Solved: Google Ads Budget Drained by Irrelevant Traffic

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I had a look at your question, and your concern about Google Ads budget being exhausted by showing ads globally is completely valid. It's actually one of the most common—and costly—mistakes I see people make when they're starting out. It’s a classic trap Google sets, and you’re right to be wary. But if I'm being honest, fixing that one setting is just plugging a single leak in a very leaky bucket. The real problem isn't just about *where* your ads are showing, but *who* they're showing to and *what* you're asking them to do.

You can have the most perfectly geotargeted campaign in the world, but if you're aiming at the wrong people with the wrong message, you're still just burning cash, only a bit more slowly. The solution isn't just a technical fix; it's a fundamental shift in how you think about your customer and your offer. So, I wanted to give you some initial thoughts that go a bit deeper than just the settings page, because this is what will actually make a difference to your bottom line.

We'll need to look at your ICP... because it's a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, let's get one thing straight. Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire probably put together in a PowerPoint. "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" or "SMEs in the North of England" tells you absolutely nothing of value. It's lazy, and it leads to the kind of generic, wallpaper advertising that gets ignored by everyone. To stop burning cash, you have to define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) not by who they are, but by the specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare they are currently living through.

You need to become an obsessive expert in their problem. Your Head of Engineering client isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified that her best developers are about to quit out of sheer frustration with a broken, inefficient workflow. For a legal tech SaaS, the nightmare isn't 'needing better document management'; it's 'a senior partner missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the entire firm to a multi-million-pound malpractice suit.' Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. It's an anxiety that keeps them awake at 3 AM.

Once you've truly isolated that nightmare, your targeting strategy writes itself. You stop thinking about broad locations and start thinking about digital habitats. Where does this person go to find solutions? Find the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute, like 'Acquired' or 'This Week in Startups'. Identify the industry newsletters they actually open and read, like 'Stratechery' by Ben Thompson. What SaaS tools are they already paying for? HubSpot? Salesforce? Slack? Are they members of the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Do they follow specific influencers like Jason Lemkin or April Dunford on LinkedIn or Twitter?

This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire paid advertising strategy. It tells you which platforms to use, which interests to target on Meta, and what keywords to bid on in Google. This is the real work. Do this first, or you have absolutely no business spending a single pound on ads. Because without it, you're just shouting into the void and hoping someone, somewhere, might be listening.

I'd say you need a message they can't ignore...

Once you understand their nightmare, you can craft a message that they physically can't ignore. It'll resonate because it speaks directly to the pain they feel every single day. Most B2B advertising is a sea of feature-lists and empty platitudes. "Innovative solutions," "streamlined workflows," "unparalleled service." It's all meaningless jargon. You need to cut through that noise with a message that feels like you've been reading their private diary.

There are a few simple but powerful frameworks for this. For a high-touch service business, you deploy Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS). You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep. Your ad copy should reflect this:

Problem: "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?"
Agitate: "Are you secretly one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round?"
Solve: "Get an expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable, scalable growth."

See the difference? You've twisted the knife a little before offering the cure. It's emotional, it's specific, and it's focused on the outcome, not the service.

For a B2B SaaS product, you can use the Before-After-Bridge. You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of relief and control. Your ad might look like this:

Before: "Your monthly AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out, another tense meeting with finance."
After: "Imagine opening your cloud bill and actually smiling. You see exactly where every single dollar is going, and waste is automatically flagged and eliminated before it becomes a problem."
Bridge: "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

And for high-ticket physical products, like complex lab equipment, you have to attack the feature-obsession head-on. Don't just state the spec; state its consequence. "Our new mass spectrometer has a 0.001% margin of error. So what? So your lab can publish results with unshakeable confidence, securing more funding and attracting top-tier talent that other labs can only dream of."

This is how you stop being a commodity. You stop selling a product and start selling a transformation. This kind of messaging is what makes your ad spend work, no matter where you target it.

You probably should delete the "Request a Demo" button...

Now we get to the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. The "Request a Demo" button is quite possibly the most arrogant and ineffective Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes that your prospect, who is likely a busy, stressed C-level decision-maker, has nothing better to do with their time than book a slot in their calendar to be sold to. It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another commoditised vendor clamouring for their attention.

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. You need to give them a taste of the win for free.

For SaaS founders, this is your unfair advantage. The absolute gold standard is a free trial (with no credit card details required) or a generous freemium plan. Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them experience the transformation for themselves. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a simple formality. You aren't generating "Marketing Qualified Leads" (MQLs) for a sales team to chase down; you are creating "Product Qualified Leads" (PQLs) who are already convinced and asking to pay.

If you're not a SaaS company, you are not exempt from this rule. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, a piece of content, or an asset that provides instant, tangible value. For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated SEO audit that instantly shows them their top 3 missed keyword opportunities. For a data analytics platform, it could be a free 'Data Health Check' that flags the biggest issues in their database. For a corporate training company, it could be a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' for new managers. For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a completely free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns and provide actionable advice. You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing for them.

This approach changes the entire dynamic. You're no longer a salesperson; you're a trusted advisor. And to do this effectively, you need to understand what a customer is actually worth to you. Chasing cheap leads is a fool's game. You need to know your numbers so you can confidently invest in acquiring high-quality customers.

Suddenly, that £250 lead from a CTO on LinkedIn doesn't seem so expensive, does it? When you know a customer is worth £10,000 to you, paying a few hundred for a highly qualified lead looks like an absolute bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads that waste your sales team's time.

You'll need to fix your targeting fundamentals...

Alright, with all that strategic groundwork laid, let's get back to your original, very practical problem. How do you stop Google from showing your ads to people in India when you only service clients in Manchester? This is where we get into the technical details, and it's where most people go wrong.

In your Google Ads campaign settings, under the "Locations" tab, you'll see a little link that says "Location options". Click it. This is arguably one of the most important settings in your entire account. By default, Google sets this to "Presence or interest: People in, regularly in, or who've shown interest in your targeted locations".

This setting is financial poison. It's designed by Google to spend your money as fast as possible. That "or who've shown interest in" part means that if someone in New York is planning a trip and Googles "best accountants in London," your ad could show up for them. They have zero intent of becoming your client. It's a completely wasted impression and, worse, a potentially very expensive wasted click. This is precisely what you were worried about, and your intuition was spot on.

You must change this setting to "Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations". This is non-negotiable. This one change ensures your ads are only shown to people who are physically located in the areas you've chosen to target. It's the first thing I check in every single account I audit, and it's amazing how often it's been left on the default, burning thousands of pounds a month. While you're there, also make sure you set the option under "Exclude" to "Presence: People in your excluded locations" to make your exclusions more effective.

This principle of qualifying your audience extends beyond just geography. On Google Search, it's about intent. You want to target keywords that signal commercial intent, not just informational queries. For instance, instead of bidding on a broad term like "what is AI?", you'd target "AI implementation service" or "AI developer near me". The first person is researching; the second person is buying. You want to pay to get in front of the buyer.

On platforms like Meta (Facebook/Instagram), where people aren't actively searching, the approach is different but the principle is the same. You have to build audiences based on how close they are to making a decision. I see far too many accounts just throwing money at a broad "brand awareness" campaign. This is a huge mistake. When you set your campaign objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are telling Meta's algorithm to "find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm does exactly that, seeking out users who are least likely to click, engage, or buy, because their attention is cheap. You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find the worst possible audience for your product.

Instead, you must always optimise for a conversion event, like a lead, a signup, or a purchase. This forces the algorithm to find people who actually take action. You then structure your campaigns in a logical funnel, prioritising the warmest audiences first. Here's how I typically structure it for our clients:

You start by spending your budget on the BoFu audiences first. As you scale, you move up the funnel to MoFu and then ToFu. This ensures you're always capturing the lowest-hanging fruit first, maximising your return on ad spend. The performance difference between these audiences can be massive, as the costs to acquire a customer from a warm, retargeted audience are almost always lower than from a cold, interest-based one.

You'll need to understand the real costs...

Finally, let's talk about money. A common question I get is "what should my cost per lead be?". The honest answer is: it depends. It depends massively on your industry, your offer, your targeting, your ad creative, your landing page, and, yes, the countries you're targeting.

However, based on the hundreds of campaigns we've managed, we can establish some rough benchmarks. The below estimates are for conversions like leads, signups, or email subscribers - objectives that can be completed fairly quickly by a user.

In developed countries (like the UK, US, Western Europe), you can expect a cost per click (CPC) to be in the £0.50 - £1.50 range for social media ads. On a decent landing page, you might see a conversion rate of 10-30%. So, if we do the maths, your cost per result could be anywhere from £1.60 (£0.50 / 30%) to £15.00 (£1.50 / 10%). For B2B on LinkedIn, these costs will be much, much higher. We've managed B2B software campaigns where a $22 CPL from LinkedIn Ads was considered an excellent result.

In developing countries, the clicks are much cheaper, maybe £0.10 - £0.50, but the quality of the traffic can be significantly lower. Your cost per result might be between £0.33 and £5.00, but you need to be very careful about lead quality and bots.

For something with higher friction, like an eCommerce sale or a long B2B form completion, conversion rates drop dramatically, often to the 2-5% range for eCommerce. This means your costs will be much higher. The table below gives you a ballpark:

The key takeaway here is not to get fixated on a single number. Instead, use your LTV calculation to understand what you *can afford* to pay, and then work backwards. If a customer is worth £10k to you, paying £75 to acquire them is an incredibly profitable transaction. Focus on acquiring high-quality customers profitably, not on getting the cheapest clicks or leads.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

As you can probably tell, getting this right involves a lot more than just ticking a few boxes in an ads manager. It's a comprehensive strategy that connects deep customer understanding with sharp copywriting, a compelling offer, and precise technical execution. It requires constant testing, analysis, and optimisation.

This is where expert help can make a substantial difference. Instead of spending months and thousands of pounds trying to figure this out through trial and error, working with a specialist can help you implement this entire framework correctly from day one, accelerating your path to profitable growth.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can review your current setup and provide some concrete, actionable recommendations. It might be a good next step to turn these principles into a practical plan for your business.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh