<b>Case #010: The leak on step three</b>

<b>Case #010: The leak on step three</b>

Full-funnel post-mortem on a lead-gen insurance offer that should have printed money and instead drained $1,900 over five days at a 22% loss.

The top of the funnel was beautiful. Cheap clicks, a strong hook, 6.1% landing-page click-through. The advertiser's payout was generous at $14 per completed application. On paper, unmissable.

We mapped the funnel step by step:
— Ad to landing page: 6.1% CTR, healthy
— Landing page to form-start: 41%, strong
— Form-start to step 2: 78%, fine
— Step 2 to step 3: 12%

There it was. A cliff. Eighty-eight percent of people who reached step three vanished. We'd been optimizing the ad while the campaign was dying three screens deep, somewhere we never looked.

Step three asked for a Social Security number before showing any value. People who'd happily given a name and email hit a request for their most sensitive data with no reassurance, and they left.

We couldn't edit the advertiser's form. But we could pre-frame it. We added one line to our landing page: an explanation of why the application asks for sensitive details and that no data is shared without consent. That single sentence raised step-2-to-step-3 completion from 12% to 34%.

— Pre-fix: $1,900 spent, $1,480 back, -22% ROI
— Post-fix: $2,600 spent, $4,100 back, +58% ROI

The lesson: a profitable ad on a leaking funnel still loses money — map every step and find the cliff, because the leak is almost never where you're looking.