Three Levels of Ad Landing Pages

It's so hard to get people to click on a link or to go to a link. If you mentioned it on the podcast that you've done so much work and you actually got people to come and then you fuck it up after that. Like that's the worst type of fuck up because like it was so hard to get them there and then they're there. It's like, yeah.

OK, today we're going to talk about how to do an ad, right? We're going to start with some podcast ads and some other stuff. And actually, we're not going to talk about the ads at all. We're going to talk about what happens after you click, what happens after you convince someone to do what you just told them to do in the app. This came up because I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, the Acquired podcast, and suddenly there's a Vercel ad. I'm like, oh, I know a thing or two about this. This is interesting. Let's listen in on this ad. Vercel spending the big bucks more than I ever spent while I was there. And at the end, they had a URL and I was like, well, let's see how the team did. I went to the URL, Vercel dot com slash acquired. And immediately I was like, OK, they did something huge correctly here. And I sent it to you. And I think we can criticize the page. But then I got curious and I looked at the other ads. StatSig also had an ad, you know, StatSig dot com slash e l slash acquired. So not as clean a URL. And then Claude, Anthropic, they also had an ad and they didn't have as clean a URL. I actually had to go back into the podcast blog post to find the link to it. And that one just skipped me to the sign up page. So first, I sent you these and said, we're going to talk about it. What are your first impressions of these pages and the ads and this whole concept?

First of all, to me, what's interesting is it's so hard to get people to click on a link or to go to a link, if you mention it on the podcast that you've done so much work and you actually got people to come and then you fuck it up after that. Like that's the worst type of fuck up because like it was so hard to get them there and then they're there and it's like, yeah, think of the audience.

These first ads, they're with the Steve Ballmer episode, which is a follow up episode to two episodes they did on Microsoft. So people like the people who listen to this are people who are concerned about high level strategy over decades of a company's life. These are your C level enterprise ads. So when someone clicks on a page and they can get a bunch of stuff, we'll talk about the Vercel page, but let's talk about Anthropic's screw up here. They forward you to a sign up page. Is a CTO going to just be like, well, I listened to the ad and I'm ready to sign up for Anthropic. Absolutely not like that. It's just throwing it away.

And if they are ready to sign up, it's going to be just to use it by their own or check it out. It's not, I think, going to be for like, oh, I'm going to use it for my entire company or something like that. So in that sense, I think that's learning number one, which is if you're doing an ad, check your audience. If your audience are CEOs and CTOs of huge companies, think what's the best target for that? So then the only thing that I think Claude did well is that at least they have the Claude.ai slash acquired URL that will redirect you to sign up. So at least they're measuring who goes there before they send you to a sign up. But then it's a sign up page. And I'm not saying a CTO will never sign up, but if they will, they will first check what the products are, what's their stuff like that. Like at least if you're not going to send them to a custom page, send them to a case study for other enterprise companies, send them to a docs page so they can browse it or something like that. But this makes no sense. Like I always think of this anecdote where Atlassian was paying three million a year to Auth0 and they found us because the CTO found the docs and started playing around and liked it and then send it to somebody else. So in that case, at least like it wasn't the enterprise page. It wasn't the contact me, but at least it was the docs. The sign up page has absolutely nothing. Having said that, I think that's the only thing that is right. The rest, they fucked up the persona they are targeting. They fucked up the page. And more than anything, like you got somebody to click. You got somebody likely given the podcast that is maybe a CTO or a VP of engineering to go and you're just missing the opportunity.

Yeah. And we're not even talking about the content of the ad here, right? Because on a podcast like this, when you're spending the big dollars, the hosts actually do a great job of, yeah, they take your notes and then they're going to adapt the content perfectly for the audience. And especially on acquired those guys, they're researchers. They research these companies. They know their audience so well. And with all of these ads, they do so great adapting the ad for their audience. There's going to be traffic and there's going to be interest and it's going to create awareness and all that good stuff. But yeah, let's contrast now the anthropic page, which also, by the way, one last confusing thing there is the ad is mostly about anthropic. They do talk about Claude, but you land on a Claude URL.

Let's talk about Vercel. So Vercel, if you want to check it out, is Vercel.com slash acquired. I talk about what I think they did right. And then I know you like them. There were things that I would have changed. But what I think they did right is they did a custom page for acquired. Like that's it. Just that is incredible. And they also understood their persona because they have an option to sign up, which is called Start Deploying. But then they also have like get an enterprise trial or talk to an expert. Get an enterprise trial is a CTA that is nowhere in the entire website of Vercel. But it is here because again, this is Acquired, it makes sense for an enterprise trial. And I think what they did right is you land there. First thing that you see is trusted by teams ads and they just show you logos and companies like that gets you like, oh, wow, there's like really cool companies that are using it.

And it's companies. This is a curated list. This isn't just their list that they always throw around. You know, it's got scale, OpenAI, granola, like tools that you've used and you're you're in the know.

And they also have some like they have runway, they have ramp. So they have some that are more fintech, some that are more startups, some that are more old school. And it's clear that they've actually thought about it like they have Chick-fil-A, for example. Like it's really thought on the list. Then they talk about Vercel Ship this. I don't get it like you shouldn't. I think in this case, if you're trying to get people to try your product, to talk to you, mention the conference, just because if somebody doesn't know your product, they will not go to your conference. Like first they will want to learn about you, learn what you do and stuff like that. So that section, I didn't like it. Then you scroll and you see V0. This one, I actually like it a lot because even though it's a new CTA and everybody will tell you, if you have an ad space, don't have that many CTAs, don't have those many things so that people can like just stay locked on one thing. In this case, what I like about it is they talk about AI. And I think every enterprise company that's old school or even new startup wants to make sure that they work with a company that cares and think about AI now. So having this V0 one and having it talk about AI, I think is key. And then lastly, they show that the Vercel CEO was actually an acquired podcast. So on this, I thought it was really good. The main thing I didn't like is that it has too many CTAs, like so many CTAs, like which one should I click? So I would have removed the register for a ship probably. And maybe the V0 instead of try, I would just mention it. I don't know. The other thing that I'm curious about what's your take is they have all of their entire nav in the page. They have products, they have solutions, resources and everything. They also have like the sign up and contact on top. Would you keep that or would you remove all of the nav so people stay on this page and pick something?

I would have removed the nav. I would have limited the choices. The ship, the little ship square, especially being placed above V0 because they talk in the ad. They talk a lot about V0 and the podcast hosts have tried it. And so they talk a lot. They hit a couple of great things in the podcast ad. They were talking all about V0 and how Vercel, whether you code or if you're coding even less, like there's a solution for you and blah, blah, blah. Like you should go listen to it. I'll put in the in the show notes, I'll put where where in the interview it is. I'll go find it. But it's a very long podcast with Steve Ballmer and not everybody listening to this is going to want to listen to Steve Ballmer for a couple hours. So the ship thing, it's total non sequitur. No one's going to land on the page and just decide, oh, yeah, I'll go to this event in two weeks, three weeks from now. They should have put V0 a little higher. They could have done that with ship. And then I like that they inserted Guillermo Rauch's podcast episode. That was their secondary. Acquired has acquired two ACQ2. It's their secondary podcast for like nonpublic CEOs, which is where Guillermo Rauch is right now. And I agree with you. Yeah. Limit the nav. Just give fewer choices and just reinforce everything that you said in your ad. Reinforce it because they came here because they heard that ad and they heard something in that ad that made them want to come here. And now you're confusing them. You're not delivering on what you said.

Let's talk about Statsig. So you have Statsig.com slash EL slash acquired. What was your take on this one?

This one's definitely more of a template, whereas so Claude and Anthropic did nothing for self custom bespoke page. Statsig is kind of in the middle. They have a nice template here. They're a little more established, I think, on these type of ads and they're more established with acquired. They sponsored them last season, if I recall correctly. They don't really mention anything about the podcast except in the subheader in the first viewport. They do do an OK job with like they've got the logos, they've got their main principles that they're trying to push. And then they've got their kind of main thing, you know, book a demo or test drive it.

I thought it was something in the middle, I agree. Like it's a good template. It's clearly focused on ads. At least it has some customization. But I don't know, I would have at least added the acquired logo or something like that to make it a bit more customizable or potentially something related to what they are saying. Right. I think even just adding the logo from acquired would have been enough. And I actually think you have to add customer logos similar to Vercel. So from all of these, I think Vercel was by far the best on how they do it. And I think if you're doing ads for whatever, you always should have like a custom landing page, even more if you're spending so much fucking money.

Yeah. A lot of times we'll get these tiny startups and they'll ask you or me as an advisor, just, you know, usually people looking for free advice because that's the stage they're at when they're doing this. They're like, oh, should I be doing ads or oh, I tried ads and I didn't get anything. And usually my first thing is, well, first off, what was your ad copy like? What were you targeting? And second off, where did that go? Were you just pointing them to your your sign up page? Because that's probably the worst thing you can do. Second worst is pointing them to your home page. But at least that's something. But at least you should do something that relates to your ad on a landing page and convert and test and experiment there, because that's the second you got their attention. But can you keep their interest into conversion?

I think it's important to think about how much are you investing in the ad? How much are you investing in the landing page? So if you're investing a lot in the ad, like acquired, invest a lot in the landing page. If you're investing pennies on Google ads because it's something you're testing, maybe don't invest as much in landing page. It's like a template. I think whatever you spend overall should be similar in all of them, but investing a lot in one and then nothing in others makes no sense. The other thing I'll say is I actually think it makes a lot of sense to think about what will the host of the podcast say about you and why. Like I've been listening lately to a podcast called Moneywise from some part I really like. And one of the ads I really like was he an ad on Kubera. Kubera is a fantastic tool to manage your net worth. So first of all, it's like really good targeting, like people who are listening to Moneywise, plural, you can use Kubera. Secondly, Sam says he uses Kubera and he talks about how he uses it before doing the promotion. So that is incredible. So at least like this relatively relativity of I'm using it or even if it's not, I'm using it, but how I learned about it, what I like about it. But if it can be personal, I think it makes a huge difference on the type of ad that you do in the podcast. And it's I think it's something that's worth spending time on it. I personally check a lot of the ads that show up in podcasts. I never go to the URLs that I mentioned. I just go to the websites. So I'm not the best target, sadly.

And that is typically in an audio format. I mean, a counter argument to a lot of what we said is, well, mostly you're just trying to get in people's ears and heads and whatever. But geez, you might as well invest for the people that will go to the URL.

I agree. Yeah. I think take away so we can share from this is number one, if you're doing a podcast or an ad and you capture the people, think about the landing page. Think about how many CTA's and where it goes so they are related to the person that you're targeting. Think about how the ad is being mentioned on the podcast or similar and spend similarly on your landing page and on the experience to what you spend on the ad.

Exactly.

OK, second topic today is actually an expansion from last week. Last week we talked about videos and how everybody now does videos for launch. And Hank actually found two videos this week, one from Sentry, one from Cursor that we were going to chat about. What were your thoughts on the videos?

Well, last week we established that you're bored of videos now. Now that they've become table stakes, you're over them. But that means they're table stakes. So you got to do them, people. And yeah, we had opposite examples. Cursor launched 1.0 of their product. And you would expect for Cursor, who's now at over 900 million or whatever billion in revenue. And they just raised, you know, almost a billion in funding. Man, they must have the sickest, coolest video. No, just a guy talking to a camera kind of awkwardly for a little bit. Couldn't even follow him.

And the demo, the demos they did on the video sucked as well. Like an animation, something fun, something different. Like it was the most boring video presentation ever. Like last week, for example, we saw Superblocks video presentation. It had better animations to go from like human beings to showing the code. And it has some animations for explaining things. This had nothing. It was nothing.

Cursor, they have the chance to become fully synonymous with vibe coding, with a future of coding, with so much. The aspiration, it's all there. And they just were like, here's 1.0, I guess. How boring. What a terrible mess.

I don't know. I would have like a guy maybe that's vibing and it's coding while they are vibing. Even something stupid like that would have been better. Yeah.

And with some of the money I know Cursor throws around, man, this could have been someone's job just for a month. Just make this video great. OK, anyways, then meanwhile, we got something. And it's not all production value because this other video also actually even lower production value. But it gave me a chuckle. It was different. It had my attention. We should have actually looked at the stats and seen if it did well. But it's Sentry's video announcing logs. And all they did was they stuck a little webcam up with like a fisheye lens and it watched David Kramer come in. And he was the CEO. He's stepped down. He's in like a technical role there. But he just comes in and he's kind of grumpy. And the joke, I guess the joke is just that Sentry records stuff now. They have logs now. And that was it. And then they have the other stuff. It was funny. It gets the algorithm going. I don't know. I love it. And man, it took them. I mean, David walked in. Maybe he maybe he did two takes if and I doubt it. I bet that was it. I bet they didn't even tell him about it.

The one thing that I think is good about this, I don't think you can if you can do it with every product is why they were actually filming him walk in, sit in the computer and eat the sandwich. In the top, it said Sentry's got logs now. And I think every developer understand what a log is so they can understand and relate this camera to what's going on. So it was funny to me, too. And they're like, OK, this was a great way to show this feature and everybody understands it. However, the problem, I think, is that for a lot of features, people do not. You cannot just understand it with one liner like Sentry's got logs. OK, I understand what a log is. I know what Sentry's done. But with Cursor 1.0, I don't think they could have done the same thing in the sense that they were more complicated features or stuff like that. But maybe for a portion of the video, they could have done something funny. So I think understanding also like, OK, what am I what I'm shipping? Is it something that everybody else has and we don't yet? Because if that's the case, we should do something funny. If it's something unique, maybe we need to explain a bit more. But I don't know, like I have a few shows and something funny, something that makes me pay attention and do something unique. I also love the Sentry one. Actually, first time I saw it, I saw it because Hank sent it to me. And I asked Hank, like, is this it? Is there more video or something? And no, that's it. That was it. But it was great.

It's great. And that type of curiosity gets you to dig deeper. I think that's I think that's a that's a good follow up to our last week thing. And we talked about some stuff with ads very applicable to what a lot of people do here. Yeah. Anything else you wanted to add? Nope. Great. Everybody have a great week.

Thank you.