Is traffic really the problem?

It is 11pm. A user is in prime purchasing mode, staring at a loading page. They wait. One second. Two. Exit. They try again. This time, they reach the payment screen, but something feels off. It doesn’t look like the website they’ve been on. Not completely wrong, just different enough to make them stop and think.

And thinking is the last thing you want your customer doing at 11pm.

They run through every worst-case scenario. Better judgement kicks in. It is easier to leave than regret it later. Exit. Mental note made. Brand filed under never again.

The next day, the numbers are reviewed. The verdict is delivered without much deliberation: ‘traffic quality’. Case closed. Back to the desk. Donut.

If this were a crime scene, we’d mark this up to lazy detectives – not wrong because they investigated and found nothing wrong, but because they never considered any other suspects.

Too many marketers hand traffic over at the top of the funnel and call it done. To be fair to the traffic – it had to survive the algorithm, the auction, the creative fatigue, the iOS update, the platform’s new bidding strategy and three attribution model changes just to get to your front door.

But we drove the traffic there. What happened after that is someone else’s problem. Except the return on investment (ROI) still is a marketing key performance indicator (KPI).

That means getting comfortable being uncomfortable because the suspects in this case do not all speak marketing – and marketing does not always speak their language.

The suspects are:

• Content delivery network (CDN) latency: Says nothing. Does nothing. Just makes your customer wait long enough to question every decision that led them to your website.

• Web application firewall (WAF) and bot management: Two systems. One job between them. Blocks the bots, blocks the attacks, blocks the person in Riyadh who just wanted to check out – wrong IP, wrong browser behaviour, wrong place and wrong time.

• Rate limiting and firewall rules: Built by someone who had a very bad day and took it out on your conversion rate. VPN user? Gone. Older phone? Gone. Clicked twice by mistake? Suspicious. Legitimate customer? Also gone.

• Email validation: Flagged. Verification never sends. Customer never arrives.

• One-time password (OTP) and telecoms delivery: Had one job. The code arrives four minutes late. The session died three minutes ago. Your customer has already decided this is not worth it. The carrier has already moved on.

• Biometric and liveness detection: Blink. Turn left. Hold still. Try again. Try again in better lighting. Try again on a different device. Some customers make it through. The ones who don’t are not in any report you will ever read.

• Issuer declines: The bank said no. It didn’t say why. Your customer assumes it was you. It wasn’t. Nobody in the room knows what actually happened, and nobody is going to find out.

• Geographic payment service provider (PSP) coverage: Seamless in Dubai. Complicated in Riyadh. Broken in Egypt. This region is not one market. The payment stack that ignores that will keep proving it, quietly, every single day.

• User experience (UX) and form validation: Asks for things without explaining why. Rejects inputs without saying what is wrong. On mobile, the submit button lives behind the keyboard.

• Risk scoring and fraud rules: Running in the background. Confident in their decisions. Wrong often enough to cost you real money.

• Right-to-left (RTL) rendering and localisation: The English-language build works. The Arabic build mostly works. In a market where Arabic is not a courtesy option, but the primary language of your customer, mostly is a commercial decision you may be making without realising it.

• Session management and authentication flow: Times out. Loses progress. Sends the confirmation to spam. Asks people to start again. Most won’t. That is not a user behaviour problem.

So, with so many suspects and ROI holding you to account, how much of your budget has already been handed to a broken funnel and called a bad month? Every suspect costs you real money – all day, every day. And most of them will not show up in any neat dashboard you currently look at.

The marketers who win in these markets are not always the most creative or the best funded. They are the ones obsessed with following the bread crumbs: past the traffic, past the hand off, past the department boundary and past the point where it starts to get technically uncomfortable.

Marketers need to consider things that were never their KPIs and make them theirs. Because if you already own the ROI, it will not be rescued by a better-negotiated media deal.

Build a deeper understanding of the suspects. Become the lead detective. Break the silos. Find out what the payment acceptance rate was last Tuesday in KSA. Find out which telecoms carrier is dropping your OTPs. Do not launch until the Arabic build works properly.

Get obsessed with the parts of the journey you were never asked to own. In a market this competitive, where every click costs more and product differentiation is harder than ever, the extra revenue is not hiding in your media plan. It could be sitting in a broken OTP, a payment screen that looks wrong at 11pm and a detective who went back to their desk too soon. The funnel doesn’t end at the click; neither should your curiosity.

By Chantelle Johnson, Group Chief Marketing Officer, Equiti