Why Your Ads Aren’t Working: Ivan Janku on Funnel Fixes and Smarter Scaling

Built to Sell | Built to Buy

Most founders think they have an ads problem. More often, they have a systems problem. In this episode, Ivan Janku breaks down why businesses waste money on traffic, how weak funnels silently kill growth, and what founders must fix first if they want to scale profitably in 2026.

In a digital world full of shiny dashboards, vague strategy decks and agencies promising miracles, Ivan Janku cuts through the fog with a machete. He does not sell fantasy. He does not worship platforms. He does not hide behind vanity metrics. Instead, he talks about something many founders desperately need but rarely get: clarity.

In this episode of Built to Sell | Built to Buy, Sam Penny sits down with Ivan Janku, founder of Digital Rocket Ads, a full-stack growth agency that has helped scale more than $250 million in client revenue. Ivan started in Serbia, freelancing with a poor computer and limited local job prospects, then built an agency from scratch by solving real problems for real businesses. Over time, that solo start became a team, then a system, then a reputation.

What makes this conversation so valuable is that Ivan is not talking about growth from the cheap seats. He has spent years inside the machinery of performance marketing, seeing where businesses actually fail. Not where they think they fail. Not where agencies prefer to point. Where they really fail.

And his core message is painfully simple: if your ads are not working, your ads may not be the problem.

The leaky bucket problem: why more traffic does not fix broken systems

Ivan frequently talks about what he calls the leaky bucket problem. It is one of the most useful ideas in the episode because it captures the central mistake so many businesses make. They keep pouring more and more into the top of the funnel, more ad spend, more traffic, more content, more campaigns, while ignoring the holes lower down.

Those holes show up everywhere. A slow mobile website. Weak copy. Missing product benefits. Poorly structured pages. Broken trust signals. No email follow-up. Bad reporting. Confused messaging. Weak search functionality. A messy checkout. Every one of these problems can quietly drain profit while the founder blames Facebook, Google or the agency.

That is why Ivan insists on doing an audit first. Not ads first. Not creative first. Not another round of random split tests. An audit. He compares it to going to a doctor. You would not expect a doctor to throw medication at you without diagnosing the issue. Yet many businesses hire marketers exactly that way, handing over budget before anyone has properly assessed the health of the funnel.

This is where a lot of founders get trapped. They think they are buying advertising, but what they actually need is a system. Ivan makes the distinction clearly. Many agencies sell platforms. One runs ads. Another builds websites. Another does CRO. Another handles email. The result is a patchwork quilt with too many hands on it and no one truly accountable for the outcome.

Why founders struggle to see their business through the buyer’s eyes

One of the sharpest insights in the discussion is Ivan’s observation that founders are often far too deep in their own business to see it clearly. They know the product too well. They know what they meant to say. They know how the back end works. They assume buyers will understand what is obvious to them.

Buyers do not. Buyers arrive cold, distracted, sceptical and overloaded. They are looking for clarity fast. If the page structure is confusing, if the benefits are vague, if the trust signals are thin or if important practical details are missing, they do not lean in. They drift away.

Ivan gives strong examples here. Companies selling high-ticket products like furniture or even houses still have poor search functionality, incomplete product information and weak page structure. That is not a traffic issue. That is a business issue. He even describes telling a CEO to try buying on mobile, only for the problems to immediately explode in his face. That moment says a lot. Many founders judge their digital experience from a laptop in the office, while most of their customers are discovering them on a phone.

This matters even more in 2026 because buyers are more cautious. Economic pressure changes behaviour. People compare more. They hesitate longer. They ask more questions. They check more boxes before committing. That means businesses cannot rely on old momentum, old assumptions or half-explained offers. They need sharper messaging and better buyer journeys.

The small bug that can kill growth without anyone noticing

One of the most memorable stories in the episode involves a fashion brand in Los Angeles. The company had already worked with multiple agencies and had become defensive about hearing the same diagnosis: the website was the issue. The founders rejected that explanation because nobody had proved it.

Ivan’s team did not argue. They installed heatmaps and session recordings. Then they watched what real users were doing. What they found was devastatingly simple. When shoppers added a second product to cart, the cart glitched and deleted everything. The site worked for single-product purchases, but the moment someone tried to buy more than one item, the experience broke.

That kind of problem is a perfect example of why founders must stop assuming. Internal teams often cannot see what customers see. Admin views behave differently. Staff are familiar with the environment. Repeat behaviours mask friction. But customers reveal the truth with brutal honesty. They click, stall, abandon, rage and leave.

Once the issue was identified and fixed, the business improved quickly. This is a massive lesson for any eCommerce brand. Before you blame creative, cost per click or algorithm changes, check whether the buying experience itself is sabotaging you.

What high-performing growth systems actually look like

Ivan’s philosophy is not complex, but it is rigorous. If you are running paid traffic, you need more than ads. At a minimum, you need a website that works, email sequences that support conversion, Google presence that reinforces trust, and a growing bank of testimonials and reviews that prove you do what you say you do.

In other words, growth is not a channel. It is an ecosystem.

This matters especially for business owners who care about valuation and saleability. Buyers pay for predictability. They pay for visibility. They pay for companies that convert well, retain customers, understand their numbers and are not held together with duct tape and optimism. A business with a documented growth engine is a far more valuable business than one riding on heroic effort and guesswork.

Ivan’s approach reflects that. Audit first. Prioritise fixes. Optimise the website. Clarify the offer. Improve the journey. Strengthen trust. Run paid traffic into a better machine. That sequence matters. Otherwise, businesses are just pouring petrol into a lawn mower and wondering why it sounds wrong.

Meta Andromeda: faster creative testing, higher stakes

A major part of the conversation touches on Meta Andromeda, which Ivan describes as a significant shift in how modern Facebook advertising works. His framing is memorable. Older creative processes were like a musket. Andromeda is like a machine gun. The volume, speed and variation now possible are dramatically higher. Teams can launch dozens of ads inside a single ad set and even hundreds of creatives across campaigns, allowing much faster iteration and more nuanced pattern learning.

But Ivan is also realistic about what this means. It does not magically make advertising easy. In fact, the foundational requirements are becoming more demanding. Server-side tracking matters. Conversion API matters. Data flow matters. Campaign structure matters. If the technical plumbing is poor, businesses will struggle to take advantage of the new power available.

He also raises an important strategic point. Andromeda favours businesses with strong data and serious spend. Meta is industrialising the process. That may help efficient advertisers, but it may also make it harder for underprepared businesses to compete. So while many people want a shortcut, the real edge still comes from understanding how your buyer thinks, how your funnel behaves and how your creative variables interact with the system.

Attribution is still messy, so founders need better judgment

Few things cause more confusion in digital marketing than attribution. Ivan explains this well. A person might first see a Meta ad, then later Google the brand, then click an email discount link, then buy through a different path entirely. Which platform deserves the credit?

He shares an example from a supplement company where first-time buyers were offered ten percent off by email. The ads drove the initial traffic, but the eventual purchase was credited to email because the discount link broke the tracking chain. That kind of reporting distortion can make a channel look weak even when it is doing critical work. It can cause founders to cut spend too early, underestimate prospecting or make timid decisions because they do not trust the numbers.

This is why Ivan emphasises broader business metrics and cleaner system thinking. He talks about tracking MER and paying close attention to average order value and lifetime value. If AOV or LTV improves, acquisition becomes easier because the business can tolerate higher costs per customer. That is strategic thinking. It moves beyond “did this ad get cheap clicks?” and into “is the business becoming stronger?”

AI in marketing: useful tool, terrible master

Ivan’s take on AI is one of the most grounded parts of the interview. He does not dismiss it, but he does not worship it either. His view is simple: AI is a tool. A senior marketer can get excellent leverage from AI because they know what information to feed it, what constraints matter, what context is missing and how to judge the output. A junior marketer, by contrast, may simply ask for “a good ad” and get something technically tidy but commercially hollow.

That distinction matters. AI can speed up ideation, help shape rough drafts and increase output volume per person. But it still needs human judgment to produce strong work. Ivan says AI has helped him brainstorm and flesh out ideas, but not beat him outright. That feels exactly right. AI can be a useful sparring partner. It is not yet a reliable replacement for taste, empathy, strategic context or genuine buyer understanding.

Sam makes a complementary point in the interview too: branding and marketing are about creating emotion, what he calls a smile in the mind. AI can imitate the surface of good marketing. It still struggles with the pulse beneath it. That is why businesses relying blindly on AI often end up publishing content that feels smooth, safe and instantly forgettable.

Why systems beat rock stars

Another strong lesson from Ivan is his belief that systems beat rock stars. This is especially important for founders trying to scale a team or build a more valuable company. Too many businesses become dependent on one brilliant person, one top operator, one charismatic strategist or one internal wizard who seems to hold everything together.

The problem is that rock stars are often bottlenecks in disguise. They do not always document their thinking. They may guard their best methods. They can become overloaded. They create fragility. If the business depends heavily on one person’s talent, it is harder to scale, harder to train others and harder to sell.

Systems, on the other hand, create transferability. They let businesses turn good judgment into repeatable process. They allow juniors to operate with clarity. They reduce knowledge hoarding. They create consistency. And from a valuation point of view, they make the company much more attractive because the machine can continue running even if a personality exits.

For anyone building a company with exit value in mind, that is gold. Buyers want durable systems, not hero dependency.

What founders should do when they feel stuck

Towards the end of the episode, Sam asks Ivan what founders should do right now if they want to get unstuck. Ivan’s answer is not fashionable, but it is extremely smart: talk to customers.

Send surveys. Make calls after purchase. Ask what they liked. Ask what they did not like. Ask what almost stopped them. Ask what alternatives they were considering. That last question is especially valuable because it reveals how buyers frame the category, who they see as competitors and what comparison points actually matter.

It is a reminder that while platforms evolve and algorithms become more sophisticated, the fundamentals have not changed. If you understand what your customers value, what they fear, what nearly prevented the purchase and what substitutes they considered, you can sharpen your offer, improve your messaging and create much stronger campaigns.

Founders often look for the exotic answer when the practical answer is sitting right in front of them. Ask better questions. Listen harder. Then improve the system.

Final thoughts: how to scale without chaos

Ivan Janku’s message lands because it is rooted in execution rather than ideology. He is not selling founders a magical platform hack. He is pointing them back to the mechanics of profitable growth: better funnels, stronger offers, clearer reporting, better buyer journeys, disciplined testing and honest diagnosis.

That is also why this episode matters for the broader mission of Built to Sell | Built to Buy. Businesses do not become more valuable through hype. They become more valuable when they are easier to understand, easier to operate, easier to trust and easier to scale. The cleaner the systems, the better the economics. The better the economics, the better the options.

If you are spending money on marketing and not seeing the return you want, this episode is a useful slap in the face. Stop assuming the channel is the problem. Audit the funnel. Review the journey on mobile. Watch what customers actually do. Tighten the offer. Build trust. Use AI intelligently. Track the right numbers. And above all, stop treating growth like a collection of disconnected tactics.

Growth is a system. And systems, when built properly, compound.

Frequently asked questions

Why are my Facebook ads not converting?

Your Facebook ads may not be the true issue. Poor mobile performance, weak landing pages, unclear offers, missing trust signals, broken checkout flows and weak follow-up systems can all destroy conversions after the click.

What is the leaky bucket problem in marketing?

The leaky bucket problem is when a business keeps pouring traffic and ad spend into the top of the funnel while losing customers lower down because of friction, broken systems, poor websites or weak customer journeys.

What should founders track instead of vanity metrics?

Founders should look beyond clicks and surface-level ROI. Broader indicators like MER, average order value, lifetime value, conversion rate quality and overall funnel health provide a stronger picture of commercial performance.

How should AI be used in digital marketing?

AI should be used as a tool to accelerate thinking, ideation and production. It works best when guided by experienced marketers who understand the customer, the offer, the context and the emotional drivers behind buying decisions.

What is the fastest way to improve an eCommerce funnel?

Review the customer journey on mobile, install heatmaps or session recordings, identify friction points, improve trust and clarity on key pages, tighten your offer and ask recent customers what nearly stopped them from buying.