Advertorial and prelander build for paid and native traffic

A prelander only earns its place when it lifts the offer page by more than the clicks it costs. At a 25 percent click-through from advertorial to offer, which is ordinary on Taboola and Outbrain inventory, the offer page has to convert four times better on that traffic than on direct traffic simply to break even. Most advertorials we are asked to review do not clear that bar, and the honest fix is to delete the page rather than redesign it. The two things an advertorial can actually do: Qualify, by sending fewer and better-informed people onward. Or install a belief the offer page assumes the reader already holds — that the problem has a cost, that the current workaround has a cost, that the category exists at all. It cannot manufacture demand for something nobody wants, and a page written as though it can reads as a scam to the reader and the network reviewer at the same moment. Compliance is a build constraint, not a review step: Native networks reject destinations before they reject creative. Meta reviews the page, not only the ad, and ad-to-page mismatch is what restricts accounts. For crypto clients selling into the EU, marketing communications under MiCA must be identifiable as marketing, must be fair and not misleading, and must not contradict the white paper. In the UK, a direct offer financial promotion to a first-time retail investor carries a personalised risk warning and a 24-hour cooling-off period, which changes the order of the page rather than its footer. We design to those constraints from the wireframe, because retrofitting them at the end costs the page its structure. What we refuse to build: Newsroom chrome for a publication you do not own. Invented bylines, invented outlets, invented comment threads. An 'as seen on' strip without a contract or a link to the piece. A countdown attached to nothing. Income claims, yield claims, before-and-after claims, and any page whose argument is that the reader will make money. If an offer needs a fake newsroom around it to convert, the answer is no — and we say it before taking the money, not by quietly watering the work down afterwards, which is the more common way agencies decline this. How we write them: One page per belief, not one page per product. The link to the offer sits where the reader has just agreed with something, and it appears more than once because readers leave at different points. The disclosure goes above the fold, written as a sentence a person would say out loud. Length follows the argument: we have shipped a 400-word prelander and a 2,000-word one for the same client in the same quarter, and the short one won. What you receive: The written page and its build. Compliant disclosure for the networks and jurisdictions in scope. Tracking that separates prelander traffic from direct traffic inside your analytics, so the four-times question above can actually be answered rather than argued about. A read at 30 days ending in one of three recommendations: keep, rewrite, kill. Not for you if: You buy on rented domains and rotate them when they burn. You are promoting an affiliate offer whose destination page you do not control. You want a page that passes review by being ambiguous. You are launching a token, running a presale, or selling anything whose pitch is a return.