Why your ad spend goes up while your leads go down

Alex Zamora on judging ads by cost per qualified lead instead of cost per click, and fixing the landing page and intake before raising the budget.

Alex Zamora, Head of Analytics. Recorded July 23, 2026. 38 sec.

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What Alex says

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Full transcript

Here's why your ad spend keeps going up, but leads keep going down.

Most businesses judge their ads by one number: cost per click. That's the wrong number. What actually matters is cost per qualified lead, because a cheap click that never converts is more expensive than an expensive click that does.

Here's the fix. Before you touch your ad budget, look at your landing page and your intake process. If leads are dropping off, there's no amount of ad optimization that will save you.

We see this consistently. Businesses blame the platform when the leak is actually downstream. Fix the conversion path first, then scale the ads.

This is part of our conversion rate optimization work.