How to get more customers: find out where you lose them

Five places customers disappear

When a business that already advertises says it needs more customers, the answer is rarely “more visibility”. More often people drop off in one specific place: they don’t find you, they pick someone else in the search results, they leave the page, they wait too long for a reply, or they forget you. Each place has its own fix, and the fixes cost very different amounts. That is why it pays to find the leak before you spend more money.

1. Are you found when people look?

Start by checking that the demand exists. Keyword Planner in Google Ads is free and shows roughly how many people search for what you sell. A few examples from Norway (Google Keyword Planner, Oct 2026): “rørlegger oslo” (plumber Oslo) gets 2,400 searches a month, “rørlegger bergen” 1,300 and “rørlegger trondheim” 1,000. “Flyttevask oslo” (end-of-tenancy cleaning Oslo) gets 1,000. These are people with a need right now.

Then run the search yourself, on your phone, where you operate. If you are not on the first screen, those searches go to someone else. Organic rankings take months to build. A search campaign on “service + city”, limited to the area you actually cover, can be live in a few days. If search volume is close to zero, demand has to be created, and Facebook and Instagram are a better place to start.

2. Do they click on you?

Being there is not enough. Your ad sits next to three others and a map. What makes people pick you is seeing their service and area in the headline, a price or a starting price, and something concrete such as “available next week” or “fixed price before we start”.

The other half is avoiding the wrong clicks. The search terms report shows what people actually typed before they clicked. Read it every week and add negative keywords for anything that never turns into customers.

3. Do they get in touch?

Conversion rate is the share of clicks that become an inquiry. It is the most important number on this list, because it decides what each inquiry costs. Double the rate from 5 to 10% and you get twice as many inquiries for the same budget.

This is what it looked like on search in the accounts we run, July 1–September 30, 2026:

Two caveats. Searches for the company name are included in several of the accounts, and they convert better than other searches. And an expensive product like a sauna converts very differently from a cleaning job, so compare yourself with something similar.

Also look at mobile and desktop separately. In the end-of-tenancy cleaning account, 20.2% got in touch on desktop and 10.7% on mobile. For business leasing it was 18.8% against 7.8%. The exception was roof and facade cleaning, where 4,258 of 5,490 clicks came from mobile and mobile converted best (11.0% against 10.0%). If your mobile number is far below desktop, the form or the phone number on mobile is often the problem.

The biggest fix is sending people to a page about exactly what they searched for, not to the home page.

4. Do you reply fast enough?

This is the leak that doesn’t show in the ad account. There, the inquiry looks like a success, but whether it becomes a customer is decided by what happens in the next few hours. Many customers send the same request to several businesses and go with whoever calls first.

Test it yourself: send a request through your own form on a Tuesday afternoon and note how long it takes before someone gets in touch. Then check what happens to an inquiry that arrives on a Friday evening. The fixes are simple: one named person owns the inbox and the phone, the customer gets an automatic confirmation that the inquiry was received, and if you have several branches, the inquiry goes straight to the right one based on the postcode.

5. Do they come back?

Most people who visit your page don’t get in touch the first time. They compare, ask their partner or get interrupted. Retargeting shows ads to people who have visited, in Google and on Facebook and Instagram, while they are still deciding. These are almost always the cheapest inquiries in an account, because people already know you.

If you have past customers, they are part of this too. An email or text message when it is natural to buy again costs almost nothing.

Which hole should you fix first?

Take them in order of cost. Reply time is free to fix. A better landing page is a one-off job that makes every krone of ad spend worth more. More traffic is the only thing that costs money every month, so you do it last, once everything else holds water.

The three fastest ways to more customers this month

1. Google search for what people are already looking for. People who type “flyttevask oslo” have made up their mind. The search campaign for end-of-tenancy cleaning in Oslo had a 26.9% conversion rate and NOK 211 per inquiry (June 9–Sept 6, 2026). How to get started: advertising on Google.
2. Retargeting people who have already visited. For the end-of-tenancy cleaning client, an inquiry from retargeting cost NOK 116, against NOK 202 for the account as a whole. All it takes is working tracking and a page that has had visitors.
3. An offer on the landing page. Give people a reason to get in touch now: a fixed price, available dates, or a sale for an online store. QualiPet got 10.3x ROAS on Meta during a sales campaign (Sept 2026).

Work out what more customers cost

Work backwards from the number of customers, not forwards from a budget. You need four numbers: how many new customers you want, what share of inquiries become customers, what share of clicks become inquiries, and what a click costs. The buttons fill in conversion rate and cost per click from the search campaigns we run (July–September 2026). Only you know the share that becomes customers, so use your own number.

An example with the numbers from roof and facade cleaning: if you want 10 new customers and every third inquiry becomes a customer, you need 30 inquiries. At a 10.8% conversion rate that is around 280 clicks, and at NOK 18 per click around NOK 5,000 a month. The same sum with the moving company’s numbers (8.5% and NOK 47) comes to around NOK 16,600. The difference comes almost entirely from the cost per click and the page.

Google needs around 15–30 conversions in 30 days in a campaign for smart bidding to work well. If the sum gives you fewer than that, you can still advertise, but the campaign should be narrow and managed more closely. For what an inquiry costs across more industries, see what a lead costs in Norway.

Do it yourself or get help?

You can do everything above yourself. Checking reply time and search volume takes an afternoon. What takes time is the weekly management: reading search terms, adding negative keywords, moving budget between areas and making new ads. If you do it yourself, set aside 2–3 hours a week.

If you want help: we take a share of what we earn you, not a fixed monthly fee. If you don’t earn more, you pay us nothing. For it to work for both sides, the ads need to generate enough that our share comes to around NOK 20–30,000 a month. That is why we work with established businesses with a monthly ad budget of at least NOK 30,000. How it is calculated.

Starting from zero, with little or no advertising today? Marketing for small businesses is a better place to begin. The channels are compared in online advertising. How the form and the follow-up affect lead quality: lead generation. Service business? Channel choice industry by industry.