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Using a 404 Page as a Marketing Tactic
Pingdom has run a variety of interesting marketing campaigns since they launched earlier this year. Their latest might be the most interesting yet! Error pages have become the talk of the town with Smashing Magazine posting a variety of fun, festive and interesting 404 pages. I have also seen 404 pages used as marketing tactics such as "Couldn’t find dog, have you considered a cat".
Now Pingdom jumps into the 404 mania by creating a homepage that is a 404. Check out the home page of Pingdom to view the campaign. Basically you get a large error message that says, "The normal price of Pingdom website monitoring is currently unavailable. Sign up now at a 50% discount or try again in a couple of days for full price." It works great for them because that’s what they do – they ping your page for uptime and 404s are a good way to detect potential downtime. It does appear they confused a few of their customers as they sent out an email noting that it’s just a marketing message and the home page is further down the page. Check out the campaign details on the Pingdom blog.
Check out our previous Pingdom coverage.
Nothin like a little hype. Smart move by pingdom.
I do have to make a comment in regards to 404 pages in general. If someone sees a 404 on your page, it’s a serious problem. 404s are dead ends and will get a previously existing page unlisted from search engines. When migrating a site to a new redesign, realign, etc, you should monitor your logs and apply a 301 Moved Permanent status code, pointing the user to the correct page. Not only will this kill dead ends transparently to human users, but search engines will reindex the page and update the link.
Death to the 404!! :)
——
Sincerely,
The Mentally Retired mad scientist behind the WackyLabs LLC movement.
Sheesh, that’s about the easiest way to lose customers I’ve seen in a long time. I doubt they would even have considered this if they knew the bounce rates of error pages. 404 = leave immediately for a large number of people.
Still, I admire their optimism in thinking people are actually going to *read* their tiny text before making their minds up. I won’t be trying that any time soon though…