I’ve been running ads at my own business for a few months and publishing the results as I go. Of everything I’ve learned, this is the finding I’d hand to a contractor first, because it costs an afternoon to act on and it changed more than any ad setting I touched.
The two pages, side by side
| Landing page | Homepage | |
|---|---|---|
| Visits as the entry point | 222 | 281 |
| Average time on the page | 1m 48s | 5m 11s |
| Enquiries generated | 19 | 3 |
Source: Google Analytics 4, last 90 days, sessions by landing page. The landing page is a single page built for one question; the homepage is my normal front door.
Fewer visits. Less time on the page. Six times the enquiries.
The homepage “won” a metric that means nothing
Notice that people spent nearly three times longer on my homepage. If you were judging these pages on time-on-page, the homepage looks like the far better page.
It isn’t. Long sessions on a homepage usually mean somebody is looking for something — scrolling, clicking into the nav, opening the about page, trying to work out whether you do the thing they need. Five minutes of hunting is not engagement. It’s friction, and some of those people gave up.
The landing page answered the question in under two minutes and gave them somewhere to click. That’s a page doing its job efficiently, and it reads as “worse” on the metric most dashboards put front and centre.
Judge a page on the one thing you want it to cause
For a service business, that’s a phone call, a form, or a booking. Time on page, bounce rate, and pageviews are context, not scoreboard. I’d take a fifteen-second visit that ends in a phone call over a six-minute visit that ends in nothing, every single time.
The two pages have completely different jobs
Once I looked at it this way, the result stopped being surprising.
What a homepage has to do
- Serve someone who already knows you and wants your phone number
- Serve a stranger with no idea what you do
- Cover every service you offer, not just one
- Reassure people you’re real and local
- Point at eight other pages
What an ad landing page has to do
- Match the exact promise of the ad that was just clicked
- Answer one question completely
- Give one obvious next action
- Remove every other exit
- Work in eight seconds on a phone
A homepage is a receptionist for everybody who walks in. A landing page is a salesperson who already knows why you called. When you buy a click from someone searching “furnace repair Waterford,” you know precisely what they want — and sending them to a page that also talks about your five other services and your company history is throwing that knowledge away.
What’s actually on the page that won
There is nothing clever about it. It’s a short page with six things on it:
That last one is the part people resist most, and it’s the part that matters. On a normal page, links are helpful. On a page you bought traffic for, every link that isn’t the call to action is a way to lose the visit.
You don’t need a new website to do this
The most common objection I hear is that this sounds like a redesign. It isn’t. It’s one page, and it can sit alongside whatever site you already have — even a site you don’t love and aren’t ready to replace.
If you’re running ads right now and they point at your homepage, here’s the whole project:
- Pick the one service you most want more of.
- Write a single page about only that service, using the six items above.
- Change the destination URL in your ad to that page.
- Leave everything else alone and watch what happens over a few weeks.
One afternoon. If your numbers move anything like mine did, it’s the highest-return afternoon in your marketing.
Where this fits in the bigger picture
I found this gap because I was running Google and Facebook ads at the same time and only one of them pointed at a purpose-built page. Google, with the landing page, produced enquiries at $14.61. Facebook, pointed at my homepage, produced them at $29.16 — despite clicks that cost a third as much. Some of that difference is the intent gap between search and social. A meaningful chunk of it was just the page.
The full numbers on both are in Google Ads vs Facebook Ads for a local business, and there’s a deeper breakdown of the search campaign in 90 days of Google Ads.
One more thing worth flagging: over the same period my contact page averaged about seven seconds per visit as an entry point and generated nothing. I’m still digging into whether that’s real behaviour or a tracking artefact, and I’ll write it up either way once I know. It’s a reminder that the pages you assume are working are worth actually checking.
If you want a second pair of eyes on where your own traffic is leaking, book a 30-minute call. We’ll look at your real numbers together, in plain English, and you’ll leave with a list of specific things to change whether or not you ever work with me.