Bad results? Remember to look beyond your ads…

One of the most expensive assumptions in advertising is believing every performance problem starts and ends with your ads.

Often, the campaigns are doing exactly what they're meant to do. It's what happens after the click that lets the business down.

A slow site. A landing page that doesn't match the ad. A checkout with one step too many. None of it shows up in your ads dashboard, but all of it shows up in your conversion rate.

If you want to get to the root of what is impacting your performance, you can’t look at your ad account in isolation. Follow the customer journey and identify sticking points. Crunch the data to see where you are losing potential buyers. Get granular with it. The founders and marketing managers I work with who get the best results aren't the ones chasing the newest targeting option. They're the ones willing to ask "is this actually an ads problem" before they touch a single campaign. And willing to fix website issues if they need to.

Even the best ads can't fix a broken journey.

I went into more detail on the exact clues I look for, and a few real examples, in this week's newsletter.