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Got paid to fix a client’s ads. turns out the ads werent the problem
Posted by on February 20, 2026 at 3:01 pmchanged a landing page and CPL dropped from €19 to €4. didnt touch the ads.
this is gonna annoy some people but whatever
had a client in insurance lead gen. CPL was sitting at around $25 and honestly the ads werent even that bad. like they were fine. not amazing but fine. everyone I talked to kept saying test new creatives, kill the bad ad sets, try different audiences. the usual stuff you read everywhere
but idk something felt off so instead of touching the ads I just went and looked at the actual page people were landing on
bro. it was a form with like 15 fields. name address phone email date of birth current provider coverage type budget range and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. it literally looked like you were applying for a mortgage. I remember sitting there thinking who the hell would fill this out from a facebook ad on their phone while watching tv
so I went and checked what competitors were doing. every single one that was clearly spending hard (you know the ones, ads running for months) was using some type of quiz. not a form. a quiz. "find out if you qualify" or "see your options in 60 seconds" type thing
told the client look just scrap the form and build a quiz. same questions basically but broken into steps with a progress bar. sounds like a small change right? its not. filling out a 15 field form feels like doing your taxes. clicking through a quiz feels like youre getting somewhere. completely different energy even tho you're collecting the same info
CPL went from €19 to €4. I didnt change a single ad. same campaigns same audiences same budget same everything. just the page
THEN we went and did the creative work. went from like 3 generic ads to 15-20 totally different angles in the CBO. fear of not having coverage, social proof, direct price comparison, storytelling. actual different approaches not just the same thing with a blue background instead of white lol
that brought us from $4 to $3.50. which is great but like… lets do the math here. the landing page was a 4.7x improvement. the creative overhaul was 1.14x. I spent way more time on the creative stuff than on the landing page recommendation tbh
and thats kind of my point with this post. I lurk here a lot and I see so many threads about ad copy and headlines and hook rates and yeah all of that matters. but if your page converts at like 2% because it looks like homework none of that stuff is gonna save you
nobody wants to "submit an application." everybody wants to "see their results." its the same thing but one converts and the other one doesnt. idk why more people dont talk about this
edit: forgot to mention we run full broad now btw. no interest targeting at all. pixel is warmed up and with andromeda the algo honestly finds better people than I ever could manually. but you need to give it creative volume to work with. 3 ads in a campaign is not enough for broad to do its thing
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1 Reply
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the landing page is almost always the problem. people blame the ads because that’s the thing they can see in the dashboard but the page is where all the friction lives. 15 fields for an insurance lead is insane – you only need enough to qualify, not enough to underwrite.
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Yeah I can say that 15 field is most likely older process to weed out spam or window shoppers, thought now its pointless since spam is song ai to fill those out at same speed.
Quiz idea is good to break up longer forms while still getting all of the information. Probably only work for certain industries though.
Other factors are sales team cant sell the service so doesnt matter how many leads come through.
But yes most times not ads themselves (though seen some bad setups), ive had solid ads numbers, analytics shows solid interaction and engagement but still minimal leads, mainly site not selling that last step or answering the question they have, usually a bottleneck somewher.
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Most conversion problems are the post click conversion problem. Ads are fairly straight forward now……just maki sure your conversion tracking is set.
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I am experiencing this more and more tbh. As the ppc world becomes more automated, more AI driven I think it’ll be less about the ads and more about the user experience after.
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