We analyzed 5000+ landing pages of 344 top-spending brands
By Asger, Co-founder of Kewise.com 5 min read
We mapped the hidden infrastructure behind 48,486 active ads to see which funnel formats actually scale. One format keeps getting budget. Another gets taken down after just 30 days.
Most marketers are only looking at one side of the coin.
They obsess over the ad. The hook. The creative. The CTR. Then they send that hard-earned click to a page that has gotten zero love, zero effort and which was just a afterthought.
That is backwards.
Ads don’t make you money. They buy you a chance. The landing page is where that click is either converted or wasted.
For years, the pages behind the biggest global ad budgets were almost impossible to study at scale. They live behind hidden URLs, soft redirects, and localized offer variants. Because these pages are hidden from the public eye, a common misconception has emerged: that landing pages matter less than the ads themselves.
We spent the last year mapping this infrastructure at Kewise. We looked at where marketing budgets are used.
Because conversion rates are private, but budgets are not infinite. When a page stops making money, the ads stop. Runtime is the only public signal of performance.
What survives past 90 days?
We analyzed 5,387 landing pages and 48,456 ads, all extracted from the world’s biggest ad libraries. We wanted to know one thing: Where is real money spent?
- The median runtime for a landing page was just 48 days.
- 71.9% of pages make it past the first month.
- Only 25.8% clear the 90-day mark.
The 90-day mark is where the “zombies” are cleared out. It’s where creative fatigue, budget reviews, and CAC reality collide. If a brand is still buying traffic to the same URL after three months, that page isn’t just “good” it’s a load-bearing pillar of their business.
These long-term landers are rare. They are also the only pages worth studying.
What landing page format to use
We classified every page by its functional DNA: free trials, quizzes, VSLs, advertorials, and webinars. Then we ranked them by their ability to keep a budget alive.
1. Free trial – 63 days median (37.2% past 90 days)
2. Quiz funnel – 62 days median (22.1% past 90 days)
3. Product page – 50 days median (28.9% past 90 days)
4. Sales page – 49 days median (24.3% past 90 days)
5. Lead gen – 48 days median (26.0% past 90 days)
6. Advertorial – 41 days median (25.2% past 90 days)
11. Webinar – 26 days median (9.4% past 90 days)
Funnels built around free trials are the most resilient, boasting the longest active lifetimes in our entire dataset.
This isn’t a design preference. This is what global ad budgets vote for when the cameras are off.
A free trial page has one job: Reduce the cost of belief.
It doesn’t need to close the whole sale. It just needs to start a relationship cheap enough that paid traffic can scale.
Webinars, by contrast, ask for a massive calendar commitment from cold traffic. That is a “heavy ask.” And in the world of high-scale ad spend, heavy asks die fast unless the offer is perfect.
If your CAC depends on filling seats from strangers scrolling a feed, you are swimming upstream against a 90% failure rate.
Cut the losers, and let the winners run
One clear pattern also emerged from the data, the big brands try out lots of different landing pages, formats, messaging, design and when they find a winning concept they double down on it.
When we looked at the highest-spend URLs in the Kewise database, brands like Zapier, Huel, and ChatGPT point hundreds of different creatives at a single, stable destination.
- Zapier has funded the same lander for nearly two years across 234 ads.
- Huel ran 455 ads into one product page.
- ChatGPT maintains a trial page clearing over $400k in estimated monthly EU/UK spend.
The lesson is simple: treat your landing pages as experiments. Once you find the one that converts, start scaling the creatives and budgetdriving traffic to it.
Build a high converting landing page
If you want to stop guessing and start building landing pages that actually convert your marketing budget into actual sales, then you gotta study what the best do.
You need to copy the concepts and formats behind the landing pages that there is a big marketing budget behind not just the pretty homepages made by some fancy design agency.
Never copy a page just because it looks good. Check its runtime. If it hasn’t been live for 60+ days, it could very well just be an under-performing experiment, not a blueprint.
You can browse the live “survivor” pages, their ad runtimes, and their spend intensity for free on the Kewise Discover engine.
Pssst you can also spy on your competitors.
– Asger
Co-founder, Kewise.com
Ready to see what brands keep paying for?