Got paid to fix a client's ads. turns out the ads werent the problem

changed a landing page and CPL dropped from €19 to €4. didnt touch the ads. this is gonna annoy some people but whatever had a client in insurance lead gen. CPL was sitting at around $25 and honestly the ads werent even that bad. like they were fine. not amazing but fine. everyone I talked to kept saying test new creatives, kill the bad ad sets, try different audiences. the usual stuff you read everywhere but idk something felt off so instead of touching the ads I just went and looked at the actual page people were landing on bro. it was a form with like 15 fields. name address phone email date of birth current provider coverage type budget range and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. it literally looked like you were applying for a mortgage. I remember sitting there thinking who the hell would fill this out from a facebook ad on their phone while watching tv so I went and checked what competitors were doing. every single one that was clearly spending hard (you know the ones, ads running for months) was using some type of quiz. not a form. a quiz. "find out if you qualify" or "see your options in 60 seconds" type thing told the client look just scrap the form and build a quiz. same questions basically but broken into steps with a progress bar. sounds like a small change right? its not. filling out a 15 field form feels like doing your taxes. clicking through a quiz feels like youre getting somewhere. completely different energy even tho you're collecting the same info CPL went from €19 to €4. I didnt change a single ad. same campaigns same audiences same budget same everything. just the page THEN we went and did the creative work. went from like 3 generic ads to 15-20 totally different angles in the CBO. fear of not having coverage, social proof, direct price comparison, storytelling. actual different approaches not just the same thing with a blue background instead of white lol that brought us from $4 to $3.50. which is great but like... lets do the math here. the landing page was a 4.7x improvement. the creative overhaul was 1.14x. I spent way more time on the creative stuff than on the landing page recommendation tbh and thats kind of my point with this post. I lurk here a lot and I see so many threads about ad copy and headlines and hook rates and yeah all of that matters. but if your page converts at like 2% because it looks like homework none of that stuff is gonna save you nobody wants to "submit an application." everybody wants to "see their results." its the same thing but one converts and the other one doesnt. idk why more people dont talk about this edit: forgot to mention we run full broad now btw. no interest targeting at all. pixel is warmed up and with andromeda the algo honestly finds better people than I ever could manually. but you need to give it creative volume to work with. 3 ads in a campaign is not enough for broad to do its thing