Most brands send every ad to the same place: the product page or the homepage. It’s the easiest thing to do, and for warm traffic it’s often fine. For cold traffic it usually isn’t, because the person clicking isn’t ready for a product page yet.
Advertorials, listicles and quiz funnels exist to close that gap. Each one does a different job, and the trick is knowing which job your ad needs done.
Start with how aware the click is
Everything we write starts from awareness levels: how much the person already knows about their problem, the ways to solve it and your product. The colder the click, the more the page has to do before it can sell.
- Unaware or problem aware: they know something’s wrong, or they don’t yet, but they don’t know the fix.
- Solution aware: they know the kind of product that solves it and they’re comparing options.
- Product aware: they know you, but they’re not sure which of your products is right for them.
- Most aware: they want it. They just need the offer.
Advertorials, for cold clicks
An advertorial reads like an article. It opens with a hook, walks through the problem, shows the discovery, explains why it works, and only then gets to the offer. It earns the right to sell by telling the story first.
That’s what a cold click needs. If someone has never heard of you and barely knows they have the problem, a product page asks for money too early. The advertorial gives them the reasons in the order they need them.
On a premium brand, the advertorial still has to look like you. It can read like editorial, but the type, the photography and the tone should be unmistakably your brand. Otherwise you win the click and lose the trust.
Listicles, for people comparing
A listicle is a handful of clear reasons to choose you, one after another, with a picture for each. It’s easy to skim, it answers the comparison someone is already making in their head, and it ends on the offer.
It works best for solution aware traffic: people who know what kind of product they want and are deciding between you and the alternatives. Each reason should come from your customers’ own words: the pains they had and what they wanted instead.
Quiz funnels, when the right product depends on the person
A quiz asks a few questions and matches the shopper to the right product. It’s only worth building when the answer genuinely changes: skin types, sizes, shades, routines. If every answer leads to the same product, the quiz is just a slower product page.
When it does fit, a quiz does two jobs at once. It helps the shopper choose, and it tells you what your customers are really looking for, which feeds straight back into your next tests.
How we choose, and how we test it
We match the page to the ad, not the other way round. The colder the audience, the more story the page tells. Then we test it, because the only way to know which format wins for your traffic is to run it.
Every landing page we build is designed in your brand and built natively in your Shopify theme, with no page builders and no apps, so it loads with your store and your team can edit it. We build up to 5 advertorials, listicles or quiz funnels a week, and each one is judged on revenue per session like any other test.
If that sounds useful, see our Shopify landing pages service, or read more on awareness levels.
