Marketing basics 5 апреля 2024 3 min SMG team

Why advertising doesn't sell — and how to find the real cause

Why does a business pay for advertising? Not for clicks, likes and followers — for sales. But what if the ads are running and there are no sales? Where exactly is the money lost? Let's break it down across two scenarios.

SMG

SMG team

Performance agency · practitioners, 100+ ad accounts since 2016

Scenario 1: you only have an Instagram page

Here is how a sale happens:

A user sees your ad.

Visits the page and explores it.

Messages / calls / submits an enquiry.

You handle the enquiry → a sale.

The job of advertising is to bring in people interested in the product, warm them up with retargeting and lead them to an enquiry. We measure effectiveness by the number of enquiries and the cost per enquiry.

Where it can break

Symptom

Where to look for the cause

Few people message, call or submit enquiries

In the advertising (wrong objective, audience, creative or technical setup) or in the content of the page itself.

There are enquiries, but no sales

Irrelevant creative/audience (the "wrong" people come in), or the handling of enquiries (how and how fast you reply), or a mismatch between the page image, the brand and the price.

Scenario 2: you sell through a website

A user coming from an ad lands on the homepage or a product page → adds to cart → places an order → buys (either straight away with an online payment or after a call). The job of advertising is to bring in a solvent audience. The metrics are cost per purchase, ROAS, ROMI.

Where it can break (step by step along the funnel)

Funnel step

Where to look for the cause

Little traffic to the site

Advertising (creative, setup, audience) or the product itself — especially for a narrow niche.

They get stuck on the homepage

Loading speed and UI/UX.

They view products, but don't add to cart

Non-targeted traffic, price, UI/UX.

They add to cart, but don't check out

UI/UX; retargeting these users helps.

They started checkout, but didn't finish

The form is too complex — simplify it + retargeting.

They bought in one click, but didn't confirm by phone

Order handling.

You can change the ads day and night — but you won't solve the problem if it isn't in the advertising at all.

Other cases

Often, besides an online store, a business also has offline locations, and sales also come through social media. In that case it's important to track the indirect impact of advertising — there are many sales channels, and you can't attribute everything to one.

Key takeaway

There are many causes of "ineffective advertising", and they are by no means always in the advertising itself. To avoid burning budget blindly, you need to trace the user's entire journey and first make sure the problem isn't on the advertising side — and only then fix the rest.

How we help here

We have been certified by Facebook (Meta) specialists and diagnose the whole chain — from the ad setup to the website and the handling of enquiries. We find at which step the money is lost and eliminate the cause, not the symptom.

This is the essence of our marketing audit; the website and conversion are handled by Analytics and CRO.

Ads are running, but no sales? We'll show you at which step of the funnel the money is lost — even if you don't end up working with us.

Analyse the funnel

Want to apply this to your business? See the related service.

Analytics and CRO

SMG

Shukurov Marketing Group team

A performance agency in Baku since 2016. 100+ active clients, $6M in ad budget under management per year. Meta and Google certified. We write from practice, not theory.