Picture this...
You've identified the problem in your business. Where things break down and money is being lost.
You analyse, design the fix, and set everyone on the path to implementing that fix.
Time to pop the champaign right?
Nope.
After you've built that awesome fix, you see... nothing.
No improvements, no meaningful changes, no new sales.
And you're back to square one.
It's a problem I see a lot. People fixing the symptom, but completely missing the cause.
here's what I mean.
I worked with a brand recently that couldn't get hteir traffic to buy.
Paid traffic was coming in like clockwork.
Ad CTR was good.
Time on site was decent.
But hardly anyone was buying.
So naturally, they did what most teams do.
They looked at where they were losing money (the sales page), and threw money at fixing the issue.
They hired CROs to fix the page itself, and went through the stages of...
... Tweaking headlines.
... Reworking promises.
... Testing layouts.
... Changed colours, buttons, copy.
All that jazz.
Spent a small fortune trying to squeeze blood from the page.
After speaking to them I asked a simple question.
What if the page isn't the problem. What if the probelm came earlier in the customer journey, and the page is just where it shows.
Turns out the problem was 2 steps earlier.
They were targeting the wrong people.
The ads were well created. They created curiosity and got the click.
But both the targeting and the copy wasn't really geared at the ideal customer.
They'd built ads that generated curiosity, but not intent.
And so all those people who landed on the page itself were never really the right people to buy.
So every “conversion issue” was just a downstream symptom.
We took the ads back to the drawing board.
Opened up the targeting and crafted new ad angles and positing that was more in line with the actual offer they wanted to push.
Know what happened?
- CTR of the ads decreased
- CPC of the ads increased
- Volume of traffic to the page decreased
... sounds awful, right? Like we broke the damn thing.
But these were now the right people.
And while we were paying more for less traffic, we ended up with more leads that led to more sales.
The page's conversion rate jumped - not because the page was the problem, but because the wrong people were seeing it.
Often, when you see...
- Low conversions
- Poor lead quality
- Bad ROAS
- Weak engagement
... you immediately jump into solving the issue at that stage.
But it could just be where that problem manifests.
You've got to zoom out and look at the wider journey to understand WHY the issue is there.
If you’re worried you might be fixing the output instead of the system that produces it, reply to this with a bit of context on your business.
If I can help, we’ll talk this week.
Pete "symptoms vs causes" Boyle