-
Ads Won’t Fix Your Bad Website Problem
Posted by on March 23, 2026 at 4:10 pmI'm 10 years into this work and still amazed at the number of organizations ready to "pull the trigger" on ads, despite having horrible website UIs (and more).
They haven't looked at a website analytics dashboard once in the past two years, no idea if custom events can be installed on buttons or if people are even making it to their conversion action page.
This can be great for me and expanding my scope of work, but I largely find they get extremely frustrated when I explain ads won't solve the fact that their website is a huge turn off for potential customers.
Does anyone else deal with this? Why do website vendors even build such unusable websites still?!
-
1 Reply
-
Preaching to the choir.
It’s not just about human users bouncing off a terrible UI. It’s about how ad platforms fundamentally interact with the site. Newer campaign formats like Advantage+ or PMax rely heavily on crawling landing pages to auto-generate assets, headlines, and understand the context of the offer. If the website lacks that oomph or clearer context, the algorithm is going to scrape and generate low quality assets (which is neither the platform nor the advertisers fault).
And as you mentioned, it turns into a diagnostic nightmare. A bad website triggers issues such as destination mismatch flags, and sometimes flat-out violations. The client looks at us asking why the ad was disapproved, and we have to spend hours diagnosing it just to realize the foundation was broken all along.
Log in to reply.