I Thought My Marketplace Had an Activation Problem — It Was Actually a Traffic Intent Problem

A small but important breakthrough with my marketplace ads.

At first I thought my problem was onboarding/activation because users were signing up but not creating listings.

But after digging deeper into the data, I realized the real issue was happening before signup.

My ads were attracting the wrong intent.

A lot of searches were things like:

• “make money online”
• “easy side hustle”
• “passive income”

But my platform isn’t about that.

It’s for people who already have:

• services to offer
• tools/equipment to rent
• local items to sell

So I restructured my campaigns around provider intent instead of general “make money” traffic.

I also changed my optimization goal toward listing creation instead of just signups.

Now I’m finally starting to see:

• better engagement quality
• stronger listing intent
• first real conversion signals

Still early, but this taught me something important:

Marketplace growth problems can look like onboarding issues when they’re actually audience-quality problems upstream.

Curious if anyone else building a marketplace has gone through this same phase.