I’m busy putting together PPC campaigns and content for the forthcoming christmas rush, and it amazes me that as I’m doing this for the Eighth Christmas in a row, merchants still have some totally shocking landing pages which will never convert in a million years.

Take a look at this landing page for Affiliate Window merchant Activity Superstore:

activity superstore christmas offers

Now it’s great that they’re highlighting their Christmas offers, but what’s with the massive CALL US! call to action and opening hours at the very top of the page? Surely your most important call-to-actions and products go there, unless of course you don’t want people to buy online and would prefer they called you instead. Eh? Oh.

Now if you strain your eyes to the very bottom of the image (that’s the equivalent of the bottom of my screen), you’ll see the very tops of some images. Can you guess what they are? That’s right, of course – They’re the actual products being sold. Much less important than a fancy Christmas graphic and a CALL US ON THIS NUMBER image.

One merchant I won’t be doing anything with this Christmas is Reid Furniture on Paid on Results. We recently sent them over 1,000 highly targeted unique visitors via PPC, and achieved a grand total of 0 sales, earning us a whopping £0.00, and an ROI of -100%. A quick glance at their Performance stats on POR (excellent tool btw) shows us that we’re not alone – Our 0.00% conversion rate is not too far away from their overall 0.21% conversion (and that’s probably just affiliates doing test sales to check the tracking isn’t awol!)

With such appalling conversions, you’d expect something must be amiss. At first glance, the landing page doesn’t look too bad – nice and professional:

Reid Furniture landing page

It’s not until you actually start to think as a buyer that you run into problems. Say you want to buy a new sofa or dining table for the big family Christmas meal. First obstacle – It took me four clicks to have a look at the price of a sofa – On the third click I can see all the different ones, but I don’t know which ones are/aren’t in my price range. So I have to click on each one I like individually to see whether I can afford it.

Once you have negated that minor obstacle, you then hit a brick wall. Delivery times are currently showing as up to as long as a 15 week wait (That’s nearly four months!) – Needless to say, once people have spent twenty minutes or so trying to find a sofa they a) like and b) can afford, they’re not going to wait until February next year to sit on it, and will no doubt jump in the car and find someone who will let them see all the prices, talk to a nice helpful sales assistant, and get their sofa in time for Christmas.

Whilst on the subject of Paid on Results, it’s very pleasing to see them stamping out merchants who have excessive leakage on their landing pages. Take mortgages.co.uk for example:

mortgages.co.uk

Aside from the “Mortgage Quote Line” 0845 number which IMO should not be on the affiliate landing page, mortgages.co.uk have all the tabs along the top (Credit Cards, Loans, Investments, Life Insurance, Home Insurance, Insurance) linked to their sister sites, which affiliates do not get paid on. so fair play to Paid on Results for sending the following email out to all mortages.co.uk affiliates yesterday:

Dear John,

Merchant: Mortgages.co.uk

Please beware that it has come to the attention of Paid On Results that
this Merchant has updated their site to include prominent tabs for other
services that commission is not paid out on. We are in contact with the
Merchant in order to try and secure an Affiliate friendly landing page.

Best Wishes,

Paid On Results Support Team.

If only more networks took a firm hand with merchants who have crap landing pages – You’d have thought that we would have this sorted by now. And merchants beware, I’m on the trail of crap landing pages – Next time it could be YOUR site I’m moaning about!

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