The ad did its job. Then they landed on your website

Every report you get stops at the tap

Every number an advertising platform sends you describes the part of the journey that happens before somebody reaches your business.

What happens in the ten seconds after the tap is in none of those reports, and on most jobs it is nobody's responsibility. The person running the ads has done their part. The person who built the website did it two years ago and has not been asked since.

So the most expensive moment in the whole arrangement is the one nobody is looking at.

You can do the arithmetic on this yourself, and it is worth doing before you read another word. Take what you spent last month. Take the number of real enquiries that came back.

You already have both figures and nobody has to interpret them for you. Whatever sits in the gap between them happened after the tap.

Sometimes it really is the ad

If the taps are coming from the wrong suburb, from a search that means something different to what you sell, or from people who thought the price was half what it is, then no landing page is going to rescue that. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you a landing page.

So check that first. Open the ad account and read the actual search terms people used. If the traffic is wrong, fix the ad and stop reading here.

Everything below assumes the right people are already arriving.

The first second decides whether they stay

Somebody taps your ad. They are almost certainly in the middle of something else. Before they read a word, they run one check: have I landed in the right place.

It is fast and mostly unconscious, and it is the same check you run walking into a shop you have never been in. Nobody reads the sign above the door. They glance at what is in front of them and decide.

On a phone the answer has to be in the top part of the screen, before any scrolling, in words they recognise. Recognise specifically from the ad they just tapped.

Say the same thing twice

If the ad says emergency hot water, same day, Redcliffe, then those are the words that want to be at the top of the page. Not because of a rule about keywords. Because the visitor is checking a promise against what they were promised, and the fastest way to let them check it is to show them the same words.

Sending everybody to the homepage

A homepage is written for a stranger who does not yet know what you do. Somebody who tapped an ad is not that person. They know what they want, and they have just been told you do it, so landing them on the general introduction makes them start the whole process again.

Starting again is the moment people decide it is less effort to go back and press the next result.

And nothing in between

Then there is the queue. Every one of these was a reasonable idea on its own, which is exactly how they accumulate:

• A cookie banner
• A newsletter pop-up
• A video that has to load before the words appear
• A carousel that changes what it says every four seconds
• A chat bubble that opens on its own

Separately, each one is a small ask. Together, on a phone, they are a queue standing between somebody who is ready and a business that has already paid for them to be there.

People scroll when they know why

There is a comfortable belief that people do not scroll and that a long page is a bad page. Both halves are wrong. People scroll happily, on a phone, for as long as they can tell that scrolling is getting them somewhere.

What nobody does is scroll to find out whether there is a reason to scroll.

So the question is never whether the page is too long. It is whether each screenful earns the next one.

• The first screen

  Yes, you are in the right place, and here is what this is.

• The second

  Here is the thing you came for, in the shape you asked for it.

• The third

  Here is why you can believe it. The work, the photos, other people who used you.

• The fourth

  Here is how to start, and it takes about ten seconds.

Be careful which numbers you celebrate

If somebody shows you a report where time on page went up and the phone did not ring more, that is not an improvement worth paying for. A visitor who spent ninety seconds on your page might have been reading it. They might have been looking for your phone number.

Those two look identical in every analytics tool ever made, and only one of them is good news. The measurement that survives contact with reality is whether the phone rang. Everything else is a proxy, and proxies drift.

Six things to do next is the same as none

Call now. Get a quote. Book online. Download the brochure. Chat to us. Sign up and save ten per cent.

Six buttons, the same size, the same colour, sitting in a row. That is not six chances to win the job. It is one extra decision the visitor has to make before they can make the one you actually wanted, and it arrives at the precise moment they were ready to stop deciding things.

Give each moment one job

At any point on the page there is one thing that makes sense to do next. Not none, and not six. Everything else can stay on the page, quieter and further down.

Weight is the instruction: the thing that looks most like a button is the thing people will treat as the button.

Match the action to the intent

Somebody who searched the word emergency wants a phone number. Somebody who searched how much something costs wants a price, or a way to get one, and handing them a phone call is asking them to have a conversation before they are ready to have it.

Same business, same website, two different next steps. The useful part is that the ad already told you which of the two you are dealing with, and almost nobody uses that.

Put it where the decision happens

Most sites put the call button at the very top, again in the footer, and nowhere in between. So the person who is convinced two-thirds of the way down has to leave the sentence that convinced them and go hunting for the way to act on it. Every second of that hunt is a second in which the feeling fades.

And when they do find it, ask for less. An enquiry form with eleven boxes is not qualification. It is a filter that removes the people in a hurry, and the people in a hurry are the ones who tapped an ad.

That subject is its own piece: nobody wants a contact form.

The ad, the page and the phone are one thing

The customer does not experience three things. They experience one, and they judge the whole of it by the worst part of it.

Which is why the last piece of this has no design in it at all: what happens after the enquiry is sent. If the honest answer is that somebody gets to it within a day or two, then the money spent on that ad bought a lead that has gone cold and rung the next name on the list. The page did its job and the business did not.

None of this is about spending more

That is the whole point of it. The taps are already bought and paid for. Making the moment after them work is a rewrite of one page and an hour of somebody's honest attention, and it is the only lever in this entire subject that does not arrive with a monthly invoice attached to it.

And if it is already fine, it is fine

If you run those five steps and the page says what the ad said, and you can see how to get hold of you without scrolling, and the form asks for three things rather than eleven, then this is not where your money is going.

Go and look at the targeting, or the offer, or the price against the other three names in the results. That is a more useful answer than a new website, and unlike a new website it costs you nothing to act on.