The Ad Landing Page Checklist

Why the home page is the wrong place to send ad clicks

Your home page does a lot of jobs at once. It tells your story, lists everything you sell, shows reviews and links to your social accounts, with a menu across the top that goes everywhere else. That's fine for someone browsing. For a stranger who just tapped an ad, every one of those links is a way off the page, and you paid for the tap that brought them there.

I ran into this in October. A client was about to run Facebook and Instagram ads for the one product he sells online, and the plan had been to send them to his home page. So I had Claude make a copy of the home page in his site builder and cut it down to one job, buying. Building it took about 55 minutes, tightening it took another 20, and the copy stayed a hidden draft until he approved it.

Meta, which runs Facebook and Instagram ads, says in its Advertising Standards that what an ad promotes has to match what its landing page promotes (checked November 1, 2026). A page with one job makes that easy. These are the seven checks I'd run on any page before paying to send ads to it.

The seven checks

1. Hide the menu and the header

The menu across the top is the biggest way off the page. Hide it on this page only, and keep it everywhere else on your site. Some site builders have a switch for that in the page settings. The one we used didn't, so Claude hid the header with a few lines of styling placed inside that one page, then closed the 90-pixel gap it left at the top on phones.

2. Take out every link that leads away

Read the page looking only for links: "see my story on the home page", the blog, your social media icons, other products. Each one goes. On our page the only things left to click were the Buy Now buttons and the phone number, plus Privacy and Terms in the footer.

3. Make the Buy button big, and repeat it

Put the product, the price and a Buy button near the top, where a phone shows them before any scrolling. We cut the empty space in the top banner from 200 pixels to 70 to get them higher. Then repeat the button further down, so it's there whenever someone decides.

The first version of ours was small and outlined, and my note to Claude was "That Buy Now button is so pathetic." It became bold black text on bright yellow, 68 pixels tall, in three places down the page, all going to the checkout the client already had.

4. Answer the FAQ from the owner's own words

An FAQ near the bottom answers the questions that would otherwise stop a sale: how to use it, sizes and colors, shipping, returns, paying without a PayPal account. Ours has nine questions, and every answer came from something the owner had already told us. AI is good at turning your notes into tidy questions and answers. It shouldn't be making up the answers, so the prompt further down tells it to leave a blank instead.

5. No testimonial without a signed release

I asked for testimonials on the page, and Claude pushed back. This is the page your ads point to, so it's the most public place to get permission wrong. Testimonials go on when the signed release forms come back. If you're a health provider, the HHS guidance on HIPAA and marketing says that, with limited exceptions, you need a patient's written authorization before using their health information in marketing (checked November 1, 2026).

Health products have their own ad rules too. Read Meta's Health and Wellness ad policy before you write the ad itself. It limits some claims and requires some health ads to target only people 18 and over, and Meta updates it, so read the current version.

6. Try buying every option yourself

Open the live page and try to buy every quantity, size and option it offers, one at a time. Go all the way to the payment screen and stop before you pay. The prices on a page and the settings inside a checkout live in different places, so they can drift apart without anyone noticing. It takes ten minutes, and it's a lot cheaper to find a problem now than after a week of paid clicks.

7. Check the live page on a phone

Site editors don't always show the page the way visitors see it. Our new yellow button still looked white inside the editor, and only the live page showed the real one. So load the page itself, on your phone as well as your computer, and look for anything that's cut off, too small to tap or makes the page slide sideways. Claude checked ours at 360 and 390 pixels wide, two common phone screen sizes, and on a desktop.

The checklist

Copy it into your notes and tick it off before the ads go live.

The Ad Landing Page Checklist

[ ] 1. The menu and header are hidden on this page only.

[ ] 2. No links lead away, except Buy, a phone number and Privacy and Terms.

[ ] 3. The product, the price and a big Buy button show near the top, and the button repeats further down.

[ ] 4. Every FAQ answer comes from my own words, with no claim I can't back up.

[ ] 5. Every testimonial, name, face or story on the page has a signed release.

[ ] 6. I tried buying every quantity and option, up to the payment screen.

[ ] 7. I checked the live page on my phone and my computer.

Have AI check your page

Copy your page's text into ChatGPT or Claude with this prompt, or give it the page's address if yours can open web pages. It only reports back, so you decide what changes.

Below is the text of the page my ads will send people to. Check it against these seven points. For each one, answer PASS or FIX, and quote the exact words from the page that made you decide.

1. Is there a site menu or header with links to other pages?
2. Is there any link that leads off this page, other than the Buy buttons, a phone number and Privacy and Terms?
3. Do the product, the price and a Buy button appear near the top, and does the Buy button appear again further down?
4. Is there an FAQ, and does each answer state a plain fact instead of a sales claim?
5. List every testimonial, review, name, face or customer story, so I can check I have a signed release for each one.
6. List every quantity, size and price the page offers, so I can test each one in my checkout.
7. Is any paragraph, table or button label long enough to be hard to read on a phone?

Don't rewrite the page. Just give me the list.

[paste your page's text here]

Write the FAQ from your own answers

Gather what you've already told customers: emails, notes from calls, the questions you answer every week. Paste them in under this prompt.

I'm writing an FAQ for the page my ads send people to. Below are my own answers to customer questions, in my own words, from emails, calls and notes.

Write 6 to 10 questions a first-time buyer would ask, each with a short answer.

Rules:
Use only facts from my notes below. If a question needs a fact I didn't give you, write the question and put [NEED ANSWER] instead of an answer.
Keep my wording where you can.
No promises about results.

[paste your notes here]

Fill in every [NEED ANSWER] yourself, or ask whoever knows, before the FAQ goes on the page.

About Andrew Voskov

Andrew Voskov is the founder of Cherry Pi AI. He spent twenty years running online businesses before AI, including product brands sold on Amazon, and now helps small businesses with marketing, bookkeeping and custom AI tools. Getting a page ready for ads is the kind of website update he does for clients.