Google Ads Scaling Guide: Beyond Location Targeting

So, you’ve found something that works on Google Ads. You're getting conversions at a decent ROAS, things are looking up. The obvious next step is to scale, right? You slide the budget dial up, sit back, and expect the hockey stick growth to kick in. A week later, you're staring at a dashboard drenched in red. Your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) has doubled, your ROAS has been chopped in half, and you're spending more money to get worse results. Sound familiar?

This is the most common scaling trap I see. And the problem is amplified when you don't have a specific city or region to anchor your campaigns. Without that geographic focus, the temptation is to just tell Google "find me more people, anywhere!" The algorithm happily obliges, but it does so by finding the cheapest, least-qualified impressions, and your profitability evaporates.

The truth is, scaling isn't about telling Google to spend more money. It's about creating a system that allows you to spend more money intelligently. It's about deepening your understanding of your customer so you can find more of them, not just shouting louder into the void. Forget simply increasing the budget. We need to rewire the entire way you think about growth. This is the playbook for doing just that.

Why does just cranking up the budget kill your ROAS?

Before we get into the solution, you need to properly understand the problem. Why does the simple act of increasing your daily spend cause your performance to tank? It feels counter-intuitive, but it makes perfect sense when you look at how the auction works. Think of your initial, profitable audience as a small, deep well of pure water. It's easy to get a drink, and every cup is refreshing. Your ads are showing to people with high commercial intent who are the absolute perfect fit for your offer.

When you tell Google to double your spend, it can't just pull more of these perfect customers out of thin air. That well only has so much water. So, it has to start looking elsewhere. It expands its reach to what I call 'adjacent' audiences. These are people who are a bit less likely to convert. Their search query might be a bit broader, their intent a bit weaker. To win these impressions, Google often has to bid more aggressively, pushing your average CPC up. You're now paying more, for a click that is less likely to convert. This is the start of the death spiral.

As you keep pushing the budget, the problem gets worse. Google is forced to enter auctions for even broader, lower-intent keywords. It starts showing your ads to people who are just "browsing" rather than "buying". Your click-through rate might stay okay, but your conversion rate on the back-end plummets. Now you're paying a high CPC for traffic that doesn't convert at all. Your ROAS is in freefall, and you're left wondering what went wrong. It wasn't the ads; it was the strategy.

So if not location, what do I target?

This is where the paradigm shift happens. When you can't use geography as your primary targeting lever, you must replace it with something far more powerful: your Ideal Customer Profile's (ICP) most significant pain point. Most businesses get this completely wrong. They describe their ICP with useless demographic data like "Companies in the UK with 50-200 employees" or "Women aged 25-40 who like yoga". This tells you absolutely nothing about *why* they would buy from you.

You need to stop thinking about who your customers are and start obsessing over the nightmare that keeps them awake at night. What is the urgent, expensive, and persistent problem that your product or service uniquely solves? Your ICP isn't a persona; it's a problem state. For a cybersecurity firm, the ICP isn't a "CTO at a finance company." It's the CTO who is terrified of being the subject of the next big data breach headline. For an e-commerce brand selling ergonomic office chairs, the ICP isn't a "remote worker." It's the remote worker whose crippling back pain is making it impossible to focus on their job, threatening their career progression.

When you define your customer by their pain, your entire marketing strategy becomes sharper. Your ad copy can speak directly to their frustration. Your keyword strategy can focus on terms that signal this exact problem. And your landing page can present your solution as the specific antidote to their specific nightmare. This is how you create ads that resonate so deeply people feel like you're reading their minds. This is particularly crucial when you're running ads without a location focus, because in that case you really need to target problems, not just location.

How do you translate that 'nightmare' into a Google Ads strategy?

This is where the theory becomes practical. Once you’ve defined the pain, you can build a targeting strategy around it. It's about finding the digital breadcrumbs people leave when they are trying to solve this problem for themselves.

1. Rethink Your Keyword Strategy:
Stop bidding on broad, top-of-funnel keywords. Instead, focus on long-tail keywords that scream intent. The back-pain-suffering remote worker isn't just searching for "office chair." They're searching for "best office chair for sciatica relief," "ergonomic chair for all-day sitting," or "what to do for lower back pain from desk job." These queries have lower search volume, but the person behind them is much closer to making a purchase. They are actively seeking a solution to their pain.

2. Target Competitor Keywords:
If your competitors solve the same pain point, their customers are your ideal audience. Bidding on their brand names (e.g., "Herman Miller alternative") allows you to insert your solution at the exact moment a potential customer is evaluating their options. Your ad can say something like, "Looking at [Competitor]? Get better ergonomic support for 30% less." It's a direct, high-intent strategy.

3. Build Custom Intent Audiences:
Don't just rely on Google's generic In-Market audiences. Create your own. In Google Ads, you can build a custom audience based on the specific search terms people have used, the types of websites they visit, or the apps they use. For our cybersecurity example, you could build an audience of people who have recently searched for "how to handle a ransomware attack" or who visit websites like Krebs on Security. You're not just targeting job titles; you're targeting recent, relevant behaviour that indicates they are in your 'nightmare' scenario *right now*.

4. Use Audience Layering:
Combine these elements. For example, you could target a custom intent audience (people who visit competitor websites) and layer it with a demographic (e.g., people who work in the finance industry). This hyper-specific targeting ensures your ad spend is concentrated on the absolute most relevant prospects, allowing you to bid more confidently and scale your budget without as much waste.

Here’s a quick look at how this reframing changes your keyword approach for a hypothetical project management SaaS:

The Maths That Unlocks True Scale: Understanding LTV

Here's the single most important metric you need to understand to scale profitably: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Most businesses are obsessed with getting the lowest possible Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). This is a trap. Chasing cheap leads almost always results in acquiring low-quality customers who churn quickly and aren't profitable. The real question isn't "how low can my CPA go?" but "how high a CPA can I afford to acquire a fantastic customer?"

LTV tells you exactly that. It's the total profit your business will make from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship with you. When you know this number, everything changes. Suddenly, a £250 lead that seemed outrageously expensive might actually be an incredible bargain if that customer is worth £10,000 to your business over their lifetime.

Knowing your LTV is your license to scale aggressively. It allows you to confidently enter more competitive, higher-CPC auctions because you know the backend maths works out in your favour. While your competitors are pinching pennies and fighting over cheap clicks, you can be strategically acquiring the most valuable customers in the market. This isn't just about ads; it's a fundamental business metric that should guide your entire growth strategy. Our guide on how to measure and maximize paid ads ROI goes into this in more detail.

Here's how to calculate a basic LTV:

-> Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): How much does a customer pay you per month on average?
-> Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue?
-> Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The formula is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Use the calculator below to figure out your own LTV and see what you can truly afford to spend on customer acquisition.

Structure Your Account For Growth, Not Just Clicks

You can have the best keywords and the most accurate LTV calculation in the world, but if your Google Ads account is a chaotic mess, you'll never be able to scale effectively. A common mistake is creating dozens of tiny ad groups and campaigns, each with a small budget. This fragments your data, making it impossible for Google's algorithm to learn and optimise effectively. It also makes it a nightmare for you to manage.

For scaling, simplicity is your best friend. A well-structured account allows you to control budget allocation, easily identify what's working and what isn't, and make strategic decisions based on clear data. While the perfect structure varies, a solid foundation often looks something like this:

Campaign 1: Core Performers (Search)
This is where your proven winners live. It contains ad groups built around your highest-intent, pain-point keywords that consistently deliver a strong ROAS. This campaign gets the majority of your budget because it's your most reliable source of profit.

Campaign 2: Prospecting/Testing (Search)
This is your laboratory. Here, you test new keyword themes, competitor targets, and different ad copy angles. The budget is smaller, and the goal isn't immediate profitability—it's data collection. When you find a new winning ad group here, you graduate it to your 'Core Performers' campaign.

Campaign 3: Performance Max (PMax)
PMax can be a powerful scaling tool, but you have to use it correctly. Instead of letting it run wild, you feed it with strong audience signals based on your ICP research (your custom intent audiences, customer lists, etc.). This guides the algorithm and prevents it from wasting your budget on irrelevant audiences.

Campaign 4: Retargeting (Display/YouTube/Search)
Not everyone converts on the first click. This campaign targets people who have visited your website but haven't yet purchased or signed up. You can show them different ads, perhaps highlighting testimonials or offering a small discount to bring them back. This is often your highest ROAS campaign.

This structure gives you a clear framework for growth. You have a stable engine for profit, a dedicated space for experimentation, a powerful tool for automated expansion, and a net to catch interested prospects. This is the foundation of structuring paid ad accounts for scale.

Your Last Unfair Advantage: Creative That Actually Converts

In 2024, you can't out-bid or out-optimise your way to success forever. Algorithms are getting smarter, and everyone has access to the same targeting tools. The last true competitive advantage you have is your creative—your ad copy, your landing page, and your offer. This is where most businesses fail spectacularly when trying to scale.

They use the same generic, feature-focused ad copy for every audience. "Our software has AI-powered analytics." So what? Who cares? Your ad needs to stop describing what your product *is* and start describing the transformation it *provides*. It has to connect directly with the 'nightmare scenario' we talked about earlier.

For the cybersecurity firm, instead of "Advanced Threat Detection," your headline should be: "Could Your Business Survive a Ransomware Attack Tomorrow?" For the ergonomic chair company, instead of "Adjustable Lumbar Support," your headline should be: "Stop Letting Back Pain Kill Your Productivity." See the difference? One is a feature. The other is a solution to a painful, urgent problem.

Relentless testing is the name of the game here. You should constantly be testing new headlines, new descriptions, and new calls to action. A small uplift in Click-Through Rate (CTR) from better ad copy, combined with a small uplift in Conversion Rate from a more persuasive landing page, can have a massive impact on your overall ROAS. Often, this is what unlocks the next level of scale, not a clever new targeting strategy. The impact of creative testing on performance is almost always underestimated. I remember one SaaS client where we managed to reduce their CPA from £100 down to just £7, and a huge part of that was just nailing the messaging for their audience.

What To Do When ROAS Dips Anyway: Your Troubleshooting Checklist

Even with the best strategy, you will hit plateaus and experience performance dips. The goal isn't to avoid them, but to have a clear process for diagnosing and fixing them quickly. When your ROAS starts to drop during a scaling effort, don't panic. Work through this checklist methodically:

1. Check the Search Terms Report:
This is your number one tool. Are you suddenly showing up for irrelevant search queries? As you increase budget, Google's broad match can get a little too creative. Agressively add negative keywords to cut out the waste. I once audited an account spending thousands on the keyword "apple" because they sold tech accessories, but they were getting clicks from people looking for fruit.

2. Analyse Auction Insights:
Have new, aggressive competitors entered the auction? Is an existing competitor suddenly bidding much higher? This can drive up your CPCs and lower your impression share, even if you haven't changed anything. You may need to adjust your bidding strategy or find less competitive keyword spaces.

3. Review Impression Share Lost (Budget & Rank):
Are you hitting your daily budget cap early in the day? This is a sign you have room to scale further, but you might need to do it in your best-performing campaigns first. If you're losing impression share due to rank, it means your Quality Score or bid is too low for your main keywords. This often points back to a need for better ad copy and landing page relevance.

4. Dig into Your On-Site Analytics:
Is the problem even with your ads? Check your landing page conversion rate. Has it dropped recently? Maybe a recent website update broke a form or slowed down your page load speed. Traffic that doesn't convert is wasted money, and sometimes the fix is on your website, not in your ads account. If you find yourself in this situation, it might be worth going through a detailed guide to troubleshooting Google Ads performance.

5. Look at Time Lag & Attribution:
Especially for B2B or high-ticket items, people don't convert instantly. Look at your time lag report. Does it take days or weeks for a user to convert after their first click? Your ROAS for a given week might look poor in isolation, but it could improve significantly as those early clicks turn into sales later on. Make sure your attribution model (e.g., Data-Driven vs. Last Click) reflects this reality.

Putting It All Together

Scaling Google Ads without a location focus is definately a challenge, but it's far from impossible. It forces you to be a better marketer. It demands that you move beyond lazy geographic targeting and build a system based on a deep, fundamental understanding of your customer's problems.

I remember one software client we worked with. They had a great product but were struggling to find a profitable way to scale their Google Ads spend across the country. Their initial efforts were getting some traction, but the cost per user was too high to justify a larger budget. We applied this exact playbook: we defined their customer's core problem, built campaigns around high-intent keywords, and optimised the messaging to speak directly to that pain. This strategic shift allowed us to acquire over 3,500 new users at an incredibly efficient cost of just £0.96 each. By focusing on quality and relevance instead of just raw budget increases, we created a profitable acquisition model that was built for scale from the ground up.

This approach works. It takes discipline and a willingness to do the hard strategic work upfront, but it's the only sustainable path to growth. You have to build a machine, not just pull a lever.

This is the main advice I have for you:

As you can see, scaling profitably is a multi-faceted challenge. It's part science, part art, and requires constant attention. It involves deep strategic thinking, rigorous data analysis, and creative execution. Doing this effectively while also running your business is incredibly difficult, which is why many founders and marketing teams seek expert help.

Getting a second set of experienced eyes on your campaigns can uncover opportunities you've missed and identify costly mistakes before they drain your budget. If you'd like to have a no-obligation chat about your specific situation, we offer a free 20-minute strategy session where we can audit your account and provide some actionable recommendations. It's a chance to see how we think and whether we might be able to help you acheive your growth goals.