# How to audit paid landing pages with an AI agent

> Tier: deep. Full contract: quantified decision rules and evidence requirements.

Which landing pages waste paid clicks: speed and status from Google Ads' own landing page view, joined to GA4 engagement and conversion by page.

**Intent.** Rank paid landing pages by the money they lose, with the cause class attached: broken, slow, or unconvincing.

## When to use

- Paid CTR healthy but conversions poor: the click survives, the page kills it.
- After site releases touching templates that paid traffic lands on.
- Quality Score complaints citing landing page experience.

## When not to use

- Single-landing-page accounts: read the funnel instead.
- As a performance profiler: this locates pages, it does not diagnose their code.

## Sources

Required: Google Ads
Optional: Google Analytics 4

## Preconditions

- Paid traffic distributed across multiple destinations.
- GA4 connected for the engagement join, ideally.

## Inputs

- `window`: Analysis window. Default: last 30 days.

## Procedure

1. Pull the landing page view: URLs, clicks, mobile speed, valid status. — tools: `google_ads_get_landing_pages`
2. Join GA4 engagement and conversions by landing page. — tools: `ga4_run_report`
3. Rank pages by paid clicks x (account median conversion rate - page conversion rate).
4. Classify each loser: technical (status, speed), engagement (instant exits), or persuasion (engaged, no conversion).

## Decision rules

- **When** A page takes meaningful paid clicks and returns errors or redirects → **conclude** Technical, severity one: every click on it is bought and lost; quote the click count.
- **When** Engagement time is near zero on a healthy-status page → **conclude** Mismatch between ad promise and page, or speed: pair the page with the ads pointing at it.
- **When** Engagement is normal but conversion trails the account median → **conclude** Persuasion class: the page argues badly; a testing candidate, not an emergency.

## Evidence requirements

- Every ranked page carries clicks, spend share, its rates and the account median as baseline.
- Technical findings quote the landing page view's own status fields.

## Human approval boundary

- Page fixes are product and CRO work; pausing ads onto a broken page is proposed as a Safe Write with the loss rate as justification.

## Failure modes

- URL parameters split one page into many rows; normalise before ranking or the top loser hides in fragments.
- GA4 landing-page attribution differs from Google Ads' final URL on redirects; state the join rate.
- A/B tests split performance across variants mid-window; note running tests before classifying persuasion losses.

## Output

- **Losers, ranked**: Page, clicks, loss estimate, cause class.
- **Emergency list**: Broken destinations still taking spend.
- **Testing candidates**: Persuasion-class pages worth a CRO cycle.

## Related

- Skill: [funnel-analysis](https://www.getmcpads.com/skills/funnel-analysis.md)
- Skill: [google-search-waste](https://www.getmcpads.com/skills/google-search-waste.md)
- Guide: [wasted-search-spend](https://www.getmcpads.com/guides/wasted-search-spend.md)