Real-life landing page stories: don't let the back button go back

Don’t you love last-minute landing page problems? It usually goes like this: everything is all set to launch and then at the last minute a few extra technical requirements are thrown in to the mix. How you adapt to those last-minute wrenches can make or break your launch timeline and even your campaign results. Here’s a real-world example of one such last-minute showstopper that happened this week for a LiveBall customer and how they overcame it.

The background: This is a long-time LiveBall customer—running about 150+ landing pages across about 50 unique traffic sources at any one time. They create a lot of pages and move with tremendous velocity. Each landing page launch is met with “Now, let’s get started on the next one”. Essentially, all of their campaign traffic across PPC, Social and Mobile goes through landing pages that they test & optimize. This customer has about 10 brands. They have a single set of custom page templates that they use across the 10 brands—using themes to easily rebrand any template with another brand as needed. This enables them find page layouts that are effective for one brand and then roll it out instantly to the other brands by switching out the brand-specific content and swapping the theme.  

The situation: This week they were launching a new product and had developed a set of landing pages for paid media. The pages for this launch were focused on capturing registrations. Once the visitor filled out the registration form they would go on to a download page where they could install the product. In order to execute this launch in LiveBall the customer did the following:

• Created a new brand theme and uploaded it to LiveBall.
• Applied the new theme to some  existing LiveBall templates that they knew would work well from previous tests in other brands. 
• Added their content into the templates (images, copy, a video, etc).
• Created a form in LiveBall (no-code required, of course!) for the registration and added it to the page.

Of course, no code needed for any of the above, except for the creation of the brand theme which their designer created and uploaded to LiveBall (they create it once and then re-use it over and over across all the pages they create for this product).

So far so good…pretty straight forward stuff. Until…

The problem: The day before the scheduled launch the customer called to say they had encountered what they thought might be a show-stopping wrench. They wanted to see if we had any ideas of how to get around this obstacle. The executive team in charge of the product launch informed them that the product couldn’t be downloaded by visitors who were under the age of 13. They needed to add age verification to the form. Plus, they needed to ensure if someone completed the reg form and was under 13 years of age, if they hit their back button they couldn’t get back to the registration page and just change their birthday to gain access by faking their birthday. 

Hm, so a standard registration landing page quickly turned into a landing page that needed to verify the visitor’s age and prevent access to the download page for those under the age of 13. 

The solution: Under normal circumstances requirements like these would require some last minute coding from a developer. But with LiveBall, both requirements could easily be accommodated, without code or developers. The account team was even able to guide the customer through set up of this functionality in about 30 minutes. Here’s what the customer did in LiveBall to make it happen:

• Added fields to the form to collect date of birth. 
• Added a “scriptlet” to the form that calculates age, based on the form field. Scriptlets are tiny snippets of code that live in your LiveBall library and can be added to your LiveBall pages as needed through a simple drop down. In this case, we already had a standard scriptlet for checking age, but if we hadn’t, the customer, or the ion team, could have simply created a custom one to handle it.
• Added a no-code advanced rule to the form that said:
  • If the age of the visitor is greater than 13, send visitor to the “download” page.
  • If the age is equal to, or less than, 13, then redirect the visitor to the “don’t allow” page. 

LiveBall advanced rules allow you to create custom if/then logic to your LiveBall pages without needing any code or developers. The “download” page was the standard thank you page that a visitor would arrive on after registration where they could then download the file. The “don’t allow” page was a page that informed the visitor that the download was only available to users older than 13. 

And there’s one more thing that needed to happen (isn’t there always?). If the age of the visitor was 13 or under, the customer didn’t want visitors just hitting their back button on the “don’t allow” page to get back to the registration page where they could just fake their date of birth to gain access. No problem, they just:

• Added an advanced rule to the initial landing page that said:
  • If the age of the visitor is equal to, or less than,13, then redirect the visitor past the registration page back to the “don’t allow” page. 

Here’s what it looks like in LiveBall to set something up like this:

No-code advanced rules let you create custom logic for your landing pages

So, although the blog post is long, the steps to create the solution actually only took about 30 minutes to set up and QA, including changing the form, adding the scriptlet, setting up the advanced rules and testing it all to make sure it worked as expected. The customer didn’t need to bother their already overloaded IT team to develop a solution and were able to meet their launch deadline, despite the last minute requirements. Voila, problem solved!