TLDR;
- Your targeting problem in Brussels isn't about Google's settings, it's about your strategy. Targeting a city is useless; you need to target a specific, urgent, and expensive pain point your ideal customer is experiencing.
- Low conversion rates are almost always an offer problem, not a traffic problem. The standard "Request a Demo" or "Contact Us" is a conversion killer because it's high-friction and offers no immediate value.
- You're likely using the wrong keywords. Stop bidding on broad, informational terms and focus exclusively on high-intent keywords that signal someone is ready to buy, making sure to account for Brussels' multilingual nature (French, Dutch, and English).
- Stop obsessing over a low Cost Per Lead (CPL). The real metric is your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). I've included an interactive calculator below to help you figure out how much you can actually afford to pay for a good lead.
- This letter provides a step-by-step framework to redefine your customer profile, rebuild your offer, and restructure your Google Ads campaigns to attract actual buyers in Brussels, not just tyre-kickers.
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out!
I’ve had a look at the problem you're facing with your Google Ads in Brussels. It’s a common story: you're spending money, you know the people you want are *somewhere* in the city, but the campaigns are bringing in the wrong traffic and conversions are nowhere to be seen. It's frustrating and feels like you're just burning cash.
The good news is, this is almost always solvable. The bad news is that the solution isn't a simple tweak to your location settings. The problem runs deeper, right to the core of your strategy. Your issue isn't really with "targeting Brussels"; it's with how you're defining who you're targeting and what you're offering them. Let's get into it.
Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic
First thing's first, we need to be brutally honest. "Buyers in Brussels" isn't a target audience. It's a pin on a map. It tells you nothing of value and leads to the kind of generic advertising that gets ignored. You end up speaking to everyone and therefore, no one. This is likely the root cause of your campaigns failing to reach the right people.
To stop burning your budget, you have to forget the sterile, demographic-based profiles. "Companies in the financial sector with 50-200 employees in Brussels" is a start, but it’s still miles away from what you actually need. You must define your customer by their pain. You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare.
Think about it. Your Head of Marketing client isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of her board asking why lead generation has flatlined for two quarters straight. Your Head of Engineering prospect isn't just a tech guy; he's awake at 3 am worrying that his best developers are about to quit out of sheer frustration with a broken, inefficient workflow. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.
For a business targeting the Brussels market, this could be:
-> A compliance officer at a financial firm in the European Quarter who is losing sleep over the rollout of a new EU directive they aren't prepared for.
-> A logistics manager in Zaventem whose company is losing money hand over fist because of inefficient supply chain routes through the Benelux region.
-> The founder of a tech startup in Etterbeek who has just secured funding but has no idea how to build a scalable sales process to compete with larger French and Dutch companies.
These are nightmares. They are specific, they are urgent, and they are expensive. When you understand this, your entire approach changes. Your ad copy stops being about your features and starts being about their relief. Your targeting stops being about a city and starts being about the digital breadcrumbs these professionals leave behind.
Once you've isolated that nightmare, your job is to find out where they go to talk about it. What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute to Brussels-Central? (Probably not the Belgian top 40). Which industry newsletters do they actually open? (e.g., L'Echo, De Tijd, specific trade publications). What SaaS tools do they already pay for? (Look at tools that integrate with yours). Are they members of specific LinkedIn groups for Belgian professionals in their field? This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire strategy. If you haven't done this work, you have no business spending another euro on ads.
Level 1: Demographic
"Businesses in Brussels"
(Useless)
Level 2: Firmographic
"Finance firms, 50-200 staff"
(Getting Warmer)
Level 3: Pain-Based
"Compliance officers terrified of new EU data regulations"
(Now You're Talking)
This deep understanding of your customer's pain is the foundation. Without it, everything else we're about to discuss will fail. So, before you touch your Google Ads account again, sit down and define the nightmare you solve.
I'd say you need to delete the "Request a Demo" button
Now we get to the second reason your campaigns are failing: your offer. I'm willing to bet your landing page's main call to action is something like "Request a Demo," "Book a Call," or "Contact Us for a Quote." This is the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising and is almost certainly why your conversion rates are so low.
The "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect—a busy, stressed-out professional in Brussels—has nothing better to do than book a 30-minute slot in their calendar to be sold to. It's incredibly high-friction. It screams, "Give me your time and contact details, and in return, I will give you a sales pitch." There is zero immediate value for them. Why would they convert?
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 flip the value equation. Instead of asking for their time, you need to *give* them something valuable for free, right now.
If you're a SaaS company, this is your unfair advantage. The gold standard is a free trial (no credit card required) or a freemium plan. Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them experience the transformation from their current nightmare to a better reality. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You're not generating 'Marketing Qualified Leads' (MQLs) for a sales team to chase; you're creating 'Product Qualified Leads' (PQLs) who are already convinced.
If you're not SaaS, you are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, content, or asset that provides instant value. Some ideas:
-> For a marketing agency: A free, automated website audit that shows them their top 3 SEO opportunities in the Belgian market.
-> For a data analytics platform: A free 'Data Health Check' that they can run on a sample of their data to flag the biggest issues.
-> For a corporate training company: A free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Managing a Multilingual Team', a very relevant topic for Brussels.
-> For a consultancy like us: A 20-minute strategy session where we audit a prospect's failing ad campaigns completely free of charge.
You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve their entire problem for money. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry. They are no longer signing up for a sales pitch; they are getting a valuable tool or resource. Your conversion rate will skyrocket, and the leads you get will be far more qualified because they've already engaged with your expertise.
Your low conversion rate isn't a Google Ads problem. It's a value proposition problem on your landing page.
You'll need to rethink your keyword strategy entirely...
So, you’ve defined your ICP’s nightmare and you’ve created a high-value, low-friction offer. Now, and only now, can we talk about Google Ads. The goal here isn't just to get clicks; it's to get clicks from people who are actively trying to solve the problem you're an expert in. This comes down to keyword intent.
You need to pre-qualify your audience with the keywords you choose to bid on. This means targeting keywords that express specific user intent, particularly commercial or transactional intent, rather than broad informational queries. Someone searching for "what is supply chain management" is a student or a researcher. Someone searching for "supply chain optimisation software belgium" is a potential customer. They are pre-qualified because their search query itself tells you they are looking for the kind of solution you offer.
Another crucial point for Brussels is language. It's a bilingual city (officially French and Dutch) and the business language is often English. You cannot get away with running ads in just one language. You must have separate campaigns and ad groups targeting French, Dutch, and English keywords. Your ad copy and your landing pages *must* be in the same language as the keyword. Sending a user who clicked a French ad to an English landing page is a guaranteed way to kill your conversion rate.
Here’s what this looks like in practice. Let’s imagine you sell accounting software for Belgian SMEs.
| Keyword Type | Bad Examples (Low Intent) | Good Examples (High Intent) |
|---|---|---|
| Informational | "how to do accounting" "belgian tax laws" |
(Don't bid on these for conversion campaigns) |
| Commercial (EN) | "accounting software" | "best accounting software for belgian sme" "xero alternative brussels" |
| Commercial (FR) | "logiciel comptabilité" | "logiciel comptable pour pme belgique" "alternative exact online bruxelles" |
| Commercial (NL) | "boekhoudsoftware" | "beste boekhoudprogramma voor kmo belgië" "yuki alternatief brussel" |
Notice how the good examples are long-tail keywords. They are more specific, which means lower search volume, but the traffic you get from them is infinitely more qualified. It's better to get 10 clicks from "xero alternative brussels" than 1,000 clicks from "accounting software."
Your campaign structure should reflect this multilingual, intent-based approach. A simplified structure might look like this:
- Campaign 1: Brussels - EN - High Intent
- Ad Group 1: Competitor Keywords (e.g., "xero alternative")
- Ad Group 2: Solution Keywords (e.g., "accounting software for sme")
- (Ads and Landing Page in English)
- Campaign 2: Brussels - FR - High Intent
- Ad Group 1: Mots-clés des concurrents (e.g., "alternative exact online")
- Ad Group 2: Mots-clés de solution (e.g., "logiciel comptable pme")
- (Ads and Landing Page in French)
- Campaign 3: Brussels - NL - High Intent
- Ad Group 1: Concurrent Trefwoorden (e.g., "yuki alternatief")
- Ad Group 2: Oplossing Trefwoorden (e.g., "boekhoudprogramma kmo")
- (Ads and Landing Page in Dutch)
This structure allows you to control your budget, messaging, and landing page experience for each language, which is absolutly essential for success in a market as specific as Brussels.
You probably should focus on LTV, not just CPL...
This brings me to the final, and possibly most important, strategic shift you need to make. You're worried about low conversion rates, which tells me you're probably also worried about a high Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). This is the wrong way to look at it. 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 lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Until you know what a customer is worth to you over their entire relationship with your business, you're flying blind. You're making decisions based on fear (high costs) instead of data (profitability).
Let's do the maths. We need three numbers:
- Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month?
- Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue?
- Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?
The calculation is simple: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate
Let's say you're a SaaS business and your numbers are:
- ARPA: €200/month
- Gross Margin: 80% (0.80)
- Monthly Churn: 5% (0.05)
LTV = (€200 * 0.80) / 0.05
LTV = €160 / 0.05 = €3,200
In this example, each customer is worth €3,200 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. Now we can have a sensible conversation about acquisition costs. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is typically 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to €3,200 / 3 = €1,066 to acquire a single customer and still run a very profitable business.
Let's take it a step further. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a paying customer (a 10% lead-to-customer rate), then you can afford to pay up to €1,066 / 10 = €106.60 per qualified lead.
Suddenly, that €50 or €75 CPL from a highly specific, high-intent Google Ads campaign doesn't look so expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths 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. A lots of businesses miss this, and it holds them back.
To make this real for you, I've built a calculator below. Play with the numbers for your own business and see what your target CPL should really be.
This is the main advice I have for you:
We've covered a lot of ground, moving from high-level strategy to the nitty-gritty of campaign structure and financial metrics. It's a fundamental shift away from simply 'doing ads' towards building a predictable growth engine. To make it easier to digest, here are my main recommendations laid out in a clear, actionable format.
| Problem Area | Root Cause (The Myth) | Recommended Action (The Reality) | Expected Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poor Targeting ("Not reaching the right people") |
Thinking of your audience as a location ("Brussels") and a demographic. | Redefine your ICP based on their "nightmare." Identify a specific, urgent, expensive pain point. Research where they discuss this pain online. | Your ad copy and targeting will become hyper-relevant, attracting a much smaller but far more qualified audience. Higher quality traffic. |
| Low Conversion Rate | Believing traffic is the problem, when it's really your offer. Using a high-friction CTA like "Request a Demo." | Create a value-first, low-friction offer. Build a free tool, a high-value checklist, an automated audit, or offer a free trial. Solve a small problem for free. | A significant increase in your landing page conversion rate. The leads you generate will be better pre-qualified and more receptive to a sales conversation. |
| Irrelevant Clicks | Bidding on broad, informational keywords and neglecting the multilingual nature of the market. | Overhaul your keyword strategy. Focus on long-tail, high-intent keywords. Create separate campaigns for English, French, and Dutch with matching ads and landing pages. | Higher Click-Through Rate (CTR), lower cost per qualified click, and a much better Quality Score from Google, which reduces costs over time. |
| Uncertainty about Ad Spend | Obsessing over keeping CPL as low as possible without understanding profitability. | Calculate your LTV and affordable CAC/CPL. Shift your mindset from cost-minimisation to profit-maximisation. Use the LTV:CAC ratio to guide your budget. | The ability to spend confidently and aggressively to acquire the right customers, enabling you to scale your campaigns profitably. |
Following this plan requires a shift in thinking, but it's the difference between campaigns that limp along and campaigns that drive real, predictable business growth. It moves you from being a passive buyer of clicks to an active architect of a customer acquisition system.
This isn't just theory. We've applied these same principles to campaigns for numerous B2B clients, from SaaS startups to established service firms. I remember one software client who came to us with a similar problem—lots of clicks, no trials. We helped them reduce their CPA from over £100 down to just £7 by focusing on a better offer and more specific targeting. It's about being strategic, not just busy.
This is a lot to take in, and implementing it correctly takes time and expertise. This isn't just about knowing how to use the Google Ads interface; it's about understanding business strategy, customer psychology, and direct response marketing. It's about knowing which levers to pull and in what order to get the desired result, and having the experience to troubleshoot when things don't go as planned.
If you'd like to discuss how these principles could be applied specifically to your business in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can go through your current campaigns together, look at your landing page, and map out a more concrete plan of action. It's often the quickest way to get clarity and find the biggest opportunities for improvement.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
