landing pages - customer rant!

[topr8]

ahhhrrgh. just ranting ...

but why, oh why do so many advertiseres just throw their money away.

i'm searching for something (as a buying customer), so i search on a very specific term:

-> brand widget model number

two advertisers take me straight to the correct page to buy that specific product, others dump me on their home page and i have to drill down to find the product, one even lands me on an old fashioned flash splash/intro page (promoting the website not the product! and i have to drill down again to find it)

i'm having a coffee so i click through all the google ads, and out of interest, see how hard it is to find the product i want.

there are 3 ads above the search listings:
1 goes to a generic widget category page that does list similiar widgets but not the model i seek.
2 goes straight to the product page with a buy button
3 goes to a homepage, (with no search box!) i have to drill down to find it
Ads at the side, a mix of the above, some stocked the model, others the widget category but not the model number.

the moral of the story is that about 11 companies paid for a click, at least half totally wasted their money as they didn't even stock the item i searched for, several others wasted my time by making me seek out the product on their sites

... only 2 actually presented the exact product i searched for on the landing page - i chose one of these and made my purchase.

i guess the point is that sloppy advertisers throw a lot of money away.
[in this case i think it extremely unlikely that someone searching on the term i used would have bought a similiar product but a different model number and i imagine this scenario is not uncommon]

[skibum]

Broad match, maybe?

[Quickdraw]

Sounds like someone(s) need to spend some time organizing their accounts and creating ads with correct landing pages for each product they offer. From your experience they would certainly benefit after recouping their investment in the time it would take to do that for a complete inventory, although some programing whiz could probably write some script to do most of the grunge work.

[jimbeetle]

Broad match, maybe?

Possibly. Might also just be the "sloppy advertisers" topr8 posed. But I do know, as a searcher and shopper, that the vaunted Google "user experience" ain't all it's cracked up to be.

From reading the boards all around I know that many advertisers know what it takes to have an effective campaign. I do think the broad, expanded and the "we'll match whatever we think should be matched" stuff just degrades advertisers campaigns and frustrates the user.

A "brand widget model number" search with a click on an ad that doesn't lead to where the user expects might get more clicks for Google. Or, for folks like me, I just chase me over to Yahoo shopping.

And that's actually what I do now. Google is not on my radar when I'm doing a buying type search.

[dkanderson]

Sometimes your site's page hierarchy provides a model for how much "drill down" your landing URL for a particular keyword/search string should have. The site will start out broad (home page), become more specific (product category pages), become more so (relatively short search results product lists), and end up very specific indeed (individual product pages).

If a site has this sort of hierarchy, it can really pay off to target the landing page based on how specific the search term is. Really general keywords to the home page, really specific product queries right to that product...and everything in between. It takes a lot of time and careful consideration to specifically target every keyword in a large campaign, but I've found it's time well spent. The customer lands as close to the "add to cart" button as their query allows for, and conversion rates go up.