I Was Just Trying to Buy Some Paint Stands
Last week, I was setting up for a new painting project and needed some stands. Found a great ad on Google, clicked through, and… 404. Page not found. The ad was running, someone was paying for that click, and I ended just using my old DIY stands instead.
It got me thinking about how many brands are doing this right now. Not intentionally, of course. But somewhere between launching the ad campaign and maintaining the website, things break. Pages get slow. Links die. And every click becomes wasted money instead of a potential customer.
Here’s the thing: you’re not paying for traffic. You’re paying for outcomes. And if the experience after the click is broken or painfully slow, those outcomes never happen.
The Real Reason Paid Traffic Doesn’t Convert
Most marketers obsess over ad creative, targeting, and bid strategies. All important stuff. But there’s a silent budget killer that happens after the click—and it has nothing to do with your messaging or your audience targeting.
It’s the landing page experience itself. And it’s costing you more than you think.
Slow Load Times Kill Intent
Your potential customer just clicked your ad. They’re interested. They’re ready to see what you’re offering. But then… they wait. And wait. And wait.
Here’s what the data tells us: 1-2 seconds is acceptable. People will stick around. But once you hit 3+ seconds, you’re in bounce territory. They’re gone. Back to Google, probably clicking your competitor’s ad.
This gets worse on mobile. Which is where most of your traffic is coming from anyway. A page that feels fine on your office desktop can be agonizingly slow on a phone with a spotty connection. Your audience doesn’t care about your server infrastructure or your image optimization strategy. They just know your page is slow, and they’re not waiting around.
Layout Shift Kills Trust
Even if your page loads relatively fast, there’s another conversion killer: layout shift. You know the experience—you’re about to tap a button, and suddenly an image loads and everything jumps. You end up clicking something you didn’t mean to click, or worse, you just close the tab in frustration.
This happens when elements load out of order. Images pop in late. The hero section shifts down. The CTA button moves just as someone’s finger is heading toward it. It’s jarring, unprofessional, and it destroys trust instantly.
These “waiting to tap” moments feel broken to users. And when something feels broken, people don’t buy.
Broken Links Kill Everything
But the absolute worst scenario? Paying for a click that leads to a 404 error. Or a redirect loop. Or a page that’s half-built because someone pushed changes without testing.
This isn’t rare. It happens all the time, especially in growing brands where:
- URLs change during website updates
- CMS migrations break old links
- Products get discontinued but ads keep running
- Campaign landing pages get unpublished after the promo ends
Every one of those clicks is money down the drain. You paid to get someone interested enough to click. You got them to your site. And then you showed them an error page. That’s not a conversion problem—that’s an execution problem.
Why This Happens (And Why It’s Not Entirely Your Fault)
Here’s the reality: most marketing teams are set up for this to fail. Not because anyone’s doing bad work, but because the systems aren’t designed to prevent it.
Your CMS might be fragmented. Marketing builds landing pages in one tool, development manages the main site in another, and nobody has a complete picture of what’s actually live.
There’s often no pre-flight QA for ads. Someone builds a campaign, sets up the ads, and launches—without actually clicking through to verify the destination works perfectly. Because there are fifty other things to do and the deadline is today.
Creative teams and dev teams aren’t always aligned. Marketing wants to move fast and test ideas. Development wants to ensure things are stable and won’t break. Both priorities are valid, but without coordination, stuff falls through the cracks.
And then there’s the last-minute campaign pressure. The sale starts tomorrow. The ads need to go live. There’s no time for a thorough check. We’ll fix any issues later. Except “later” often means “after we’ve already wasted budget.”
This is where the 3E Framework becomes relevant. You need three things working together:
Audience Experience means your customers get fast, reliable pages that build trust instead of frustration.
Creator Experience means your marketing team has workflows and publishing checks that catch problems before ads go live.
Developer Experience means your platform is stable and maintainable, so changes don’t unexpectedly break live pages.
When all three are aligned, you stop burning money on broken experiences.
The 5-Second Test
Here’s a simple exercise you can do right now to see how much money you might be wasting:
Step 1: Pull up every active ad campaign you’re running.
Step 2: Click through to each landing page and watch the first 5 seconds carefully. Don’t just glance at it—actually watch how it loads. Time it if you need to.
Step 3: Note anything that feels off. Slow load times. Images popping in late. Layout shifting around. Elements that don’t load at all. And obviously, any 404s or error pages.
Step 4: Do the same test on your phone. Not your desktop. Your actual phone, on a normal connection. This is how your customers are experiencing it.
Step 5: Take your findings to your dev team or whoever manages your site. Don’t just say “the page feels slow”—be specific. “The hero image takes 4 seconds to load on mobile” or “the CTA button shifts down 3 inches after the page loads.”
You’ll probably find at least one campaign that’s underperforming not because of targeting or creative, but because the landing page experience is broken.
Easy Wins You Can Implement This Week
You don’t need to rebuild your entire website to fix this. Here are some quick improvements that can make a real difference:
Remove heavy scripts. Every third-party tool adds load time. Audit what’s actually necessary on your landing pages. That chat widget, that analytics tracker, that social proof popup—do they all need to be there? Strip out anything that’s not essential.
Use lighter hero images. That beautiful 4MB photo is killing your load time. Compress it. Use modern formats like WebP. Or use a simpler design that doesn’t rely on huge images at all.
Preload key elements. Tell the browser what to load first. Your logo, your hero text, your CTA button—these should appear instantly. Images and scripts can wait.
Fix any 404s or redirects. This should be obvious, but check it anyway. Click every single ad destination. Make sure they all work. If a URL changed, update the ad or set up a proper redirect.
Standardize your UTM to landing page mapping. Make it impossible to accidentally send an ad to the wrong page. Document which campaigns point where. Better yet, build a system that prevents broken links from going live in the first place.
Build a “fast version” of your highest traffic pages. If certain landing pages get most of your paid traffic, create stripped-down versions optimized purely for speed. No bells and whistles. Just the essential information and a clear CTA.
These aren’t massive projects. Most of them can be done in a day or two. And the ROI is immediate—every second you shave off load time and every broken link you fix means more of your ad budget turns into actual revenue.
Fix the Experience Before You Launch the Campaign
Here’s the bottom line: it’s not about spending more on ads. It’s about losing less to preventable problems.
Every click you pay for should have the best possible chance of converting. That means fast pages, stable layouts, and zero broken links. When the experience after the click matches the promise in the ad, your conversion rates go up and your cost per acquisition goes down.
Performance and reliability aren’t just technical concerns. They’re revenue drivers. And most brands have easy wins sitting right in front of them—they just haven’t looked.
If you want to audit your landing page experiences and see where you’re losing money, we’re happy to take a look. Sometimes an outside perspective catches things your team has gotten too familiar with to notice.
Connect with me on LinkedIn or reach out at ndevr.io/contact
Let’s make sure your ad budget is turning into customers, not frustration.
