Your ads aren’t the problem. Your website is.

When enquiries start to dry up, the first place most businesses look is the ad account. The targeting gets adjusted, the copy gets rewritten and the budget creeps up, and if that doesn’t work, there’s usually a conversation about whether it’s time to try a different agency.

What we see quite often, though, is that the ads were never really the issue. They found the right people and got them interested enough to click, which is everything an ad can reasonably be asked to do. It’s what happens once those people arrive on the website that decides whether that spend turns into anything.

An ad’s job is to get the right person to your website, and from that point on it’s over to the website. If the page someone lands on is slow, confusing or asks too much of them, they’ll leave, and you’ll have paid for that visit regardless.

It’s an easy thing to miss, because the reports from the ad platforms can look perfectly healthy. Impressions might be up, click-through rate might be decent and cost per click might be right in line with your sector, but none of those numbers tell you whether anyone actually did anything once they got to your site.

To put some numbers on it, imagine you’re spending £2,000 a month on ads at around £2 a click, which brings roughly 1,000 people to your website. If 1% of them get in touch, that’s 10 enquiries at £200 each. Most businesses in that position would look at the £200 and start thinking about how to bring the cost per click down.

If you left the ads exactly as they are and improved the website so that 2% of those visitors got in touch instead, you’d have 20 enquiries from the same spend and the same traffic, and your cost per lead would have halved to £100 without anyone touching a keyword. Improving your conversion rate has the same effect as increasing your budget, with the added benefit that you only pay for it once rather than every month.

Rory Sutherland has a story about Eurostar that I think about a lot and often reference. Around £6 billion was spent on new track to take around 40 minutes off the journey between London and Paris, and his argument was that for a fraction of that money you could have made the journey so enjoyable that passengers would happily have stayed on longer.

Ad budgets tend to go the same way. When results dip, the natural reaction is to try to buy more traffic, partly because it’s easy to buy and partly because it’s easy to measure. Working out what’s going wrong on the page itself feels slower and harder to justify, even though it usually costs far less and the improvements carry on working long after a campaign has ended.

We’ve written before about how paid visibility is something you rent rather than own, and the same thinking applies here. Money spent on ads stops working the moment the campaign stops, whereas an improvement to your website keeps helping every visitor who arrives, whether they came from an ad or not.

Most of what stops paid visitors from converting isn’t anything dramatic. It’s usually a handful of small frustrations that nobody inside the business notices anymore, simply because they never use the website the way a stranger would – or possibly never look at it at all.

The page doesn’t match the ad

If someone clicks on an ad for emergency boiler repairs and ends up on a homepage that covers every service you offer, they now have to work out for themselves where to go next, and a lot of people won’t bother. The page an ad points to should pick up the conversation exactly where the ad left off.

It’s slow on a phone

Most paid social traffic, and a good share of search traffic, comes from mobile devices. Google’s own research found that more than half of mobile visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds to load. Large images, autoplaying video and a growing pile of tracking scripts all add to that, and it’s a bit ironic that the tracking added for the ad platforms is often part of what’s slowing things down.

It isn’t clear what to do next

When the call to action is below the fold, hidden away in a menu or competing with several other buttons, people hesitate, and on a visit you’ve paid for, that hesitation can be expensive as they will quickly head back to their initial search.

The form asks for too much

Every extra field on a form gives someone another reason to stop. Asking for their budget, company size and how they heard about you before you’ve even spoken to them can give the impression that working with you is going to be hard work.

There’s nothing to reassure them

Someone arriving from an ad usually doesn’t know who you are yet. Reviews, recognisable clients, clear pricing or a named person they’ll be speaking to all make it feel less of a risk to get in touch, and without those, it’s much easier for them to head back to the search results and try someone else. Social proof is crucial to create immediate trust.

Some people can’t use the site at all

Around one in four people in the UK has a disability. If your form can’t be completed using a keyboard, your buttons don’t have proper labels or your text doesn’t have enough contrast to be read comfortably, you’re effectively paying to send people to a website they’re unable to use. Accessibility issues are conversion issues too, and they’re often among the easiest to find and fix. Do you really want to be turning people away because they’re disabled?

Daniel Priestley often talks about the fact that, at any given time, only a small share of your market is actually ready to buy. Everyone else might be interested but isn’t quite there yet, whether they’re still researching, comparing options or waiting for the budget or the timing to line up.

A lot of paid landing pages are only really built for that first group, with a “contact us” button and very little else. Anyone who isn’t ready for a sales conversation that day has no other way to stay in touch, so they leave, and the visit you paid for doesn’t lead anywhere.

Giving those people something else they can do, whether that’s downloading a guide, taking a short assessment, signing up for updates or just being able to see your pricing, means that click isn’t wasted. It also tends to tell you a lot more about who’s interested in what you do than a bounce rate ever could.

In many businesses, the ads and the website are looked after by different people. The PPC agency reports on clicks and cost per click, and the web team or developer looks after the site, which means nobody is really responsible for the bit in between, when someone arrives, has a look around and decides whether to stay.

That’s where conversion rate optimisation comes in. It’s about looking at what real people actually do on your website, such as where they click, how far down the page they get and where they give up, and then making changes based on that evidence rather than on opinion or guesswork. Heatmaps, user journey analysis, user testing and A/B testing all have a part to play.

Paid campaigns can actually be really useful for this, because you have control over who arrives, which page they land on and what message they saw beforehand. That makes it much easier to test a change properly and see whether it’s made things better.

If you’re still weighing up which channels to invest in, we’ve covered that in SEO, PPC and social media ads: how to choose. Whichever route you go down, though, the same principle applies: ads can bring people to your website, but it’s the website that decides whether they get in touch.

Before increasing your spend, it might be worth asking yourself a fairly simple question. If twice as many people clicked on your ads tomorrow, would twice as many of them actually contact you? If you’re not completely sure, that’s usually a sign the money would be better spent finding out why.

If your ads are bringing in clicks but not enquiries, it might be worth having a closer look at what’s happening on your website. Have a chat with us about user experience and CRO and we can help you see where visitors are dropping off and what’s getting in their way.