How to add a prelanding page

Prelanding is a one-page site with a link to a landing page. Its task is to warm up the buyer's interest in the product before it appears on the landing page. Most often it looks like a news item, a blog post, or a site with product reviews. In some cases, it contains not only links to the landing page, but also an order form. If there is a form, but there are no links, this is already a landing page, regardless of its appearance!

Prelandings are managed under the "Sites" button in the "Control" - "Offers" section. To add, you need to click on the green "Prelanding" button, specify the prelanding path, enter its name and select the creation method - upload a customized or simple archive, create a dummy site, download the site from the link.

Prelanding requirements

To work correctly with AlterCPA, prelandings must meet the following requirements:

  • The main contents of the prelanding should be placed on one page. Any transition from prelanding is performed on the corresponding landing page.
  • The prelanding page should not contain any scripts blocking the operation. Very often, this phenomenon is observed on sites made on site builders. Before using a site that was designed via site builder, it must be rebuilt from scratch. It is not recommended to use prelanding pages from site builders in real work, since their behavior can be unpredictable.

Creating prelanging

Click on the "Sites" button of the selected offer in the "Control" - "Offers" section. This section works with all offer websites: landings, pre-landings, redirect sites and TDS. To add a new site, click on the green "Prelanding" button above the table.

The main parameter of the site is its location in the storage - URL. The domain is specified automatically, you only need to enter the path. The choice of path is described in detail below. The path is specified without slashes at the beginning and end, for example: de/my-top-offer/info. The name of the site can be anything and is indicated only for the convenience of users.

There are several options for initializing the site when adding:

  • Just add the site to the list. With this option, no actions are performed with the server. The configured site should already be located on the selected path. Instructions for manually setting up the site are presented below.
  • Create default dummy site. A miniature site will be hosted on the server: a big button with the link to your landing.
  • Upload the site created according to the manual. Instructions for setting up the landing page are presented below. The site is packed into a ZIP archive. The content of the site (folders and files, especially index.php) should be located in the root of the archive, and not in a subfolder.
  • Upload the site site from a regular archive. The archive must be in ZIP format, the site content must be located in the root of the archive. Automation will try to find the index.php or index.html file, clean it from extraneous code, convert links and add the necessary code to the header, footer and forms of the site. Be sure to manually check the site after uploading! Automation won't remove pixels, metrics or third-party networks sending code, this must be cleared manually!
  • Try to download the site by the URL. Automation will try to download the site from the specified link, clean it from extraneous code and configure it according to the instructions. The result is not guaranteed - not all sites are downloadable! Manual verification after download is required.

When creating a site in an active offer, it is recommended to check the "Add hidden" checkbox so that users do not see your manipulations in preparing and checking the site.

When adding a site from a configured archive, it is recommended to check the "Automatically generate archive" checkbox so that users can immediately download the prepared site archive from their flows.

After creating a landing page, you can set additional options:

  • URL - full site link. In this field, it is set in its entirety, including the domain and path. The protocol at the beginning and the slash at the end are not specified. Examples are in the next section.
  • HTTPS - SSL settings for the site. You can use system settings or force enable/disable SSL in the link.
  • API-key - used for site interaction with the platform, it is not recommended to change it.
  • Mobility - a recommendation for using the site for mobile or desktop traffic. Affects only the icon in the list of sites, does not cut off traffic.
  • Private site - the landing page is shown only to the specified white list and hidden from the black list. The lists contain the IDs of users, teams, or agency webmasters.
  • Naming - setting the name of the advertising campaign for working with applications.
  • Website archive - you can download a specially prepared archive for webmasters. The archive can be created automatically if you check the "Automatically generate a site archive from the repository now" checkbox. In this case, the archive is formed exactly at the time of submitting the form. Check this box every time you change the site.
  • Rename folder on the server - if you change the path of the site, the folder with it will be renamed automatically.

On the site editing page, there are additional forms for creating a stub site, uploading a prepared or simple site archive. The behavior of these forms is the same as when creating a site.

Placing prelanding into site repository

Before manual adding a prelanding page, you need to place it on your server. Site storage is used to host landings and pre-landings. It is located on your server in the r.domain.com folder for the server version or sites for the cloud version. Inside this repository, you need to create a folder in which the site will be located.

The choice of folder name is very important! We recommend using one of the following layouts for prelanding pages:

r.domain.com/offer/geo/site
r.domain.com/offer/lang/site
r.domain.com/offer/site

In these schemes r.domain.com is the name of your existing repository folder, offer is short offer name, geo and lang are two-letter country and language codes, and site is the site name. For maximum compatibility, it is recommended to write folder names in lower case without using capital letters. We recommend choosing a site name for prelanding pages from the list: news, blog, info, whatsnew, important, blog-2019 etc. For example: r.altercpa.site/titan-gel/en/blog.

The first and second schemes are suitable for networks working with the same offers in several countries or in several languages. The third scheme is optimal for networks working in one language or in one country.

Prelanding page setup

The prelanding must consist of one working index.php file, and the other content consists only of design elements (fonts, styles, scripts, images). If prelanding was provided to you by the coder, simply rename the suggested index.php and make the following changes with it.

At the beginning of the index.php code needs to be inserted in the code (XXX – number of the offer). This code is displayed in the form of a site editor in the system, copy it from there. It looks like this:

<?php
$cms = require_once $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/init.php';
$url = $cms->preland( 1, 2 ); // Offer and site IDs
?>

The href field of each link must contain the code:

<?=$url;?>

All the links should look like this:

<a href="<?=$url;?>"> ... </a>

Put the following code in the header part before the </head> tag:

<?php $cms->header(); ?>

Put the following code before the </body> tag:

<?php $cms->footer(); ?>

In the site code, you can use the insertion of price and geo parameters, which are determined automatically depending on the list of countries specified in the offer settings and the country of the customer.

  • <?=$cms->price;?> - the price of the main item in customer's country
  • <?=$cms->prices[123];?> - the price of variant item with ID 123
  • <?=$cms->oldpr;?> - the "old" price of the main item in customer's country
  • <?=$cms->oldprs[123];?> - the "old" price of variant item with ID 123
  • <?=$cms->discount;?> - the discount of the main item in customer's country
  • <?=$cms->discounts[123];?> - the discount of variant item with ID 123
  • <?=$cms->currency;?> - the currency of customer country
  • <?=$cms->country;?> - customer country ISO-code
  • <?=$cms->geoinfo('city'); ?> - customer city (if available)
  • <?=$cms->geoinfo('region'); ?> - customer regoin (if available)
  • <?=$cms->geoinfo('district'); ?> - customer district (if available)

Adding form on the prelanding page

You can add forms to send leads. For their functioning, a landing is required. Please note that in statistics, the lead will not be attached to the prelanding, but to the landing. The prelanding form essentially sends the lead to the landing page without opening the landing page itself.

  1. In action attribute of the form put <?=$url;?>
  2. In method attribute of the form put post
  3. In the beginning of the form add <?=$cms->params(); ?>.
  4. Rename the fields according to the landing page requirements.

The form should look like this:

<form action="<?=$url;?>" method="post">
  <?=$cms->params(); ?>
  <input type="text" name="name" />
  <input type="tel" name="phone" />
</form>

Copying and downloading prelanding pages by URL

You can download prelanding pages of your suppliers in automatic mode. To do this, use the "Download" section in the offer management. In this section, add a upload task, specify the required offer and a list of URL sites that you want to download. You can specify the name of the folder where the site will be uploaded, a space after the URL of the site. Prelanding pages are downloaded in semi-automatic mode, they must be modified and corrected after uploading. Proofreading should include the removal of third-party JS-code that may interfere with the operation of the site. You can set regular tasks to clear the site code when you add a upload job tasks.

NB! Once again. After downloading someone else's website illegally, you need to take measures to restore your karma. Pet the cat!