Solved: Ad Account Setup in Cardiff (See Why It Fails)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts on your situation. It's a common question, but I think the focus on Cardiff specifically is probably sending you down the wrong path. Tbh, a good account structure has very little to do with the city you're targeting and everything to do with how you guide a potential customer from being a complete stranger to a paying client.

Let's unpack that a bit. You're not really looking for an "ad account structure for Cardiff," you're looking for a robust structure that works everywhere, which you can then apply to your target audience *within* Cardiff. The principles are universal. Getting this right is about understanding people and their journey, not just drawing a circle on a map. Let's get into it.

We'll need to look at your customer's nightmare, not their postcode...

This is probably the most important shift in mindset you can make, and it's the foundation for everything else we'll discuss. Most people start with demographics: "I want to target men, aged 30-50, who live in Cardiff and earn over £40k". This tells you almost nothing of value and leads to incredibly generic, ineffective advertising that gets ignored.

You need to stop defining your customer by who they are and start defining them by the problem they have. What is their specific, urgent, expensive, career-or-life-threatening nightmare? Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. Once you nail this, your targeting and your ad copy write themselves.

Let's take a practical Cardiff example. Say you're a local IT support company.

• Bad Targeting: "Business owners in Cardiff." This is useless. You'll hit florists, cafe owners, and solicitors who are perfectly happy with their current setup. You're just burning cash.
• Good Targeting: You're targeting the nightmare. The nightmare is the Office Manager at a 30-person accountancy firm in Cardiff Bay whose server just went down at 4 pm on the day payroll is due. She isn't thinking "I need IT support." She's thinking "I'm going to get fired if 30 people don't get paid tomorrow."

Your job isn't to sell "IT support." It's to sell the solution to her nightmare. Your ad shouldn't say "Cardiff IT Services." It should say "Server down on payday? We can have an engineer on-site in Cardiff in under 60 minutes. Get your payroll run tonight." See the difference? One is a commodity, the other is a rescue service.

To do this, you need to become an expert in their world. What specific software do they use that always breaks? What industry newsletters do they read (that you could advertise in)? What local business groups in Cardiff are they a member of on Facebook or LinkedIn? This deep understanding is the bedrock of any successful ad campaign, long before you even think about account structure. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

I'd say you need to structure your account around the customer journey...

Right, now that we've established *who* you're targeting, we can talk about structure. Forget campaigns named "Cardiff - Campaign 1". It's meaningless. Your account structure should be a mirror of your sales funnel. This is often called ToFu/MoFu/BoFu (Top, Middle, Bottom of Funnel).

This approach works because it allows you to speak to people differently based on how well they know you and how close they are to buying. You wouldn't use the same language with a total stranger as you would with someone who has visited your pricing page three times this week. Your ad account should reflect that reality.

• ToFu (Top of Funnel): Prospecting.
  This is your cold audience. These are people in Cardiff who fit your 'nightmare' profile but have never heard of you. The goal here isn't to make a hard sale; it's to make them aware that you exist and that you understand their problem. The key performance indicator (KPI) here might be click-through rate (CTR) or cost per landing page view, not cost per lead. You're building an audience for the next stage.


• MoFu (Middle of Funnel): Consideration.
  This is your warm audience. These are people who have engaged with you in some way. They've visited your website, watched one of your videos, or liked your Facebook page. They know who you are but aren't ready to buy yet. The goal here is to build trust and educate them further. You retarget them with case studies, testimonials, or helpful guides. Your KPI here might be cost per content download or cost per video view completion.


• BoFu (Bottom of Funnel): Conversion.
  This is your hot audience. These are people who have shown strong buying signals. They've visited your pricing page, added a product to their cart, or spent a long time on a key service page. The goal here is to close the deal. You retarget them with a direct offer, a special discount, or a final piece of social proof to get them over the line. Your KPI here is what matters most: cost per lead, cost per sale, or Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

By structuring your account this way, you create a logical flow. You spend money at the top to fill the funnel, and then you efficiently guide people through the middle and bottom stages. Every pound has a specific job to do. This is infinitely more effective than just lumping everyone in Cardiff into one campaign and hoping for the best. One of the campaigns we ran for a home cleaning company got their lead cost down to £5, purely by getting this seperation right and tailoring the message for each stage.

You probably should pick the right platform for the job...

The funnel structure is a principle, not a rigid set of rules. How you implement it will vary slightly depending on the ad platform. For a local business in Cardiff, your two main battlegrounds will likely be Google Ads and Meta Ads (Facebook/Instagram).

Implementing the Funnel on Google Ads

On Google, the funnel is defined by user intent, which we can tell from their search keywords. This is brilliant for local services because you can catch people at the exact moment they have a problem.

• ToFu: Here you might use broader keywords with a location qualifier. For example, a campaign targeting keywords like "cardiff business accounting tips" or "how to manage small business finances". You're not expecting leads here. You're driving traffic to a helpful blog post to capture them for retargeting later. The campaign goal would be 'Website Traffic'.
• MoFu: This is your remarketing campaign. You use Google Display or YouTube ads to show visual banners or short video ads to everyone who visited your blog post from the ToFu campaign. The message is about building trust: "The Cardiff Accountants Trusted by 100+ Local Businesses".
• BoFu: This is the money-maker. It's a Search campaign with a 'Leads' objective, targeting high-intent, "buy now" keywords. These are things like "accountant near me", "emergency electrician cardiff", "family lawyer in roath". These people need help now, and you're there with a direct solution. This is where you spend the majority of your effort optimising. We're running a campaign for an HVAC company currently in a competitive area, and they see costs around $60/lead from these types of keywords. It works, but you have to be precise.

Implementing the Funnel on Meta Ads (Facebook/Instagram)

On Meta, the funnel is defined by audience temperature, as people aren't actively searching. You're interrupting them, so the approach has to be different.

• ToFu: A campaign with a 'Sales' or 'Leads' objective (yes, even for cold traffic, you want to teach the algorithm what a conversion looks like from day one). Your Ad Sets will target cold audiences in Cardiff based on interests, behaviours, or lookalikes. E.g., for our accountant, we might target people in Cardiff who are 'Admins of a Facebook Business Page' AND have an interest in 'Xero' or 'QuickBooks'.
• MoFu/BoFu (often combined on Meta for smaller budgets): A separate retargeting campaign, also with a 'Sales' or 'Leads' objective. Here, your Ad Sets will target Custom Audiences. You'd have one ad set for 'All Website Visitors - Last 90 Days' and another for 'Viewed Pricing Page - Last 14 Days'. The ads for the pricing page viewers would be much more direct and might include a special offer to encourage them to take the final step.

The key takeaway is this: seperate your campaigns by their job in the funnel. A prospecting campaign has a different job to a retargeting campaign. Don't mix them. This seperation allows you to control your budget and messaging with precision.

You'll need an offer they can't ignore...

This is probably the single biggest point of failure I see in ad accounts, way more than bad structure or targeting. You can have the perfect funnel targeting the perfect audience in Cardiff, but if your offer is rubbish, nothing will happen. You're just paying to send highly qualified people to a dead end.

The "Request a Demo" or "Contact Us for a Quote" button is the most arrogant Call to Action in marketing. It presumes your prospect, a busy person, has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction and offers them zero immediate value. It instantly positions you as a commodity they need to shop around for.

Your offer's only job is to deliver an "aha!" moment of undeniable value that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. It has to solve a small, real problem for them for free, to earn you the right to solve their whole problem for a price.

Here’s how you can do that:

• For a Service Business (e.g., our Cardiff Accountant): Instead of "Contact Us", offer a "Free 5-Point Financial Health Check for Cardiff SMEs". This is a tangible, valuable asset. You're not selling a consultation; you're providing a diagnosis. The sale becomes the natural next step after you've shown them the problems you've uncovered.
• For a SaaS Product: Delete "Request a Demo". Offer a free trial with no credit card required. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation from their current painful process to your smooth, automated one. A product-qualified lead (PQL) who has already seen the value is a thousand times better than a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) who just downloaded a PDF.
• For an eCommerce Store: Don't just sell a product. Sell a solution. For example, a skincare brand doesn't just sell moisturiser. They could offer a "Free Skin Type Analysis Quiz" that recommends the perfect product for the user. It provides value first, then presents the sale.
• For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy: We offer a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free. We solve a small problem (diagnosing the issue) to show we can solve the big one (fixing it).

Your entire ad structure and all your campaigns should point towards a compelling, low-friction offer. When you get this right, your conversion rates will improve dramatically, which in turn lowers your cost per lead and makes your entire advertising effort more profitable. I remember one campaign we worked on for a client in the environmental controls industry; by overhauling their offer to provide more upfront value, we managed to reduce their cost per lead by 84%. It just goes to show that the offer is often a bigger lever than the targeting itself.

You'll need to understand the numbers to scale...

Finally, let's talk about money. Too many businesses get obsessed with lowering their Cost Per Lead (CPL). "I got a £10 lead! Amazing!" But a £10 lead that never turns into a customer is worth exactly zero. It's a waste of £10.

The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer to that lies in calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

LTV tells you the total profit you can expect to make from an average customer over the entire period they do business with you. When you know this number, you can make much smarter decisions about your ad spend. Here's a simple way to calculate it:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month/year? (e.g., £200/month)
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (e.g., 75%)
3. Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? (e.g., 5%)

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

So in our example: LTV = (£200 * 0.75) / 0.05 = £150 / 0.05 = £3,000.

This means each customer you acquire is worth £3,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. A common rule of thumb is to maintain a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £1,000 to acquire a single customer.

Now, work backwards. If your sales team closes 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £100 per qualified lead (£1,000 / 10). Suddenly, that $60 lead from Google Ads I talked about earlier doesn't look so expensive anymore, does it? It looks like a bargain.

This is the math that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to confidently invest in acquiring the right customers, knowing exactly what they are worth to your business.

So, to bring it all together, stop worrying about a "Cardiff" ad structure. It's a distraction. Focus on the fundamentals that work everywhere, and then apply them with local precision.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

Executing all of this can be complex, and there's a lot of nuance in getting the targeting, creative, and bidding strategies right for each stage of the funnel. It's not just about setting up a few campaigns; it's about building a predictable system for aquiring customers, which takes ongoing testing and optimisation. This is where professional expertise can make a huge difference, helping you avoid costly mistakes and get to profitability much faster.

If you'd like to go through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can look at your business and give you a tailored action plan. It's often the quickest way to get clarity on the next steps.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh