Why advertising brings leads but no sales, and how to fix it

A familiar picture. A hundred leads in the account, a handsome agency report, and managers complaining there is nobody to call: some do not answer, some were “just checking prices”.

The first reaction is usually: the advertising is bad. Sometimes it is. But more often the problem is in one of three places.

Place one: the ads brought the wrong people

The ad promises “cheap and fast”, the prices on the site are higher, people leave. Or the campaign is set up for any leads rather than the ones that turn into sales. Advertising does exactly what it was told: it finds people who will fill in a form. If you do not say you need buyers, it will find the cheapest ones.

How to check: look at which searches and audiences bring leads, and compare them with the ones that bring sales. For that you need your advertising connected to your CRM. Without it you are looking at half the picture.

Place two: lost on the way to the lead

A form with ten fields, a site that takes six seconds to open, a button that slides off the screen on a phone. The person wanted to leave a request but could not. Or could, but dropped off at the second step.

How to check: go through the customer’s path yourself on a phone, on ordinary mobile internet rather than the office Wi-Fi.

Place three: lost after the lead

The manager called back after four hours. Or did not call back. Or called once, on a Friday evening. The advertising did its job, and the money went nowhere.

How to check: count how long it takes on average to call a customer back and how many attempts are made to reach them. This is often where the most unpleasant numbers surface.

What we do in these cases

We connect end-to-end analytics: we see which campaign brought not a lead but a payment. Then we pass this data back to the ad systems so they look for similar people. The effect can be noticeable: in one of our cases the cost of a lead fell by a third when we returned the lost data to the ad accounts.

Our take

It is easiest to blame the advertising. But if nobody has ever counted how many leads in your funnel reach payment, there is nothing to base the argument on. Start with the numbers.

We will show where customers get lost in your funnel. The audit is free.

More about the service: End-to-end analytics