How to Use Plerdy to Find Landing Pages That Waste Ad Spend

The short answer: if one paid landing page takes budget and returns nothing, Plerdy's Traffic Value flags it as Budget Loss once it has 100 sessions: a paid channel, zero conversions and a bounce rate above 90%, per Plerdy's wasted ad spend guide; to get there, install the tracking code, set a goal or ecommerce tracking, pick a month and split by device, read the Needs attention card, work the diagnoses from Budget Loss down, watch five recordings per flagged page, add your cost per click by hand, let an assistant draft the weekly review, and compare periods after one fix.

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The ad account grades the click. The money is made or lost on the page after it, and a campaign average hides the one page that sells nothing behind the ones that work. Plerdy's guide makes that argument and builds a report around it; this walk-through follows the guide and the product pages. For plans and rivals, see the Plerdy glossary entry.

What you need first:

• A Plerdy account. Traffic Value is in every plan, including Free with one month of data; the AI connector needs a paid plan, from $21 a month billed annually (pricing page, checked on 26 October 2026).
• UTM tags on paid links. Traffic Value sorts sessions into Google Ads, Google Organic, Paid Social, Social, Email, Referral, Direct and Other from UTM tags and referrers (Traffic Value FAQ).
• Spend and cost per click from the ad platforms. The report shows what traffic brought in, not what it cost.

1. Install the tracking code

Plerdy creates one JavaScript snippet per site. Its installation guide covers FTP, the WordPress theme editor, Google Tag Manager, Cloudflare Zaraz, Shopify, Magento and Next.js, and the pricing FAQ asks for the code before the closing body tag on every page.

2. Give it a goal, or revenue

In Traffic Value settings, choose the goal: a form submission or a visit to a thank-you page such as /thank-you, and Plerdy suggests goals from your own data, per the wasted ad spend guide. For revenue, put the ecommerce script on the order success page with the order ID, the amount as a plain number and the quantity, place a test order and check that it appears under Sales Performance, as the ecommerce tracking guide describes.

3. Pick a month and split by device

The default period is the last 7 days. For ad decisions the guide suggests a month, so more pages collect enough sessions for a verdict, and a device filter, because a campaign can pay its way on desktop and lose money on phones.

4. Read the two cards

The first card names the channel that earns most per session. Needs attention names the one furthest below your site average and estimates the gap as its sessions times the difference in revenue per session (Traffic Value FAQ). For example, Paid Social with 4,000 sessions at $0.90 per session, on a site averaging $1.40, shows 4,000 x ($1.40 - $0.90) = $2,000. Without revenue, conversion rate takes its place.

5. Work the diagnoses from the top

Each row is a landing page. The guide's order: Budget Loss first, the same day; then Page Problem, a conversion rate under 0.5% with bounce up to 75%; then Complex Issue, where audience and page are both off. Traffic Problem, zero conversions with bounce between 75% and 90%, points at targeting or ad copy rather than the page. Verdicts apply from 100 sessions, and under 30 a page shows as collecting data, per the wasted ad spend guide.

6. Open the row and read the behaviour

A row expands into rage clicks, sessions without a single click, scroll depth, engaged sessions and Trust and Friction scores. Behaviour can overrule the verdict: more than 10% of sessions with rage clicks, or friction above 60 out of 100, marks the page a UX Blocker, and trust under 40 with bounce above 60% marks a Trust Issue, per the guide.

7. Watch five recordings

From the same row, open the page's heatmap or session replay. The guide's rule: five recordings of paid visitors usually show whether people leave at the first screen, a traffic or message-match problem, or try to buy and get stuck, which is a broken page no targeting change will fix.

8. Add the cost side yourself

The guide's shortcut: a landing page's return on ad spend is roughly its revenue per session divided by cost per click. For example, a sale page earning $0.84 per session on clicks costing $1.20 returns 0.84 / 1.20 = 0.7, so each dollar of spend brings back 70 cents of revenue before product costs.

9. Let an assistant draft the weekly review

In Claude, open Settings, then Connectors, choose Add custom connector, name it Plerdy, paste the server URL from Plerdy's Settings, AI Connectors page and pick No sign-in. With that form still open, click New connection in Plerdy, choose the sites it may read and an expiry of 90 days, 365 days or none, then copy the authorization header, shown once, into Claude and click Add anyway, as the connection guide shows. Then ask: "Give me a weekly money review."

The human check: the same guide notes that Plerdy sends exact numbers but the assistant writes the explanation and can draw a wrong conclusion, so every answer links back to the report. A person opens that link before any budget is cut or page rebuilt. Treat the token like a password, and revoke it in AI Connectors if it leaks.

10. Fix one thing, then compare

Change the targeting, the ad text or the page, one at a time. After two to four weeks, compare with the previous period: revenue, revenue per session, goals and conversion rate each show the change, per the guide.

Where the numbers stop

The ad platform sells the click and also sets the window that credits it: Google Ads counts a conversion for up to 30 days after the click by default, while Plerdy counts only the session it happened in, so the platform's return will usually sit above yours, and the higher figure is the one that argues for more spend. The guide lists its own limits too: no ad costs, no verdict under 30 sessions, and no revenue per session without ecommerce tracking.

Later, if you want that gap between platform credit and what the site shows measured all the time, across channels, a causal attribution tool like Causality Engine does it. Disclosure: I founded it.

FAQ

Do I need ecommerce tracking for this?

No. Without it, Traffic Value uses your goal, a form submission or thank-you page visit, and diagnoses pages by conversion rate and bounce rate; revenue, order value and revenue per session need ecommerce tracking.

Can I share the report with a client?

Yes. The Share button creates a read-only link that needs no Plerdy login, per the Traffic Value FAQ.

How many questions can the AI assistant ask a day?

It depends on the plan: 100 requests a day on Startup, 300 on Scale, 600 on Thrive and up to 5,000 on Enterprise 3, and one question often uses several requests, per the connection guide.