When a client says their cost per lead is too high, landing page mistakes are more often the cause than the ad account. The page is. You already paid for the click; everything after it is yours to lose.
Here are the nine we find most, roughly ordered by how much money they cost.
1. Sending paid traffic to the homepage
A homepage is for people who already know you and are deciding where to go. Someone arriving from an ad about modular kitchens should land on a page about modular kitchens, with the form visible without scrolling. Every extra decision loses a share of the people you paid for.
2. Slow on a real phone, on a real connection
Not slow on your office wifi on a laptop. Slow on a mid-range Android on 4G in a lift. Test it that way. Every second past about three costs a meaningful share of arrivals before they see anything at all.
The usual culprits are unoptimised hero images, four font families, and an analytics stack with six tags in the head.
3. The offer is not on the page
Contact us for more information is not an offer. It asks for effort and promises nothing specific. Get a room-by-room quote in 24 hours, no site visit needed is an offer. Same business, same ad spend, completely different conversion rate.
4. Seven form fields where three would do
Every field costs completions. Ask for what you need to make the first call — usually name, phone, and one qualifying question. Everything else can be asked on the call, when the person is already talking to you.
5. No proof anyone can check
Stock photos and adjectives are not proof. Proof is a number, a named customer, a photo of actual work, a review with detail in it. Indian buyers are, sensibly, sceptical of a page with no evidence.
Every claim on the page should be something a visitor could, in principle, verify. The rest is decoration.
6. Price nowhere on the page
Hiding price to force a conversation fills your pipeline with people who cannot afford you and wastes your team's day. A range with what it depends on qualifies the lead before they cost you anything.
7. No WhatsApp option
A significant share of Indian buyers will message before they will fill a form or take a call. Not offering it means losing them silently. Offer both and let people pick — then make sure someone actually answers.
8. The form does not work on the phone
Worth checking on an actual device, because this fails constantly: wrong keyboard for the phone field, a dropdown that will not open, a button hidden under the browser bar, a date picker that fights the OS. Broken forms produce a zero-conversion page that looks fine on your desktop.
9. Nothing happens after submit
The page says thank you and the lead waits. Meanwhile they open three competitors. The thank-you state should tell them exactly what happens next and when — and an automated WhatsApp message should already have arrived by the time they read it.
Which landing page mistakes to fix first
In order: the offer, then speed, then form length, then proof. Those four cover most of the gap in most accounts, and none of them require touching the ad account at all.
Fixing the page is also usually cheaper than a 30% budget increase, and it improves every campaign you will ever run afterwards rather than just this month's.
See what tightening each stage does to the numbers with the lead funnel calculator.
Questions people ask
What is the most common landing page mistake?
Sending paid traffic to the homepage. A homepage is built for everyone, so it answers nobody. The visitor arrived because of a specific promise in the ad, and the page has to continue that promise rather than start a new conversation.
How many form fields should a lead form have?
As few as the sales team genuinely needs to act, which is usually name, phone and one qualifying question. Every extra field costs completions, and fields added to help someone who never reads them cost the most.
How fast does a landing page need to be?
Fast enough on a mid-range Android on a 4G connection, which is a much harsher test than a desktop on office wifi. Test on a real phone on mobile data before you trust any score a tool gives you.
What proof actually helps?
Anything a visitor can check: named clients, real photographs of work, numbers with a period attached, registration or certification details. Unattributed quotes and stock photographs read as decoration and are ignored.
Want us to look at yours? Send us the page.