Land, Zoom, Go

Did you get your iPhone yet? If you’re one of the 1 million plus Americans who purchased an iPhone this summer, you’ve obviously noticed that as a result of the screen’s small size (320 x 480 pixels, or 480 x 320 if you rotate it), all websites that you visit are shrunken, or miniaturized. To zoom in on a portion of a site, you double touch the screen, and to look at another part of the site while still zoomed in, you have to scroll around. While this is all fine and dandy considering the iPhone’s extreme portability and convenience, can you trust that users are going to zoom in on your landing experience after they’ve clicked on your ad?

Bear in mind, when a user clicks on your ad, it wasn’t a considered choice. It was a split-second response to the interest that was sparked when they saw your ad. And all it takes is a split second to turn them off and get them to close your page. There is a definite difference between the motivations and expectations of a user who specifically went to your website while on their iPhone and a user who clicked on your ad. A user who specifically went to your site is going to be more willing to fiddle with their device to get what they need.

So, if you’ve gotten users to click on your ad while on their iPhone (or any mobile device for that matter), and you send them to a page that requires lots of zooming, scrolling, navigating, and reading (also known as work), I’m going to guess that the chances of them converting are even lower than when they are using a regular computer. Requiring users to scroll, navigate, and read is burdensome enough on a regular browser. Combine that with the limits of mobile devices and you’re in for even more dismal conversion rates.

Is this even worth worrying about yet?

With the latest iPhone price decrease, and the prediction that Apple will sell 45 million iPhones by 2009, I’d say it’s definitely time to start thinking about optimizing your landing experiences to iPhone users.

The best way to optimize your post-click marketing to iPhone and mobile device users? Simply create campaigns that are optimized to your regular visitors. Send them to simple, streamlined, and effective experiences that don’t require heavy scrolling, navigating, and reading. The landing experiences that result in the highest conversion rates on regular web browsers are perfect for iPhone and mobile device users. To demonstrate this, I took pictures of pages that I was sent to after clicking on paid links while using an iPhone.

Notice the work and effort that is required of users who land on these pages:

  

Would you be willing to zoom, scroll, navigate, and read? The drawbacks of sending users to a deep link or your home page are only magnified by the iPhone.

So, you’re probably thinking: “This is all the more reason to use landing pages!” Well, in case you haven’t noticed, around here, we never advocate using single landing pages. Instead, if you send users to a conversion path, not only will your conversion rates be a lot higher, but your iPhone respondents will be more likely to convert as well.

Now, look how much easier it is for users to segment and convert on a conversion path—no zoom required.

  

Once you take away all the distractions and start sending your respondents to landing experiences that are simple and streamlined for regular visitors, those 1 million (and counting) iPhone users will be more likely to convert as well.