Your marketing machine is not always going to be firing on all cylinders. When growth stalls, leads dry up, or your inbox feels almost eerily quiet, it's usually a sign that something isn't working.
For many startups juggling budgets, teams, and product development, it is crucial to know not just which marketing tactics are essential, but you should know how to spot when they are failing you.
Understanding where things go wrong is the first step for building the right type of marketing that supports your business goals.
Here's a few things to bear in mind:
Audit Your Paid Traffic
If you are running Google Ads or similar campaigns but seeing very little return, you should start with a structured review of your spend and your performance.
A specialist review, like a free PPC audit, can quickly reveal wasted budget on irrelevant keywords, poor targeting, or ad groups that are underperforming.
Even small fixes can free up some cash for other experiments, so you can understand which search terms are truly working for you. Also, look closely at things beyond the total clicks. For example, click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost per acquisition.
Clicks are one thing, but if it's not turning into conversions, the problem may be mismatched messaging, slow landing pages, or unclear calls to action, rather than the ad platform itself.
Treat each campaign as a test rather than an activity you can set and forget.
Trace Every Lead Back to Its Source
One common sign that marketing is going wrong is when you get mystery leads or, of course, a complete lack of leads.
If you can't see clearly which channels are bringing in potential customers, you are just guessing where to go.
Basic tracking can help you understand where the leads are coming from: paid activity, referrals, social, or organic searches.
Tagged links, contact form fields asking “how did you hear about us,” or CRM notes can capture all this data. Over time, you will spot patterns, and you'll be able to fine-tune or cut out specific channels entirely.
What's the Story on Your Website?
Even the best campaigns will fail if your website is confusing people when they arrive.
If visitors land on your site and quickly leave, your messaging may not be clear enough about who you serve, what problem you solve, and why you are different from others.
Look at your bounce rates and time on page because if they are respectively high and low, this will point to a mismatch between campaign promises and page content.
Also, review your key pages, ideally with someone who is not close to the business at all, and ask whether the headline speaks directly to a real customer problem and whether the next step is obvious.
Sometimes a little bit of consulting can make a big difference, so you make smaller changes to copy, layout, and social proof that can have seismic returns.
When you see that a particular channel is working, it's because it's driving the inquiries, and when it does not, it's all about adjusting, testing something new, or reallocating your budget, but the key is about doing this with confidence.
Understanding where we're going wrong is a difficult but necessary part of our work, and we should prioritise it
