The budget goes out, the clicks come in, and the sales don't follow — so naturally the campaign gets the blame. But in most of these cases the ad was fine. The money dies downstream, in one of four stages: the click doesn't load on a phone, the page doesn't match the ad, the checkout leaks halfway, or the confirmation never lands so the order 'never happened'. Each stage has its own cheap test, and running them in order turns 'ads don't work' into 'this specific stage ate my budget'.
Check these first, yourself
Test the landing page on a throttled phone connection, not your desk. Ads are clicked on phones; if render takes over 3 seconds there, every click after the first is wasted money.
Verify the pixel/tag fires once and only once on the landing page. Double-firing inventory, or a tag that never fires, makes the optimizer steer blind for weeks.
Run a real test order through the checkout. If the cart or the payment step fails on a common browser, you're paying for clicks that physically cannot become sales.
Watch what happens after payment: does the confirmation appear, and does the order land in your store? A sale that shows 'abandoned' because confirmation broke is revenue you'll never count.
Should you fix it yourself or call a rescue?
Still have questions?
Why do ads work for competitors but not for me?
Because they're not the same page. The ad only wins the click; the page has to close the sale. If your page is slow on mobile, fires no clean tracking, or leaks at checkout, no amount of ad spend fixes it — that's infrastructure, not creative.
How do I know the problem is the page and not the offer?
Change one variable. Test the identical offer on a page you've verified loads fast, tracks cleanly and checks out — if it converts there, the page was the leak, and the pre-flight just proved it.
Is it worth pre-flighting before more ad spend?
It's cheaper than the alternative. One week of ads pointed at a page that physically can't convert costs more than the flat pre-flight, and the report tells you exactly which stage to fix instead of guessing.