Your salon ads get clicks but nobody rings

A click is not a decision. It is somebody tapping to have a look, usually on a phone, usually while they are doing something else. So a month of clicks and a quiet phone is not proof that the ad is broken. Most of the time the problem is in one of the small steps between the tap and your phone ringing, and nearly all of those steps sit on your side of the line, where you can check them yourself this afternoon.

Here is the order I would check them in.

Do the ten second test on your own phone

Open the page your ad sends people to, on your own phone, on mobile data rather than the salon wifi. Hold it the way a client would, one hand, half paying attention. Then count:

• How long before anything appears. Anything that keeps you waiting is keeping her waiting too, and she has not invested anything in you yet.
• Whether you can tell what this place is and roughly where it is, without scrolling.
• Whether there is something to tap that starts a phone call, near the top, not at the bottom of a contact page.
• Whether it says what anything costs, even as a from price.
• Whether there is a way to get in touch that is not a phone call.

If any of those is a no, you have found something worth fixing, and fixing it is cheaper than buying more clicks. A page that sends her off to look you up somewhere else has already lost a good share of the people who tapped.

It is worth being honest about what you actually know at this point. The click is a counted thing. There is a number for it, which is why you noticed the problem at all. Almost nothing after the click is counted. So “nobody rings” is part fact and part gap in the record.

Most of the people who tap were never going to ring

Ringing a salon is a bigger ask than it looks. She is on a bus. She is at work with people around her. It is nine at night and you are shut. She has not decided anything yet, she is having a look, and a phone call is a conversation with a stranger about her hair and her money.

So before you decide the ads brought you nothing, go and check what else came in that week. A form. A text. A message on the salon’s Facebook page. Somebody who walked in on Saturday and said she found you on Google. If the phone is your only measure, you will under-count yourself, and you might switch off something that was quietly working.

One month on one salon’s account, as we report it: £300 spent, 38 calls and 21 enquiries, which came out at £14 an enquiry. That is one salon and one month, and I am not going to dress it up as a benchmark. The useful part is the shape. Twenty one of those fifty nine contacts never made the phone ring at all, so judged on the phone alone that month would have looked about a third smaller than it was.

What the page has to answer before she scrolls

Four questions, roughly in this order:

• Do you do my hair? Colour, curly, afro, fine, extensions, men’s. She wants to see hair like hers on the page.
• Where are you, and is it a nuisance to get to?
• Roughly what will this cost?
• When could I actually come in?

Price is the one most salons leave off, and it is the one that stops the call. She is not being tight by wanting to know. She is avoiding the moment where she is sat in the chair, gowned up, being told a number she was not expecting. A from price against your main services does more for the phone than any other line on that page.

After that: photographs of your own work rather than stock hair, and your opening hours somewhere she can see them. If the page tells her nothing about Thursday evening, she is not going to ring to find out.

Some of those clicks were never a client

Some of what you paid for was never going to book. Somebody looking for a course. Somebody after a job or an apprenticeship. Somebody wanting a free model. Somebody two towns over who is never coming. None of that shows up in the click count, because the click count is one number with all of them folded into it.

So ask whoever set the ads up to show you what people actually typed before they clicked, not just how many clicked. If nobody can show you that, you have learned something about the setup rather than about your page. When we build an account we block 536 searches of that kind before the first click: courses, jobs, apprenticeships, free models, cheap, DIY, wholesale. It does not make the rest of the clicks book, but it stops you paying for people who were never going to.

And if it turns out the clicks are not really happening either, that is a different problem with a different answer: why your salon ads are not showing at all.

What I would fix first

In order, because the order is most of the value.

1. The page. Free to look at, an evening to fix, and it is where the money is leaking.
2. A second way to be contacted. A form, a number she can text, a booking link. Anything that does not require her to speak to you today.
3. Whoever is meant to pick up. If the calls are being made and missed, your page is fine and the problem has moved: the bookings you lose when nobody can answer the phone.
4. Only then, more clicks.

That is the order we work in too. Your Google listing gets fixed before you have paid anything. The ads point at a page on our domain built to answer those four questions. The campaign is split by service, so a colour search and a fringe trim are not treated as the same job. The price is £15 to £149 a month depending on your ad spend band, there is no commission on bookings ever, fourteen days are free and it is one click to cancel.

The honest limit, said plainly: we count calls, form enquiries and booking click-outs, and we stop there. Nobody can tell you which booking came from which search, and anyone who says they can is selling you something.

Rachel Hartley at The Lockhouse put £300 a month through it. “I’d tried boosting posts and it got me students. This got me eight colour clients in the first month and I didn’t touch a thing after signing up.” One salon, one month, same as the numbers above.

If your ads are getting clicks, the expensive part is already working. Somebody in your town typed something, saw you, and picked you out of the results. What happens in the ten seconds after that is nearly always fixable, and it is usually free.