The channel is not broken. What happens after the click is.
At small budgets, your ads worked. Leads came in. Cost was reasonable. Then you increased spend and watched efficiency collapse. The instinct is to blame the channel, test new audiences, or hire a better agency. But the pattern keeps repeating. The issue is rarely the ad. It is usually what happens in the seconds after someone clicks. If you are scaling spend into a leaking surface, you are paying to amplify the leak.
The Reframe
Paid channels do not break. What breaks is everything after the click. If you are scaling spend into a page that does not convert, you are paying more to leak faster. The problem is not the ad. The problem is the surface the ad points to.
What This Is Really About
Why ads work small and break large
At low spend, you are reaching the most intent-rich slice. These are the people closest to buying. Scale brings colder traffic into unchanged pages. The page that converted warm leads fails with lukewarm ones.
The post-click problem
The ad gets the click. The page loses the person. This is not an ad problem. The targeting was right. The creative worked. What failed was the handoff. The page did not continue the conversation the ad started.
What “better targeting” cannot fix
If the landing surface is leaking, precision targeting just delivers better people to the same broken experience. You are not solving the problem. You are moving it.
Why testing can't fix a structural leak
Testing variations of a broken page produces variations of bad results. You can test headlines, images, and button colors forever. None of it matters if the fundamental match between ad promise and page delivery is off.
What a diagnosis shows
Where post-click leakage is happening and what would need to change before spend makes sense again. The gap between what the ad promised and what the page delivered. The friction points you cannot see in dashboards.
Where This Applies
This diagnosis helps when you're spending on paid and watching efficiency collapse as budgets increase.
Next Step
If your cost per lead keeps climbing despite better targeting, the leak is downstream.
We will trace what happens after the click — where attention drops, where the promise breaks, and why spend is not compounding.