Ads and their creativity play a significant role in attracting users or communicating value propositions to them. However, Ads should link to the entire customer journey, as exaggerated promises could lead to a negative brand association. Overpromising or clickbait ads often lead to higher bounce rates and low conversion and more importantly, the users could complain or post negative comments.

Digital marketers often complain that they achieved high CTR, although they are not getting conversions. This could happen due to many reasons. However, the good news is that some reasons are easily rectifiable.

1. Promises made in ads are not available on the landing page
   If the landing page is different to what you promise in the ads, users will bounce back immediately without taking any action. For instance, companies mention discounts in their ads but forget to mention them or apply them on the landing page. Sometimes the user must remember the coupon code and enter it in the shopping cart, which is quite inconvenient for them.
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2. Poor Landing pages or Broken pages
   The landing page experience should be of high quality to convert people who are visiting from the ads. Especially, product pages should have quality images or videos, proper descriptions, warranties and guarantees, a clear call to action, and refund policies.  
   
   Social media platforms take longer to load than an external website. It is common to see a disparity between clicks and landing page views due to users closing the landing page even before it loads. Fast loading and mobile-optimized landing pages are paramount to connecting touchpoints in a customer journey.
   
   Technical changes in websites often break existing landing pages, have 404 errors, or redirections. Sometimes the product pages are not available due to out-of-stock products. Ensure your landing pages are free of errors and the products that are available have enough stock. By periodically checking the landing page, you can avoid a bad experience with the user journey.
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3. Competitors are with a sale or unique value propositions
   Customers' messy middle shows us users can look at multiple competitors within a few clicks, thanks to high-speed internet and technologically advanced smartphones. It is safe to assume that users know the competitor's offering, so you must differentiate yourself from your competitors.  
   
   For example, if competitors have low pricing, faster delivery or any other significant benefits than you, the customers are going back to the competitors although they have clicked your ad. Sometimes competitors are on big sales, so it will be challenging to convert your web visitors.  
   
   Always keep an eye on competitors and monitor if your users have good reason to go for your competitors and work on improving those areas. You can also manage your ad budget accordingly.
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4. Longer time to conversion
   Consumers buy a pen drive within a few hours, but they research for weeks before purchasing a television or high price item. However, the challenge is that Facebook only tracks transactions within seven days, so the actual transactions may not be tracked if the time to convert is longer than seven days. In this situation, digital marketers might experience high CTR and low conversion rates with their ads. Before you make or break anything, understand the time to conversions for your product and analyze the entire customer journey via Google Analytics to note any conversions recorded from the ads after seven days. Don’t forget to look at assisting conversions and last click conversions as well.
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5. The campaign objective is not conversions or catalogue sales
   ‍Google or Facebook campaign objectives and optimization events should be set to purchases. For instance, if your Facebook campaign objective is set to landing page views, you will receive traffic with high CTR but not conversions. Ensure you have set your optimization event and the objectives to drive purchases.
   

Conclusion

High CTR ads are essential to driving traffic at lower costs, but they won’t ensure the quality of traffic to drive more transactions. Ads should be an integral part of the customer journey so that all the promises made via ads should be genuine, and users should experience a smooth journey until they purchase the offer.

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