Checklist 02 · by Kaspar Vaher · updated 2026-08-14
The prelander build
A prelander has three jobs: load fast, renew the creative's promise, and hand the click ID forward intact. Every failed prelander audit we have run broke at one of those three points, usually while looking perfectly fine to the person who built it. Ten checks below, in build order. Budget reality: a solid prelander costs a day to build and $30 per GEO to localize properly, then earns or loses its keep across every click the campaign buys, which on a $0.03 Tier-3 whitelist means it faces judgment thousands of times a day.
Weigh it before you write it
Target under 200 KB transferred and first paint under one second on a mid-range Android over 3G-class throttling. Push traffic skews mobile in exactly the GEOs where data is slow and patience is a luxury; every extra second of load is a tax collected in bounces.
One claim per screen
The push creative made a promise in fifteen words. The prelander's only job is to renew that promise once and pass the click on. Three stacked claims read like three chances to leave. Headline, one supporting line, one action: that is the whole screen.
Match the creative's angle exactly
If the notification said battery problem, the prelander opens with the battery problem. Angle drift between creative and prelander is the most common conversion leak we audit, and it is invisible in any report because both halves look fine alone.
Pass the click ID through, always
The network's click ID must survive the hop: prelander links carry every sub-ID parameter forward or your tracker attributes conversions to a void. Test with a real click before spend, not with a pasted URL. The postback checklist covers the full chain.
Localize past the language
Currency, date format, and phone-number shape all betray a lazy translation. A Manila user reading pesos converts; one reading dollars in Tagalog wonders who is asking. Machine translation plus a native read costs $30 per GEO and pays for itself in a day.
Fake nothing that looks like the OS
System-dialog styling, fake close buttons, and countdown timers pretending to be alerts are the fastest route to network review failures and, since Chrome's January 2026 engagement scoring, to inventory that quietly stops delivering. The compliance checklist has the full boundary line.
Put the exit where thumbs already are
Primary button in the bottom half, full width, 48 pixels tall or more. Push clicks arrive mid-scroll, one-handed, on the bus. Buttons designed for desktop mice convert like buttons designed for someone else, because they were.
Measure the prelander itself
Track prelander CTR (clicks out ÷ clicks in) as its own metric with its own sub-ID slot. A healthy sweeps prelander passes 35 to 60% of clicks; below that band the page is the problem, above it you are probably skipping a qualifying step the offer will punish later.
Split-test two builds minimum
One prelander is a guess with hosting costs. Run two builds per angle with a single variable different, weight traffic evenly in the tracker, and let 1,000 clicks per variant decide. Our sweeps account ran a five-prelander ladder before the winner earned its whitelist.
Host it on boring, fast infrastructure
Static files behind a CDN, no builders that inject 400 KB of runtime, no third-party scripts except the tracker. Every external dependency is a new way to miss the one-second paint budget in Dhaka.
The three failure points, named
Weight (checks 1 and 10), drift (checks 3 and 5), and attribution (check 4). If you only audit three things on an existing prelander, audit those; the postback checklist handles the attribution half in depth. Prelanders feed whatever the creative brief promised, so fix the pair together or not at all. When a rebuilt prelander still underperforms, the GEO math usually confesses first.