A prelander is a page you show between the ad and the offer. Its only job is to warm the visitor up: explain the problem, build some trust and make the click to the real offer feel like the obvious next step. It reads like an article, a quiz or a short story, not like a sales page.
A prelander (pre-landing page, bridge page) is an intermediate page in an affiliate funnel: ad → prelander → advertiser landing page. The advertiser’s page is built to convert a visitor who already wants the product; cold traffic from native, push or social rarely arrives in that state. The prelander does the work the ad could not: it frames the problem, introduces the product as the solution, handles objections and ends with a single call to action that leads to the offer.
The common formats are the advertorial (an article-style page in the tone of a news or lifestyle site), the quiz or survey (a few questions that make the recommendation feel personal), the listicle (a short comparison of options) and the story page (a first-person account). Which one works depends on vertical and source: advertorials dominate nutra and finance on native, quizzes work for e-commerce and insurance, short warning-style pages are typical for utilities and VPN offers on push.
Prelanders are also where most compliance problems live. The FTC’s Enforcement Policy Statement on Deceptively Formatted Advertisements and its companion guide, Native Advertising: A Guide for Businesses, both published on December 22, 2015, state the principle plainly: advertising must not be presented as independent editorial content. Platforms turn that into policy. Taboola requires promotional pages that could be mistaken for editorial to carry an “Advertorial” label and to name the sponsor, and Google Ads treats showing reviewers one page and users another, known as cloaking, as a circumvention violation. Fake news layouts, invented doctors and fabricated testimonials are the fastest way to lose an ad account and a network relationship.
A compliant prelander is still a strong prelander. It stays consistent with the ad that brought the visitor, discloses that it is sponsored, makes only claims the advertiser can substantiate, loads fast on mobile and sends every click through a tracked link, so the funnel can be measured at each step: ad click-through rate, prelander click-through rate, offer conversion rate.
A nutra offer pays 35 USD per sale. You buy 10,000 native clicks at 0.35 USD each, 3,500 USD in total, and compare sending them straight to the offer with routing them through an advertorial.
| Direct link | With prelander | |
|---|---|---|
| Clicks reaching the offer | 10,000 | 3,800 (38% click-through on the prelander) |
| Offer conversion rate | 1.1% | 4.2% |
| Sales | 110 | 160 |
| Revenue | 3,850 USD | 5,600 USD |
| ROI | 10% | 60% |
The prelander sends fewer people to the offer, but the ones who arrive have read why they should buy, so they convert almost four times as often. The cost side does not change, because you pay for the first click either way. The numbers here are illustrative; what is not illustrative is the method: run both routes on the same traffic and let the tracker decide, because on warm search traffic a prelander can just as easily lose clicks without adding conversions.
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The landing page belongs to the advertiser and is where the conversion happens: the form, the checkout, the registration. The prelander is your page in front of it, built to prepare a cold visitor for that step. You control the prelander; you usually cannot change the landing page.
No. Warm traffic with clear intent, such as branded search or an email list that already knows the product, often converts better with a direct link. Cold traffic from native, push, pop and most social placements almost always benefits from a prelander. Test both on every new source.
Yes, when they are honest about being advertising and make claims the advertiser can substantiate. The FTC guidance and platform policies require that the sponsored nature is clear and that the page does not imitate independent editorial content. The format is fine; the deception is not.
Either with a landing page builder (hosted tools with templates and A/B testing) or as a static HTML page on your own domain, which loads faster and gives full control. Most networks share prelanders that already convert for an offer; ask your account manager before building from scratch, then localize and adapt the angle.
References are listed as plain text on purpose; look them up by title and publisher. Updated: 2026-10-02.
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