YourLandingPageIsaConversionTax
You've optimised your bids. You've refined your audiences. You've tested twenty ad variations. And then you send the click to a page that asks people to scroll past a hero image, read a paragraph, click a tab, find the product, select a variant, and then add to cart.
Every unnecessary step between ad click and purchase is a tax on your conversion rate.
We see this constantly. Brands spending £50k/month on Google Ads, sending traffic to pages that actively resist conversion. Not because the page is ugly. Because the page is doing too much.
The most common conversion taxes:
- Hero banners that push the product below the fold
- Category pages with 200 products and no filtering logic
- Product pages where "Add to Cart" requires scrolling past reviews
- Pop-ups that fire within 3 seconds of landing
- Mandatory account creation before checkout
- Mobile pages that load in 6+ seconds because of uncompressed lifestyle images
Each of these individually might drop conversion rate by 0.1-0.3%. Together, they compound. A page with three conversion taxes might be converting at 1.2% instead of 2.4%. That's not a design problem. That's a P&L problem.
The maths is straightforward: if you double your conversion rate, you halve your cost per acquisition.
No amount of bid optimisation can compensate for a landing page that fights the user. Fix the page before you increase the spend.