Google Ads: Target Problems, Not Just Location

I see this question all the time. Everyone's obsessed with finding keywords for a specific city or country, because that’s what most of the guides out there teach you. But what if your business sells to everyone, everywhere? What if you're a SaaS founder, an e-commerce store owner, or a course creator? Suddenly, all that advice about "plumber near me" becomes completely useless.

The truth is, fixating on location is a mistake. It’s a lazy proxy for relevance. The secret to finding genuinely profitable keywords without a geographic anchor isn’t to find a new proxy, it's to go directly to the source: your customer's most urgent, expensive, career-threatening problem. Once you understand their pain, you'll find a goldmine of keywords that your competitors, still stuck thinking about demographics, have completely overlooked.

So, you think you need a location to find good keywords?

Let's get one thing straight. The whole "keywords + location" formula is a relic. It was built for businesses with a physical footprint – the local electrician, the neighbourhood cafe. For them, location is everything. For a B2B software company, an online retailer, or a digital service provider, it’s a distraction. You're not selling a product in London; you're selling a solution to a problem that a person in London happens to have. The problem is the target, not the city.

Relying on geo-targeting when you don't need to is like fishing with a tiny net in a vast ocean. You might catch something, but you're ignoring the huge schools of fish just a bit further out. When you drop the location qualifier, you force yourself to get much, much sharper on what truly matters: user intent. Are they just browsing? Are they comparing solutions? Or are they in pain and ready to buy, right now? That's what determines a keyword's value, not whether the user is in Manchester or Mumbai.

We see this all the time with new clients. They come to us with campaigns targeting "SaaS UK" or "e-commerce software USA" and wonder why their costs are through the roof and conversion rates are in the gutter. It’s because the targeting is hopelessly broad. The keyword tells you nothing about the user's actual need. We often have to completely rebuild their strategy from the ground up, and the first thing we do is make them forget about the map. Instead, we help them focus on targeting the specific problems their customers are desperate to solve.

What if your customer isn't a person, but a problem?

This is the most important shift in mindset you need to make. Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire put together. "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" tells you nothing of value. It leads to generic ads that speak to no one and resonate with even fewer. To stop burning cash on Google Ads, you must define your customer by their pain.

You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare.

Let's make this real:

• For a B2B SaaS product: Your Head of Engineering client isn't just a job title. She's a leader terrified of her best developers quitting out of frustration with a broken workflow. Her nightmare is losing talent to a competitor with better tools. She isn't searching for "project management software"; she's searching for "how to stop developers wasting time in meetings" or "best way to manage agile sprints for remote teams".
• For a high-ticket e-commerce product: You sell specialist outdoor equipment. Your customer isn't "male, 30-50, interested in hiking". He's an adventurer planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Patagonia, and he's terrified his cheap tent will collapse in a storm miles from safety. His nightmare is equipment failure. He's searching for "most durable 4-season tent" or "lightweight tent for high winds".
• For a high-touch service business: You're a fractional CFO. Your client isn't a "founder with £1M ARR". He's a founder who lies awake at 3 am staring at the ceiling, petrified he'll miss payroll next month. His nightmare is cash flow uncertainty. He's searching for "how to forecast cash flow for a startup" or "when should I hire a CFO".

Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. Once you've isolated that nightmare, the rest of your strategy falls into place. You can find the niche podcasts they listen to, the industry newsletters they actually open, and the SaaS tools they already pay for. This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. You have to do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

How do you turn a customer's nightmare into a keyword list?

Right, so you've defined the nightmare. Now, how do you translate that into a list of keywords that people actually type into Google? You need to think in layers of intent. People don't just wake up and decide to buy your specific product. They go on a journey, from vaguely knowing they have a problem to actively seeking out your solution. Your job is to meet them at every step.

This is how we structure campaigns for our clients, from B2B software to e-commerce stores, and it consistently works because it mirrors human psychology.

Layer 1: Problem-Aware Keywords (Top of Funnel)

These are people who are feeling the pain but don't know a solution like yours even exists. They're using question-based or symptom-based language. Their searches are broad and informational, but they are the seed corn of your future customer base.

• How to find them: Think about the symptoms of the nightmare. What questions keep your ideal customer up at night? Go to places like Quora, Reddit, and industry forums. Look at the titles of the threads. That's the exact language people are using.
• Keyword examples (for a FinOps SaaS): "why is my aws bill so high", "how to reduce cloud spending", "aws cost spikes unexpectedly", "cloud waste management".
• The Strategy: Don't try to sell to them directly. You'll scare them off. The goal here is to be helpful. Target these keywords with ad groups that point to high-value content: a detailed blog post, a free guide, a webinar. You're building trust and educating them that a solution is possible. The goal is an email signup, not a credit card.

Layer 2: Solution-Aware Keywords (Middle of Funnel)

Your prospect now understands their problem and knows that categories of solutions exist. They aren't looking for your brand specifically, but they are actively shopping for a *type* of product or service. This is where the real commercial intent starts to kick in.

• How to find them: Think about generic product categories and use cases. What would you call your solution if you removed your brand name?
• Keyword examples (for a FinOps SaaS): "cloud cost management software", "finops platform", "aws cost optimization tools", "software for managing cloud budgets".
• The Strategy: Now you can be more direct. The landing page should be focused on your product's features and benefits, directly comparing them to the generic solution they're looking for. Case studies, feature comparison pages, and free trial offers work brilliantly here. They know they need a tool; your job is to convince them your tool is the right one.

Layer 3: Product-Aware & Competitor Keywords (Bottom of Funnel)

This is the goldmine. These people are at the very bottom of the funnel. They know the main players in your space, and they are making a final decision. Bidding on your competitors' brand names is one of the single most effective strategies in Google Ads, and it's amazing how many businesses are too scared to do it.

I remember one B2B SaaS client in the recruitment space. They had a great product for matching medical professionals with hospitals but were getting crushed by a huge, well-funded competitor. Their CPA was over £100 and they were burning through cash. The first thing we did was build a campaign exclusively targeting keywords like "[Competitor Name] alternative", "[Competitor Name] pricing", and "reviews of [Competitor Name]". We pointed this traffic to a landing page that directly compared their features and highlighted their superior customer support. Within two months, we had their blended CPA down to just £7. It completely transformed their business because we were intercepting buyers at the exact moment of decision.

• How to find them: This is the easy part. List your top 3-5 direct competitors. Then use modifiers like "vs", "alternative", "review", "pricing", "competitor". Don't forget to bid on your own brand name too, to defend against others doing the same to you!
• Keyword examples (for a FinOps SaaS): "cloudability vs cloudhealth", "harness alternative", "cloudcheckr pricing", "apptio cloudability reviews".
• The Strategy: Be aggressive. Your ad copy should call out the competitor by name and present a clear reason to switch. "Tired of [Competitor]'s high prices? See a better alternative." The landing page needs to be a direct comparison page. Make it easy for them to see why you're the better choice. Offer a free trial or a demo specifically tailored to users switching from that competitor. This is where you should be spending most of your effort and a significant chunk of your budget, as outlined in our guide on how to avoid wasting money on the wrong keywords.

Your keyword is great, but does your ad speak their language?

Finding the right keyword is just step one. If your ad copy is generic, you've wasted your time and money. The ad needs to act as a perfect mirror, reflecting the exact pain or question that drove the search in the first place. You have to join the conversation already happening in their head.

For this, we use a couple of tried-and-tested copywriting frameworks that are brutally effective for paid ads.

For Service Businesses or High-Touch Sales: Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS)

You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep. PAS is perfect for this because it hooks them with the pain they're already feeling.

• Problem: State the nightmare directly. "Cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?"
• Agitate: Pour salt on the wound. Make the problem feel more urgent. "One bad month away from a payroll crisis?"
• Solve: Introduce your service as the clear way out. "Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire."

Keyword Targeted: "startup cash flow forecast"
Ad Headline: Inaccurate Cash Flow? Stop Guessing.
Description: Projections a shot in the dark? Worried about making payroll? Get an expert fractional CFO to build a predictable financial model. Sleep better at night.

For B2B SaaS Products: Before-After-Bridge (BAB)

You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of relief after seeing a cloud bill that makes sense. BAB is brilliant for painting a picture of transformation.

• Before: Describe their current, painful world. "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why."
• After: Paint a picture of the ideal future. "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling, seeing where every dollar is going."
• Bridge: Position your product as the vehicle to get them there. "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there."

Keyword Targeted: "aws cost optimization tool"
Ad Headline: Finally Understand Your AWS Bill.
Description: Another surprise AWS bill? See exactly where your money is going and eliminate waste automatically. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today.

Notice how specific these are? They connect directly to the intent behind the keyword. Someone searching for a cost tool is feeling the pain of a high bill. The ad acknowledges that pain and immediately offers a path to relief. That's how you get the click from the right person.

Why is your "Request a Demo" button killing your conversion rates?

Now we arrive at the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising, and it happens after you've already paid for the click. The offer. You can have the perfect keyword and the most compelling ad copy, but if your landing page asks for too much, too soon, you'll lose them.

The "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do than book a 30-minute meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor begging for their time. It's a conversion killer.

Your offer’s only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. For B2B SaaS in particular, as we've seen in our guide to Google Ads for B2B SaaS, the offer is everything.

If you're a SaaS founder, this is your unfair advantage. The gold standard is a free trial (with no credit card required) or a freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation. I've worked on so many software campaigns, driving thousands of trials, from a campaign generating 5082 software trials at $7 each to another getting 1535 trials for a B2B SaaS product. The pattern is always the same: when the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You aren't generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a sales team to chase; you are creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced.

If you're not a SaaS company, you are not exempt from this rule. You must bottle your expertise into a tool or asset that provides instant value. For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated SEO audit. For a data analytics platform, a 'Data Health Check' that flags issues in their database. For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it’s a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns for free. You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve their bigger problems for a fee.

How much should you actually pay for a click?

This is the question that trips everyone up. They get obsessed with lowering their Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Lead (CPL). But the real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" It's "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer to that lies in a simple but powerful piece of maths: Lifetime Value (LTV).

Most founders just guess at their ad budget. The smart ones calculate exactly what a customer is worth, and then work backwards to figure out what they can afford to spend to get one. Let's do the maths.

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month? Let's say it's £500.
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? Let's say it's 80%.
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? Let's say it's 4%.

Now, the calculation:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04

LTV = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000

In this example, each customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This number changes everything. A healthy SaaS business aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single £10,000 customer.

Suddenly, that "expensive" competitor keyword with a £20 CPC doesn't seem so bad, does it? If it takes 10 clicks to get one qualified trial, and 1 in 10 trials converts to a customer, your CAC is £2,000 (£20 * 10 * 10). That's well within your £3,333 budget. That "expensive" keyword is actually incredibly profitable. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of cheap, low-quality clicks.

Use the calculator below to plug in your own numbers and see what you can truly afford to spend.

So, what does a winning campaign structure actually look like?

Theory is nice, but how do you put all this together in your Google Ads account? You want to structure your campaigns to mirror the intent funnel we just discussed. This keeps things organised, gives you clear control over your budget, and makes it easy to see what's working.

Here’s a simplified but powerful structure we use as a starting point for many of our non-geo clients:

You allocate your budget based on performance. The Bottom of Funnel (BOF) campaigns will almost always have the highest ROAS, so they should get the lion's share of the budget. The Top of Funnel (TOF) campaign is more of a long-term investment in building your audience. By separating them out, you can make clear, data-driven decisions instead of having everything jumbled together in one messy campaign.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in. Moving from simple geo-targeting to a sophisticated, intent-based strategy is a big step. But it’s the only way to build a scalable, predictable customer acquisition engine on Google Ads when you're selling a digital product. It's less about finding a magic list of keywords and more about a fundamental shift in how you view your customer.

Executing this strategy correctly requires expertise and constant attention. You're not just setting and forgetting; you're actively managing a complex system, shifting budget, testing copy, and optimising landing pages. It's a significant amount of work, and it's easy to make costly mistakes.

If you've read this far and feel a bit overwhelmed, or if you simply want an expert pair of eyes to review your current strategy and see where the biggest opportunities lie, that's what we're here for. We offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can dive into your ad account and provide actionable advice based on our experience scaling businesses just like yours.

Hope that helps!