UK Ad Strategy: A Founder's Guide to Channel Choice

You're thinking about expanding into the UK. You've got a product, a bit of budget, and a question that feels massive: "Which ad channel should I use?" You're probably looking for a neat little table that says "eCommerce use Meta, B2B use LinkedIn". But if you start there, you've already lost. You're about to burn cash chasing vanity metrics on the wrong platform, talking to people who will never buy from you.

The problem isn't a lack of data on channel allocation. The problem is you're asking the wrong question. Before you spend a single pound on a Google click or a Facebook impression, you need to get uncomfortably specific about who you're selling to and, more importantly, what deep, expensive, urgent problem you solve for them. This isn't about marketing fluff; it's about building your entire paid acquisition strategy on a foundation of reality, not assumptions. Get this right, and the channel choice becomes blindingly obvious. Get it wrong, and you're just shouting into the void with a credit card.

So, what's this 'customer nightmare' you keep talking about?

Forget the ICP document your last marketing person put together. "UK-based companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" is utterly useless. It tells you nothing about motivation, pain, or urgency. It leads to ads that sound like they were written by a robot, for a robot. Your ads end up being generic wallpaper that gets scrolled past without a second thought.

To stop wasting money, you have to define your customer by their nightmare. Not a mild inconvenience, but a genuine, career-impacting problem. A problem that keeps them awake at night. A problem they would gladly pay to make go away.

Let's make this real. Your Head of Sales client isn't just a job title. She's a leader staring at a sales dashboard that's flatlined for the second quarter in a row, terrified her best reps are about to get poached by a competitor because their pipeline is dry. Her nightmare isn't 'needing more leads'. It's the fear of telling her CEO she's missed her target again.

For a compliance SaaS targeting London's FinTech scene, the nightmare isn't 'inefficient document management'. It's a compliance officer terrified of a single missed filing, leading to a massive fine from the FCA and irreparable reputational damage. Your ICP isn't a person; it is a very specific, very expensive, and very urgent problem state.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can find them. Where do they go to talk about this pain? They're probably not searching on Google for "generic solution". But they might be listening to podcasts like 'The Diary of a CEO' on their commute from Surrey into Canary Wharf. They're probably reading newsletters like 'Stratechery' or specific industry publications. Are they in private Slack communities for UK sales leaders? Do they follow people like Steven Bartlett on LinkedIn? This is the intelligence that underpins a succesful ad strategy. You don't just target 'job titles'; you target their information diet. Do this work first, or you have no business spending money on ads.

Okay, but what's the real cost of getting a customer in the UK?

Most founders are obsessed with the wrong metric. They ask, "What's a cheap Cost Per Lead (CPL)?" This leads to a race to the bottom, generating loads of low-quality leads that waste your sales team's time and never convert. The real question you should be asking is, "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a fantastic customer?"

The answer is unlocked by understanding its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the total profit you'll make from an average customer over the entire time they stay with you. Once you know this number, everything else falls into place. Let's do the maths.

You need three bits of information:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you charge a customer, per month?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after costs of goods sold?
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

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

Let's say you're a UK SaaS business. Your ARPA is £400/month, your gross margin is 75%, and you lose 5% of your customers each month (your churn rate).

LTV = (£400 * 0.75) / 0.05

LTV = £300 / 0.05 = £6,000

So, each customer you sign is worth £6,000 in gross margin to your business. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is at least 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £2,000 to acquire a single customer. If your sales process converts 1 in every 10 qualified leads, you can now afford to pay up to £200 per qualified lead. Suddenly that £150 CPL from LinkedIn doesn't seem so scary, does it? It looks like a profitable investment.

This is the fundamental maths that seperates businesses that scale from those that stagnate. Use the calculator below to figure out your own numbers.

Right, now can we talk about channels?

Yes. Now that you know who you're talking to, what their nightmare is, and how much you can afford to pay to solve it, the channel choice becomes a tactical decision, not a wild guess. Each platform is a different type of tool, suited for a different job. You wouldn't use a hammer to saw a piece of wood.

When to use Google Ads: The Hand-Raiser

Use Google Ads when your customer knows they have a problem and are actively searching for a solution. This is the lowest hanging fruit. They are typing their pain directly into the search bar. Your job is to show up with the most relevant answer. In the UK, competition can be fierce, especially for commercial terms in finance, law, and software, so you can't afford to be sloppy.

• The Nightmare It Solves: Capturing existing demand. You're not creating desire; you're fulfilling it.
• Who it's for: B2B services (e.g., 'emergency commercial electrician london'), high-consideration B2C (e.g., 'best financial advisor for inheritance tax'), niche SaaS (e.g., 'brexit compliance software'), and most local service businesses.
• The Catch: You pay for every click, and if your keywords are too broad, you'll burn money on irrelevant traffic. You're also limited by search volume. If no one is searching for what you do, Google Ads is useless. It can get expensive quickly, but it's often the fastest path to revenue. You need to understand the difference between someone seeking information and someone ready to buy. For an in-depth comparison of platforms, we have a complete UK founder's guide comparing Google and Meta Ads.

When to use Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram): The Demand Creator

Use Meta Ads when your customer doesn't know your solution exists, or isn't actively looking for it right now. You are interrupting their social scrolling with a message so relevant to their unspoken problems that they have to stop and pay attention. This is about creating demand, not just capturing it.

• The Nightmare It Solves: Reaching people based on who they are and what they're interested in, not just what they're searching for. It's for building an audience and nurturing them over time.
• Who it's for: eCommerce brands (especially visual products), B2C services with broad appeal (e.g., meal delivery, online courses), software with a strong visual element, and B2B companies targeting personas that are hard to define by job title alone (e.g., 'small business owners'). One of our most successful campaigns was for a home cleaning company, achieving a £5 cost per lead, which is almost unheard of.
• The Catch: You are an interruption. Your creative and your offer must be incredibly strong to cut through the noise. Setting your objective to "Brand Awareness" is a trap; you're essentially paying Meta to find people who will never buy from you. You must optimise for conversions (leads, sales) from day one. To learn more, check out our guide on choosing the right ad platform for your UK business which dives deeper into the data.

When to use LinkedIn Ads: The B2B Sniper Rifle

Use LinkedIn Ads when you need to reach a specific person, with a specific job title, at a specific company, in a specific industry. It's the most powerful B2B targeting platform on the planet, but it comes at a premium. This is not the place for bargain hunting.

• The Nightmare It Solves: Getting your message in front of high-value decision-makers that are almost impossible to reach anywhere else.
• Who it's for: High-ticket B2B services, enterprise SaaS, professional services firms, and anyone selling to a clearly defined corporate hierarchy. Think selling data enrichment tools to the Head of Sales at UK-based Series B tech companies. We've seen CPLs for B2B decision-makers drop to around $22, which is fantastic for high-value deals. If you're a B2B founder in London, this platform is almost certainly on your radar, and our London B2B expansion playbook is essential reading.
• The Catch: It's expensive. Clicks can cost £5-£15 or more. The audience is there for work, not to be sold to, so your ad copy needs to be value-driven and professional. A "Request a Demo" call-to-action is often a death sentence. You need to offer genuine value upfront, like a whitepaper, a free tool, or an insightful webinar. The potential ROI is huge, but the barrier to entry is high.

So what's a 'good' performance in the UK, really?

This is where the "it depends" answer is actually true. A 'good' cost per acquisition (CPA) for a £20 t-shirt is very different from a good CPA for a £20,000 software contract. But based on our experience running campaigns for dozens of UK companies, we can give you some realistic benchmarks. These aren't promises; they're starting points. Your milage will absolutly vary.

We've seen campaigns for consumer services get leads for as low as £5-£10, while more competitive B2B software trials on Meta can be around the $7 mark (£5-6). On LinkedIn, you should brace yourself for leads costing anywhere from £40 to £200+, but the deal size should more than justify it. For eCommerce, a good Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is anything above 400% (or 4x), meaning for every £1 you spend on ads, you get £4 back in revenue. We've had clients hit 600-1000% ROAS, but that often requires a mature brand and a highly optimised funnel.

The chart below gives you a rough idea of what to expect for Cost Per Lead (CPL) across different platforms and business types in the UK market. Remember, these are averages—the top 10% of advertisers will do much better, and the bottom 50% will do much worse.

What if I'm launching a completely new product here?

Launching a new product in the UK market is a different beast. You don't have existing brand recognition or customer data to lean on. This is where many businesses make costly errors, trying to go for the hard sell from day one. You need to earn the right to ask for the sale.

Your first job is to validate demand. Before you even have a finished product, you should have a simple landing page. Show off the features, use persuasive copy to get people excited about the 'nightmare' you're solving. Then, your call to action isn't "Buy Now." It's "Join the Waitlist."

Collect emails. Offer an early-bird discount or some exclusive bonus for the first 100 people who sign up. This does two things: it builds an audience of interested prospects you can market to for free when you launch, and it proves people actually want what you're building. If you can't get people to give you their email address for free, you're going to have a very hard time getting them to give you their credit card details.

Once you have this waitlist, you can start promoting it. Not with a huge budget, but with small, targeted tests. Post in relevant UK-based Facebook groups or subreddits. Reach out to niche UK bloggers or influencers. Run a small Meta ads campaign targeting a very specific interest group. The goal isn't to get thousands of signups; it's to get your first 100-200 and gather feedback. Your launch should feel less like a big bang and more like a controlled fire. For a more detailed walkthrough, you should read our guide on how to avoid costly ad mistakes during a UK product launch.

I've got something working. How do I scale it without it all falling apart?

This is a very common scenario. You've found a winning combination of audience and creative, your ROAS is looking good, and you think, "Great, let's just double the budget!" And then your CPA skyrockets and your ROAS plummets. It's a frustrating, and entirely normal, plateau.

You can't just throw more money at the same audience and expect linear growth. You've likely saturated the small pool of people who were most likely to convert. To scale profitably, you need a more strategic approach. There are really three levers you can pull:

1. Improve Your Funnel: Before you spend more on ads, can you get more from the traffic you already have? A 1% increase in your landing page conversion rate can have a massive impact. Can you increase your Average Order Value? Can you improve your LTV by reducing churn? Every improvement here makes your existing ad spend more efficient and allows you to bid more competitively for new customers.

2. Improve Your Ads: This means relentless testing. You need to be constantly trying new audiences, new creatives, and new messaging. If you've only been using image ads, try video. User-generated content (UGC) style videos often perform incredibly well for our SaaS and eCommerce clients. Build lookalike audiences from your best customers. Expand your retargeting pools. This isn't about finding one 'perfect' ad; it's about building a system of continuous experimentation.

3. Expand to Other Platforms: If you've truly maxed out your best-performing audiences on Meta, it might be time to introduce a second channel. Use the traffic from Meta to build retargeting audiences on Google Search for your brand terms. Or, if you're in B2B, take your learnings from Google and apply them to a targeted campaign on LinkedIn. The key is to expand methodically, not to spread yourself too thin from the start.

Scaling isn't just about spending more; it's about getting smarter. It's an ongoing process of optimisation. To help you track your profitability as you scale, here is a simple ROAS calculator.

Just give me a plan. What should I do?

Alright, no more theory. Here is a simple, actionable framework. This isn't a one-size-fits-all solution, but it's a battle-tested starting point that will put you ahead of 90% of your competitors who are just boosting posts and hoping for the best. We use a version of this for our own clients when we start working with them.

The advice is broken down into four key stages. Find where you are, and focus only on the actions in that column. Trying to do everything at once is a recipe for disaster.

As you can see, this is a process. It takes discipline. But by following this structure, you move from gambling to a calculated strategy. You're no longer just 'doing ads'; you're building a predictable customer acquisition machine.

Navigating the nuances of the UK advertising landscape can be challenging, especially when you're trying to expand your business. The platforms are complex, the competition is smart, and mistakes can be expensive. Getting it right requires deep expertise, constant testing, and a strategic understanding of what actually drives growth, not just clicks.

If you're looking to build a predictable growth engine and want to ensure your ad spend is working as hard as possible, it might be time to bring in an expert. We offer a free, no-obligation strategy consultation where we can review your current efforts and provide actionable advice on how to improve your performance in the UK market. It's a chance to get a second opinion from specialists who live and breathe this stuff every single day.