Your Ads Are Running, But Where Is the Money Going?

You launch a campaign, the clicks roll in, and then... nothing. Conversions stall, cost-per-acquisition skyrockets, and you are left wondering what went wrong. The answer is almost always the same: your funnel is leaking.

A marketing funnel leak is any breakdown between the moment a visitor clicks your ad and the moment they complete your desired action. It could be a broken form, a slow-loading page, an expired SSL certificate, or a tracking pixel that stopped firing. Whatever the cause, the result is the same — you are paying for traffic that never converts.

Sign 1: Sudden Drop in Conversion Rate

If your conversion rate drops by more than 20% overnight with no change to your ads or targeting, something in your funnel broke. The most common culprits are form validation errors, payment gateway timeouts, and redirect loops. These issues can appear without any code changes on your end — a third-party script update or a CDN outage can trigger them silently.

What to check

  • Test every form submission on your landing page manually
  • Check your checkout flow from start to finish in an incognito window
  • Review your server logs for 4xx and 5xx errors in the last 24 hours

Sign 2: High Click-Through Rate but Low Landing Page Views

When your ad platform reports strong click-through rates but Google Analytics shows far fewer pageviews, visitors are dropping off before your page even loads. This gap usually points to slow page speed, DNS resolution failures, or SSL certificate problems. We cover this in more detail in our guide on how broken landing pages silently drain your ad budget.

Pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load lose 53% of mobile visitors. If your landing page is image-heavy or relies on unoptimized JavaScript, you could be hemorrhaging paid traffic before prospects even see your offer.

Sign 3: Tracking Pixels Are Not Firing

If your Meta Pixel, Google Tag, or conversion tracking stops sending data, you lose the ability to optimize your campaigns. Worse, your ad platforms cannot build accurate lookalike audiences, so future campaign performance degrades over time. If you suspect this is happening, read our deep dive on why your Meta Pixel stops firing and how to fix it.

Pixel failures happen more often than most marketers realize. Browser updates, cookie policy changes, and tag manager misconfigurations can all break tracking without any visible error on the page.

Sign 4: Forms That Silently Fail

A form that looks fine but does not actually submit data is one of the most expensive funnel leaks. The visitor fills in their information, clicks submit, and sees what appears to be a confirmation — but the data never reaches your CRM or email platform.

This happens when backend APIs change, when CORS policies block form submissions, or when JavaScript errors prevent the form handler from executing. Without active monitoring, these silent failures can persist for days or weeks.

Sign 5: Broken Redirect Chains

Marketing funnels often involve multiple redirects — from ad to landing page, from landing page to checkout, from checkout to thank-you page. Each redirect is a potential point of failure. Redirect chains that are too long (more than 2 hops) slow down page loads and confuse tracking pixels.

Circular redirects are even worse. They create an infinite loop that completely blocks visitors from reaching your page, burning your ad spend with zero chance of conversion.

Sign 6: SSL Certificate Expiration

An expired SSL certificate turns your landing page into a browser warning screen. Visitors see a frightening "Your connection is not private" message and immediately leave. This is an especially painful leak because it affects 100% of your traffic, not just a percentage. Learn how to prevent this in our complete guide to SSL certificate monitoring.

Sign 7: UTM Parameters Getting Stripped

UTM parameters are the backbone of campaign attribution. When redirects, URL shorteners, or misconfigured server rules strip your UTM parameters, you lose the ability to trace conversions back to specific campaigns, ad sets, and creatives.

This does not just affect reporting — it actively harms campaign optimization. Without accurate attribution data, your ad platforms cannot learn which audiences and creatives drive the best results.

How to Stop the Leaks

Manual checks do not scale. By the time you discover a broken funnel through a routine audit, the damage is already done. The only reliable solution is automated, continuous monitoring that checks every critical element of your funnel — page speed, SSL status, form functionality, tracking pixels, redirects, and more — around the clock.

That is exactly what FunnelLeaks was built to do. Our platform runs 22 automated health checks on your funnel pages every hour, detects failures within minutes, and can automatically pause your ad campaigns to stop wasting spend on broken funnels.

Run a free scan on your landing page to see if any of these 7 warning signs apply to your funnel right now.