How We Plan Paid Traffic Around the Customer Journey

A paid campaign needs a clear path from the first click to a useful customer action. We begin with the buyer, the offer, and the economics, then look at the keywords, message, landing page, and follow-up. The aim is to find which part of that journey deserves investment — and what needs to improve before spending more.

That order matters. Most of the paid-traffic problems I'm asked to look at weren't caused by the ads. They were caused by what happened after the ad worked.

We start with the sale, not the keyword

Before anyone opens a keyword tool, we write one sentence: who we want, what help they need, what action we want them to take, for which offer, at what acquisition cost. If we can't fill in that last blank, we're not ready to advertise.

Then we work out what a click is allowed to cost. Here's an illustrative version using our own $997 Growth Fix — the delivery costs are invented for the example, so treat the numbers as mechanics, not a forecast:

• A $997 sale with $450 of delivery cost leaves $547 before advertising.
• If we want $247 left after ads, we can spend $300 on ads per new customer.
• If 1 in 5 qualified calls becomes a customer, that's $60 per call.
• If 1 in 20 clicks books a call, that's $3 per click.

If the market charges $10 for those clicks, no amount of ad-copy polish fixes it. We either raise the click-to-call rate, narrow to higher-intent searches, change the offer, or validate through another channel first. You can run your own numbers in the free PPC Planner on Outcome Driven.

Then we walk the path a paid visitor will take

A paid visitor is less patient than someone who found you through a friend. They arrive with one question — is this what I searched for? — and leave quickly if the answer isn't obvious. So we walk the path in the order they experience it, and look for the leak at each stage:

1. The promise. Does the ad say exactly what the page delivers, in the buyer's words? A vague promise buys curious clicks, not qualified ones.
2. The page. Can someone tell within a few seconds who it's for, what they get, what it costs, and what to do next? One primary action, not five.
3. The form or booking. Does it work on a phone? Does it ask only for what we'll actually use? Does the confirmation say what happens next?
4. The follow-up. Who responds, and how fast? A paid inquiry that waits two days is mostly wasted spend.
5. The measurement. Does the source survive into the lead record — including through a scheduler or a second domain? Can we tell a booking from a button click?
6. The economics. Do we know the close rate and the allowable cost per click, or are we hoping?

The weakest stage is where we start. Often that means the first job isn't advertising at all — it's fixing the page or the follow-up so the clicks we eventually buy have somewhere useful to go. You can check your own path in two minutes with the Paid Traffic Leak Check.

What a first paid test looks like

When the path is ready, we keep the first test deliberately small so the results mean something:

• One offer, one audience, one platform — usually Google Search, because the buyer is already looking.
• A handful of exact and phrase keywords with clear service intent, so the search-term report stays reviewable.
• Starter negatives for jobs, logins, and courses — and a log of every term we exclude and why.
• One primary conversion: a completed booking, not a page view or a download.
• A loss limit and review dates set before launch, and a search-term review on every working day of the first week.

We change one major thing at a time and write down why. At small volumes, one sale is a signal, not a verdict.

What this isn't

The Growth Fix is a diagnostic and working session on your customer journey. It doesn't include setting up or managing an ad account — if your situation calls for that, it's scoped and priced separately, and only after the path is ready to receive the traffic. And we won't quote you a cost per click we haven't looked up for your market.

If you want the full, step-by-step version of this process — keyword research, match types, negative keywords, ad writing, measurement — it's written up on Outcome Driven: How to plan a PPC campaign that brings qualified traffic.

Already getting traffic that rarely becomes customers?

Start with a Growth Fix. We identify one priority problem, implement an agreed improvement together, and define how to measure it. It's $997 and deliberately small.

See the Growth Fix →