You know those moments when you think things are ok only to realize they are definitely not ok?

I had one of those moments not long ago.

We had a digital campaign running to promote a group of programs. Nothing out of the ordinary: Meta, YouTube, OTT, email all driving traffic to a campaign landing page.

NBD.

At our monthly agency meeting, we reviewed campaign metrics: ad performance, clicks, CPC, conversions, etc.

Numbers weren’t stellar, but they weren’t bad. So we agreed on a few tweaks and I moved onto the next thing feeling like things were going well.

The next day, I pulled some stats for a different project.

Turns out things were not going well.

No RFI completions. As in zero. We had been in market for over two months and other than some vanity metrics, we had little to show for it.

I jumped into troubleshooting mode.

I checked the creative. It looked great. We worked hard on it, laboring on Every. Single. Syllable. Of our :20 Insta spot. Solid work.

Then the tech stuff. Test the forms, confirm the event trackers, cross-reference GA4 with Meta, double-checked the form database. Everything worked.

We were just sucking wind.

Next, I reviewed the landing page. Like, really looked at it. The structure. The flow. The copy. The photos. The RFI placement.

Oof.

Now be honest, repurposing old pages with some copy tweaks and a new photo is how many teams save time to keep production on schedule. I mean, you crafted all that copy previously and it converted before, so making a few tweaks should be good. Right?

We had fallen for one of the oldest fails in the book. We poured all our love into the creative and failed to shore up the last mile. The closer. The end of the yellow brick road.

Zero love = zero form fills.

Dammit.

The Five Whys

Coincidentally, I was scheduled to talk to our digital marketing program students the next day about analytics.

What were the odds?

So instead of dazzling them with the real-time analytics on the GA4 dashboard, I asked for their help and conducted a Five Whys test.

A Five Whys test is where you ask a question and follow up each response with a why to get to the root of the idea or core belief. It is extremely powerful at revealing insight.

“Go to this page and tell me what you think.”

Well?

“I dunno. It’s ok, I guess,” said Evy, a first-year digital marketing student.

Would you fill out the form?

“I don’t know. Maybe?”

Why not?

“The form button says ‘let’s talk.’ I like ‘let’s meet’ better.”

Why?

“Because I don’t like to talk on the phone and sometimes counselors write emails a certain way and I don’t want them to think I don’t care.”

Why?

“Because it’s formal and I don’t know how to write like that.”

Why does that matter?

“Because I don’t want to look like I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Why?

“Because it’s embarrassing.”

I didn’t need to ask another why.

The students had just schooled the teacher.

With all the work we did right on the campaign – the targeting, the placements, the flighting, the budget, the creative, the landing page – the answer to all the promises we made along the messaging journey… fell flat.

The success of the entire campaign may have hinged on one word: “talk.”

All because we tried to save a little time writing a proper landing page.

I assembled the team later and I created a new failsafe. Every piece of campaign content – ad, email, social post, postcard, and yes, the landing page – would have to pass the Evy Test: reassure the Reader that we’ve got her every step of the way. If she gives herself permission to be vulnerable with us, we’ll respect that and help her grow her confidence and be successful doing whatever she wants to do.

We burned the old landing page to the ground and started over. If it didn’t convey support and empowerment, it was gone. The messaging would be inspiring but not bold. Helpful but not coddling.

You’re probably saying, “duh, Jeff. That’s how you’re supposed to write landing pages.”

And you’re completely right.

The lesson wasn’t about landing pages per se. It was about not having anything in place to catch what we stopped seeing.

Tips for keeping your your work from careening into the ditch:

Name your success criteria before you launch. Not after things go sideways. Decide what a win looks like — form fills, applications, calls — and make sure everyone on the team knows it. Vanity metrics will fill the vacuum if you let them. We let them for two months.

Build in a moment that forces you to look. Not a committee. Not 25 rounds of revisions. One step where someone outside your own head checks the work against the brief before it goes live. The Evy conversation happened by accident. It shouldn’t have to.

Run a postmortem when something breaks. Five Whys, a team debrief, whatever fits your shop. The point isn’t blame. It’s finding the gap in the process so it doesn’t bite you the same way twice. Yes, we had a landing page problem. But we had a much bigger process problem.

We’re human and it’s inevitable we’ll mess up again. The goal isn’t a perfect process. It’s having something in place that catches what you stop seeing.

One first-year student, one honest answer, one word might have saved our whole campaign.

What does your Evy Test look like?

How do you protect yourself from yourself?

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