Today, we’d like to talk about a simple but effective trick, that is very popular, but still ignored by many. It’s called the Back-Button Redirect.
Browsing a site when you are not interested in an offer you’ve been presented with, you decide to go back to the previous page. You hit the “back” arrow inside your browser and, in a normal situation, your browser will simply return to the previous page you’ve been at.
What a Back-Button Redirect script does, is that it rewrites the browsers “history” with an url you can specify. So when someone hits the “back” arrow, it will load the url you’ve specified, instead of actually returning to the previously visited url.
By installing such a script into your landing page, you are gaining one more chance to keep your target audience.
There are several options for you to consider here, the most popular are:
1. Sending to the offer directly anyways. Even though the landing page didn’t grab their attention, maybe the offer itself will. This is the most used method.
2. Sending to another landing page. It can even be a more aggressive landing page for the same offer.
3. Sending to a landing page for a completely different vertical, promoting and offer from that vertical. The theory here is simple, if the surfer isn’t interested in a particular vertical, a different one might work.
4. You can also use the back button script to load an email collection box or a newsletter signup form – offer the visitors something in return for subscribing, then monetize them later on.
TIP: When using a back button redirect, create separate campaigns in your tracker for this traffic. In case you would use the same tracking link, the stats would become skewed a lot. Simply treat this traffic as a new source. I will explain this more below, along with giving the instructions on how to install it.
Where to get such a script from? This is a simple one that works well, you need to set it up in 2 steps.
Step 1: copy this code into the landing page, you can put it in the <head> </head> part of the source code. This is a simple html version, it works even on a CDN.
<script>
function init() {
setTimeout(function(){window.scrollTo(0,1)},0);
}
window.history.pushState(‘back.html’, ‘back’, ‘back.html’);
window.history.pushState(‘index.html’, ‘Index’, ‘index.html’);
window.addEventListener(“popstate”, function(e) {
if(document.URL.indexOf(“back.html”) >= 0){
document.location.href = document.location;
}
});
</script>
Step 2: Create a back.html file and put it in the same directory as the landing page. Copy the code below into the back.html file.
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<script>
document.location.href = “http://redirecturl.com”;
</script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Replace “redirecturl.com” with the real URL you want to redirect the traffic to.
That’s it!