Paid traffic is the only kind where you know the exact price of a visitor walking away. You bid, you pay for the click, and the person lands on your page with a specific expectation set by the ad. If something on that page does not match, or leaves a question hanging, they press back. The click is spent either way.
Most landing page advice focuses on headlines, buttons and form length. All worth doing. But a lot of paid visitors do not leave because the button was the wrong colour. They leave because they had one question the page did not answer, and filling in a form to ask it felt like too much commitment.
That single unanswered doubt is what a landing page chatbot is for.
The doubts that make paid visitors bounce
Paid visitors behave differently from people who found you through a recommendation. They know less about you and they have other ads a click away. Their doubts tend to be practical and immediate:
- "Is the price in the ad the real price, or is there a catch?"
- "Does this apply to my situation?" (a rental property, a small office, an older car)
- "How soon can you actually do it?"
- "Do you cover where I live?"
- "What happens after I fill this in? Will I get a sales call?"
Notice that the last one is about the form itself. Plenty of people are willing to enquire, but not until they know what they are signing up for. A page that answers that in a sentence often does more than a shorter form.
A worked example of what a bounce costs
Use your own numbers in place of these. Say a campaign sends 1,000 paid clicks a month at $3 a click, so $3,000 of spend. The landing page converts 4% of visitors into enquiries, which is 40 enquiries at $75 each.
Now suppose a well-set-up assistant answers enough doubts to turn an extra 1 visitor in every 100 into an enquiry. Conversion moves from 4% to 5%.
| Without assistant | With assistant | |
|---|---|---|
| Paid clicks | 1,000 | 1,000 |
| Ad spend | $3,000 | $3,000 |
| Enquiries | 40 | 50 |
| Cost per enquiry | $75 | $60 |
That one-point change is an illustration, not a promise. It might be larger or smaller for you, and on some pages it will be zero. The point is how little it has to move to matter when you are already paying for the traffic. The chatbot ROI calculator lets you run your own version.
Setting up an assistant for one campaign
The biggest mistake is dropping a general website assistant onto a campaign page and hoping. A visitor who clicked an ad for emergency boiler repair does not want to hear about your bathroom fitting service.
- Write down the promise in the ad: the offer, the price if shown, the area and any time claim.
- Give the assistant knowledge that covers that promise in depth. Crawl the landing page itself and add Q&A pairs for the doubts listed above.
- Add the terms that sit behind the offer. If the ad says "from $99", the assistant must know what the $99 includes and what costs more.
- Set suggested prompts that match the likely doubts, such as "What does the price include?" or "How soon can you come?"
- Switch on lead capture so the assistant can take details once it has helped.
- Decide what should happen with questions it cannot answer. Capture them rather than guessing.
- Test it with the ten questions you would ask as a sceptical buyer before any money is spent.
On SpideyChat, Starter includes three assistants and Pro includes ten, so a focused assistant for each major campaign is practical rather than messy.
What a good exchange on a landing page looks like
Short, specific and aimed at the doubt. Something like this:
Visitor: the ad says $99 boiler service, is that actually it or do you add stuff
Assistant: The $99 covers a standard annual service for one gas boiler: safety checks, cleaning and a written report. Parts, if anything needs replacing, are quoted separately before any work is done, so there are no surprise charges. Would you like me to check whether we cover your area?
Visitor: yes, postcode is in the north of town
Assistant: Could you type the first part of your postcode? I will confirm straight away, and if you like I can take your details so someone arranges a time.
It answered the catch honestly, named what costs extra and offered a next step that matched the visitor's intent. It did not ask for a phone number in the first line.
Timing the greeting so it does not get in the way
On a landing page, the headline has one job: confirm the visitor is in the right place. A greeting that pops up before they have read it competes with the most important words on the page.
A few seconds' delay is usually a safer start. If you use a proactive greeting, make it about the ad's offer rather than generic ("Questions about the $99 service? Ask here."). The post on when to nudge with proactive greetings goes through timing in more detail.
Exit-intent greetings can work on desktop, but keep them to one gentle offer of help. If you are running traffic without a dedicated page at all, see capturing leads from paid traffic without landing pages.
How to tell whether it is working
Do not measure the assistant by chats started. A chat that ends with no enquiry is not a result.
Measure enquiries per 100 paid clicks, from both forms and chat combined, over a period long enough to smooth out daily noise. Two weeks is a sensible minimum for most small campaigns. Compare with the same length of time before you added the assistant, keeping the ad, bid and page otherwise unchanged. If you change the headline in the same week, you will not know which change did what.
Also read the transcripts. They tell you which doubts your ad or page creates, and sometimes the right fix is to change the ad copy rather than the page.
Your next step
Choose the campaign that spends the most. Write down its promise and the five doubts a sceptical visitor would have, and check whether the landing page answers each one clearly. Fix the page where you can. Then add a focused assistant for the doubts that remain, test it yourself with awkward questions, and compare two weeks of enquiries per 100 clicks against the two weeks before.