Brayan Iliev
How to read your results: what drops mean and when not to take action
When ad results drop, panic leads to chaotic changes and even worse data. In this art...
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In this article you will find out why the ads are not always the problem when sales are missing despite good traffic. You will learn what CRO is, how to analyse your website and your ads, and how to build a strategy that brings marketing and conversion rate optimisation together into one whole.
Have you ever wondered why paid advertising does not bring the sales you expected, even though traffic to your website is growing? Have you asked yourself whether the problem might lie elsewhere? With new clients we often hear things like “Facebook doesn’t work” or “Google just burns money”. But when we audit the ad accounts, it turns out the campaigns are fine – the website simply is not at its best and is holding everything else back. In this introduction I will walk you through the topic so you understand why CRO is just as important as advertising. You will learn how to recognise exactly where the bottleneck is for your business and how to overcome it, so you can turn traffic into real customers.
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) is the process of turning more of your website visitors into real customers. It covers analysing user behaviour and improving page structure, UX, button design, loading speed, the mobile version and every element that leads to a conversion. The main conversion factors are: clear calls to action (CTAs), easy navigation, trust (reviews, certificates), a fast checkout and no unnecessary steps.
A good website combines excellent UX (easy navigation, logical structure, clear buttons), fast loading (under 3 seconds), well-structured product photography (quality images from different angles and with detail), sales elements such as reviews, certificates and guarantees, clear calls to action, and an excellent mobile experience. All of this builds trust and makes the path to purchase easier for the user. If you want to go deeper and see 10 practical tips you can apply today, read our article here: CRO optimisation: 10 tips for more conversions.
Paid online advertising is a powerful tool for driving targeted traffic to your website. But this is where confusion often arises – many business owners expect advertising on its own to deliver the sales as well. The truth is that advertising sends people to your website, but the website has to be ready to turn them into customers. This is exactly where the roles of the advertising agency and your CRO team (if you have one) meet.
The advertising agency is responsible for building and managing the campaigns: audience research, creating ad messages, setting up the platforms (Facebook, Google, etc.), analysing results and optimising the ad budget. A good marketing agency will consider CRO needs before you even sign a contract to work together. If changes are needed, or there are concerns that the website could stand in the way of good results, this will be raised at the very first introductory meetings. That said, the marketing agency is not obliged to fix things on the website itself unless this is stated in your contract. At Evol, for example, we make the changes as long as the website was built by us and runs on WordPress + WooCommerce or Shopify. If it runs on a custom system or another CMS, that is a job for the development team. What advertising cannot do on its own is make up for poor UX, a slow website, a confusing purchase process or a lack of trust in the website. These elements are part of the internal work on CRO and the sales structure.
We strongly believe that a website should be built with sales and marketing in mind. Many website development teams lack the marketing mindset a good sales website needs. They focus on the look or the technical execution, but not on how the website will actually generate sales.
This leads to the “more traffic = more sales” trap. In theory it holds – more traffic should lead to more sales. But in practice, before you scale your advertising, you need to carefully test different positionings, marketing angles, offers, prices and other key elements. Only then does the “more traffic = more sales” logic start to work.
Chances are that if CRO has not been done, the rest of the marketing is most likely missing too – market research, finding a positioning, differentiating from the competition, marketing angles, defining the target audience and more. All of this is part of a successful marketing strategy.
Before we move on to the specific signals, it is important to shift your thinking – let’s stop looking at advertising and the website as separate things. Your marketing should be seen as a complete ecosystem in which everything is connected and every part affects the results. Now let’s look at the main signs that a website needs CRO.
High traffic but low conversions – this is one of the most common and at the same time most misleading signals. On the one hand the traffic looks promising – the campaigns achieve good engagement, a high CTR, and there are add-to-baskets. But sales stay low or do not happen at all. This clearly points to a problem at website level – users arrive, show interest, but do not complete the purchase.
The causes often lie in poor UX, slow loading, a checkout that is hard to navigate or a lack of trust (e.g. no reviews or certificates). These problems are easy to identify with tools such as Clarity or Hotjar, which show how users actually behave on the website.
In somewhat more established shops with some history, customers start sending signals themselves – you receive enquiries or complaints about difficulties placing an order, problems with the website loading, unclear product information or a lack of convenient payment methods. All of these indications are valuable and should be analysed carefully.
Pro tip: listen to the questions customers ask about products on the phone and in messages. This will help you understand exactly what information they are interested in, which you can then add to the website. That way you will cut unnecessary calls and shorten the purchase process, because the customer will not have to dig for information or call (something many people prefer to avoid, so they leave the website instead).
Data analysis is not difficult, as long as you have good tracking. It is important to look at the ad accounts and the data in them. If you see good CTRs and add-to-baskets but no sales, chances are the website needs to be reviewed and optimised.
A good practice is to set up a session recording tool right at the start of the work – for example Clarity (the one we use), Hotjar, Smartlook or similar. The aim is to log in 1–2 times a month and review 40–50 user sessions to see whether people find their way easily and what might be getting in their way.
Data does not only come from tracking but also from you as the business owner. When you call a customer or receive a call, have your staff ask at the end of the conversation how easy it was to place the order, from 1 to 10 (1 being very difficult, which is why they are calling, and 10 being super easy). If the score is below 6–7, they should ask in more detail what exactly the obstacle was. It is also a good idea to add a short anonymous form with the same question to the thank-you page after an order, to collect feedback there as well. This makes a huge difference when problems come up often or you are not sure whether the website has any.
Before you start with the specific steps, it helps to realise that CRO is not a one-off task but a process of continuous improvement. Here I will give you guidelines that are easy to apply and can immediately give you a better picture of the state of your website and the user journey. The goal is to find the small details that often make the big difference.
For 7 more specific things you can do, see here: CRO optimisation: 10 tips for more conversions.
It is never too late, but also never too early, to think about getting help from a specialist. We recommend that business owners first run basic tests themselves – many of the problems can be found at this stage. It makes sense to hire a CRO specialist once the basic small obstacles, such as slow loading and a complicated checkout, have already been addressed, but there are still conversion problems or the website clearly does not provide enough information. At Evol we can carry out a full CRO audit with specific recommendations, as well as a page design in Figma for your web development team to implement.
Before we finish, let’s sum up why it is so important to see advertising and CRO as one whole.
In online business everything is complex and simple at the same time. There are many pieces of the puzzle – positioning, targeting, offers, design, ads, CRO – but none of them is complicated on its own when you work with data. The same rule applies everywhere: correct tracking, behaviour analysis, ad analysis and making decisions based on that data. Guesswork never works. That is why building a complete strategy is essential – from positioning and differentiation, through defining the target audience and its problems, to the solutions the business offers, design and branding, the website’s CRO, and only then building the ads and creatives. Everything has to work in symbiosis, which requires structure, a plan and a marketing strategy. There is no CRO without ads, no ads without CRO, and without a marketing strategy there is neither CRO nor ads.
To start the right way, it is important to organise your actions strategically. First, carry out a detailed audit of the website and the ads – this will give you a clear picture of where the weak spots are and what is already working well. Then draw up a structured plan that combines the website improvements and the advertising effort into one complete strategy. Only then move on to execution – with a focus on testing, analysis and adapting based on real data. At Evol we can help with all of this, and we offer a completely free 1-hour consultation in which we will get to know your business, discuss the problems and give you specific guidance and solutions.
