Sniff, Sniff…Don’t Lose the Scent

When someone clicks on your Pay per Click ad, promotional email or organic search result, they have caught the scent.

Ensuring the message on your landing page or conversion path matches the start of the scent ensures an early gain in momentum.

Message Matching

Once you establish the scent and have the visitor follow it, it becomes all too easy to have the scent dissapear from the nose of your visitor.

Enter message matching…

Message matching is an elementary skill in creating effective landing pages but unfortunately correct execution is all too rare.

If your PPC ad says “Discount Widgets - Over 100,000 widgets at half price - Buy Now”, you had better make sure your landing page says the same thing.

Here is an example of losing the scent right from the outset:

I’m in the market for an ipod, so naturally type in ‘ipod’ into Google to see who wanted to sell me one:

Perfect.

That is EXACTLY what I was looking for.

Let’s click on the ad and take a look at their range of ipods and prices.

*CLICK*

Oh dear. This wasn’t part of the deal now was it?

Mac Warehouse have done a pretty good job at getting me to smell the scent, but have confused and dissapointed me by having me land on a page that has absolutely nothing to do with iPods. Nothing.

Wouldn’t this better page to land me on?

Obvisouly, yes. This would be an enormous improvement over the previous landing page attempt.

By simply adding some introductory copy reaffirming the ad copy from Google that had me following the scent in the first place and you have a fantastic landing page, not to mention the start of a great conversion path.