Match your ad to your landing page. Keep distractions to a minimum. Make the CTA impossible to miss. We’ve all heard the landing page commandments.

And they’re useful! But best practices come from tests conducted with specific audiences, products, and buying journeys. What worked for one campaign might not work for yours.

In one example shared by PPC Hero, a dark landing page outperformed a lighter version by 32% in conversion rate. In another, a broader product page generated 71% more conversions than a personalized one.

Before following the playbook, consider:

• Start with the basics. Clear messaging, intuitive design, and relevant offers provide a useful baseline when you don’t have historical testing data.
• Know your audience. Industry expectations, buying behavior, and customer feedback can challenge conventional design advice.
• Look beyond conversion rates. A page that generates more leads isn’t necessarily better if those leads never become customers.
• Test one meaningful variable. Build hypotheses around your own campaign data instead of copying someone else’s winning design.
• Account for your limitations. Traffic volume, budget, seasonality, and sales cycles all influence what you can realistically test.
• Give AI-generated pages a reality check. AI can speed up production, but a polished design doesn’t guarantee that the message resonates.

Best practices are a starting point, not a substitute for understanding your customers. Sometimes the winning landing page is the one that breaks a few rules.

Head to PPC Hero for more.

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Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show, here’s what we’re covering:

🔒 Apple’s secret blocklist: How Safari’s restrictions work and which ad tech companies have been affected.

📉 The impact on advertisers and publishers: Why disruptions to ad delivery and audience signals could affect campaign performance, publisher revenue, and programmatic advertising.

📊 The measurement problem: Why winning an ad auction doesn’t always mean an ad actually appeared on a user’s screen.

⚖️ Privacy vs. platform power: What happens when the company controlling the browser also operates an advertising business?

🛠️ What marketers should do next: Audit your ad tech dependencies, verify campaign delivery, strengthen your first-party data strategy, and ask vendors about their contingency plans.

Apple’s approach raises a bigger question for the open web: How do we protect user privacy while maintaining the infrastructure that supports digital advertising?

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• AI Is Killing Entry-Level Marketing Jobs (12:55)
• Microdramas Are Taking Over Marketing (10:43)
• AI CEOs Want to Slow Down. The AI Race Won’t. (11:39)
• Reddit Is Changing SEO & AI Search (10:55)
• The Creator Economy Rules Gaming (43:53)
• Dark Patterns Are Becoming a Legal Problem for Meta (12:06)
• Dissecting the Brand Apology (11:35)
• Google Image Search is… Pinterest? (9:26)
• Sony & The Death of Physical Media (8:57)

🎙️ Now streaming on Youtube, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music.

The Daily Carnage reaches decision-makers at brands, agencies, SaaS companies, and startups who are actively researching solutions, evaluating vendors, and making purchasing decisions every day.

Now, we’re opening up a limited number of Friends of The Daily Carnage partnerships for brands that want to build a consistent presence with our audience, not just run a one-off ad.

Friends get discounted sponsorship inventory, priority booking, first access to unsold placements, bonus opportunities, and performance reviews throughout the year.

Partnership levels include dedicated newsletter features, premium placements, podcast pre-rolls, classified ads, social promotion, and more.

Past sponsors include Canva, HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Marketing Brew, and dozens of other leading brands.

Interested in reaching marketers who actually click? Reach out to get started!

Let’s take this party outside of the inbox, Carnies!

Connect and network with over 20,000 marketers to get (and give) advice, feedback, support, and LOLs.

• 💬 Join r/TheDailyCarnage on Reddit
• 👍 Join The Daily Carnage Facebook Group

😎 See ya there.

A refreshing summer drink looks a lot less appealing when it’s served through an IV drip.

Greece’s Road Safety Institute takes that unsettling idea into its latest outdoor campaign, replacing the usual vacation imagery with hospital IV bags filled with colorful drinks.

Created by The Newtons Laboratory, the campaign reminds drivers how quickly speeding, distractions, or other reckless decisions can turn a long-awaited holiday into a hospital stay.

Definitely not the all-inclusive experience anyone had in mind.

TIAA-CREF, 1996