Happy Sunday, Everyone!
We’ve officially entered the 8th month of 2025 – BFCM planning is in full swing, 2026 budgeting is underway and amongst all the chaos, there’s still some summer sunshine to enjoy and back-to-school campaigns to deploy.
This week’s issue was inspired by a combination of things.
For decades (maybe longer), marketing has embraced the concept of “right person, right time, right message” – and for good reason. It makes sense. The wrong message to the right person is a dud. The right message to the right person at the wrong time is ignored. The theory goes that only by nailing all three can your marketing be successful.
I think that’s wrong.
There’s a fourth component that’s missing. One that I’ve seen go awry over and over again in account audits and campaign reviews.
The “Right Experience”
If you’ve run ads for any amount of time, you’ve experienced situations where everything was seemingly set up for success – the strategy was good. The creative was exceptional. The targeting + ad account was pristine. The tracking was flawless. Every single component of the above was there – but the results didn’t follow. In every situation where that’s happened to me, the culprit has been the same: a suboptimal, broken or otherwise flawed post-click experience.
What’s ironic is that, in a world where creative has dominated the headlines and the online conversation (and rightly so! More brands should be investing more into creative and should be making more diverse and interesting ads), the most powerful lever available to marketers is the one that no-one talks about: the experience after the click. Put another way: 80% of marketers are primarily focused on creative, but 80%+ of the impact comes from what happens after the click.
A brilliant ad, perfectly delivered to the right person means absolutely nothing if the experience that follows it is disconnected, boring, broken or otherwise flawed. Nailing the first three “rights” means nothing if you can’t nail the fourth (and most important) one.
With that in mind, this week’s issue is focused on the core elements of a truly remarkable post-click experience - and the framework we use to develop and evaluate those experiences.
Before we dive into this week’s topic, I want to first talk about the elephant in the room: creating the time necessary to even think about the post-click experience.
The reality is that most CMOs, media buyers and marketing directors are absolutely overloaded. Most agency people are running too many accounts for their own good (when you conduct well over 100 interviews a year, you get a good sense as to what’s going on in the industry), and they can barely find the time to do the routine maintenance on their accounts - let alone adding something has far-reaching and time-intensive as post-click experiences.
I know that feeling. It sucks. The way out is to find leverage. For me, that was Optmyzr (and it’s why I still use it to this day). It reduces the time I spend on routine management tasks by 75% - 90%, which frees up the time I need to do cool, smart, strategic stuff (like fixing broken post-click experiences).
One of my favorite features for ongoing management are the PPC Blueprints. They are one of Optmyzr’s hidden gems.
The concept is as simple as it is brilliant: you have a method of managing and optimizing your accounts - things you check. Steps you take. Stuff you do at various intervals (daily, weekly, monthly).
What if that process was streamlined and expedited, so instead of (for example) having to go through hundreds of search terms, they were presented to you? What if winner/loser ads were automatically determined, and all you had to do was validate the conclusion and pause? What if pacing, placement reports, time of day reports, even experiments - all the things you do, in the way and order that you are accustomed to doing them - were standardized (reducing human error is good) and accelerated?
That’s what blueprints do.
You build the blueprint based on your process. You configure the rules and parameters and details. You set the order. You create the schedule. Optmyzr runs it, then presents you with the information you need to make optimization decisions, all from the Optmyzr interface (to be honest, anything that gets you out of the Google Ads interface is a win). You can share these across your team and get logs of when each component task of a blueprint (like search term management, negative KW management, budget pacing, creative review, etc.) is completed.
It’s amazing - not just because it helps you get more of the basics done, but also because it creates and maintains account management standards. You no longer have to worry or double-check if one of your PPC people checked the search terms - Optmyzr tells you it was done. It’s accountability and automation wrapped into one fully-customizable, completely-transparent platform.
Yes, this is way longer than I intended the sponsor section to be; no, they didn’t pay extra. I just love blueprints.
Optmyzr is currently running a 14-day free trial (no credit card required) - see for yourself the impact it can have on your accounts.
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We’ve reached a bizarre moment in digital marketing.
Budgets are swelling. Creative testing is endless. AI & adtech/martech gets more sophisticated by the week.
And yet, conversion rates remain flat. CAC is rising. LTV is compressing. Most funnels bleed money not because the targeting is off, but because the post-click experience is an afterthought.
Everyone’s fighting to win the attention war. But almost no one is asking, “What are we doing with that attention once we’ve earned it?”
The answer, for most brands, is… not much. A generic Shopify PDP. A bloated Unbounce landing page. A Frankensteined Squarespace site that loads like molasses and reads like a finance memo. The simple fact is this: the vast majority of those marketers launching 50+ new creatives a week are sending everyone who clicks to the same LP.
Dozens of different hooks. Absolutely staggering creative variety. Different angles. Different offers. All going to the same experience. And they wonder why most of them don’t work.
Right Message. Right Person. Right Time. Wrong Experience.
Which brings us here.
The leverage is no longer just in “getting the click.” That game is commoditized. It’s solved.
The edge - the alpha - is in what happens AFTER the click. And it just so happens that the framework we use has that nice little acronym (with a little finagling).
The AFTER Framework
A new mental model for how high-performing brands turn attention into revenue—after the user lands.
This isn’t a list of best practices. It’s a strategic shift in how you think about experience design, incentive structures, and cognitive alignment post-click.
Let’s break it down:
A — Attention as an Asset Class
Most marketers treat attention like a light switch: on or off. Clicked or didn’t click. Converted or abandoned. Most marketers are wrong.
Attention is gradational; it can be weak, strong, scattered, concentrated, intermittent, fleeting. Just because someone is on your lander doesn’t mean they’re actively there. If you want to test this, record someone while they’re browsing your lander, then view that footage alongside the session recording from your site. The overwhelming majority of the time, you’ll see moments of interest/focus, followed by drifting, followed (sometimes) by a “snap back” to the page (when you have elements that re-hook them) and a positive outcome....or either hard or soft rejection (leave the page or just open another tab).
Test it for yourself. Go pull up some screen recordings. Then, (non-creepily) spy on your friend or significant other while they’re browsing a site. Observe how their attention fluctuates.
Accepting that attention isn’t consistent is step #1. Step #2 is shifting your approach in recognition of that fact.
When someone clicks an ad, they’re making a micro-investment: of time, trust and curiosity. They are giving you the benefit of the doubt, trusting that what’s in your creative and what they’ll find next are congruent. But like any other organic thing, that attention can either compound OR decay. If you don’t immediately reinvest it - through storytelling, clarity, ad-experience congruence, trust signals, relevance - you squander the opportunity and you lose that potential customer/client.
Think of attention like capital: your ad is the initial acquisition. When that person clicks on the ad, you are now renting their attention for a finite period of time. What happens next - your post-click experience - determines your return on the investment you made with the ad.
If the post-click experience does not systematically reinvest the attention you acquired in service of the goal you’re seeking to achieve, the return you ultimately realize will be lower than what is otherwise possible.
How to Shift Your Mindset About Attention:
- They think of their site like an investment portfolio, with each component as a constituent asset: some elements are disproportionately effective; others struggle to achieve even mediocre performance. And, like any good investor, they know that (1) past results are not indicative of future returns and (2) none are sacrosanct. If an element ceases to perform, they drop it.
- They don’t just track bounce rate. They use tools like heatmaps and scrollmaps to analyze behavioral gradients: scroll depth, hover time, input engagement, interaction rate/velocity, re-engagement triggers.
- They don’t assume “more time on site” is better (spoiler alert: in most cases, it isn’t!) Instead, they focus on understanding how effectively each page and each element compounded the initial attention into something useful: What was the cost per unit of attention, and how efficiently did we convert it into action?
- They don’t build static pages. They build dynamic experiences (to the extent possible) that make it easy for users to find the information they need and discover what to do next.
- They design their pages to reward attention - they create/deliver value for the user every time they engage. It might be a useful bit of information, a counter-intuitive use case, a case study from a person/brand facing a similar challenge.
If that’s too abstract, here’s how you can make it real, actionable & tactical for your team:
- Signal “you’re in the right place” within 2 seconds: immediate visual and narrative congruence with the pre-click ad. If you’re running UGC, the creator should be featured prominently on the lander. If your ad talks about replacement windows, there better be hyper-prominent content about windows above-the-fold.
- Guide the eye in a clear sequence: design that mirrors how people make decisions - skimming first, scanning for trust cues then diving deeper. The cardinal sin most marketers make when they spend 90% of their time on ads is assuming that the ad alone is sufficient to create conviction. It isn’t. The ad sparks curiosity; the lander’s job is to serve as your “digital salesperson” - compounding that initial seed of interest/curiosity into a desire to take the next step. And, just as any successful salesperson will tell you, accomplishing that requires responding to the needs of the prospect. Some will want social proof. Others will want to understand the benefits for their particular situation. Still others will want to understand how it works. Some may want to see case studies. Your lander should provide all of that, organized in a way that allows each person to get where they need to go as efficiently as possible.
- Continuously reward attention with clarity: every scroll, hover, or interaction should yield new value for your audience. If you’re regurgitating the same brand talking points in every section of the lander without bothering to think about why a visitor would be reading this specific copy, you’re probably not “getting it” from their perspective. Create your content from the perspective of your audience - why do they want to read this? What does the fact that they are reading it tell us about them? Example: if someone is reading the social proof section, they’re likely trying to de-risk the decision. They want to know that it’s safe to move forward. They want reassurance that the investment they’re going to make will have the intended effect. Have that at the forefront of your mind as you are designing that section. Use colors that create trust (blues, grays, beige, greens). Ask your salespeople how they build trust in the brand with prospects, then convey that in this section. The end result of doing all that? You reward attention with clarity. They came seeking reassurance, and you delivered it.
Stop thinking of your landers as a destination. Think of it as a portfolio of assets (each element) that reinvests attention until it compounds into conversions OR goes to $0. Your job is to rapidly identify where the leaky parts of the experience are (heatmaps, scrollmaps, customer surveys), then fix them before they tank your overall results.
F — Friction Is A Tool
I think every person I’ve ever met in CRO shouts about “removing friction.” It’s the go-to tactic for most agencies the instant you tell them conversion rate dropped – simplify the checkout. Create a squeeze page. Remove form fields (or worse: go to Facebook Instant Forms).
Friction is anything that slows the user down or adds resistance to taking action. That includes:
- Asking for more information
- Additional clicks or steps
- Decision complexity or cognitive effort
- Waiting (load time, delayed gratification)
- Emotional hesitation (risk, fear, uncertainty)
Don’t get me wrong - that stuff works, IF your goal is to get more people to do the first thing (submit the lead form, book the demo, buy the widget). If your goal is something bigger - say, get real, qualified potential buyers to attend the demo, or get customers who buy again and again and again - then you have to think a little bigger.
The truth is more nuanced: friction is not the enemy. Unjustified friction is.
Unjustified friction feels like a tax: unexpected, annoying, unjustified. In the best case, it annoys the user (the pop-up that doesn’t close, or the video that auto-plays with sound on); in the worst case, it actively prohibits them from doing the thing that both they and you want them to do (like complete a checkout or add a product to the cart). This friction should be ruthlessly eliminated.
There’s a second kind of friction - the good friction - that feels like a test or a tool. It’s designed to signal importance, segment the user or create a sense of personalization. This is the good stuff.
A constant across nearly every high-converting post-click experiences we have is that it introduces intentional, framed friction to separate the serious from the curious, to add perceived value and/or to anchor expectations.
This makes the challenge twofold: (1) diagnose and eliminate the bad friction while (2) simultaneously creating (or retaining) the good friction.
The best place to start is with removing the bad friction. We bucket this into three groups, categorized by the kind of resistance the user feels when encountering it:
1. Cognitive Friction
“How hard is this to understand?”
- Caused by complex copy, unclear layouts, mismatched messaging
- Makes the brain work too hard to extract meaning
- Resolution: Increase clarity, simplify decisions, improve storytelling/narrative sequencing
2. Emotional Friction
“How risky or uncertain does this feel?”
- Rooted in fear, skepticism, doubt, and perceived cost
- Comes from unclear guarantees, lack of trust signals, or misaligned tone
- Resolution: Add proof, reduce perceived risk, mirror emotional state
3. Mechanical Friction
“How hard is this to do physically?”
- Slow load times, janky forms, device incompatibility, broken UX
- Frustrates the user through effort misalignment
- Resolution: Fix UI/UX, shorten flows, remove technical blockers. Seriously, we should not still be talking about broken UX/UI in 2025 - but here we are.
Here’s the challenge: if you remove all friction, you get low-quality leads and transactional churn. If you insert framed, earned friction, you get commitment. The solution? Inject more strategic friction in your post-click experience:
1. Intent-Qualifying Friction
Used to segment low vs high-intent users and protect resources.
- Multi-step forms that filter for high-value users
- Quiz flows that offer personalization at the cost of additional information
- Dropdowns or filters that force reflection
- Questions that immediately self-select out people who aren’t serious or aren’t the ultimate decision-maker.
By design, these will reduce the completion rate on your form/experience – but they’ll increase the qualification rate of those that complete it.
2. Value-Anchoring Friction
Used to increase perceived value by making users work (just a little) for it. This triggers the Ikea Effect, which has the wonderful side effect of making whatever it is you show them next appear more valuable.
- Builders that tailor outcomes (e.g., build your bundle, create your skincare routine)
- Tools that require a single input before showing results
- Pages that gate high-value content behind a short diagnostic or form
These all work because we are all hard-wired to associate effort with value. If something is too easy to get, we assume it’s worth very little.
3. Belief-Building Friction
If you’ve ever gone shopping at a luxury retailer or a car dealership, you’re probably familiar with this kind of friction. At a luxury brand, the salesperson won’t just give you the thing you ask for (go into Hermes and ask for a Birkin - I dare you). They’ll explain to you the process. They’ll make you wait. They’ll tell you about so-and-so who is still waiting for their bag. Each one of these things is designed to reinforce your conviction in what you want OR weed you out.
- Micro-explainer sequences that answer questions one by one
- Side-by-side comparisons that require scrolling
- Sliders or calculators that require exploration
By design, belief-building is not easy. There’s a reason religions make people wait and jump through hoops to join. It creates the sense that the thing at the end of the journey is worth working for. It builds conviction in the decision.
Here’s the tricky part: the same element can either convert or repel depending on the framing. Asking someone to “Fill out this form to schedule a call.” is bad friction - it feels like more work for no payoff. But, if I change the headline to: “To get the most accurate quote, we’ll ask you 3 quick questions.” - both the completion rate AND the qualification rate jumped over 50%.
The form didn’t change. But now the friction has a purpose. And purpose flips friction into value.
Go back to the Hermes example above.
You don’t walk into a Hermes store and find 1-click checkout, 15% off your first order, and a chatbot begging to help. You find a stand-offish person who will reluctantly talk to you, only to tell you had he made [insert person with serious social status] wait and wait for the thing you want (or worse, something inferior to what you want). That’s intentional friction: a slower pace, human interaction, layers of validation. The entire point is to signal this is not for everyone and if you can’t deal with this, you’ll never be one of us.
DTC brands use this principle all the time. A classic example is a quiz-based onboarding flow. That friction isn’t a bug. It’s a confirmation process that ensures the user belongs here and will actually be well-served by the brand.
Designing for Constructive Friction
Frame the Friction: Always explain why the friction exists. Humans will tolerate - hell, they’ll even enjoy - effort if they believe it’s in service of a better outcome.
Make It Predictable: Uber’s great insight was that people don’t actually care that much if the car arrives in 2 minutes or 7 minutes, IF they know when it’ll be there. The solution wasn’t to shorten the wait time; it was to make it predictable. You can do that, too. Use progress bars, step indicators or preview states so users understand the scope of the effort required. Uncertainty makes friction feel heavier.
Use It to Earn the Next Step: Reward each act of friction with clarity, personalization or access. Make the user feel like they unlocked something with their effort.
Friction + Scarcity = Leverage
One powerful tactic is to pair friction with scarcity.
Instead of offering something to everyone, you require action and limit availability. That double-layer pressure - effort AND urgency - forces prioritization.
“We only take on 10 new clients per quarter. Apply to see if we’re a fit.”
“This offer is only visible to users who complete the 4-question fit check.”
This isn’t dark pattern manipulation. It’s psychological congruence. People value what’s hard to get, even more so when they believe they’ve earned access to it.
The tl;dr: friction should be a feature, not a bug. Use it to create perceived value and psychological buy-in from the right people, and to repel the wrong people. Your brand isn’t for everyone, so your post-click experience shouldn’t be, either.
T — Time-on-Site ≠ Trust. It Often Means Confusion.
We’ve all seen it: pages with long session durations but terrible conversion rates. Even worse: teams still celebrate “time on site” like it’s a KPI.
Let’s start this section with what should be a lukewarm-at-best take: If users are lingering, they’re either confused, unconvinced, or unable to act. Long time on site + low conversion rates = your post-click experience is failing.
It’s not compounding attention into action. It’s not leveraging friction to create belief. It’s sucking.
The job of your post-click experience is NOT to be an attention blackhole; it’s to collapse the distance between curiosity and clarity.
What actually matters post-click is how quickly and confidently the user gets what they came for.
This is clarity velocity—how fast someone moves from:
- “What is this?”
- “Is it for me?”
- “Can I trust it?”
- “What should I do next?”
The faster you can move users through those steps, the better your post-conversion experience will perform. It doesn’t matter if this is via one page (a single, self-contained lander) or multiple; your primary objective must be to move users through this series of steps.
One of the major conclusions I have from reviewing (quite literally) thousands of post-click experiences is this: speed-to-understanding is one of the highest leverage metrics in marketing.
This all harkens back to the primary equation of commerce: when value > price, the probability of conversion increases.
Everything you’re doing in this section is making the “value” component of the equation more intelligible to your target audience. And every second saved compounds. The end result is higher engagement, higher purchase intent, lower probability of abandonment.
If you want to know how to implement this tactically, here are four things we look for:
1. Accordion-style Storytelling: Structure your content like an accordion: core idea first, supporting logic second, proof/detail third. Repeat this structure with sub-points throughout the page, ensuring you place the “keys” to finding everything prominently at the top (anchor links are your friend). This structure mimics the way people consume information - skimming for the right general solution, then zooming in, then confirming.
2. Nudge Your Visitors: Guide users with small cues (“Next step →”, “Estimated 30 seconds”) to eliminate ambiguity and maintain momentum. This is the same principle you see in theme parks or casinos, where micronudges are used to direct people “to” the attraction (through a path that often has a lot of slot machines or treat vendors on it).
3. Overwhelm with Social Proof: One big mistake most brands make - they scatter social proof across their lander like a child scatters sprinkles on their ice cream. Don’t. Instead, consolidate them into tight visual units near key CTAs to reinforce belief right before the ask. The entire goal of social proof is to give your visitor that final push - and if they’re everywhere, they’re going to be ignored.
4. CTA Progression: Repeat and reframe CTAs to match the visitor’s belief state. Early CTA = “Curious? Explore.” Mid-page CTA = “Ready? Let’s go.” BOFU CTA = “You’ve seen the proof. Now act.” This mirrors the narrative progression you’ve created and continually rewards the user’s attention with new nuggets of information/insight/value.
E — Expectation Alignment
I’m convinced that one of the root issues of most human-involved issues (this goes way beyond marketing) is misaligned expectations. We’ve all experienced it - we expect something is going to happen (a colleague will send an email, or our significant other will have dinner ready, or our 5 year old will clean up their playroom), and when that expectation is not met, bad things ensue.
If you are not tailoring your post-click experiences to your ad creatives, odds are that’s exactly what you’re doing to your visitors. They clicked an ad that promised one thing….only to arrive on a page that delivers something else.
The biggest culprit is UGC/influencer campaigns: the user saw a person they knew (influencer) or related to (creator). They were persuaded to make that initial investment of attention based on what they saw….only to arrive on a generic lander or PDP or (even worse) your homepage. No mention of the person they saw. No mention of the angle/offer/pain point that piqued their attention.
The result? Confusion. Distrust. Frustration. Skepticism.
It’s the same way you’d feel if a friend invited you to brunch, only for you to arrive and find 10 other people sitting at the table. Yes, you’re still having brunch with your friend, but the experience isn’t what you signed up for (that’d be one-on-one brunch with your friend).
Don’t do that to your visitors!
Note: this is way bigger than matching headlines (which is a good first step for PPC, but it’s not the whole ballgame).
If you’re going to invest the time, energy and resources into creator/influencer partnerships, then make the investment in the entire journey, not just the ad creative. Here are three things you can do to ensure expectations are aligned after the click.
1. Narrative-Specific Landing Variants
Instead of segmenting landing pages by ad platform (Meta, Google, TikTok), segment them by narrative structure:
- Pain vs Aspiration
- Identity vs Utility
- Hope vs Fear
- Belonging vs. Differentiation
- Speed vs. Mastery
Every great ad creates an emotional connection. Your landing page should build on that emotional connection - the pain point, the challenge, the vision, the goal, whatever - and help the user move from where they are to where they want to be.
To make this more concrete: imagine I’m running an ad for B2B SaaS focused on the angle: you’re wasting 30% of your budget. Instead of sending them to a generic page, direct them to a “budget recovery calculator” that doubles down on that pain (wasted budget) and offers a path to resolution.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel; just think about what emotional strings your ad is pulling, then ask yourself, “what would my audience want to see next if they’re feeling this way?”
Then, just deliver that on your lander. It’s not rocket science; it just takes good, old-fashioned elbow grease.
2. Tone Mapping
Build a tone ladder from low-trust to high-trust. Map your traffic sources onto this scale, then adjust landing tone accordingly:
3. Mirror the Problem Language
Don’t just describe your offer; describe the problem exactly as it was framed in the ad.
The person (quite literally) told you that this articulation of their problem resonated with them, so why are you changing it?
If your ad says “Creative fatigue is killing your ROAS,” your landing page better not start with “We help brands scale efficiently.” That’s a narrative reset. It feels like a bait-and-switch.
Keep it simple.
R — Relevance Is About Recognition, Not Personalization
Let’s start with a bold statement: users hate personalization because you suck at it.
Hey , blah blah blah blah 20% off…
Isn’t personalization. It’s a thinly veiled attempt to manipulate your visitor/user/reader. It’s shallow. And it’s entirely misguided.
Let’s take a step back and ask a more fundamental question: why do people convert?
Is it because you know their name? No.
Is it because you know where they live? No.
Is it because you know what device they are using? No.
None of that shit matters, so why are you using it as the axis on which your personalization hinges?
What does matter? Simple: do you understand their problem and can you help them solve it?
No one gives a single damn about your product or service or brand unless you can convince them that you have a way to help them. People are selfish.
What’s the antidote to this? Focus on recognition.
The difference may seem subtle, but it means everything – personalization focuses on identity (who they are, where they are, what device they’re using); recognition conveys an understanding of their reality.
Recognition triggers what psychologists call the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (or frequency illusion): once you notice something that mirrors your experience, you begin to trust and focus on it more. When a landing page describes your internal dialogue better than you can, it creates immediate trust. The visitor assumes, “If they understand the problem this well, then they probably know how to solve it.”
Implementing this isn’t difficult - it just requires changing your perspective and adopting a new way of creating post-click experiences:
Start With Problem State, Not Persona
Personas are helpful for media buying. But in landing experience design, they’re often too broad. Instead, define problem states: emotional or situational contexts your user is in at the moment of clicking.
Examples:
- “Under pressure to hit CAC targets”
- “Stuck in creative iteration hell”
- “Skeptical of software that overpromises and underdelivers”
- “Already tried [competitor] and burned by the experience”
Now ask: how does that person talk to themselves? What’s the self-narrative? Frame your content in their words, not yours.
Remember, to your audience, you are nothing more than a means to an end. That’s OK. Once you embrace that, everything else becomes easier.
Use Diagnostic Language
When you go to the doctor, the physician doesn’t walk in with a shiny scroll of credentials and begin reading them off to you (if s/he does, please find another doctor). Instead, the doctor likely begins with some open-ended questions that roughly align to your problem state (i.e., “what’s going on with your stomachache?” or “how long as your shoulder been giving you problems?”)
That sets the stage for more discovery, giving you (the patient) the opportunity to share relevant details that are pertinent to the diagnosis.
Only after s/he has received enough information does the doctor begin to diagnose your issue and prescribe a solution.
If the immediate-credential experience would turn you off to a doctor, then why are you doing it to your users with your post-click experiences? It’s madness.
Take a page out of our doctor’s playbook and open your LP with diagnoses.
- “You’re not overpaying for ads. You’re under-optimizing after the click.”
- “The reason your LTV is flat isn’t your product. It’s your funnel’s belief sequence.”
- “You’re scaling revenue, but your ops team is breaking.”
The moment a user reads something and thinks, “damn, that’s me”, you’ve won. Everything else is easy street because the user is bought in.
Layer Proof That Mirrors Their Situation
Recognition doesn’t stop at copy. It extends to case studies, social proof, visuals and offers.
The user shouldn’t just think, “This sounds like my problem.”; they should think, “that person is like me. That outcome is possible for me.”
This is where vertical-specific proof outperforms generic logos or testimonials. Simon Sinek was 90% right in his famous TED Talk: people join people…like them.
Demonstrate to your visitors that you are their people, and convincing them to join you is much, much easier.
Drop the Ego. Use Their Voice, Not Yours.
Too many brands prioritize sounding polished, professional and clever. There’s a time and a place for the brand police, but it isn’t on post-click experiences. Recognition is built through mirroring, not polish.
Imagine how you’d feel if you were talking to a scientist, and instead of speaking to you normally, they spoke to you as if you were a colleague with advanced training in their field – hyper-technical, jargon-y, making obscure references, etc.
You’d be put off. Confused. Annoyed. And understandably so – because you wouldn’t feel heard, understood or like you could contribute to the conversation.
When you litter your landers with a bunch of industry jargon and accolades and fancy brand terminology, that’s what you’re doing to your users.
Instead: write how they think. Speak how they speak. Don’t say “omnichannel attribution frameworks” if your audience says “how do I tell which ad is working?”
At the end of the day, a great post-click experience begins with empathy, understanding and a willingness to treat your visitors like people, not numbers on a spreadsheet (or in ads manager, as the case may be).
If you take nothing else away from this issue, I hope you remember this: we are in a rare window of arbitrage.
Everyone’s fixated on improving creative, LTV:CAC ratios, and channel diversification. Meanwhile, the post-click layer is neglected, underleveraged, and grossly under-optimized.
This isn’t about improving your landing page.
It’s about fundamentally rethinking how you turn attention into action.
The AFTER Framework is your blueprint:
- Attention as an Asset Class
- Friction as a Feature
- Time ≠ Trust
- Expectation Alignment
- Recognition over Personalization
If your funnel isn’t converting, it’s probably not your ad. It’s what happens after.
Until next week,
Cheers,
Sam
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