Why Your Website Gets No Leads

Why does a website get no leads?

The situation is familiar: the site is built, the ads are running, the money is going out, and there are no leads or just a handful. The first thought is usually the wrong one - "bad site, we need to rebuild it". Rebuilding blindly is expensive and often does not help, because the cause was never the design.

Almost always it comes down to one of five things. I will go through them in order, from the most common to the least visible, and you can check each one yourself in ten minutes.

Is it clear within five seconds what you offer?

The first screen decides everything. A person arrives from an ad, looks at the page for a couple of seconds and decides: is this about what I need or not? If at that moment they see "Welcome to our website" and a slider with abstract pictures - they leave.

Check it yourself: open the home page and, without scrolling, answer three questions. What is being offered here? To whom? What do I do next? If even one answer is not obvious to an outsider - you are losing most of your traffic in the first seconds.

A separate common mistake is a mismatch between the ad and the page. The ad says "fridge repair in an hour", and the page is a general service centre site with every service on it. The person does not find what they came for and closes the tab. An ad for a specific query should lead to a page about that query.

How many clicks to the lead form?

The second most common cause is that the action is too far away. The form lives in the footer, there is one and the same button for the whole page, and on a phone you need to scroll six screens to reach it.

The rule is simple: the chance to leave a request should be in view almost all the time. A button on the first screen, a repeat call to action after the pricing or portfolio block, a form at the end. Not one button for the whole site, but several entry points into the same action.

Check it on a phone, not on a computer: open the site from mobile and count how far you need to scroll to the first chance to leave your contact details. Most ad traffic comes from a phone.

Does your form actually work?

This sounds silly, but it is the first thing to check. A form can be broken and give no sign of it: the button responds, the "thank you" appears, and the message goes nowhere. Or it goes to a mailbox nobody opens. Or it lands in spam.

The check takes two minutes: fill in the form from your own phone like an ordinary customer and make sure the request arrived - in the mailbox, in Telegram, in the CRM, wherever it is supposed to go. Do it again after any edit to the site.

While you are at it, check whether the form accepts real data formats. Validation is often set up so that a phone number with spaces or a Telegram handle gets rejected - and the person leaves, because they could not submit.

Is the right traffic coming to the site?

Sometimes the site is fine and there are still no leads, because the wrong people are arriving.

The signs: plenty of visitors, but time on site measured in seconds. Requests come in for things you do not do. Ads are set up for broad queries where the person is looking for information rather than a service - "how to fix it myself" instead of "call a technician".

Here the site is not at fault, and rebuilding it is pointless - what needs sorting out is the ad settings: queries, negative keywords, geography, and the match between the ad and the page.

Do you know exactly where people drop off?

The least visible cause: there is no analytics, or it does not measure what matters. Then any conversation about leads is guesswork.

The minimum a site should have: a Yandex Metrica counter and GA4, and above all - a form submission recorded as a goal. Not just visits, but the specific "request sent" event. Without it you do not know which ads bring customers and which only bring clicks.

An extremely useful thing is session recording in Yandex Metrica: you literally see how a person scrolls, where they stop and which field makes them abandon the form. It replaces long guesswork about what is wrong with the site.

Check whether requests are tagged with their source: which ad, which query, which page the person came from. Without that link you are optimising your ads blind.

Where should you start checking?

In order, from cheap to expensive. Send a request through your own form from a phone - make sure it arrives. Open the site from a phone and look at the first screen through the eyes of an outsider. Count how many scrolls it takes to reach the form. Look into your analytics: how many people reach the request page and how many submit. And only then discuss redesigning.

In most cases the problem is solved with targeted fixes and costs incomparably less than a new site.

If you would like me to take a look - write to me, send the link to your site and your ad data, and I will tell you exactly where the leads are being lost. Even if you end up doing the work without me.