Five checks before you spend £1 on ads

Paid ads are the most expensive way to discover your website doesn't convert. Before a pound goes to Meta or Google, run these five checks — each takes minutes, and any one of them can save you a month of wasted spend.

1. Can a stranger say what you sell in five seconds?

Open your homepage, count to five, close it. Could a first-time visitor say what you sell, who it's for, and what to do next? If not, ads will pay to bring people to a page that confuses them. Fix the headline before you fund the traffic.

2. Does the site have one clear next step?

Every page needs one obvious action — buy, book, enquire. If your product page has six competing links and no visible button, the ad click dies there. Ads amplify what a page already does; if the page does nothing, ads amplify nothing.

3. Is tracking telling the truth?

If conversions aren't tracked properly — pixel installed, purchase or enquiry events firing, checked against reality — the platform optimises blind and so do you. Broken tracking is the most common problem we find in audits, and it silently wastes every pound spent while it's broken.

4. Is anything catching the 97%?

Most visitors don't buy on the first visit. If there's no email capture and no follow-up flow, you're paying for the same people twice. A welcome flow and an abandoned-checkout email are cheaper than any campaign, and they raise the value of every click you buy afterwards.

5. Do the sums work at your margins?

Take your average order value and your margin, and work out what a customer can cost before ads lose money. If a £25 product with thin margins needs a £5 cost per purchase to break even, you need the site converting well before ads make sense — or a higher-value offer to send traffic to.

The order matters

Site first, tracking second, ads third. It's why our ads launch sprint starts with pixel and conversion setup, and why we'll say plainly on a call if your site needs work before ads do — even though that's a smaller job for us. Ads won't fix a page that doesn't convert; we fix the page first.

Not sure where your site stands? A conversion audit answers it within a week — or book a free 20-minute call.