Three Perils with Search Landing Pages

By Jared M. Spool Dec 16, 2009

It had been going so well. The shopper, a grandmother looking for a holiday gift for her two grandsons, had decided to buy a Wii video game the boys really wanted: The Beatles: Rock Band.

In Google's search box, she typed "wii beatles rock band", following the instructions the boys' dad had given her, which produced many promising results. Being a loyal Kmart shopper, she was excited when Kmart's site showed up in the sponsored listings and clicked on the link without any hesitation.

That's where the problem started.

K-mart

Kmart's Landing Page for The Beatles: Rock Band.

The Peril Of Giving Them More Than They Ask For

The shopper found multiple choices for her desired game, all looking remarkably similar. While the Wii version was right there, she chose the Xbox 360 version, because it was first.

We let her continue with her shopping, finally stopping her during the checkout process, to see if she detected her mistake. (We weren't supposed to do that — our test protocol said we should let people buy everything — but she was very nice and we couldn't stand seeing her make a mistake.)

Later, she explained she didn't know anything about video games. It never occurred to her that there would be different versions and she needed to carefully choose.

We asked, what would've happened if we hadn't stopped her? Turns out, she would've given the boys their gift, only to discover it wouldn't work in their game system. Along with the immediate disappointment of not having a working present, they'd go through the frustration of returning and exchanging it. The whole experience was far from a positive one.

The shopper specified Wii but got other Xbox & PS3 games too.

Our shopper had made an honest mistake. After all, she specified that she wanted a Wii game when she typed the query into Google.

Kmart seemed to understand other elements of her query. The site only provided the Beatles game, not any other variations of Rock Band or Guitar Hero or any other Wii games. The site, confident on every other attribute in her query, decided to waver on the platform, presenting a decision our shopper didn't know she needed to make.

Target also displays different versions of the game.

Kmart isn't alone with this problem. The same query picks up a similar result at the Target site. And, like Kmart, the Wii version, though specified in the query, doesn't appear as the first choice — this time it's the Playstation 3 version.

Many sponsored ads barely matched the query at all.

Part of this problem is caused by sponsored ads that aren't matching the query. In the results our shopper received, only one from Yahoo! Shopping seemed to match the query directly. The others were taking liberties with one attribute or another. (Barnes & Noble's ad was for Wii game systems — not the Rock Band game at all.) These companies are paying for clicks on ads, which are inevitably not producing great results. In the mild case, the user is abandoning after the click, only to hit the back button and go somewhere else — costing the site the cost of the unconverted click.

However, in the severe case, like what we saw with our shopper, they make the purchase. The shopper is then left to wonder how things became messed up, while trying to fix it. This can only hurt that customer's engagement with the brand and will rack up preventable customer service costs.