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!