Where Did My Paid Clicks Go? Five Post-Click Leaks You Can Plug with Cloudflare - HeroConf April 26

You pay for the click, but somewhere between the ad and your form, traffic quietly disappears. Slow landings on mobile, bot clicks, form spam, broken redirects, and blocked tracking scripts; these post-click leaks silently inflate your CPA and make ROAS look worse than it really is.

In this talk Baris will walk through five specific leaks he see again and again when auditing paid funnels and he’ll show how to plug each one using Cloudflare as an edge control layer without turning it into a software project.

You’ll see how to speed up landings without touching the CMS, block bots and spam leads without conversion-killing CAPTCHAs and recover lost tracking signals with first-party approaches like Google Tag Gateway and Cloudflare Zaraz.

Transcript

1. Baris Asa SyncTag Where Did My Paid Clicks Go? Five Post-Click Leaks You Can Plug with Cloudflare @BarisAsa | Speakerdeck.com/barisasa
2. You pay for the click.
3. Google takes the money.
4. The user starts their journey.
5. And then… they vanish.
7. Where Did My Paid Clicks Go?
9. Me IRL
10. GTM GA4 CAPI Server-side Tagging CoMo2 E-commerce Tracking Product Analytics
11. Let's follow a click.
12. running shoes Ad yoursite.com/running-shoes Premium Running Shoes – Free Next-Day Delivery Shop the latest collection. 30-day returns. Trusted by 50,000 runners.
13. CPC = £1.40
14. What happens when someone clicks Google records the click A GCLID generated Appended to your URL
15. yoursite.com/running-shoes?gclid=EAIaIQob...
16. The GCLID needs to reach your landing page.
17. Before anything loads… Browser DNS TLS 70–300 ms 200 ms–2 s+ Load Balancer Origin
18. Your server doesn't know this is a paid click.
19. The edge layer Browser DNS TLS Edge Node Load Balancer Origin
20. Without edge North California ~8600 km Edinburgh ~300 ms
21. Without edge With edge North California ~8600 km Edinburgh ~300 ms North California Edge node ~5ms Edinburgh
22. What the edge can do
23. What the edge can do Cache content close to the user
24. What the edge can do Cache content close to the user Block bots and bad traffic
25. What the edge can do Cache content close to the user Block bots and bad traffic Rewrite URLs and run tracking logic
26. Most of today's fixes happen at edge.
27. A typical landing page HTML CSS Fonts GTM Google Ads tag Meta Pixel Hotjar Cookie consent Images × 12 80–100 requests
31. 3 seconds White screen.
32. 3 seconds User is gone.
33. 53% of mobile users leave after 3 seconds.
34. Five leaks 1 Speed 2 Redirects 3 Bots 4 Spam 5 Tracking
35. LEAK #1 SPEED LEAK
36. Every one-second delay 7–20% fewer conversions Google / Deloitte
37. £1.40 click × 4 s load = £1.40 for a loading spinner
39. Fix it in Cloudflare Cache > Cache Rules > Content Optimisation Caching You decide what gets cached, where, and for how long.
42. Fix it in Cloudflare Early Hints Browser starts downloading before page is built = ~500 ms LCP boost Speed > Settings > Content Optimisation
44. Fix it in Cloudflare Polish Auto-converts images to WebP/AVIF. 90% compression = Faster load. Speed > Settings > Image Optimisation
45. Pro, Business and Enterprise
46. Fix it in Cloudflare Cloudflare Fonts Serves Google Fonts from your own domain. Faster load. Speed > Settings > Content Optimisation
48. 40–60% faster TTFB 50–70% less bandwidth
49. Test before you ship.
50. LEAK #2 REDIRECT LEAK
51. GCLID can be lost here http:// site.com What the visitor's browser is doing 301 → https:// site.com 301 → https:// www.site.com 301 → https:// www.site.com/new +200 ms +200 ms +200 ms = 600 ms wasted + GCLID lost HTTP HTTPS WWW SUBFOLDER
52. The redirect chain http://site.com/landing?gclid=abc123 → https://site.com/landing?gclid=abc123 → https://www.site.com/landing GCLID can disappear → https://www.site.com/new-landing
53. Your ROAS looks worse than it actually is.
54. Fix it in Cloudflare URL Rewrite No redirect. No extra round trip, and nothing gets lost on the way. Rules > + Create Rule > URL Rewrite Rule
58. 1 2 3
60. Fix it in Cloudflare Redirect Rules One clean hop. Preserve query strings = make sure the GCLID survives Rules > + Create Rule > Redirect Rules
64. 1 2 3
66. Always verify.
67. LEAK #3 FAKE CLICK LEAK
68. $63B wasted on invalid traffic 11–22% of PPC clicks are not from humans IAS / FraudBlocker
69. Google catches some. Not all.
70. You've already been optimising bids on inflated numbers for two weeks.
71. Activate it in Cloudflare Security > Settings > Bot fight mode Free
72. Super Bot Fight Mode Pro and Business Bot Management Enterprise Bot Score
73. Also: campaign-level protection ClickCease Lunio ClickGUARD Works inside Google Ads at the campaign level. Use both: edge layer + campaign-level
74. LEAK #4 SPAM LEAD LEAK
75. Your CRM, last Tuesday Sarah Johnson s.johnson@company.co.uk Valid test test asdf@asdf.com SPAM Buy SEO Links seo@spambot.ru SPAM Mark Davies m.davies@gmail.com Valid aaaaaa fake@fake.fake SPAM
76. Smart Bidding trains on your conversions.
77. The Spam Loop Spam form submissions Reported as conversions Smart Bidding optimises for more Google finds more spam
78. Clean forms are not enough.
79. You need clean success signals.
80. Fix it with Cloudflare Turnstile Free Mostly invisible Standalone Add a snippet or use a WordPress plugin Clean forms → clean signals → better bidding
81. Protect & Connect > Application security > Turnstile
82. Your CPA drops when you stop feeding the algorithm junk.
83. Alternative: Google reCAPTCHA v3
84. LEAK #5 TRACKING LEAK
85. Blocked.
86. Delayed.
87. Duplicated.
88. Your browser loads your landing page HTML CSS Fonts GTM Google Ads tag Meta Pixel Hotjar Cookie consent Images × 12 BLOCKED BLOCKED BLOCKED BLOCKED BLOCKED Ad Blocker Blocks known third parties. Your conversion tags never fire.
89. +50 tags in your GTM container. They make your page heavier +2 seconds load time = 20% fewer conversions Ad blockers & some browsers block them ~30% of users use ad blockers
90. 15-30% of your conversions are invisible.
91. Your dashboard says 4x ROAS It might be closer to 5x
92. That gap is enough to make you scale back a campaign that was actually hitting your target.
93. 1 Google Tag Gateway Setup: 5 minutes; no code changes Cost: Free on any Cloudflare plan Google tags are served from your domain Ad blockers are less likely to flag it Google measurement stack only Early testers saw an average uplift of 11% in conversion signals Five-minute win
94. GTM > Admin - Container > Google Tag Gateway
95. 2 Cloudflare Zaraz Lighter page + better tracking Server-side tag management on Cloudflare servers Small client script still in browser (not zero-JS) Heavy third-party scripts removed 50+ tools: Meta, LinkedIn, GA4, Google Ads… Free < 1M events/month, £5 per 1M after Less expensive than sGTM infrastructure
96. Protect & Connect > Delivery & performance > Web tag management > Tag setup
97. 3 Server-side Tagging (sGTM) Longer-term + full control Full GTM container on your own server All platforms: Meta CAPI, TikTok Events API… Best option for more durable 1st party cookies Lightweight client container still in browser Needs a developer + hosting More maintenance, but full control
98. Tag Gateway Zaraz sGTM Setup 5 min Hours Hours + infra Cost Free Free < 1M Paid Google ✓ ✓ ✓ Meta / LinkedIn ✗ ✓ ✓ Safari resilience ✗ ✗ ✓ Speed boost Small Big Medium Maintenance None Low Higher QUICK WIN ULTIMATE LOW BUDGET
99. Five leaks. One journey. All fixable. 1 Speed 2 Redirects 3 Bots 4 Spam 5 Tracking
100. You may not need a dev sprint.
101. You probably need an edge layer.
102. ☀ Monday morning to-do list
103. 1 PageSpeed Insights Top 5 pages. Mobile. LCP > 2.5s?
104. 2 Screaming Frog Your ad URLs. More than one hop? GCLID survives?
105. 3 Clicks vs Sessions Google Ads clicks vs GA4 sessions. 30 days. Gap > 15%?
106. 4 Form Submissions Last month. What % is junk? > 10%?
107. 5 uBlock Origin Test Install it. Open your landing page. Does the conversion tag fire?
108. 6 Error rate / landing health Check 4xx / 5xx / origin timeout rate. Have a backup URL. Know who owns cache purge / rollback
109. The infrastructure between the click and the conversion.
110. That's where the treasure is hiding.
112. Let’s connect! 󰗞 /in/barisasa baris@synctag.co.uk synctag.co.uk/heroconf
113. Thank you!