Home / New / Web Marketing / Giving People What They Want - The Pink Rose Problem
I was at the SES Toronto conference the other week, and a speaker went in front of the audience and showed his results for the search term “pink roses”. He went through all of the Google PPC ads for pink roses and noted that very very few of the sites that had PPC ads on the search term “pink roses” actually provided them on the ad’s landing page! We saw red roses, we saw white roses, sometimes we even saw orange roses, but pink roses were always a click away or more away. And this is the pink rose problem.
It got me thinking - are we really at a point, where someone can use Google as a universal interface to get whatever they want within one click? Maybe we are, since when there is no additional clicks, any good marketer knows that their conversions go up. Conversions go up, and cost per acquisition goes down. And everyone is happier.
One industry that has recently impressed me is the online rug selling industry. I recently was doing some searches on Persian Rugs, since we used to have a beautiful Persian in the house that I grew up in. I clicked on a landing page belonging to Rug Man and found the following display on the landing page:
It was amazing to see - that counter to what their competitors were doing (sending me to the homepage so I would have to root around the site myself to find the persians), they gave me the persian results right away.
I then executed searches on other rugs - and of course as a child of the 70s the shag was the first thing that came to mind. I found this landing page at Area Rug Universe:
Although Rug Man’s landing page was slightly more impressive, since it had a short introduction on persians before it went into the rugs, it is still great that I can type in what I am looking for and instantly get the results that I want - without learning about how to navigate a new site’s infrastructure to get started. This is straightforward to do from a technical perspective, since you can simply pre-fill the query for that ad in the search parameter. Which begs the question - why don’t more people, from more industries create lading pages liks this?
As more marketers wake up to the world of user behavior and provide them what they are looking for quickly, maybe we will get closer to that world where everything we want is available to us within one click. Because… the world definitely needs more pink roses.
