? It's usually pretty, pretty solid to get it to pop. And I think like, with, usually they have like the ability to integrate the code export into it. So majority now you can do that. But sometimes there can be bugs, of course, and whatnot. And if that's the case, I definitely encourage try to work with any good apps support team if it's related to Shopify or a third-party vendor. Just work through that with them for sure. By the way, quick shout out to the audience for Aaliyah, which was a tool that we're using a lot of now. And we just had Sean, their CEO and founder on the podcast a few episodes ago.

22:39Everybody go check that out if you want to get some awesome ideas on how to get pop-ups to work. No financial relations. He didn't pay to be on the podcast, everybody. I brought them on because we use the tool, right? And we're happy with it. So I'm just sharing that with you for the good of e-commerce in general. We talked on a couple of super simple funnels there for a second, which is like, you got homepage to bestselling PDP and then homepage to top category. And then from there, any PDP, right? And that kind of funnel ends on, did they end up on a PDP after ending on the top category. Of course, a funnel is PDP to cart, but that's actually, that funnel is taken care of directly in Shopify.

23:24You can go and you can just look at your add to cart rate. If you see more add to carts, that funnel is easy to measure. And then we talked about two replacements, which is, let's just call it an unaware landing page, like problem unaware landing page, probably two category page, problem aware or solution aware landing page, probably going to the PDP, like super broad stuff, right? And just kind of these, let's just call those five funnels. And I want to bring this in a little more structured way to the audience in a couple of episodes. But here's a question for you as I'm doing this. Do you ever look at that set of funnels or some similar set of funnels that you kind of work through?

24:02Do you ever look at what share of the total site traffic are these to say like, I don't even need to focus on these because it's total soup what's going on with this site. Or yeah, it looks like there's enough going through these funnels. You know, and interesting, this is now, we're no longer talking about landing pages. We're talking about something else, but it's just evolving. But like, and if it's the right size, if it's a big enough, we're going to do what we're talking about. Hey, let's insert a landing page. Let's test a PDP. What happens when those core funnels, how do you approach when they're not enough of the total site business to actually be worth optimizing?

24:40How do you then approach improving e-com revenue? It's a tough one, right? It's a good question. Yeah, you're kind of moving over into the other zones too, because I think first to start, I'm a big fan and believer in... A lot of people talk about stat sig and the reality of it for a lot of businesses is it's tough to align to traditional stat sig amounts or whatever person X decided was stat sig. So I'm a big fan of setting expected and then measuring the outcome against it. So often when I'm running like a new meta creative test, for example, to use that example, I might even go as low as like, I'm looking for 10 purchases.