Solved: Diminishing Meta Ads Traffic Despite Constant Spend

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on what you're seeing with your Meta ads.

What you're describing—diminishing traffic and rising costs on a campaign that was once performing well—is incredibly common. In fact, it's pretty much inevitable. Your first thought that performance should just keep getting better if left untouched is a myth a lot of people fall for. The reality is that all campaigns hit a plateau. Your frustration is completely understandable, but it's not Meta being arbitrary; it's the natural lifecycle of an ad campaign in a competitive auction. The good news is, there are very clear ways to break through this plateau, and it starts by looking beyond the ad itself and focusing on the underlying strategy.

I'd say you're looking at the wrong problem...

The core issue isn't that your cost per visitor is going up. That's just a symptom. The real problem is that you've likely exhausted the most receptive part of your initial audience. Think of it like this: when you first launch an ad, Meta's algorithm is brilliant at finding the "low-hanging fruit"—the people within your targeting parameters who are most likely to click and convert, and it finds them cheapy. You get great initial results, and it feels fantastic.

But that pool of people isn't infinite. After a few months, a few things happen:

• -> Audience Saturation: You've shown your ads to the most interested people multiple times. Those who were going to convert probably have done already. The rest have become blind to your ad.
• -> Ad Fatigue: The people who keep seeing the same ad over and over again simply start ignoring it. Their brain just filters it out as background noise. This leads to a lower Click-Through Rate (CTR), which in turn tells the algorithm your ad is less relevant, and it starts charging you more to show it.
• -> Auction Dynamics: You aren't advertising in a vacuum. New competitors enter the auction every day, bidding on the same audience you are. This increased competition naturally drives up the price for everyone.

So, the algorithm isn't screwing you over. It's just that the easy wins are gone. Now you have to work a bit harder to find the next batch of customers. This is where most businesses get stuck, but it's also where the real growth begins. You're moving from just running an ad to actively managing a paid acquisition system.

We'll need to look at what really matters: Lifetime Value (LTV)

The fact you're focused on "cost per visitor" tells me you might be optimising for the wrong metric. Traffic is a vanity metric; it doesn't pay the bills. What you should be obsessed with is your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) in relation to your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Most businesses have no idea what their LTV is, so they have no idea what they can actually afford to spend to get a new customer.

The question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" It's "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a great customer?" Let's do the maths. It’s simpler than you think.

• -> Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average amount a customer pays you per month?
• -> Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after costs of goods sold?
• -> Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

Once you know these numbers, you can calculate your LTV. This figure tells you what a customer is actually worth to your business in profit over their entire relationship with you. Suddenly, paying £50 or even £200 for a lead doesn't seem so scary if you know that customer will generate £5,000 in profit over the next two years.

I've built a small calculator for you below. Play around with the sliders to get a feel for your own LTV. This is the number that should guide your entire advertising budget.

I'd say you need to redefine your customer

Now that you know what a customer is worth, we can focus on finding more of them. The problem is, most businesses define their customers with useless demographic data. "Companies in the tech sector with 50-100 employees" tells you nothing. It leads to generic ads that speak to no one.

You need to stop thinking in demographics and start thinking in nightmares. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. What is the specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening problem that your product or service solves?

• -> A fractional CFO service doesn't sell 'financial oversight'. It sells a good night's sleep to a founder who is terrified of running out of cash and missing payroll.
• -> A project management SaaS doesn't sell 'better workflows'. It sells relief to an engineering manager who's afraid her best developers will quit out of frustration with a chaotic process.
• -> A home cleaning service doesn't sell a 'clean house'. It sells the gift of 4 hours of free time on a Saturday to a busy working parent who feels guilty they're not spending enough time with their kids.

Once you've defined that nightmare, you can build your entire advertising strategy around it. The targeting you choose, the words you use in your ads, and the offer you make all stem from this deep understanding of your customer's pain. This is how you create ads that don't just get clicks, but get the *right* clicks.

You probably should restructure your campaigns

When I audit new client accounts, the most common mistake I see is a messy, unstructured approach to targeting. People test random audiences without a clear strategy. To break through your current plateau, you need a systematic way to test new audiences and find fresh pockets of customers. The best way to do this is by structuring your campaigns around the marketing funnel: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

This isn't just theory; it's a practical blueprint for how to allocate your budget and test audiences in a logical order. The audiences closest to the purchase decision (BoFu) will almost always perform best, so you start there and work your way up.

This structure forces you to constantly test new audiences at the top of the funnel to feed your retargeting pools. When an ad in your ToFu campaign starts to fatigue (like yours has), you don't panic. You simply turn it off and launch a new test with a different creative or a different lookalike audience. It turns advertising from a guessing game into a repeatable process. We've seen this exact structure take a medical job matching SaaS client from a £100 Cost Per Acquisition down to just £7. It's all about the process.

You'll need a message they can't ignore

Once your targeting is dialled in on the customer's nightmare, your ad creative has one job: articulate that pain better than they can themselves. This is where most ads fail. They talk about features, not feelings. They talk about the 'what', not the 'so what'.

Here are a couple of frameworks we use with our copywriters that work extremely well:

1. Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS): You state the problem, you poke the bruise to make it hurt a little more, and then you present your product as the painkiller.
   Example for a SaaS product: "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. (Problem). Another fire to put out, another awkward conversation with the CFO about budget overruns. (Agitate). Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today. (Solve)."


2. Before-After-Bridge (BAB): You paint a picture of their current frustrating reality (Before), show them the desired future state (After), and position your product as the vehicle to get them there (Bridge).
   Example for a service business: "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round? (Before). Imagine opening a dashboard that turns uncertainty into predictable growth. (After). We provide expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. (Bridge)."

Notice that neither of these examples talks about "innovative features" or "synergistic solutions." They speak directly to the emotional core of the problem. This is what stops the scroll and gets the click. Paired with this, we've had several SaaS clients see really good results with simple, authentic User-Generated Content (UGC) style videos. It doesn't need to be a polished, high-budget production. Often, a founder talking directly to the camera about the problem they solve works far better because it feels real and builds trust.

You'll have to make an offer they can't refuse

This is the final, and most critical, piece of the puzzle. You can have the best targeting and the best creative in the world, but if your offer is weak, your campaign will fail. The most common failure point in all of B2B advertising is the "Request a Demo" button. It's an arrogant, high-friction Call to Action. It asks your prospect to give up their time to be sold to. It offers zero immediate value.

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 SaaS: The gold standard is a free trial or a freemium plan. No credit card. Let them use the actual product and feel the transformation. A successful trial is the best salesperson you will ever have. One of our B2B software clients, for example, generated 4,622 registrations on Meta Ads at just $2.38 each by focusing on a frictionless free trial offer.
• For Services: You must bottle your expertise into an asset that provides instant value. A free, automated website audit. A free 15-minute strategy session where you solve one small problem for them. A downloadable template or calculator that helps them do their job better. You have to give value to get value.

Fixing your offer is often the single highest-leverage thing you can do to improve your ad performance. A stronger offer makes your ads more compelling, which increases your CTR, lowers your CPC, and ultimately drops your cost per acquisition. It's a domino effect.

I know this is a lot to take in, but the key takeaway is that you've just graduated from 'Level 1' of paid advertising. The journey from here isn't about finding one magic bullet ad; it's about building a system of continuous testing and optimisation across your targeting, creative, and offer. This is how you build a predictable, scalable customer acquisition machine instead of just an ad campaign that runs out of steam.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Putting a system like this in place takes time and expertise. You need to be able to analyse the data correctly, prioritise your tests effectively, and write copy that actually converts. It's not just about pushing buttons in Ads Manager.

This is where working with an expert can make a huge difference. We've spent years building and refining these systems for dozens of businesses, helping them break through the exact plateau you're facing now. We can help you implement this entire process, from calculating your LTV and defining your ICP to building out your campaign structure and scripting new ad creative.

If you'd like to have a chat and see how we could apply this to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can take a look at your current campaigns together and give you some more specific, actionable advice.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh