Not meeting user expectations [Example]

Seasonality and holidays are great drivers to drive incremental sales. Mother's Day is just around the corner and as you would expect offers for jewelry, gifts and flowers are everywhere online. Today on the Yahoo! homepage - which roughly gets 30 million unique visitors per day - is no execption and can be a great place for direct response advertising

But is Pro Flowers (one of the advertisers today) missing an opportunity with their current ad and landing page experience? Let's dig a little deeper:

Step 1: Driving traffic with online advertising (OLA)

The OLA is done well. They have three different flower arrangement that have their own price points and Free giveaway. This allows the user to see different options and let's them "shop" within the ad (note the add is a 300x600 unit, so a bit larger than standard banners). Let's choose the $19.99 option.

Notice the call-to-action is "Buy Now." This assumes that you have chosen the flowers you want to purchase and the next logical step would be to give them your money.

Step 2: The landing page

The landing page that the user goes to is not a checkout page or a product page for the specific flowers you picked. It went to a page that had 48 flower arrangements on this. To me, this is like saying "are you're ready to give us your money, here's another chance to drop off?"

If the ad unit had a "See all options" or "See more" or "Shop now" button, then this would be a great place to send them.

However, the user expectation was not meet when the "Buy Now" button was clicked on the online advertising.

Takeaways

First, we're not saying that this approach is wrong or isn't working for them at all. This is simply an observation on our end. If Pro Flowers can afford a Yahoo homepage buy, then they're doing just fine.

What can we learn from this? Some things to keep in mind:

1. Have the CTA and landing page be in concert - If the CTA is buy now, perhaps it would make sense to send them to the checkout page.
2. The landing page should be simple and serve one purpose - 48 product options on one page is simply too much. Keep it simple.

Are they any other suggestions for this ad unit and landing page experience? Let us know in the comments!