By Greg Nudelman
Published: February 21, 2011
“ On the small screens of mobile devices, well-designed landing pages can provide a much better experience than keyword search results.”
On the desktop Web, ecommerce landing pages get a bum rap—sometimes well deserved. Laden with ads and gimmicks, pushing items with higher markups, and confusing customers with complicated information architectures, these marketing monstrosities typically strongly underperform the search results pages from a simple keyword search. However, passing a death sentence on all landing pages may be premature. On the small screens of mobile devices, well-designed landing pages can provide a much better experience than keyword search results. Currently, few mobile sites use landing pages, which makes them the next big mobile ecommerce opportunity.
Introducing Landing Pages
Landing pages are simply pages a system serves up in place of search results pages—typically as a result of a keyword search query. Landing pages were originally Web developers’ response to the deep links search engines started delivering, causing customers to land deep within their sites when they clicked an ad or link in an external search engine’s results.