When social creates interest but sales don’t follow, it deserves a closer look. Finding where customers struggle gives you something to act on, and a reason to spend the next bit of budget differently.
26,598 engaged visits. 123 purchases.
You can imagine the conversation. Plenty of people arriving, considerably fewer buying, and someone asking whether the social campaign was worth the money. Fair enough. If you commissioned activity to sell city breaks, bookings are going to matter rather more than a traffic chart.
Those were the figures recorded in a travel campaign promoting Belfast and Dublin offers through Facebook and Instagram. The team looked beyond the campaign totals and found a large drop-off at checkout, which they attributed to the poor mobile experience. Some people had got as far as starting their booking. Something was getting in their way.
They retargeted mobile ad engagers, particularly people who had started checkout, with desktop ads encouraging them to complete on a computer. They also took the website issue into the business, where conversations began about the mobile experience.
It is an example of social revealing a problem beyond its own reporting. Once the team could see where customers were struggling, they could change the response.
And, you know, things go wrong in customer journeys. Offers change, systems get updated and teams work to different deadlines. The commercial value comes from noticing what is happening and doing something about it, before another campaign sends more people through the same difficulty.
Before you commission another batch of content
When results disappoint, social gives you plenty of things to adjust. You can change the creative or try a different audience. There’s a team ready to get on with it, and next week’s report will show that something has happened. Compared with getting a checkout change into the development queue, it can feel wonderfully straightforward.
Sometimes that is exactly the right response. But ease of commissioning is a dubious way to choose your next investment. You know the pressure. Someone wants an explanation, the budget is under scrutiny and the next campaign is already approaching. Nobody is particularly keen on a six-month archaeological dig through the customer journey. They want an answer now.
The sensible response is to make the investigation small enough to be useful quickly. Pick the offer that isn’t converting. Open the page it leads to. Find out what happened to the enquiries. You may discover that social needs attention. You may discover a problem you can take to a colleague.
Different dashboards, same customer
Your customer has no interest in which department owns the next step. They saw something worth investigating and would quite like the business to make that easy. Meanwhile, you may have social reporting on traffic, ecommerce reviewing purchases and customer care answering questions about an offer that changed yesterday. Everyone can be working hard and still miss what happens between their responsibilities.
That is a recognisable business problem. In EY’s 2026 research into consumer products businesses, based on a survey of more than 850 senior executives globally, only 11% of surveyed organisations said sales, marketing and ecommerce operated as a unified growth engine.
The research concerns consumer products. If you work in B2B, you may recognise your own version: marketing can explain how an enquiry arrived, but needs sales to explain what happened next. Neither report is necessarily wrong. You need to look at them together to understand the outcome. This can be delicate when you are accountable for performance but don’t own the part that needs changing. Your colleague has a workload too. Arriving with evidence of a particular difficulty gives you both something manageable to discuss.
Start with what people actually did
The travel brand team had more to investigate than disappointing sales. They could see people starting checkout and leaving. That behaviour gave them somewhere specific to look, and their investigation pointed to the mobile experience.
A click alone gives you much less. Someone might be curious, tap accidentally or discover that the offer isn’t suitable once they read the details. Even a checkout exit needs interpretation. Perhaps they were checking delivery charges or comparing prices. You cannot assume that every visitor was desperate to buy until the website thwarted them.
So follow the evidence far enough to make a judgement. For a purchase campaign, examine the steps towards buying. For B2B, read the enquiries and check whether the business could serve those people. If you set out to build familiarity, assess that objective rather than suddenly demanding immediate sales.
This also means being willing to find a social problem. The audience may be unsuitable, or the content may make a promise the business cannot fulfil. Cheap traffic won’t rescue either.
Try the journey on your own phone
There is a particular kind of faff you only discover by attempting what you have asked your customer to do. The offer is hard to find. A form field won’t behave. The page requires too much scrolling. None of it looked troublesome in the campaign prep.
Try the actual route from the post or advert. Check whether the destination continues the same promise and whether the next step is obvious. If you are promoting a product sold through retailers, check where the customer arrives and whether they can buy it. For B2B, read the follow-up alongside the content that prompted the enquiry. Does the conversation still make sense?
A good experience is evidence too. If the journey works and the enquiries are unsuitable, you can return to audience selection with a stronger reason to change it.
A gap in tracking isn’t a lost customer
There will be places where you cannot follow the person. They might return another day, purchase through a retailer or contact sales without mentioning the content they saw. Losing sight of them does not establish that they lost interest. It establishes a limit to what you can currently observe.
Keep that distinction in the discussion. You may need sharper tracking, or you may need to compare several sources of evidence. What you should avoid is confidently diagnosing abandonment from a report that simply stops at the platform boundary.
There is no need to promote every encouraging signal into ROI, either. An enquiry may indicate progress, but it isn’t a financial return. Repeat visits may warrant investigation without proving that social caused a sale. You can explain what appears promising and keep checking what follows. You don’t have to oversell the numbers.
Questions worth asking
Start with the questions that would change what you do next.
What was social actually meant to change? Agree the job before judging the result. If the brief was unclear, that is something you can improve immediately.
Did we reach people who could plausibly matter to the business? Look at the audience evidence and what followed. Size alone won’t answer this.
What suggests interest beyond a passing click? Examine behaviour relevant to the objective, without assuming you know everyone’s motivation.
Did the next step deliver on the promise? Open the destination from the actual content. Try the form or checkout on mobile, rather than relying on how it looked when the campaign was approved.
Could the customer make progress? Check product availability where relevant. For B2B, see whether follow-up addressed what prompted the enquiry.
What are colleagues seeing? Customer care may know about a recurring difficulty. Sales may be hearing an objection that the campaign never addresses. Compare those observations with the available journey data.
Who can act on what we have found? Separate a demonstrated problem from an assumption, and give the person responsible enough detail to investigate.
Are we asking for more content because another remedy would involve a harder conversation? It happens. Recognising it gives you the chance to spend the next bit of budget more productively.
Give the finding somewhere to go
The investigation needs to lead to action. Choose one problem with a meaningful commercial consequence and agree who will take it forward. That person needs the authority and time to act, as well as a detailed account of what you have observed. Otherwise, the “findings” can spend weeks circulating in email while the customer keeps encountering it.
Agree how you will check the remedy. If a mobile form is the suspected obstacle, test it and examine completion after the change. If follow-up is missing the point of an enquiry, revise it and review subsequent conversations. Keep other changes limited where practical, so you have a chance of understanding what made the difference. Set a date to return to the result; don’t let “we’ve passed it to the team” become the final entry in the story.
You can also adjust social while another part of the journey is being repaired. The travel brand account describes putting more emphasis on engagement alongside its desktop retargeting approach. That was a response to the circumstances. It could not, by itself, demonstrate that the booking difficulty had gone away. Keep the original commercial objective visible while you work around the obstacle.
Finding the problem is progress
There is something encouraging about a disappointing number becoming an answerable question. You started with “Why isn’t this working?” and now have a particular part of the experience to investigate, with someone who can do something about it.
It also makes the next conversation easier.
Nobody builds a customer journey that stays perfect while the business carries on around it. You will find gaps. Give people enough room to point them out and enough backing to fix them, and each discovery becomes something the business can learn from. The customer may never know about the conversation that made their next step easier. They will simply be able to take it.
FIND THE GAP
Where is social leaking value?
Take the Rethink diagnostic and see where the biggest problems sit across strategy, proof, discovery and how social actually works inside the business.
