I was on a travel site today (checking out the exact distance between home and Albury, which happened to be 314.98km) and spotted a graphic ad in the margins for a “versatile travel and sports towel” for $39.95.

Interested, I clicked on the link - which landed me at the gogogear.com.au travelmate store — the “landing page” for the towel link.

However, no mention of a towel. Anywhere. All I’d reached was the front page of the site. It had six “featured travel accessories” — no towels of course. And 42 categories to browse in the left-hand column — no towel their either. No category for sports towels, travel towels … hang on, there’s travel clothes — nope, when I clicked that, no towels either.

There was a most popular list with “most wanted” products — nope, not there either.

I even typed “towel” into the search field and the product advertised was NOT even in the results shown! Only 2 results came up, and neither of them for this towel.

You can’t buy a product you can’t find!

What a WASTE of advertising.

Big marketing lesson: put some thought into the logical process of what happens from the customer’s point of view. Create a specific “landing page” for the linked product. Or at least make it easy to find if you’re going to use a particular product to draw in visitors to your site.

In this case, I saw a product of interest, followed a link and couldn’t even find details of the said product to decide whether or not I’d purchase. Even with some searching!

Pics:

1. Here’s a screenshot (reduced size link, but you’ll still be able to tell what it is) of the ad on the map page:

2. Here’s a screenshot of the “landing page” - no mention of towels anywhere!

If you’re putting a website together, depending on how keen you are to optimise your site for search engine results, often the “title” of the website is something like:

Welcome to XYZ Company

This is not a good idea! If a visitor bookmarks your site, and the bookmarks are sorted alphabetically, you’ll be down near the end with all of the other sites starting with “Welcome to…”

Drop the “Welcome to” and make it easier to find your name amongst the visitor’s favorites/bookmarks.

If you are putting keywords into your title, remember than not that many of them will be visible when users are viewing the favorites/bookmarks. So having “Fantastic cheap business printing | Cheap Business Printing | Low C…” as your bookmark name may not help when visitors revisit your bookmark days, weeks or months later.

You might not want your name at the very front, but consider the wording that visitors will see later and make sure you’ve designed your name accordingly!