 If there is a disconnect between whatever you are using to drive customers to your website and the website itself, then right now, as you are reading this, you are flushing money down the toilet.
Here are a few examples:
- Your radio ad is hyping some super-duper summer special and giving people your website address as the place to go for more info. Yet when listeners head over to your home page, they can't find anything that talks about the advertised deal.
- Someone searches on a keyword and you snag 'em with a Pay-Per-Click ad, but the landing page you point them to doesn't include the advertised keyword or phrase in its headline.
These examples are both examples of broken scent. You see, people sniff out content online in the same way that animals forage for food, they follow scent trails until either:
- The scent trail runs out, forcing them to start over again, or
- They get to the content they want
If people come to your Website following the scent of a special offer and you kill off any trace of the scent on your home page - in other words if you fail to include any information about that offer or any intuitively obvious and visible link to more information on that offer - then most of your visitors will give up that scent trail as dead and go somewhere esle. A minority of visitors might take a stab in the dark by clicking on the most likely navigation element, only to then give up when and if they don't immediately see some kind of reemergence or confirmation of the scent trail. And since these visitors had already responded to your offer, chances are good that every one of those bounced prospects represent a flubbed sale that had essentially been yours to lose.
 Don't believe me? According to Web-wide industry usage statistics, 54% of Website visitors leave after only 1-2 clicks. Bad scent drove them away.
Of course, at this point you're probably thinking that you can only put so much stuff on your home page, right?
Well, that's the beauty of campaign-specific landing pages. When you advertise a specific offer, deal, service, etc., you simply create a page specific to that advertising campaign, so that there is a maximum match-up of scent between the advertising and the landing page.
This is easy to do with PPC ads, as you can effectively direct ad click-throughs anywhere you'd like, including any campaign specific page you've created. It's a little harder with offline ads in traditional media, but not that much harder; it just requires a little advanced planning.
If you are promoting a new service, why not get that service its own landing page under a new url specific to the product/offer/service name? Same thing with a major event. Say a dog grooming business has a new process for sucking out every last bit of loose hair from your dog so that your furry friend will stop shedding for the next month. Basically, as long as you keep sending fido in for this process every month, you'll have a dog-hair-free house. If the groomer was running a radio campaign for this service, wouldn't it make sense to develope a micro-site or landing page with a URL like www.nomoreshedding.com? That's a lot better than trying to promote this service from the home page of Billy-BobsPetGrooming.com, isn't it? Not only does this tactic of creating an offer-specific URL make it easier to increase the scent match-up between ad and landing page, but it makes the Web address much easier to remember for the radio listeners, as well.
And if you can't get a campaign or offer-specific landing page because the name you want is already taken (i.e., someone else has already snagged that URL), I recommend you think long and hard about prominently promoting your special from your home page.
Because if you end up directing traffic to a page with no follow-up scent, you'll be flushing money down the drain - both the money you spent on the ads AND the money you would have made in sales.
 Read About Jeff Sexton
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