Solved: Birmingham Ads Not Converting (The Real Reason)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your situation. It's a really common problem to see traffic that just doesn't convert, and it's easy to jump to the conclusion that the landing page is the sole culprit. To be honest, while the landing page is definitely part of the puzzle, the real issue is almost always a few steps further up the chain. Focusing just on 'optimising for Birmingham' is probably a red herring that's distracting you from the fundamental problems that are actually costing you sales.

I'm going to walk you through how we'd diagnose this, starting with the stuff that really matters: your customer, your offer, and the quality of the traffic you're buying in the first place. Get those right, and the landing page piece of it becomes a lot simpler.

We'll need to look at your Ideal Customer, not their postcode...

Right, let's get this out of the way first. Thinking your page isn't 'optimised for Birmingham' is almost certainly the wrong way to look at this. Unless you're selling something incredibly specific to that city, like "Birmingham City FC memorabilia," the location is just a geographic filter. It tells you nothing about the person, their needs, or their willingness to buy.

You're falling into a classic trap: defining your customer by sterile demographics instead of by their actual problem. Your ads are failing in Birmingham for the same reason they would fail in Manchester, London, or anywhere else – you haven't defined your customer by their pain. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a demographic; it's a problem state.

Who are you actually trying to sell to? What is the specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare that keeps them up at night? That's what you need to figure out. I remember working with a legal tech SaaS client where we identified their customer's nightmare wasn't 'needing a document management system'; it was 'a senior partner missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the firm to a massive malpractice suit.' See the difference? One is a feature, the other is a visceral fear.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, everything else follows. Your ad copy speaks directly to it, your offer is positioned as the cure, and your targeting hones in on the people most likely to be experiencing it. Focusing on a city is a distraction. You need to do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

I'd say your offer is the real problem...

Now that we've established you need to target a problem, not a place, we hit the next, even bigger, hurdle: your offer. I haven't seen your product or service, but I can tell you from experience that the number one reason campaigns fail is a weak offer. People build what they think is a great product, spend ages developing features, and then wonder why nobody wants to buy it. It's usually because there's a lack of genuine, urgent demand for what they're selling.

A strong offer does three things:

1. It focuses on a specific audience. You cant be everything to everyone.
2. It identifies an urgent problem that audience has.
3. It presents a clear solution that feels tangible, simple, and less risky to buy.

For example, if you sell B2B services, you dont sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep. Your ad message becomes: "Are your cash flow projections just a guess? Worried you're one bad month away from a payroll crisis? Get an expert financial strategy that turns uncertainty into predictable growth." That's an offer that solves a nightmare.

If you're a SaaS company, the offer is even more critical. The "Request a Demo" button is one of the most arrogant, high-friction calls to action ever invented. It assumes a busy decision-maker wants to schedule time to be sold to. It's a terrible offer. The gold standard is a free trial (with no credit card) or a freemium plan. Let the product prove its own value. We've seen this time and again with our software clients; moving from a "demo" model to a "free trial" model can completly transform campaign performance. I remember one B2B SaaS client where we helped them generate over 1,500 trials with Meta Ads simply by shifting the focus to a value-first offer.

Your offer’s only job is to deliver an "aha!" moment of undeniable value. If you're not a software company, you have to bottle your expertise into something that provides instant value. A free audit, a checklist, a calculator, a short video training. You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the big one for money.

You probably should look at the traffic quality first...

Okay, so let's assume you've now defined your ICP's nightmare and you've crafted an irresistible offer. The next failure point is the traffic itself. All clicks are not created equal. If you're getting traffic that doesn't convert, it's highly likely you're buying the wrong kind of traffic.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth about platforms like Facebook and Instagram (Meta). If you set your campaign objective to "Brand Awareness" or "Reach," you are paying the algorithm to find you the cheapest eyeballs possible. The algorithm does exactly that: it finds people inside your targeting who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely will never, ever buy anything. Why? Because their attention is cheap. You are actively paying one of the world's most powerful advertising machines to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

This is a mistake we see constantly. The only way to find people who will actually buy from you is to tell the algorithm to find people who buy things. You MUST use a conversion objective, whether that's 'Sales', 'Leads', or 'Appointments'. Awareness is a byproduct of making sales to happy customers, not a prerequisite for it.

The same logic applies to Google Ads. You need to target keywords with commercial intent. Someone searching for "how to manage cash flow" is in a different universe to someone searching for "best accounting software for small business UK". The first is looking for information; the second is looking to buy. You need to target the buyer. This is how you pre-qualify your traffic before they even click the ad.

Once you've got your objective right, you need a structured approach to testing audiences. For Meta ads, we usually prioritise audiences like this:

• Top of Funnel (New People): Start with detailed targeting (interests, behaviours) that align with your ICP's nightmare. For one B2B SaaS client in the recruitment space, we didn't just target "recruiting" as an interest; we targeted users who were admins of Facebook pages for recruitment agencies, people interested in competitor software, etc. Once you have data, you build Lookalike audiences from your best customers.
• Middle & Bottom of Funnel (Retargeting): This is where you target people who have already shown interest – website visitors, people who've added to cart, people who watched 50% of your video ad. These audiences are small but they convert at a much higher rate. If your budget is small, you can combine these into one ad set.

Getting traffic is easy. Getting the *right* traffic is the hard part, and it starts with choosing the right campaign objective and being methodical with your targeting.

You'll need a landing page that converts, but only after you've fixed the rest...

So, finally, we get to the landing page. Your original suspect. Yes, it matters. A bad landing page can absolutely kill a great ad campaign. But it's the last piece of the puzzle, not the first.

Once you have the right person (from your ICP targeting) who has the right problem (their nightmare), who has clicked an ad promoting the right offer (your irresistible solution), they arrive on your landing page. Its only job is to persaude them to take that final step.

Here are some of the most common landing page mistakes we see:

• No clear value proposition: The headline doesn't instantly communicate the benefit of your offer. It needs to speak to the 'After' state in the 'Before-After-Bridge' framework.
• Too much clutter: Navigation bars, links to other pages, social media icons... get rid of it. The page should have one goal and one button to achieve that goal. Anything else is a distraction.
• Weak copy: The text is all about you and your product's features, not about the customer and their problems. It needs to agitate their pain and present your solution as the only logical choice.
• Lack of trust: There are no testimonials, reviews, case studies, or trust badges. People are sceptical, especially of ads. You need to provide social proof to make them feel comfortable buying from you.
• A poor offer: We're back to this again. If the call to action is "Request a Demo" or something equally high-commitment, your conversion rate will suffer. Make it an easy 'yes'.

But before you obsess over conversion rates, you need to understand the economics of your business. The real question isn't "how low can my cost per lead be?" but "how high a cost per lead can I afford to acquire a great customer?". The answer is in your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

You need to know this number. It dictates your entire advertising budget and strategy. If a customer is worth £10,000 to you over their lifetime, spending £300 on a lead that has a 1 in 10 chance of closing suddenly looks like a bargain. Without knowing your LTV, you're flying blind. Use the calculator below to get a rough idea.

So what should a conversion actually cost?

This is a question we get all the time, and the real answer is "it depends". It depends on your objective, your industry, your targeting, and a dozen other factors. But I can give you some very rough ballpark figures from our experience to help set your expectations.

Let's talk about leads, signups, free trials - conversions that are relatively low-friction. In developed countries like the UK, you might see a cost per click (CPC) between £0.50 and £1.50. From there, a decent landing page might convert 10-30% of that traffic. So, the maths gives you a cost per lead of anywhere from £1.60 (£0.50 / 30%) to £15 (£1.50 / 10%). For one of our software clients, we managed to get over 45,000 signups at under £2 per signup, which is on the very good end of that spectrum.

Now, if your goal is an actual sale for an eCommerce product, the numbers change. eCommerce stores often see a conversion rate of 2-5%. So your cost per purchase could be anywhere from £10 (£0.50 / 5%) to £75 (£1.50 / 2%). Again, these are massive ranges. We've run campaigns for cleaning products that saw a 633% return, and for an apparel brand that saw a 691% return. In these cases, the absolute cost per sale matters less than the overall Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

The key takeaway is that costs are variable. Your job isn't to chase an arbitrarily low cost, but to build a system where the cost you pay is profitable against your LTV. If you want to get an idea of how these numbers interact, play around with the calculator below.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To wrap this up, you need to stop thinking about your problem as a "Birmingham landing page issue" and start thinking about it as a complete system. Each part has to work for any of it to work. Here's your action plan, in order of priority.

As you can probably see, there's a lot more to this than just tweaking a headline. Getting paid advertising to work profitably is a complex process that requires a deep understanding of strategy, psychology, and the technical aspects of the platforms. It's not something you can just set up and hope for the best.

This is where expert help can make a massive difference. We've spent years running campaigns for all sorts of businesses, from B2B SaaS to eCommerce stores, and we've seen these patterns play out time and time again. We know what works, what doesn't, and how to quickly diagnose the real bottlenecks in a campaign that's underperforming.

If you'd like to get a second pair of expert eyes on your specific situation, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can audit your campaigns and landing page together. We can give you some concrete, actionable advice you can implement right away. Feel free to book one in if that sounds helpful.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh