Solved: Ad Performance Drop, Bot Traffic Suspected

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on the drop in performance you're seeing. It's a common worry, and it's easy to point the finger at bots when conversions suddenly dry up despite clicks looking okay. Tbh, while bot traffic does exist, in my experience it's rarely the main culprit for a sustained drop in performance. More often than not, the issue lies in a few fundamental areas of the strategy that can be fixed.

So, instead of just blaming bots, I'm going to walk you through a different way of looking at the problem. We're going to diagnose the real reasons you're attracting 'bot-like' traffic—clicks from real people who have zero intention of ever converting—and how to fix it at the source. This is about building a system that actively repels low-quality clicks and attracts high-intent customers.

I'd say your Ideal Customer Profile is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic...

Right, let's get straight to it. The single biggest reason campaigns attract clicks that vanish into thin air is a poorly defined audience. Most businesses I talk to have an "Ideal Customer Profile" (ICP) that looks something like this: "Companies in the tech sector, 50-200 employees, UK-based, with a Head of Marketing as the decision-maker."

Frankly, that's useless. It tells you absolutely nothing about what keeps that Head of Marketing awake at night. It's a sterile, demographic-based snapshot that leads to generic, ignorable advertising. When your ad says something like "Innovative Marketing Solutions for Tech Companies," you are speaking to absolutely no one. You get clicks from curious tyre-kickers, competitors, and people who are just bored. They land on your page, realise it's not for them, and leave instantly. Their behaviour looks exactly like a bot's.

To stop burning cash, you have to redefine your ICP based on their pain. You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, and career-threatening nightmare. Your customer isn't a job title; they are a person trapped in a problem state.

Let's make this real. Imagine you sell a project management SaaS tool.

• Bad ICP: "Software development teams of 20-50 people."
• Nightmare ICP: "A Head of Engineering who just had her top three senior developers quit in a single month because they were sick of the chaotic workflow, constant context-switching, and feeling like their best work was being buried under administrative nonsense. She is now terrified of missing the next major product deadline and looking incompetent in front of the board."

See the difference? The first is a category. The second is a story. It's a visceral, emotional problem. When you understand the nightmare, you can craft a message that acts like a dog whistle. For that Head of Engineering, an ad that says "Stop losing your best engineers to workflow chaos" will cut through the noise in a way "The #1 PM tool for devs" never could. It pre-qualifies them. Only people experiencing that specific pain will click, and when they do, they arrive with purpose, not just curiosity.

This isn't just theory. When you get the targeting and messaging right for a specific pain point, the results can be dramatic. I remember one campaign for a B2B software client on Meta Ads where we achieved 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each. Focusing on a highly relevant audience with a message that resonated was key, showing that the right targeting isn't about demographics; it's about frustration.

Do this work first. Talk to your best customers. Talk to the ones who churned. Find the pattern in their pain. Once you have that, you have the blueprint for your entire advertising strategy. Without it, you're just shouting into the void and wondering why only echoes and bots seem to answer.

You probably should kill your "Request a Demo" button...

Now that we've fixed the 'who', let's fix the 'what'. Specifically, your offer. This is the second most common reason for attracting traffic that doesn't convert. Your prospect, intrigued by your ad, lands on your page and is met with the most arrogant Call to Action (CTA) in B2B marketing: "Request a Demo."

Think about what you're asking. You're asking a busy, important person to commit their valuable time to a meeting where they know they will be sold to. It's high-friction and, from their perspective, low-value. They don't know you, they don't trust you, and you're already asking for a commitment. What happens? The vast majority say "no thanks" and leave. The few who do click might be competitors doing research or unqualified leads who don't respect their own time. Again, their behaviour mimics bots: a click, a brief visit, and a bounce.

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. It needs to be high-value and low-friction.

For SaaS founders, the gold standard is a free trial or a freemium plan, with no credit card required. Let them use the actual product. Let them experience the transformation from their 'before' state of pain to the 'after' state of relief. A user who solves a real problem during a trial is no longer a lead; they're a future customer. The impact of a strong offer combined with an optimised campaign structure can be profound. For one client, a medical job matching SaaS, we managed a campaign that reduced their Cost Per Acquisition from over £100 down to just £7. This demonstrates how powerful it is when you remove friction and deliver value upfront.

But what if you're not a SaaS compnay? You are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, a piece of content, or an asset that provides instant value.

• Marketing Agency? Offer a free, automated website audit that uncovers their top 3 SEO opportunities.
• Financial Consultancy? Build a free "Cash Flow Projection" spreadsheet template they can download.
• Corporate Training? Offer a free 15-minute interactive video module on "Managing Your First Direct Report."

For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it’s a completely free 20-minute strategy session where we audit a prospect's failing ad account live on the call. We solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing. The goal is to give them a tangible win that demonstrates your expertise and builds trust. That's how you turn a click into a conversation.

We'll need to look at how you're telling the platforms to find non-customers...

This brings us to the ad platform itself. Here is an uncomfortable truth about platforms like Meta (Facebook/Instagram). When you set your campaign objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific, literal command: "Find me the largest number of people inside my targeting for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, in its infinite wisdom, does exactly what you asked. It scours your audience and seeks out the users who are least likely to click an ad, least likely to engage with content, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever pull out a credit card. Why? Because those users are not in demand by other advertisers. Their attention is cheap. By choosing the wrong objective, you are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst, most passive, most 'bot-like' audience for your product.

This is a mistake I see all the time in account audits. Businesses think they need to "build awareness" before they can "ask for the sale." This is a myth perpetuated by big brands with nine-figure marketing budgets. For a startup or a small buisness, the best form of brand awareness is a competitor's customer switching to your product and raving about it. That only happens through conversion.

You MUST optimise for the action you actually want.

• Want leads? Your campaign objective must be "Leads".
• Want sales? Your campaign objective must be "Sales".
• Want trials? Your campaign objective must be "Leads" or a custom conversion for sign-ups.

When you do this, you tell the algorithm: "I don't care about cheap impressions. Go and find the specific people in my audience who have a history of taking this exact action, even if it costs more to reach them." The platform's machine learning is incredibly powerful at this. It knows who the window shoppers are and who the buyers are. By optimising for conversions, you align your goals with the platform's capabilities. You're now fishing in the right part of the lake.

This naturally leads to a better campaign structure. You shouldn't have one giant campaign trying to do everything. You need to mirror the customer journey with different campaigns for each stage:

By structuring your account this way and always optimising for your final conversion goal, you force the platforms to find you higher-quality users. The low-intent, 'bot-like' traffic simply gets filtered out because it doesn't match the behavioural profile of a converter.

You'll need to understand the math that makes growth possible...

This leads to a crucial mindset shift. Most people I speak to are obsessed with lowering their Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Click (CPC). They see a high CPL and panic, thinking the campaign is failing. 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 question lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Until you know what a customer is worth to you, you have no logical basis for deciding what you can afford to spend to acquire one.

Let's do some simple maths. You need three numbers:

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

The formula is straightforward:

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

Let's say your SaaS product is £200/month (ARPA), your gross margin is 85%, and you lose 5% of your customers each month (churn).
LTV = (£200 * 0.85) / 0.05
LTV = £170 / 0.05 = £3,400

In this example, each customer you acquire is worth £3,400 in gross margin to your buisness over their lifetime. Now you have a powerful piece of information. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £3,400 / 3 = £1,133 to acquire a single new customer.

Suddenly, that £150 CPL from a highly-targeted LinkedIn campaign doesn't look so expensive, does it? If your sales process converts 1 in 8 of those leads into a customer, your CAC is £150 * 8 = £1,200. That's right on the edge of your target, but it's a scalable, predictable engine for growth. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent scaling and frees you from the tyranny of cheap, worthless clicks.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

To pull all this together, the problem isn't bots; the problem is attracting the wrong people. By fixing these core strategic pillars, you build a system that naturally filters for high-quality, high-intent prospects. Here's the plan in a nutshell:

As you can see, this is a much deeper issue than just blocking a few IP addresses. It requires a fundamental shift in strategy from chasing cheap clicks to investing in high-quality customer aquisition. It's about building a coherent system where your audience, message, offer, and campaign goals are all perfectly aligned. When they are, the 'bot' problem tends to solve itself.

Implementing all of this can be a lot of work, especially when you're busy running your buisness. It involves research, strategic thinking, copywriting, technical setup, and constant testing and optimisation. This is where getting some expert help can make a huge differance.

We specialise in this exact process. We help businesses like yours diagnose the real root causes of poor performance and then build and manage high-performance advertising systems that deliver predictable growth. If you'd like to have a chat and get a second pair of eyes on your campaigns, we offer a free, no-obligation strategy session where we can dive into your specific situation.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh