Most advertising does not fail in the ad. It fails in the four steps after it.
The ad, the page it lands on, the reply, the follow-up. Run them as four separate things and you pay for all of them and get customers from none. This page shows the whole chain working, step by step, before you speak to anybody.
- Real client, real register
- $5,393 of ads
- Turned into
- $437,890 delivered
- Over
- 2 February to 24 July 2026
Where it goes
Four places the money leaves, and none of them is the ad budget.
- 01
The ad talks about you
Family owned since 1998, great service, competitive prices. Nobody scrolling at 9pm has ever stopped for that sentence.
- 02
The click lands nowhere useful
You paid for someone to arrive on a home page that makes them hunt. Most of them do not hunt.
- 03
Nobody answers
The enquiry comes in on a Sunday. It gets seen Tuesday. By then they have rung someone else.
- 04
Nobody counts
Boosted posts, a bit of Google, the odd flyer. No one number that says what a customer costs.
Every one of these is somebody else’s job in a normal agency. That is exactly why they stay broken. Here it is one person, running the whole chain, which is the only reason the seams get looked at.
The chain
One customer, all the way through.
Her phone and your side of it, changing together. Step through it yourself, or press watch and let it run.
Bailey Advance, on the yard now. Tow it with a mid-size ute.
Campaign running
Nothing to do. It is Tuesday night.
01/08Your buyers are not shopping at 10am. They are on the couch, on a phone, after dinner.
Demonstration. Invented customer, invented business, illustrative timings.
Judgement
The same budget, spent two ways.
Creative is not decoration, it is the whole cost of the click. Here is one ad that pays for people scrolling past, and one that starts conversations.
Marlborough Caravans has been proudly family owned and operated since 1998. We pride ourselves on great service and competitive prices. Contact us today!
Tap a number to see what is wrong with it.
2019 Bailey Advance, 4 berth, on the yard now. Tows behind a mid-size ute. WOF and gas cert current. Message us and we will send you the full spec and walkaround.
- Names one unit a buyer can picture in their driveway.
- Answers the two questions that stop the sale: can I tow it, is it legal.
- Asks for a message, which is a conversation, not a click.
- Runs to people who looked at caravans, not to everyone in Marlborough.
Same budget. Same yard. The difference is that this one gives somebody a reason to stop and a job to do next.
Demonstration. Both ads were written for this page. Neither one has run.
Proof
$5,393 of ads. $437,890 of caravans out the gate.
Grovetown Caravans in Blenheim, 2 February to 24 July 2026. Ad figures from the live account, sales from the dealer’s own register. This is the only client whose numbers appear anywhere on this site.
Bar lengths are logarithmic. The real drop from half a million impressions to twenty deliveries is too steep to draw straight, and a funnel graphic that flattered it would be a picture rather than a measurement.
Every week
You get four numbers and a sentence.
Not a twelve-tab dashboard nobody opens. Four things that tell you whether this is working, and a plain sentence about what was changed and why.
- Conversations started
- People who messaged you, and what about.
- Leads captured
- Names and numbers, with which ad they came from.
- Cost per conversation
- What it cost to get one person talking.
- What changed this week
- What was turned off, what was turned up, and why.
Start here
The Acquisition Review.
Before anybody talks about running ads, Richard Smith goes through what you already have: the website, your Google listing, whatever advertising is running, and what happens to an enquiry after it arrives. You get it in writing, plus half an hour on the phone.
- Whether your site turns visitors into enquiries, or loses them
- What you are already paying for that is not working
- What happens to an enquiry that arrives at 9pm on a Sunday
- What a customer would need to cost for the numbers to work
Richard Smith, Blenheim. You deal with the person doing the work, not an account manager. 03 567 1600.