Landing Pages - The Consumer Just Won't Behave

Would you like to know the single biggest reason why online campaigns are not strong?  The consumer just won't behave. 

No, this is not another screed about user-generated media.  I love the mentos and diet coke guys as much as anyone.  The problem isn't that users are making more interesting ads.  Instead, it is that they are not consuming our media correctly.  We are working hard to make beautiful display ads.  We are making ever more luscious site experiences, and we are becoming sensitive impresarios of email.  But they are not following the rules.

No, they have the gall to want to click from an ad to a page that is relevant, and even to continue engaging in relevant content click after click until its satisfying conclusion.  How dare they.

In the old days, it was different.  You hired a small army of people, you made a 30 or 60-second spot, and the consumer consumed it.  They didn't ask us to make our stores match our ads.  They were disciplined back then.  They knew how to consume media in the exact chunks that we produced it.  And it was good.

It was simple. Start watching from the beginning of a show, and end at the end.  Start at the first minute, end at :30. But now that is over.  The new online generation will never have the stolid discipline of old. 

As marketers, we do ourselves a disservice when we still think about media as discrete units of production (an ad, a layout, a site).  The consumer isn't buying it.  Just because we have a different agency and subspecialty for site, display ad, PPC ad, email, etc., does not change the fact that every single action of every person on the web is defined as part of a group of actions. Very rarely does a person go online, type a URL into a browser, visit that single site, accomplish a task, and leave the web completely.

More often, we search, we dither, we explore, we lose track, we gain focus, we complete an action, we get bored, we get called for dinner, we log off.

In other words, a unit of consumption online is a Family Circus-like wandering from  point of engagement through completion, or -- often -- from point of engagement through boredom.

Only when we begin to consider the whole process, from first point of engagement and including every other step along the way, will we truly engage with our prospects.

Let me illustrate.

I was recently searching for a chiminea -- one of those outdoor fireplaces in which you can burn wood, toast marshmallows with the kids, and pretend you're camping (must be some primitive quest-for-fire drive).

So I typed in the word "chiminea" (I know, it's a stupid word) on Google, and came up with a long list of possibilities.

The first paid search listing was for FirePitShop.com. I clicked. Too many choices. While the landing page was designed well, showing a featured chiminea and some other, "popular" chimineas, it was still too generic.

FirePitShop did a good job landing me on a chiminea page, but for such a generic search term, the site might have fared better with me by providing some basic information.

The third paid search listing, BlueRooster.com, did better. (Why didn't I click on the second paid search listing? I have no idea -- it just didn't appeal. I think I didn't like the name of the URL - Yardiac.com. See the whims of your customers you have to contend with?)

While TheBlueRooster.com landing page didn't look as spiffy as FirePitShop.com, it offered me a list of tips on how to buy a chiminea. First off, I learned some definitions. Good news: the product I was looking for is actually called a fire pit (a bowl or 360 degree open fireplace without a chimney) rather than a chiminea (a fireplace that has a chimney to efficiently fuel fire with fresh air), which means that, thankfully, I can stop typing that silly word.

The tips were nice, but the layout was lousy (lots of strangely centered text marching down the page) and I navigated away. Still, I think it was a good choice on the part of the retailer to land me on a tips page rather than a product or category page.

Now lets explore an alternative - This time, one done by our marketing folks:

Search on "Landing Page Optimization" and click on our ad (which is relevant).  Here is what you will see:

The goal is to connect the search to the experience.  What matters?  For one, be relevant to the search.  Secondly, offer some value - landing page articles that offer tips and suggestions.  Finally, give them something to do.

What is it not?  It is not a "Home Page" or "Product Page" that was built by the site group and linked to by the search marketer.  It is not a stranded landing page that is built by the PPC folks and divorced from the site.

It is a site page that fits in the site but is part and parcel with the PPC ad and relevant to the keyword. It carries the user into the the site in a way that is not jarring.

The user can't be trained to act in a way that is convenient for us. So lets meet them half way.

Update: Check out this post from Jon Mendez at Optimize and Prophesize on Tips for Better Landing pages.  Jon is one of the top landing page guys out there today.

Comments

[Michael Whitaker]

Many thanks for having actual examples; this really makes your post so much more relevant to me!

I did follow your suggestion and clicked on your ad (hope it's not too expensive) and wanted to give you my first impression and ask a question.

The call to action on your landing page that grabbed my attention was the "Find out more" button. Why did you decide to send visitors to the homepage from there? To me that didn't seem intuitive.

Also, I am a small biz guy, but landing page optimization is important to everyone, not just big business. When I don't see any pricing information on someone's site I immediately assume that it's not affordable to a small biz. It's of course fine for you to target a certain size business, and perhaps your pricing model is complicated, but to me it would be great to have some upfront info as to who you are targeting. If you said "we have affordable solutions for small biz too, please contact us..." I would be more likely to request more information. On the flip side, perhaps there might be a way for you to be more concrete in saying that your typical customer is not small biz. That way I can just move on.

I hope I didn't misbehave too much ;-)

Cheers,
Michael