404 Pages: How a Wrong Turn Can Be a Branding Opportunity
Monetize with Affiliate Links
Participating in some kind of affiliate program (such as Adsense, Adbrite, Commission Junction, and FastClick) to display ads on your error pages. Working on the web opens up new streams of income for practically everyone. You never know what people will buy, or click. I’m still trying to convince my mom that she is not the bazillionth visitor to that crazy, colorful blinking website as explained by the infamous pop-up…but she keeps clicking. The drawback to this approach is that you can lose potential customers by sending them away from your site…maybe never to return. But, if you could care less about generating business then don’t worry about it. Let the user click away.
Your Own Products or Deals
Display ads or sale items from your product inventory. Why not make it a point to customize your 404 error pages to display the latest sale item from your inventory? Or even special service offers. This snags those who may have mistyped a URL from an advertisement, or thought they knew a particular URL for one of your items. Regardless, give them something to look at that is yours.
Redirect and Take Me Home
Automatically send the user to the home page of your website. This is a great catch all. Maybe the user isn’t looking for anything in particular, just trying to snoop around your website, or in my case, typing in random URLs. This is like walking into the maintenance entrance and getting transported automatically to the front door.
Information
Present the user with a sitemap of possible destinations. This is a great way to appease those who think you are insulting their intelligence by pushing a product that we thought they were looking for. The wording can be as straight forward as “Can’t find what you are looking for? Perhaps our sitemap could be of some assistance. If not please visit our request information page.” There you go, nobody is offended. This is like a straight shot to the mall directory. Click on the thumbnail for an example of a screen shot:
Camo
Provide information such as a sitemap, affiliate ads or products relating to their ill-founded search on the same page, masked in the general style of your website. Adotas.com is a perfect example. Being an inquisitive person, I’ve decided to see if my special section of Adotas.com has been set up at http://www.adotas.com/tonyrocks. Visiting that URL yields one sly looking custom 404 error page. As you can see, all advertising real estate is in place. All typical web controls are intact and the basic roadmap of where you should be looking is prominently displayed. Unfortunately for me, the special tonyrocks section of Adotas.com does not exist, however maybe there is something else that may be of interest to the user. This is a pretty transparent and effective way of displaying a “Page Not Found”.
However you want to approach this, the custom 404 error should be taken seriously. This is a simple way to cash in on mistakes from all parties involved. Start analyzing those logs and count how many missed opportunities exist for you! Yes, you’ll be hurt at first and want to fire your webmaster, but then you’ll cool down and assign him or her the new job of building a custom 404 error page.
Reader Comments.
Great reading. You have opened my eyes to some interesting knowlege.
Steve Foulk your cuzzzzzz
213 631 8159
Yea 404 Error pages are a big turn off! I don’t think twice and leave the site when i get the page not found or 404 error message.Dressing it up or even just a something to put you on the right page would be awesome!
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