Too often, microsites are riddled with irrelevant content, causing the user to feel disconnected. Consider these tips to make your microsite an effective part of customer journeys.

Nothing frustrates me (and I suspect millions of other web users) more than when I click on some banner ad or text link, only to then land at a destination wholly unrelated to the place I just clicked on.

It happens all the time -- most guilty are search text ads. I search for something specific, the resultant listings look relevant to my search, I click on the ad and find myself arriving somewhere completely disconnected.

It cost someone good dollars to create the ad and to buy the right keywords -- surely, someone must be monitoring the ROI of all this activity. And surely, there must be a highly visible and significant drop-off of traffic once people get to the post-click area.

It happens to you too, right?

So what's going on?

I suggest, at the root cause of this, are advertising agencies and clients who don't understand the nature of customer journeys. These folks fundamentally fail to understand the nature of web behaviour. At the very core of web behaviour is people's desire to explore further; to undertake a journey of uncovering, and to be subsequently rewarded with interesting and (hopefully) relevant content. People have been conditioned to interact with assets, to click on a call-to-action, and marketers must learn to deliver to this behaviour.

Development of soft-landing destination areas (or microsites) featuring contents that are in-sync with the ad, which drove someone there in the first place is an intuitive, but often overlooked activity. 

Here are a few tips and tricks to get you going.

Have a plan
Microsites add a dimension to ad campaigns, enabling brands to provide a hub for users to find out more information and interact with the brand directly. But they require investment. Microsites can cost anything from US$1000 for something fairly basic to more than US$100,000 for larger builds, and you may decide that each and every campaign you run should have an associated microsite. So you need a strategy and clear objective to justify the cost.

Firstly, you should decide if you actually need to create a separate destination -- maybe you could support your campaign with additional content or pages on your main site, or completely side-step the click-process via the creation of distributed content such as in-asset engagements or applications, widget, gadgets etc.

Secondly, you should be single-minded in the objective for your site. If sales are what you're after, make the sale process clear and untrammelled. If your objective is engagement, make sure you've detailed how you're going to measure it: duration of visits, level of interactivity, specific action events etc.

Thirdly, consider the site's live-time and associated "end-of-life" plan. As a general rule, microsites must be live for the duration of a campaign, but it is a good idea to keep them running longer. Post-impression data shows that someone exposed to a banner ad sometimes takes up to four months to visit the microsite. You should monitor traffic and wait until levels begin to tail off significantly before closing a microsite. One option is to leave a slimmed-down version of the site live. Alternatively, consider migrating the content into the main site.

It's all about the content
Many microsites are sales promotion oriented but you don't necessarily have to offer a prize, just make sure you offer great content that is of value to that particular audience. The trick here, of course, is knowing what constitutes value. Develop something that is relevant, humorous, or of high utility etc. and you won't go wrong.

Ideally, the microsite should have a similar theme, look and feel to the campaign creative. But also consider designing the landing site in a way that is sympathetic to the brand's main site. This enables content from the microsite to be easily re-purposed once the campaign has finished, making it easier to justify the cost of build.

If you've gone to the effort of getting someone to a microsite, don't close the door on them. Maximise the interaction and create a series of "resolving doors" -- let users discover other content (not necessarily on the microsite), let them explore the brand in more depth.

Furthermore, assuming these users are the right users you're trying to target, they'll probably have some like-minded friends. Why not make it easy for them to share this content with their peers? Consider adding digg; del.icio.us and "send to friend" type functionality.

Who's building it for you?
You need to decide who you are getting to build your site for you. Traditionally, you'd commission your creative agency to do this for you. But more and more, we're seeing the media owners getting this work, usually wrapped up in a 'co-operative' media arrangement (especially if the media agency has brokered the deal).

On the face of it, asking portal owners to build your microsite for you and to host it within their site can be an attractive proposition. The deal will usually provide advertising across the portal to drive traffic and (as the production costs are often hidden in the media costs), it can appear cheaper than asking your agency to build it for you.

But there are trade-offs in terms of design and production control. Media owners won't know your brand as well as your creative agency, and some publishers lack the necessary design discipline and production build processes to construct such sites. Publication-built microsites can be very template-driven, which makes it hard to bring a brand to life. There are countless poor examples. Only allow media owners to build your site if they can demonstrate good processes to you and if they allow you control of your brand.

Checklist
Questions that should be considered when thinking about building a microsite.

• Do you really need a separate microsite?
• Are your objectives clear?  How will you be measuring the success?
• Do you have the technology and resources to analyse how users are interacting with your microsite? What are your optimisation plans? It may be necessary to optimise it during the campaign.
• Do you have compelling content to entice users to interact?
• Who are you targeting? Is it best to reach them on a standalone microsite or a media portal?
• How will you link it with your corporate site?
• Can the content be re-purposed and used on your main site after the campaign finishes?
• If you're asking a media owner to build your microsite, how much control will you have over production?
• How long will the microsite be live for?  How will you pull the site down?

Mark Cripps is digital director, Asia, of McCann WorldGroup.