TLDR;
- Stop thinking about location. Your best customers aren't defined by their postcode; they're defined by their problems. Effective Google Ads campaigns target intent, not geography.
- Your keyword strategy is everything. Focus on keywords that signal a user is actively looking for a solution you provide, not just researching a topic. This is your primary filter for quality.
- Performance Max (PMax) is your best friend for broad targeting. Instead of telling Google *who* to find based on demographics, you feed it signals about your best customers and let its machine learning find more people just like them, wherever they are.
- Your offer is more important than your targeting. A weak, high-friction offer like "Request a Demo" will fail no matter how perfectly you target your ads. You must provide instant, undeniable value.
- This guide includes a flowchart for choosing keywords, a visual guide to campaign structure, and an interactive calculator to figure out exactly how much you can afford to pay for a customer.
I see this all the time. Founders and marketers get obsessed with pinning their customers to a map. They think success on Google Ads means drawing the perfect little circle around a city and hoping for the best. But when your business isn't tied to a physical location, that thinking will send you broke, fast. You're right to be concerned about wasting money, but the solution isn't to find a better map—it's to throw the map away entirely.
The truth is, location is one of the weakest signals you can use. A person's physical coordinates tell you almost nothing about the urgent, expensive problems they're facing right now. The real money in paid advertising is made by targeting the problem itself. When you shift your focus from "where" to "why," you unlock a far more profitable way to use platforms like Google. This isn't about finding people in a place; it's about finding people in a specific *state of need*, regardless of their location. And when you get that right, you can scale almost infinitely.
So, if not location, what do I target?
You target a nightmare. Forget the demographic profiles you've been told to create. "SMEs in the tech sector with 50-100 employees" is a useless abstraction. It leads to generic, forgettable ads that speak to absolutely no one. You have to get much, much deeper than that.
Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a persona; it's a specific, career-threatening problem. Your client isn't just a "Head of Sales." He's a leader who just lost his top two performers to a competitor and is terrified his pipeline will collapse next quarter. Your customer isn't a "Marketing Manager." She's someone who just had her budget cut by 30% and is desperately looking for a way to prove ROI before her job is on the line. These are nightmares. They are specific, emotional, and urgent.
Before you spend a single pound on Google Ads, you must define this nightmare with absolute clarity. What is the precise pain that keeps your ideal customer awake at night? What are the real-world consequences if they fail to solve it? Once you know that, your entire ad strategy becomes clear. You're no longer shouting into the void; you're whispering the exact solution into the ear of someone who desperately needs to hear it. This is the foundation of any successful campaign, and it's something many agencies completly miss. If you're struggling with this, our guide on solving targeting nightmares can help you define that core problem.
How do I find these people on Google Search?
Google Search is the ultimate intent machine. Unlike social media where you're interrupting someone's day, on Search you're answering a direct question from someone who is actively looking for help. When you're not targeting by location, your keyword strategy becomes your single most important tool for filtering out the wrong people.
You need to focus exclusively on keywords that signal commercial or transactional intent. You're looking for people who are problem-aware and solution-aware, not just topic-aware. This means avoiding broad, informational queries and focusing on phrases that show someone is ready to take action.
Here’s how to think about it:
- Informational (Avoid): "what is cloud cost management" - This person is a student or a junior employee doing research. They are not a buyer. Wasted click.
- Navigational (Maybe): "aws cost explorer" - This person knows a specific tool. They might be a potential customer, but they could also just be looking to log in. Risky.
- Commercial/Transactional (Target): "software to reduce aws bill", "aws cost optimisation tools", "best finops platform" - This person has a specific, expensive problem and is actively searching for a product to solve it. This is your target. They are pre-qualified by the very words they type.
Your goal is to build tight, thematic ad groups around these high-intent keywords. This discipline pays off. For one of our B2B software clients, we generated over 5,000 trials at just $7 each on Meta. For another, a medical recruitment platform using Google Ads, this laser-focus on intent helped bring their cost per user down from £100 to just £7. The volume might be lower, but every single click is from someone already in the buying cycle. When you don't have location as a crutch, you have to be this precise. In fact, a good approach is to target the user's problem instead of their location, which is a much stronger signal of intent.
What about ad copy that actually works?
Once you've got the right person's attention with your keyword, your ad has one job: prove you understand their nightmare better than anyone else. This is where most B2B ads fail spectacularly. They talk about features, technology, and themselves. Nobody cares.
Your ad needs to speak directly to the pain. Use the Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) framework.
Problem: State the nightmare directly. "Another month, another surprise AWS bill?"
Agitate: Twist the knife. Remind them of the consequences. "Your CFO is asking questions, and your engineers have no answers. It feels like burning money."
Solve: Introduce your solution as the clear, obvious path to relief. "Get a clear view of your cloud spend in 10 minutes. Find and eliminate waste automatically. Start your free trial."
See the difference? You're not selling a "FinOps platform." You're selling an end to painful meetings with the finance department. You're selling confidence and control. For one of our software clients, we generated over 5,000 trial signups because our ads tapped directly into a universal frustration for their audience instead of just listing features. That's the secret. You have to enter the conversation already happening in your customer's head.
Should I use Performance Max if I have no location?
Absolutely. Performance Max (PMax) was practically built for this exact scenario. It's designed to work best with broad targeting, using machine learning to find your ideal customers across all of Google's properties (Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, etc.). But it's not magic. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the quality of the signals you give it.
Think of it like a highly skilled apprentice. If you give it vague instructions, you'll get poor results. If you give it a detailed blueprint of your best customer, it will go out and find thousands more just like them. Your job is to provide the best possible blueprint.
Here are the most powerful signals you can provide, in order of importance:
- Customer Lists: Upload a list of your existing customers (or even better, your *highest value* customers). This is the gold standard. You're literally telling Google, "This is exactly what a good customer looks like. Go find more."
- Website Visitors (Remarketing): Create audiences of people who have visited specific pages on your site, like your pricing page or a key feature page. These are warm leads who have already shown interest.
- Custom Segments (based on Search Activity): This is incredibly powerful. You can create an audience of people who have recently searched for your high-intent keywords on Google. You're essentially taking your Search campaign's targeting and applying it across the entire Google network.
- Custom Segments (based on Websites Visited): Create an audience of people who have visited the websites of your direct competitors, or industry publications and blogs that your ICP reads.
Notice that we're not using standard "in-market" or "affinity" audiences. They are often too broad and generic. The power of PMax is in feeding it highly specific, custom signals that are unique to your business. When you give it this high-quality data, it can effectively find your customers anywhere in the world. Getting this right is a core part of structuring Google Ads for a broad audience.
How do I know if it's working (and what to pay)?
This is the most important question, and the answer has nothing to do with your cost-per-click or click-through-rate. Those are vanity metrics. The only question that matters is: "How much can I afford to spend to acquire a customer?" To answer that, you need to know your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).
Most businesses have no idea what a customer is actually worth to them, so they try to get the cheapest leads possible. This is a fatal mistake. It leads to optimising for low-quality traffic that never converts into paying customers. The goal isn't to get a low Cost Per Lead (CPL); it's to have a profitable LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. A healthy SaaS or service business aims for a ratio of at least 3:1 (the LTV should be at least three times the CAC).
Let's do the maths.
Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average a customer pays you per month? Let's say £300.
Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? Let's say 75%.
Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers cancel each month? Let's say 5%.
The formula is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate
LTV = (£300 * 0.75) / 0.05 = £225 / 0.05 = £4,500
In this scenerio, each customer is worth £4,500 in gross margin to your business. With a 3:1 LTV:CAC ratio, you can afford to spend up to £1,500 to acquire a single customer. If your sales team converts 1 in 10 qualified leads, you can afford to pay £150 per lead. Suddenly, that £50 click from a high-intent keyword doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain. This is the maths that separates businesses that scale from those that stagnate. If you want to dive deeper into this, we have a complete guide to help you stop wasting money on Google Ads.
So, what's the plan?
Forgetting about location targeting can feel daunting, but it forces a level of discipline that often leads to far better results. It makes you focus on what truly matters: understanding your customer's deepest problems and proving you can solve them. A lot of agencies get this wrong, focusing on clicks and impressions instead of actual business impact. If you recall, I mentioned a SaaS client in the medical recruitment space earlier. They came to us with a £100 Cost Per Acquisition because they were targeting broadly by location. We scrapped that, focused entirely on targeting user intent with high-intent keywords and custom audiences, and brought their CPA down to just £7. That's the power of targeting intent over geography.
I've put together my main recommendations for you in a table below. This is the exact process we'd follow. It's not about finding a magic button in Google Ads; it's about a strategic, disciplined approach that works wether you're targeting one city or the entire world.
| Action Item | Why It Matters | First Step |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Define Your ICP's Nightmare | All effective targeting and messaging starts here. Without a deep understanding of the user's pain, your ads will be generic and ineffective. | Interview 5 of your best customers. Ask them what specific problem they had before they found you and what would have happened if they hadn't solved it. |
| 2. Build High-Intent Keyword Lists | This is your primary filter. It ensures you only pay for clicks from people who are actively looking for a solution, not just browsing. | Use Google's Keyword Planner to find keywords with words like "software," "tool," "alternative," "pricing," "service," and "agency." Create tightly themed ad groups. |
| 3. Launch a PMax Campaign with Strong Signals | This allows you to scale beyond Search by letting Google's AI find new customers, but only if you guide it with high-quality data. | Create a Custom Segment audience based on your top 10-15 high-intent search keywords. Use this as your primary audience signal in a new PMax campaign. |
| 4. Calculate Your LTV and Affordable CAC | This shifts your focus from chasing cheap clicks to acquiring valuable customers profitably. It's the key to making intelligent budget decisions. | Use the calculator in this article. Gather your ARPA, Gross Margin, and Churn Rate from your financial/CRM data and determine your maximum allowable CAC. |
| 5. Optimise Your Offer | Even the best ads will fail if the landing page offer is weak. Reduce friction and provide immediate value to maximise conversions. | If you have a "Request a Demo" button, try replacing it with a "Start Free Trial" or a valuable, free asset (like an audit or a checklist). Measure the impact on lead quality and volume. |
Executing this strategy correctly takes expertise and constant attention. It involves deep research, careful campaign construction, and relentless optimisation based on performance data, not guesswork. While you can certainly implement these principles yourself, the learning curve can be steep and costly. Misinterpreting the data or setting up campaigns incorrectly can quickly lead to the wasted ad spend you're trying to avoid.
If you're serious about growing your business without being limited by geography and want to ensure your advertising budget is invested as effectively as possible from day one, it might be worth getting an expert opinion. We offer a completely free, no-obligation strategy session where we can look at your specific situation and provide a tailored plan. It’s a chance to get a second pair of expert eyes on your strategy before you commit significant spend.
