The challenge
Paid media can be precisely targeted and still lose performance in the few seconds after someone clicks.
That was happening at McAfee. Campaigns were reaching the right audiences, but the landing experience did not always carry through the message, offer or level of relevance that had earned the click in the first place.
The disconnect sat between two parts of the customer journey that are often managed separately. Media performance could look strong at campaign level while conversion was being lost further down the page, where the relationship between the original ad and the landing experience became much harder to see.
For McAfee, the opportunity sat in that gap. With significant media investment already generating traffic, improving the post-click journey offered a way to increase the value of existing demand before putting more budget behind acquisition.
Our solution
We treated the ad and landing page as a single conversion journey.
The experimentation programme looked closely at message alignment across individual ad variants and the pages they led to, testing whether the language, offer, product emphasis and visual cues remained consistent from click through to conversion.
That level of alignment matters in performance marketing. Someone responding to a specific product benefit or offer arrives with an expectation already established; the landing page has to continue that thought immediately.
Testing then moved further through the journey, including checkout simplification and the removal of unnecessary friction around conversion.
Page speed and relevance were improved alongside the CRO work, giving us a broader view of the factors influencing performance after the click.
The programme created a much tighter relationship between media and on-site optimisation, with campaign decisions informed by what users actually did once they arrived rather than stopping at the performance of the ad itself.
The outcome
Conversion rate increased by 11% and paid media ROAS improved by 16%, with no increase in media budget.
McAfee was generating more value from traffic it was already paying for: more visitors progressing through the journey, stronger returns from existing campaigns and a higher-performing conversion experience underneath future media investment.
The programme also gave the team a more complete view of paid media performance. Ad effectiveness and landing-page behaviour could be considered together, making it easier to identify where conversion was being gained or lost across the full journey.
Improvements to page speed, relevance and checkout created a stronger post-click environment that could support ongoing campaigns without depending on continual increases in spend.
The result was a more efficient acquisition model, with media and conversion working as one system and a larger proportion of existing demand turning into customers.
