Above the fold: why Russian visitors leave without scrolling

A visitor decides to stay or leave in the first seconds, before the first scroll. If in that time they have not grasped what you offer and why it matters to them, everything below could have been left unwritten: nobody will scroll down to it. The first screen is not the “header of the site”. It is a filter, and every paid click either passes through it or is thrown away by it.

The uncomfortable part: nobody is obliged to tolerate a confusing page. If the offer is unclear and the route to the action is stressful, the visitor leaves for a competitor who explains themselves better, and does not come back. Which campaign brought them and what the click cost is irrelevant at that moment.

For a foreign company selling into Russia, this filter is set tighter than at home. The click came from Yandex, where the visitor saw a page of local competitors whose sites were built for this audience from the first line, while your Russian site was translated last and economised on most. A visitor comparing five tabs will not give the sixth one, the one with slightly odd Russian and an unfamiliar layout, more patience than the others. They give it less.

The offer is read in seconds or not at all

Advertising delivers traffic. Turning that traffic into an inquiry is the site’s job: usability, navigation, the first screen, the offer. A common mistake is to look for the problem in the campaign settings when the campaign has been stable for years and the cost per inquiry keeps climbing. If bids, audiences and ads have not changed and the lead price is creeping up, what is degrading is not the advertising. It is how the site is perceived. Either competitors have become visibly better, or the site stood still while the market moved.

The key node here is the offer. If the proposition on the first screen is uncompetitive, or cannot be understood in the first seconds, nothing else on the page works, because the visitor never reaches the arguments further down. They either read the essence and the value at once, or they leave without ever seeing your carefully written content. That is why polishing the first screen is not cosmetics. It is work on the most expensive square centimetre of the site.

A high speed score does not equal conversion

The temptation is understandable: run the site through a speed-testing service, polish the numbers and consider the job done. Speed does matter, but the link to conversion is not direct. A speed service looks at image weight, mobile load time and markup quality. Those parameters are not wired directly into the ad-serving algorithms.

There is an indirect link. Extremely slow loading, a long wait for the first screen to render, heavy photographs: these damage the experience, the visitor leaves, there are fewer conversions, automated strategies learn worse, the campaign’s result sags. But the reverse is not guaranteed. There are cases where a site was driven to the maximum speed score, images compressed and markup fixed, and conversion fell several times over while the cost per inquiry rose. The reason is that clarity of the offer, the visual packaging of value and the simplicity of interaction are independent factors, and none of them is tied to a technical score.

The practical conclusion is simple. Critically slow loading has to be fixed: that is hygiene. But technical polishing for the sake of a pretty score is not a priority for conversion growth. Repackaging the meaning, and removing surplus clicks and scrolls on the way to the action, comes first.

This matters doubly for accounts running Yandex Direct on automated strategies. The strategy has no idea what your page says; it only sees whether the click converted. A first screen that loses most visitors feeds the algorithm a thin, noisy signal, and the campaign gets more expensive without a single setting having moved. This is one of the reasons I treat Yandex Ads and the landing page as one job rather than two.

What to move to the top: ask your sales team

The fastest way to find out what belongs on the first screen is not to guess, but to listen to the people who talk to buyers every day. Two questions to the sales team give more than any brainstorm.

First: what questions do buyers ask YOU, in what order, and why? Second: what questions do YOU ask buyers, how do you qualify an inquiry, which criteria matter most and why? What you hear goes onto the site in the same order the questions come up in a live conversation, and it goes on the first screen so that everyone who arrives sees it. If the most important things do not fit, the top of the page gets scroll buttons that jump to the relevant sections.

For a foreign company, the people to ask are the ones selling in Russia, in Russian. Delivery terms, payment methods, whether there is a local legal entity, whether documents come in a form the buyer’s accountant will accept: these come up in the first two minutes of a call here and appear nowhere on a page translated from the English original. If your sales run through a distributor, ask them. Their call logs are the brief for your first screen.

There is a separate topic for businesses with a physical location: people do not come because it is unclear how to get there. Then the top of the page gets a map and routes, the names of the nearest public transport stops and route numbers, a photo of the building from outside and a photo of the entrance, a short video of the walk from the street to the door. The uncertainty of “where do I go” is removed visually, not with an address line in small print. In a Russian business centre with three entrances and a pass desk, this is the difference between a visit and a no-show.

Reasons to trust belong on the upper screens too. Photos of the office and the showroom, staff in branded clothing, branded vehicles, examples of completed work. These signals work precisely where the visitor is still hesitating, and they cost nothing, because the business already has them, sitting on distant screens or never photographed. For a company selling into Russia from abroad, the set gets one more item: evidence that you operate here. A local phone number that is answered, a Russian-speaking contact, a warehouse or partner on Russian soil. A visitor who suspects a translated brochure with nobody behind it will not scroll to find out.

If the page has a gallery, check it separately: packaging, filtering and sorting, and how fast the first-screen images load. A heavy gallery at the top sinks speed at exactly the point where the visitor decides whether to stay.

Where the wording comes from: the leaders of the results page

To stop the first screen being composed out of your own head, there is a reliable source: the sites that already hold the top of organic results consistently, across the whole keyword set of the industry. Not the first sites you happen to open, but the systematic leaders.

Here is how to find them. Run the project’s collected semantics through a keyword tool with the search-results panel switched on, take positions in both major search engines, and look at the aggregated top in two cuts: by URL and by domain. From that top, remove aggregators, marketplaces, the search engine’s own service blocks and its own products by hand. What remains is a list of genuine direct competitors who hold the top across a wide range of queries, not on one lucky phrase.

The “both search engines” step is where foreign teams most often cut a corner. They know Google and check Google. But your buyer searches in Yandex, whose organic top for a commercial query is a different set of sites, with a much heavier layer of aggregators, classified boards and marketplaces to strip away first. Study only the Google top and you get wording built for the wrong audience.

Then, using those leaders, you build a bank of solutions: headlines and calls to action that catch, strong first-screen sections, the way prices, galleries and reviews are presented. The goal is not to copy one site but to assemble a better-considered version from the best practice of several. Draft around twenty headlines and calls to action, select the best five, put them on the first screen and test them in turn, rather than falling in love with the first one.

One caution on register. The Russian wording of a strong local competitor is short, concrete and almost blunt by the standards of an English-language brand page. This audience reads that as confidence. A warm, abstract mission statement, translated faithfully, reads here as a company with nothing specific to say.

What to do with the first screen

A short route for this week:

1. Walk the path yourself. Open the site as a customer and time it: is the offer clear within five seconds? If not, everything else can wait. Do it in Russian, on a phone.
2. Do not pray to the speed score. Fix critically slow loading, but put the effort into clarity of meaning and simplicity of action.
3. Collect the two sales-team questions. Move to the top what buyers actually ask, in the order they ask it. Ask the people selling in Russia, not the head-office team.
4. Remove uncertainty. For an offline location, add a map, transport, a photo of the entrance and a video of the walk to the door. For a foreign seller, add proof that someone is behind the site in this country.
5. Build a bank of wording. Select the leaders of the Yandex results, write out their strong headlines, draft twenty versions of the call to action and test the best five.

The first screen is a promise that the visitor checks in seconds. If the promise is coherent, they scroll further and read your arguments. If it is not, they close the tab, and no depth beneath the fold will save it. All the advertising runs up against these few seconds, which is why it is cheapest to start the analysis there.

Which screen your visitors leave on, and why, is something I can show on a free review of your site and account. How to set up traffic so that it arrives on a page ready to hold it is covered on the Yandex Ads page.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Первый экран: почему уходят, не долистав