Ion develops iPhone-optimized landing page platform

By Mickey Alam Khan

April 21, 2008

A soft landing for iPhone users

Ion Interactive has created a new platform for iPhone-optimized landing pages.

The ion LiveBall iPhone framework is designed to help marketers reduce the amount of scrolling or zooming on ads, or less point-and-flick. Constellation Energy has signed up as a client.

“We want to deliver the highest-quality landing experiences regardless of platform,” said Justin Talerico, CEO of ion, Boca Raton, FL. “The iPhone is a very attractive platform and demographic and a very logical extension for us.”

Ion’s LiveBall post-click marketing technology platform will let online search marketers offer landing experiences that are geared for the iPhone.

The experiences that have been customized to the iPhone include portrait and landscape orientation optimization, which cuts pinching or zooming, as well as formatting and designing for the iPhone screen size and high pixel density requiring minimal scrolling.

Also, the optimization is designed to keep in mind iPhone-only browser standards. And ion is offering an alternative to the marketer’s core Web site, with one that can detect an iPhone user and redirect traffic to LiveBall’s iPhone landing pages.

The Apple iPhone currently has a 28 percent share of the U.S. smartphone market. The device also has a 70 percent share of the U.S. mobile Web browser usage market. And 85 percent of iPhone users access online information each month through their phone.

“To us, we look at that as a ratio that’s very disproportionate,” Mr. Talerico said.

“The exciting thing is that you see Apple’s share continue to grow as well as competing devices improving their Web interfaces and it becomes a very real, tangible, immediate opportunity for marketers,” he said.

LiveBall creates, hosts, tests and analyzes landing pages, microsites and conversion paths. The technology also rolls specialized content management, testing and analysis into a real-time platform.

The overall goal of such efforts, including the iPhone-optimized landing pages, is to grow conversion rates and make online spending more effective for marketers.

“Low conversion rates is a universal problem,” Mr. Talerico said. “With under 3 percent industry averages and using an optimized landing page on the iPhone is far more work than it needs to be for the user.

“So by optimizing the landing pages and getting them to be a single-finger interaction – no pinching, no scrolling – we can speed them through and dramatically increase conversion,” he said.