Marketers keep funding the parts of paid media that are easiest to see: audience targeting, ad creative, and AI tools. New research says the biggest ROI lever sits one click later, on the landing page, and most budgets barely touch it.
The industry is optimizing the wrong half of the funnel
A survey of 304 U.S. paid media professionals, conducted by Unbounce with Ascend2 in May 2026, found that landing pages were the strongest predictor of paid media ROI among everything tested. Marketers who said they were most confident in their landing pages were 4.5 times more likely to exceed their ROI targets than those who were less confident. Only 46% of respondents said their paid media ROI is currently above target.
That gap between what drives ROI and what gets funded is the real story. It is not that marketers do not know landing pages matter. Forty percent said optimizing destination pages is one of the most effective ways to maximize paid media spend. But only 31% had actually invested in landing pages in the prior six months. Budget went instead to audience research (40%), AI tools (39%), and ad creative (38%), the categories that are easier to brief, easier to demo, and easier to justify in a budget meeting.
Where the traffic actually lands
The survey also exposed a basic mechanical problem: more than half of respondents send paid traffic to general website pages instead of campaign-specific landing pages. Twenty-eight percent primarily direct clicks to existing product or category pages, and 25% send visitors to the homepage. Only 24% primarily use a dedicated landing page built for the individual campaign.
The performance gap tracks that split closely. Nearly two-thirds of marketers who mainly send paid traffic to their homepage said they are not exceeding their ROI goals, a direct consequence of asking a page built for browsing to do the job of a page built for converting one specific audience against one specific offer.
AI spend is following the same pattern
Eighty-six percent of marketers reported using AI somewhere in their paid media operation, and 74% said it improved ROI. But that adoption clusters in reporting, audience targeting, and ad copy. Just 19% used AI for landing page creation or optimization, even though the survey found marketers who beat their ROI goals were roughly twice as likely to apply AI to that specific layer. The tool budgets are following the same visibility bias as the human budgets: AI gets pointed at the parts of the campaign that are already getting attention, not the part that the data says matters most.
The pattern is not unique to paid media. A separate WFA and Ebiquity analysis found that more measurement data has not translated into better decisions for most brand owners, because the volume of dashboards and reports has outpaced the organizational ability to act on them. The Unbounce findings suggest the same disconnect one level down: marketers can see the ROI data pointing at the landing page, and still choose not to reallocate toward it.
The obvious caveat
Unbounce sells landing page software, so a finding that says “invest more in landing pages” is also a finding that flatters the vendor funding the survey. That is worth naming plainly rather than ignoring. But the mechanism underneath the finding does not depend on which vendor published it: a landing page built for one audience and one offer will convert better than a homepage built to serve every visitor at once, regardless of which tool built it. The self-reported nature of the data (marketers rating their own ROI performance and their own confidence in their pages) is also a real limit. It measures perception and behavior, not an independently audited ROI figure. Treat the specific multipliers as directional, and the underlying budget-allocation pattern, that visible spend crowds out high-leverage spend, as the more durable takeaway.
What this means for the marketing leader
The 90% of survey respondents reporting budget or resource constraints is the real reason this gap persists. Under constraint, teams default to spending on the categories that are visible to leadership and easy to report on, not necessarily the ones the underlying data says will move ROI. A landing page rebuild does not generate a demo for the next town hall the way a new AI feature does, even when it is the higher-leverage investment.
The survey’s clearest signal for budget planning is not “spend more on landing pages” as an isolated line item. It is that marketers who exceeded their ROI targets invested more evenly across audience research, AI, attribution, testing, and landing pages, rather than concentrating resources in the two or three areas that get the most internal visibility. Pre-campaign measurement is moving the same direction: platforms like xpln.ai now let teams score attention before a campaign goes live, which only pays off if the destination the ad points to is built to convert what that attention buys.
What to do
Three checks follow directly from the data. First, audit where paid traffic actually lands: if more than half of spend routes to a homepage or generic category page, that is the single highest-leverage fix available, ahead of any new targeting or creative investment. Second, treat the landing page as a budget line with the same standing as creative and targeting, not a design afterthought funded from whatever is left. Third, if AI tools are already approved for reporting or copy, extend that same tooling to landing page variant generation and testing, since that is the layer where the survey found the biggest gap between adoption and impact.
None of this requires new headcount or a new platform purchase. It requires reallocating budget that is already being spent, toward the step in the funnel the data says is actually deciding whether the rest of the spend pays off.
Source: Unbounce
