We Spent $10k on Ads to Learn One Lesson: Message Match Matters
We burned through budget learning a hard lesson: If your landing page doesn't repeat your ad's promise, you're lighting money on fire.
Early on, we ran a Google Ad campaign that had a 4% CTR. We were ecstatic. We were promising "Automate your B2B Sales."
But our conversion rate was abysmal. Why? Because when users clicked that ad, they landed on our homepage which said, "The Future of Marketing Data."
The disconnect was jarring. Users felt like they had been bait-and-switched. They clicked for "Sales Automation" and got "Marketing Data." They bounced in 3 seconds.
The "Ad Scent" Theory
We learned about a concept called "Ad Scent." It's the idea that a user follows a scent trail. If the scent changes—if the language, tone, or offer shifts between the ad and the page—the user gets lost.
We realized we couldn't just build one page. We needed the page to mirror the ad. If the ad said "50% Off," the H1 needed to scream "Get Your 50% Discount."
Solving it Programmatically
Instead of manually building a landing page for every ad group (which we tried, and hated), we built GetIntent to do it for us. Now, we pass the ad headline as a parameter. The landing page catches it and dynamically rewrites itself to match.
Our Quality Score went up. Our CPC went down. And most importantly, our visitors stopped bouncing because they finally found exactly what they were promised.