TersbyTersby blog· 5 min read
Six places where leads get lost between the landing page and the CRM
The ads ran, the clicks came, and there are fewer orders than there should be. Where exactly leads disappear, and how to notice it in minutes rather than days.
The ads ran, the clicks came, and there are fewer orders in the CRM than you expected. The first thought is a weak offer or a poor creative. Sometimes that's it. But very often the buyer did come and even wanted to order, and the lead got lost on the way.
A lead travels a long road: the ad, the site, the form, the CRM, a manager, the ad account. Every link can break, and each breaks quietly. Below are six such places and the signs that give them away.
1. The site didn't open
The domain wasn't paid for, a DNS record broke, the certificate wasn't renewed. The ad platform doesn't know and keeps showing the ad. The budget is spent while people see a browser error.
How to notice. There are clicks in the ad account and no visitors on the site. By hand you see it only the next day, so a site's availability has to be checked automatically, every few minutes, with a message to a messenger.
What helps. A spare domain in case of a block, and an availability check that reports not only “down” but also “back up”: then you see how long the ads were pouring into nothing.
2. The buyer left the form
Someone pressed “Order”, started typing a phone number and changed their mind. Or got distracted. Or the form refused the number, because it was pasted with the country code and the field expected it without.
How to notice. You need a funnel of four steps: opened the site, pressed “Order”, started the form, sent it. A big gap between the second and the fourth step points at the form, not at the ads.
What helps. A short form, a phone field that understands a number however it's typed, and saving what the person managed to enter. A number from an abandoned form is almost a lead: you can call that buyer back.
3. The lead didn't reach the CRM
The most frustrating loss: the buyer did everything, the lead exists, and it isn't in the CRM. The causes are mundane. The API key was changed in the CRM. A product was removed from the catalog, and orders with it are no longer accepted. The CRM's server answered slower than usual and the request was cut off.
How to notice. There are more leads on the site than orders in the CRM for the same day. Nobody reconciles that by hand, so you need a delivery history with the CRM's answer for every lead, and an alert at the very first error.
What helps. A retry when the failure is temporary, and keeping the lead on the site's side. While a lead lives only in the CRM, any CRM failure destroys it.
4. Nobody took the lead
The lead arrived, but a manager saw it three hours later. By then the buyer cooled off, found the product elsewhere or simply stopped answering calls from unknown numbers.
How to notice. See how many of the day's leads are still “New” by evening. And compare the approval rate of leads taken at once with that of leads that waited.
What helps. A lead in a messenger the same second, with a button that shows who took it. When a lead is nobody's, nobody takes it. When it has a name on it, there are no questions.
5. Spam clogged the queue
Bots and pranksters send forms in bursts. A manager spends the morning calling numbers that don't exist while real buyers wait in the same queue. On top of that, fake leads go to the ad account as conversions, and the algorithm starts looking for more “buyers” like them.
How to notice. Many leads from one address, numbers with impossible codes, forms filled in a second.
What helps. A filter before the CRM: a number check, a hidden field for bots, a rate limit, a blocklist of numbers and addresses. What matters is that spam goes neither to the CRM, nor to the ad platform, nor into the stats.
6. The ad platform never learned about the lead
The lead exists, the order exists, and the ad account knows about neither. The browser blocked the pixel, the server events token expired, the event went out with an error. The algorithm gets fewer signals than there really were and understands less well whom to look for.
How to notice. The ad account steadily shows fewer leads than the site. A small difference is normal, a noticeable one means a problem.
What helps. Sending events from both the browser and the server, with one identifier so the platform doesn't count them twice. And checking the platform's answer: if it rejects events, you need to know at once. More in the post about the Conversions API.
Three numbers for every day
To catch any of the six losses, it's enough to compare three numbers for the same day:
- clicks in the ad account;
- visitors and leads on the site;
- orders in the CRM.
If the gap between neighboring numbers is bigger than usual, you know which link to look at. Between clicks and visitors: the site or the domain. Between visitors and leads: the offer or the form. Between leads and orders: the integration, spam or the speed of handling.
In Tersby these checks run by themselves: alerts arrive in Telegram when a site is down, the CRM doesn't accept leads, the pixel rejects events or ad clicks suddenly stop.
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