Even giant e-tailers like Target.com can miss the mark now and then. Despite big budgets, keeping track of everything can be a nightmare to manage. But if you're going to place Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, it's absolutely critical to follow though and check the links. The customer experience should be as effortless as possible, and if PPC ads don't bring the visitors where they intended to go, they're just one click of the "back" button away from your competitors. And if you don't fulfill their expectation on a landing page, it's less likely they'll click your PPC ads in the future.
Nice ad placement
Here you can see that Target is paying for their ad to show up on top of the list for my search for "Logitech Harmony Remote." Target is a company I trust, and it looks like they have exactly what I'm looking for, so I click the link.
Looking good, until…
Instead of taking me to the Logitech-branded page from the text ad, I'm taken back to square one: Target's homepage.
The more logical choice
This is more like it. Although you can't quite see from this last screenshot, the remote I had searched for was just below on this landing page (click the image to go to the page). Actually, I found it by typing in "target.com/logitech" since I'd already seen it in the text ad. But my job is to analyze these types of things. And that's just it: Even if they remembered the web address from the ad, most customers wouldn't bother.
While this may seem like nitpicking, these types of oversights show how a missing link can ruin an otherwise decent scent trail.
(If you'd like to see more examples like this, check out Bryan's screencast on conversion-boosting tips for Target.com.)
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