Your $100M Company Has Trash Landing Pages and You Don't Even Know It
Your $100M Company Has Trash Landing Pages and You Don't Even Know It
Let me tell you about the company making $100 million in annual revenue that was sending paid traffic to landing pages that didn't work on mobile.
Not "didn't work well." Didn't work at all.
I sat down with Borja Cuan—26 years in performance marketing, co-founder of a performance agency—and he shared a truth that's going to make some of you very uncomfortable:
Your marketing fundamentals are probably trash. And you're wondering why your customer acquisition costs keep rising while your conversion rates keep falling.
Borja's entire career has been built on a simple principle: Make relationships less about assumption and more about evidence.
Not gut feelings. Not "best practices" from 2015. Not what your CMO thinks will work.
Evidence. Data. Actual results.
And the evidence says most of you are burning money on vanity metrics while your competitors are optimizing for actual revenue.
You Can't Manage What You Can't Measure (But You're Trying Anyway)
Here's what's happening at most companies:
You're running ads. Traffic is coming to your site. Some people are converting. You're celebrating the "engagement" and "reach" numbers in your dashboard.
And you have no idea which channels are actually driving revenue.
Borja works exclusively with direct response advertisers—companies focused on actual business outcomes:
More revenue
More sales
More qualified leads
Not:
How many people viewed the ad
How many people clicked
How many "impressions" you got
Those are vanity metrics. And vanity doesn't pay the bills.
His approach starts with the least sexy topic in marketing: Tracking infrastructure.
Not creative. Not messaging. Not the latest TikTok trend.
Tracking.
Because as Borja put it: "In business, you can't manage what you can't measure."
And most of you are trying to manage marketing campaigns with tracking that's held together with duct tape and hope.
The Red Flag Every Agency Should Trigger (But Most Don't)
Borja dropped this line that should make you audit your current agency relationship immediately:
"Anytime you're working with an agency, if they skip the tracking conversation, I would consider that to be a red flag."
Think about your last agency onboarding. Did they:
A) Spend significant time understanding your tracking infrastructure, defining your KPIs, and ensuring you can measure what actually matters?
B) Jump straight into campaign ideas, creative concepts, and "growth strategies" without ever discussing how you'll measure success?
If you answered B, you're working with an agency that's optimizing for their billable hours, not your results.
The foundation for any marketing effort is tracking. It's the concrete and rebar (yes, Borja used that exact metaphor) that everything else gets built on.
Without it, you're building on sand. And wondering why everything keeps falling apart.
The $100M Company That Didn't Know They Were Broken
Here's the case study that perfectly illustrates this:
Borja worked with a company doing $100 million in annual revenue.
You'd think at that scale, they'd have their shaet together, right?
Wrong.
When Borja looked at their data, it wasn't telling a story. Their landing pages weren't optimized for conversions. They weren't mobile-responsive (in an era where most traffic is mobile). And their campaigns were bringing in residential leads when they only served commercial clients.
Read that again.
A $100 million company was paying for ads that brought in the wrong type of customer.
They were literally burning money attracting people they couldn't serve, while their sales team wasted time filtering through unqualified leads.
This is what happens when you scale without fixing your fundamentals.
Here's what Borja did:
First: Built proper tracking infrastructure (before spending a dollar on ads)
Second: Optimized landing pages for conversions and mobile
Third: Defined their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) with specificity—company size, titles, actual decision-makers
Fourth: Cleaned up campaign settings to filter out residential keywords
Results within 4-5 months:
Bigger deals
Better pipeline
Higher average deal size
Qualified commercial leads instead of residential waste
This isn't rocket science. It's marketing fundamentals.
But most companies skip the fundamentals and jump straight to "innovative growth hacking strategies" that fail because the foundation is broken.
Your Leads Aren't All Equal (But You're Treating Them Like They Are)
Borja made a critical point that most marketers miss:
"Just because you drive a lead through an advertising campaign doesn't mean that lead is actually qualified."
Someone filling out your form with bogus information? That's a lead in your dashboard.
Someone who's not in your ICP but clicked your ad? That's a lead.
Someone who will never, ever buy from you? Still a lead.
And you're celebrating your "lead gen success" while your sales team is drowning in garbage.
This is what happens when you optimize for the wrong metrics.
You need to look at:
Lead quality, not just lead quantity
Conversion rate by source
Average deal size by channel
Customer acquisition cost by campaign
Lifetime value by segment
Most of you are looking at:
Total leads
Click-through rate
Cost per click
Impressions
And wondering why your marketing "isn't working."
The First Impression You're Blowing
Here's something most marketers don't connect:
Your marketing fundamentals directly impact your ability to build client relationships.
When someone clicks your ad and lands on a page that:
Doesn't load on mobile
Has confusing messaging
Isn't optimized for conversion
Doesn't speak to their specific needs
You've already damaged the relationship before it started.
They form an impression: "This company doesn't have their shaet together."
And you'll spend the rest of the sales process trying to overcome that first impression instead of building trust.
Borja nailed it: "If you start off awkward, then it makes all the other steps more and more difficult going forward."
This is why authentic client connections begin with getting the basics right.
Clear messaging. Mobile-optimized experience. Speaking directly to your ICP. Making it easy to convert.
Not rocket science. Just discipline.
The Testing That Never Ends
Here's the part that separates winners from losers:
You can't test once, find something that works, and coast.
The minute you stop testing, you start losing.
Borja emphasized this: "Even when you find an ad that performs very well, you then have to be still creating the next one. What's going to outperform that one? It's kind of this continuum. You just have to keep going."
Your competitors are testing new offers, new messaging, new creative.
The market is evolving. Customer preferences are shifting. New platforms are emerging.
If you're not constantly iterating, you're already behind.
Most companies do this:
Launch campaign
It works
"Great! We figured it out!"
Coast for 6 months
Wonder why performance is declining
Winners do this:
Launch campaign
It works
"Great! What can we test to beat this?"
Launch variation
Repeat forever
It requires discipline. Consistency. A methodology.
It's not sexy. But it's how you build sustainable business expansion instead of temporary wins.
The Relationship Between Data and Trust
Here's Borja's core insight:
"We are working with clients, and really the only way that we're able to gain trust is by showing them the data."
Not by being likable. Not by having great presentations. Not by promising amazing results.
By showing evidence.
This is relationship-driven revenue growth in its purest form:
Build the right tracking infrastructure
Target the right people with the right message
Measure what actually matters
Show clients the data
Adjust based on evidence, not assumptions
No matter how much clients like you, if you don't drive results, you lose the relationship.
And you can't prove results without proper measurement.
This is why Borja calls tracking infrastructure the foundation. Everything else—creative, messaging, targeting, optimization—is built on top of it.
Without the foundation, nothing else matters.
The Fundamentals You're Skipping
Let's be brutally honest about what you're probably doing wrong:
1. You're not tracking the right things
You're measuring clicks, impressions, and engagement instead of revenue, qualified leads, and customer acquisition cost.
2. Your landing pages suck
They're not mobile-optimized. They're not conversion-optimized. They're not speaking to your ICP. They're generic corporate marketing speak that converts nobody.
3. You're targeting too broadly
You think "more reach = more success" so you're casting a wide net and catching mostly garbage.
4. You're not testing consistently
You run one campaign, call it good, and wonder why performance degrades over time.
5. You're working with an agency that skipped the tracking conversation
And they're optimizing for metrics that make them look good, not metrics that drive your business forward.
Fix these fundamentals before you worry about the next marketing trend.
The Competition That's Eating Your Lunch
While you're celebrating your vanity metrics and coasting on last quarter's winning campaign:
Your competitors are:
Building better tracking infrastructure
Testing new creative every week
Refining their ICP targeting
Optimizing landing pages for conversion
Measuring what actually matters
They're playing chess while you're playing checkers.
And in a market where customers are bombarded with messages from every direction, the companies with the best fundamentals win.
Not the flashiest creative. Not the biggest ad budget. Not the most "innovative" approach.
The companies that get the basics right and execute consistently.
Watch the Damn Episode
This conversation with Borja went deep into performance marketing fundamentals, why tracking infrastructure is non-negotiable, and how to make marketing relationships based on evidence instead of assumptions.
If you're frustrated with rising customer acquisition costs, declining conversion rates, or marketing that "isn't working"—this episode will show you exactly where to start.
Watch the full episode here because Borja's frameworks for building business relationships through data-driven marketing are the difference between burning money and building sustainable growth.
P.S. That $100M company sending paid traffic to non-mobile-optimized landing pages?
They're not an anomaly. They're the norm.
Most companies scale by brute force—throwing more money at marketing—without ever fixing their fundamentals.
And it works. Until it doesn't.
Until customer acquisition costs get so high that the unit economics break.
Until your competitors figure out the fundamentals and start eating your market share.
Until you realize you've been building on a broken foundation the entire time.
If your agency never had the tracking conversation with you, that's your wake-up call.
P.P.S. Borja said something critical that most of you are ignoring:
"The minute you start coasting, you've already lost."
That campaign that's been running unchanged for six months? It's dying.
That landing page you built two years ago? It's outdated.
That targeting strategy that worked last quarter? Your competitors have already adapted.
Marketing isn't a "set it and forget it" operation. It's constant testing, iterating, and improving.
The companies that understand this build high-retention client relationships and relationship-driven revenue growth.
The ones that don't? They wonder why their marketing "stopped working" and blame the algorithm instead of their own lack of discipline.
Go watch the episode. Fix your fundamentals. And for god's sake, make sure you can actually measure what matters before you spend another dollar on ads.
Karl Pontau hosts The Human Connection Podcast, where we talk about the stuff that actually matters in business: the humans running it. Because whether you're B2B or B2C, it's really H2H—human to human. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode where we probably say something that'll make your HR department uncomfortable.
