Paid Media ROI: Marketers Underinvest in Post-Click Experience

What happened

New research has surfaced a striking contradiction at the heart of paid media strategy: marketers broadly agree on what drives return on investment, yet consistently fail to fund those very things. According to findings reported by MarTech, practitioners point to post-click experience — landing pages, site speed, personalised onward journeys — as a primary lever for improving paid media performance, but continue to direct the bulk of their budgets towards pre-click activity such as audience targeting, AI-driven bidding and creative production.

The research indicates this is not a knowledge gap. Marketers are not unaware that what happens after the click determines whether ad spend converts into revenue. Rather, the underinvestment appears to reflect structural and organisational pressures: attribution models that reward the click itself, siloed ownership between media and web or product teams, and a bias towards visible, measurable upstream activity over the harder-to-attribute work of experience optimisation downstream.

Why it matters

For customer experience professionals, this finding is both familiar and frustrating. The paid media funnel does not end at the click — it ends at the moment a customer either completes a desired action or abandons. When the post-click environment is slow, inconsistent with the ad's promise, or poorly designed for conversion, the entire upstream investment is partially wasted. This is a textbook case of what behavioural economists call the peak-end rule operating in reverse: the experience immediately after the ad sets an expectation, and a jarring landing page violates it, triggering cognitive dissonance and drop-off.

For service designers and CX leaders, the implication is strategic. If media budgets are being allocated based on what is easy to measure rather than what demonstrably works, then the conversation about ROI needs to be reframed around the full customer journey — not just the moment of acquisition. Organisations that bridge the gap between their media teams and their experience teams stand to extract significantly more value from the same ad spend.

The Renascence take

The real story here is not that marketers are irrational — it is that their incentive structures are. Attribution systems that credit the click, and organisational charts that separate media buying from journey design, make underinvestment in post-click experience the path of least resistance. Knowing the right answer and being rewarded for acting on it are two different things.

Most readers will frame this as a media efficiency problem. It is actually a governance and incentive design problem. The post-click experience is where brand promise meets operational reality — and that is precisely where CX, behavioural economics and service design have the most to contribute. A customer-obsessed operator should audit not just where budget goes, but whose performance review depends on what happens after the click. Until post-click experience has an owner with budget authority and a seat at the media planning table, the gap between knowing and doing will persist regardless of how compelling the research is.