It had been going so well. The shopper, a grandmother looking
for a holiday gift for her two grandsons, had decided to buy a Wii video game
the boys really wanted: The Beatles: Rock Band.
In Google's search box, she
typed "wii beatles rock band", following the instructions the boys'
dad had given her, which produced many promising results. Being a loyal Kmart
shopper, she was excited when Kmart's site showed up in the sponsored listings
and clicked on the link without any hesitation.
Kmart's Landing Page for The Beatles: Rock Band.
That's where the problem
started.
The Peril Of Giving Them More Than They Ask For
The shopper found multiple
choices for her desired game, all looking remarkably similar. While the Wii
version was right there, she chose the Xbox 360 version, because it was first.
We let her continue with her
shopping, finally stopping her during the checkout process, to see if she
detected her mistake. (We weren't supposed to do that—our test protocol said we
should let people buy everything—but she was very nice and we couldn't stand
seeing her make a mistake.)
Later, she explained she
didn't know anything about video games. It never occurred to her that there
would be different versions and she needed to carefully choose.
We asked, what would've
happened if we hadn't stopped her? Turns out, she would've given the boys their
gift, only to discover it wouldn't work in their game system. Along with the
immediate disappointment of not having a working present, they'd go through the
frustration of returning and exchanging it. The whole experience was far from a
positive one.
The shopper specified Wii but got other Xbox & PS3 games
too.
Our shopper had made an
honest mistake. After all, she specified that she wanted a Wii game when she
typed the query into Google.
Kmart seemed to understand
other elements of her query. The site only provided the Beatles game, not any
other variations of Rock Band or Guitar Hero or any other Wii games. The site,
confident on every other attribute in her query, decided to waver on the
platform, presenting a decision our shopper didn't know she needed to make.
Target also displays different versions of the game.
Kmart isn't alone with this
problem. The same query picks up a similar result at the Target site. And, like
Kmart, the Wii version, though specified in the query, doesn't appear as the
first choice—this time it's the Playstation 3 version.
Many sponsored ads barely matched the query at all.
Part of this problem is
caused by sponsored ads that aren't matching the query. In the results our
shopper received, only one from Yahoo! Shopping seemed to match the query
directly. The others were taking liberties with one attribute or another.
(Barnes & Noble's ad was for Wii game systems—not the Rock Band game at
all.) These companies are paying for clicks on ads, which are inevitably not
producing great results. In the mild case, the user is abandoning after the
click, only to hit the back button and go somewhere else—costing the site the
cost of the unconverted click.
However, in the severe case,
like what we saw with our shopper, they make the purchase. The shopper is then
left to wonder how things became messed up, while trying to fix it. This can
only hurt that customer's engagement with the brand and will rack up
preventable customer service costs.
The Peril of Not Giving Them Enough Help
Responding to the query
"wii games", Radio Shack seems to have them all - 1,710 games for the
Wii.
Radio Shack offers up 1,710 games for the Wii.
A shopping site with hundreds
of games is great—it's nice to have selection. But how does someone choose?
Had the shopper already had a
game in mind, they probably would've typed some variant of the title into
search. Yet our shopper typed in a very generic query—"wii games".
When we asked why he chose that query, he said he didn't know which game he
wanted and was hoping the site would help him choose.
Radio Shack's response is a
list, in order by price, of all their games. It didn't try to show the hot
games, or the newest, unlikely-to-be-already-owned games. It left that up to
the shopper, who was unequipped to make the decision.
The result: the shopper left
the site with an unconverted ad click, not happy with Radio Shack.
The Peril of Missing the Mark Completely
Online Shopping isn't the
only place where we see issues with search landing pages.
Recently, we met up with a
gentleman who was considering changing careers to become a lawyer. As an
engineer, he'd been filing bunches of patents and realized he found the legal
aspects more interesting than the engineering portions.
We were excited when we had
the chance to watch him start his search for a law school in Boston, where he
could attend classes in the evenings while keeping his day job. His search
query was "law school nights Boston." A reasonable query for someone
looking for exactly those things.
One of the first links to
catch his attention was for a school called Argosy University. He commented
that he was surprised, since he thought he knew all the Boston schools, and
this piqued his interest.
Argosy's landing page has nothing to do with Law or Boston.
It took a few minutes for the
user to realize the site didn't have anything about law studies on it. Nor did
it have a Boston campus. (The nearest campus was Washington, DC.)
Returning to Google's search
results, the next choice was an organization that sounded more promising:
Lawline.com.
Lawline's landing page isn't for law school students, only
lawyers.
Unfortunately, Lawline only
offers CLEs, which—though the site doesn't tell you this—are continuing legal
education courses, for practicing lawyers needing to renew their license.
There's nothing on the site for someone who wants to become a lawyer.
In both these cases, the
sites paid a decent amount of money to end up with the top results, only to
have it completely miss the mark for the user.
Asking the Right Questions
Creating a successful landing
page starts with asking the right questions. What is the query trying to tell
you about the user? What are they looking for?
Cooley's landing page.
Cooley.edu's landing page
almost does a nice job. It explains the school, when classes start, what the
required and elective courses are, and how to apply—all the things someone
considering a new education might be interested in.
Again, the only problem is
that Cooley isn't in Massachusetts (even though their Google Ad implied they
were)—they're in Michigan.
Any decent analytics program
will tell you the queries that are coming into your site. The best teams
regularly inspect the top queries, determine what those users are seeking, then
check their landing pages to ensure they're delivering it. They carefully prune
out ads that are missing the mark, and they make sure they are getting the most
for their search advertising dollar.
