Solved: High CTR, Low ATC & Checkout Rate - Landing Page Issue?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you my thoughts on your campaign. It's a common situation to be in – you've got one metric looking great (the CTR), which tells you the ad creative is grabbing attention, but the story falls apart afterwards. That drop-off between the click and the cart is where your profit is leaking.

To be honest with you, while a 6% CTR sounds brilliant on paper, it can often be a vanity metric that masks a deeper problem with your audience-to-offer match. You're getting them in the door, but they're not liking what they see when they get inside. We need to figure out why. Is it the product page, the price, the offer itself, or are we attracting the wrong sort of people in the first place? It's usually a combination of these things.

Let's break it down properly.

We'll need to look at your Post-Click Experience...

Right, let's get straight to the heart of it. The journey from an ad click to a purchase is a series of small steps, and you've got a massive hole in your bucket somewhere between the 'click' and the 'add to cart'. When we see a pattern like this – loads of interest, no action – the landing page is the first suspect. People are arriving with the expectation set by your ad, and that expectation is being shattered almost immediately.

It's not just about having a 'nice' looking page. It's a machine for turning interest into intent. Every single element either helps or hurts that process. Let's do a bit of a virtual audit. You need to be brutally honest with yourself about these points:

• Product Photography: Is it professional? Grainy, poorly lit photos taken on a phone just wont cut it in a competitive niche. Are you showing the product from multiple angles? Crucially, are you showing it in context, being used by a person? People buy outcomes, not objects. A photo of your product on a white background is a catalogue entry; a photo of someone happily using your product is a sales pitch.
• Product Descriptions: This is a massive one. Are you just listing features and specs? Nobody cares. Seriously. They want to know what it does for them. You need to sell the transformation. Use the classic 'Problem-Agitate-Solve' formula. What's the nagging problem your product solves? Agitate that pain point a little. Then present your product as the obvious, perfect solution. If your copy is flat and uninspired, their motivation to buy will be too. It's a common mistake, a lot of businesses just dont have the copywriting skills needed.
• Pricing & Perceived Value: Is your price immediately clear? And more importantly, is it justified? If your product is more expensive than competitors, you need to work twice as hard to explain why. Is it higher quality materials? Better craftsmanship? A longer warranty? This value needs to be communicated instantly, not hidden away on an 'About Us' page. Also, be upfront about shipping costs. A surprise shipping fee at checkout is the number one reason for cart abandonment.
• Trust Signals: You're a new brand with a fresh pixel. To a potential customer, you're a complete unknown. You have zero trust. You need to build it, and fast. This means plastering your page with social proof. Customer reviews (with photos if possible), trust badges (secure payment icons, satisfaction guarantees), a clear and easy-to-find returns policy, and professional branding. Without these, you look risky, and people would rather just go back to Facebook than risk their money on you.

The issue is almost definately in one of those four areas. I've put together a simple flowchart that visualises this diagnostic process. It shows exactly where the likely failure points are based on the symptoms you're describing.

I'd say you need to question your 'good' CTR...

Now, this might sound a bit backwards, but I'm going to challenge your premise that a 6% CTR is a good thing. Of course, on the surface it is. But in this context, it could be a symptom of the problem. When you have a CTR that high, it often means your ad creative is extremely broad in its appeal. It's like shouting "Free Beer!" in a crowded street. You'll get a lot of attention, but how many of those people are actually your ideal customers?

You might be attracting an audience of "window shoppers" – people who are curious, but never had any real intent to purchase. They click, have a quick look, and then leave. This behaviour is expensive. You're paying for every one of those clicks, and they're not converting. The ad is making a promise that resonates widely, but your product page, with its specific details and price point, is only for a niche audience. There's a mismatch.

The goal isn't to get the most clicks; it's to get the most qualified clicks. Sometimes, this means deliberately trying to lower your CTR by making your ad more specific. You want to pre-qualify your audience before they even click. How?

• Call Out Your Audience: If you sell high-end gear for professional photographers, start your ad copy with "Attention Pro Photographers...". This immediately tells amateurs not to bother clicking.
• Hint at the Price Point: You don't have to state the exact price, but you can use language that signals quality and a higher price. Words like 'premium', 'handcrafted', 'artisan' can help weed out bargain hunters. In some cases, we've even put the price directly in the ad image. The CTR drops, but the conversion rate on the website skyrockets because every click is from someone who already knows and accepts the price.
• Focus on a Niche Problem: Instead of a generic benefit, talk about a very specific, urgent problem that only your ideal customer has. Your current ad might be visually appealing (hence the 60% hook rate), but the messaging might be too generic. The more niche you get, the more you repel the wrong people and the more you attract the right ones.

This is about shifting your mindset from getting cheap attention to getting valuable intent. An ad that pre-qualifies traffic will naturally have a lower CTR, but the people who do click are far more likely to convert. This leads to a lower cost per purchase, even if the cost per click goes up slightly. It's a trade-off that is almost always worth making.

You probably should re-evaluate your entire offer...

Let's zoom out a bit. People don't just buy a product; they buy an offer. The 'offer' is the entire package: the product itself, the price, the shipping, the guarantee, the bonuses, the customer service experience. Your product might be fantastic, but if the offer surrounding it is weak, it will fail.

You're in a highly competitive niche, which means you can't just compete on the product. You have to compete on the offer. You need to make your offer so compelling that it feels like a no-brainer to the right person. Right now, your low ATC rate tells me your offer isn't hitting the mark.

Instead of just tweaking the copy on your product page, you should be testing completely different offers. This is often where the biggest breakthroughs happen. Here are a few ways to structure an offer to make it more compelling:

You need to start thinking like a direct-response marketer. Your job is to present an offer so good that people would feel foolish to say no. A simple percentage discount is the most common tactic, but it's often the least creative and can hurt your brand perception over time. A strong risk reversal, like an unconditional money-back guarantee, can often outperform a discount because it addresses the core fear of buying from a new brand: "What if I don't like it?". A bundle offer can dramatically increase your Average Order Value (AOV), which is critical for making paid ads profitable, especially with high CPMs.

Don't just stick with your current offer because it's what you started with. Test aggressively. Create a separate landing page with a new offer and run an A/B test. The results might surprise you.

You'll need to understand your numbers properly...

You mentioned you're "15% profitable." That's great, but I have to ask: how are you calculating that? Is that 15% profit on the revenue from that specific ad campaign over the last 4 days? If so, that's a very short-sighted view of profitability. You're in a competitive niche, and acquiring a customer is expensive. The real money isn't made on the first sale. It's made over the lifetime of the customer.

This is where understanding your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) becomes not just important, but absolutely essential. The LTV tells you how much a customer is worth to your business over their entire relationship with you. Once you know this number, it completely changes how you think about your advertising costs.

Let's break down how to calculate a simplified version for an eCommerce business:

1. Average Order Value (AOV): Total Revenue / Number of Orders.
2. Purchase Frequency (F): Total Number of Orders / Total Number of Unique Customers. (How many times a customer buys from you over a period, say, a year).
3. Gross Margin % (GM): The percentage of revenue left after accounting for the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS).

The calculation is then: LTV = (AOV * F) * GM

So, let's say your AOV is £80, your average customer buys 1.5 times a year, and your gross margin is 60%.
Your LTV would be (£80 * 1.5) * 0.60 = £120 * 0.60 = £72.

This means, on average, every new customer you acquire will generate £72 in gross profit for your business over their lifetime. Now, that $70 (£55-ish) CPM doesn't look quite as terrifying, does it? It gives you a clear ceiling for your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). A healthy business model often aims for an LTV:CAC ratio of at least 3:1. In this example, you could afford to spend up to £24 to acquire a single customer and still have a very healthy, scalable business.

This isn't just academic. It's the core principle that allows businesses to scale aggressively with paid ads. They're not worried about making a profit on day one. They're focused on acquiring customers at a cost that is sustainable relative to their LTV. I've built an interactive calculator for you below. Play around with your own numbers (or your best estimates) to get a feel for what your LTV might be. It will be the most important number in your business.

We'll need to look at your campaign structure & targeting...

Finally, let's touch on the technical side of the campaign. A $70 CPM and a fresh pixel in a competitive niche are all related. When your pixel is new, Meta's algorithm has no idea who your ideal customer is. It's essentially guessing. It's trying to find people within your targeting parameters who are most likely to perform the action you've asked for. Because it has so little data, its guesses are inefficient, and it has to bid high in the auction to get your ad shown. This drives up your CPM.

The most critical mistake you can make right now is running a campaign optimised for the wrong objective. If you're optimising for "Reach" or "Traffic," you are actively telling Facebook to find you the cheapest, lowest-quality audience possible – people who browse but never buy. You absolutely MUST be running a campaign with a "Sales" objective, optimising for "Purchase" conversions. This is the only way to feed the pixel the data it desperately needs. Every purchase teaches it more about what your buyers look like, and over time, it will get smarter, your CPMs will stabilise (or even decrease), and your results will improve.

You've also only been running this for 4 days. That's not nearly enough time for the algorithm to exit the 'learning phase'. You need to be patient and let it gather at least 50 conversion events per ad set per week. Cutting it off too early is a classic error.

Beyond that, your campaign structure is key. You can't just run one campaign and hope for the best. You need to structure your campaigns to match the customer journey. A simple, effective structure is the Top-of-Funnel (ToFu), Middle-of-Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom-of-Funnel (BoFu) approach.

• ToFu (Top of Funnel): This is what you're doing now. Targeting cold audiences based on interests, lookalikes, or broad targeting. The goal is to introduce your brand and products to new people.
• MoFu (Middle of Funnel): This is for people who have shown some interest but haven't made a move. You'd retarget people who have visited your website or engaged with your ads, but haven't added anything to their cart. You could show them testimonials or different product angles.
• BoFu (Bottom of Funnel): This is your hottest audience. You retarget people who have added to their cart or initiated checkout but didn't buy. This is where you can use a small discount or a reminder ad to get them over the line. These campaigns are usually your most profitable.

Right now, your ToFu campaign is generating a perfect audience for MoFu and BoFu campaigns. All those people who clicked but didn't buy are now in your pixel data. You need to create new campaigns to talk to them again. This is how you turn those expensive, curious clicks into profitable customers.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To pull this all together, here is a table of actionable steps I'd recommend you take, based on everything we've discussed. This isn't about a single magic fix; it's about systematically improving each part of your advertising machine.

As you can see, there's a lot more to it than just the ad itself. Getting paid advertising to work at scale is a complex process of aligning your audience, message, landing page, and offer. Your initial results show promise – you have something that people are interested in clicking. Now the real work begins: converting that interest into profit.

This process of continuous testing, analysis, and optimisation is where having an expert can make a huge difference. It's a full-time job to manage these moving parts correctly, and getting it wrong can be a very expensive learning curve. For instance, I remember one campaign we worked on for a women's apparel brand facing a similar issue. They were getting decent traffic from their Meta ads but very few sales. After we overhauled their product pages with better photos and benefit-driven copy, and implemented a structured retargeting campaign for cart abandoners, we were able to achieve a 691% return on their ad spend. It's often not one single fix, but a systematic approach that turns clicks into customers.

If you'd like to go over your campaign and website in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation strategy session where we can do a proper audit and give you a more tailored plan of action. It might be useful to have a second pair of expert eyes on it.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh