Solved: LinkedIn Ad Retargeting in Leeds (A Step-by-Step Fix)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I've had a look at your problem with LinkedIn retargeting. Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on this.

Tbh, the fact you're struggling with retargeting suggests the problem isn't actually with your retargeting campaigns at all. It almost always points to a deeper issue, right at the start of your funnel. Retargeting is just amplifying what you're putting in at the top. If you're putting a poorly defined, low-intent audience into the funnel, you're just paying more to show more ads to people who were never going to buy in the first place. It's like trying to build the roof of a house on a foundation of sand.

So, we're not going to start with retargeting settings. We're going to start at the begining and fix the real issues. This is the only way you'll get it to work and stop burning cash on audiences that don't convert.

We'll need to look at who you're actually targeting first... your ICP is a nightmare, not a demographic

This is the absolute bedrock of any successful B2B campaign, and it's where 99% of them fail. Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire made. "Companies in the finance sector in Leeds with 50-200 employees" tells you precisely nothing of value. It’s a lazy descriptor that leads to generic, ignorable ads that speak to no one. To stop burning cash, you must define your customer not by who they are, but by the pain they are in.

You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, and ideally career-threatening nightmare. Your Head of Engineering client isn't just a job title; she's a leader who lies awake at 3 AM terrified that her best developers are about to quit out of sheer frustration with a broken, inefficient workflow. Your prospect at a law firm isn't 'looking for document management'; he's haunted by the spectre of a partner missing a critical filing deadline, exposing the entire firm to a multi-million-pound malpractice suit. Your Ideal Customer Profile isn't a person; it's a problem state.

The location, like Leeds, is almost irrelevant in the digital world unless you're a local service business like an electrician. Your targeting should be based on professional pain, not geography. You're not selling to a postcode; you're selling a solution to a very specific business headache that transcends physical location.

So, how do you find this nightmare? You need to answer these questions with brutal honesty:

• What is the tangible, financial cost of them NOT solving this problem? Does it lead to wasted man-hours? Lost revenue? Fines? Customer churn? Put a number on it. If you can't, it's not a big enough problem.
• What is the emotional, personal cost? Stress? Frustration? Fear of being fired or looking incompetent in front of their boss? B2B buying is still done by humans, and fear is a powerful motivator.
• What are the broken, manual workarounds they're currently using? Are they wrestling with a monster of a spreadsheet? Chasing people for updates via email? These are the symptoms of the disease you're here to cure.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, your entire targeting strategy changes. You stop looking for job titles and start looking for signals. Find the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute, like 'Acquired' or 'The All-In Podcast'. Identify the industry newsletters they actually open, like 'Stratechery'. Pinpoint the SaaS tools they already pay for and integrate with, like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Xero. Are they members of the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Do they follow specific influencers like Jason Lemkin or Scott Galloway on LinkedIn? This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire advertising strategy. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

This is how you build an audience worth retargeting. You're no longer just targeting 'Marketing Managers'; you're targeting 'Marketing Managers at SaaS companies who are members of three specific marketing groups on LinkedIn, follow HubSpot, and whose companies use Intercom'. Suddenly, your audience is smaller, more expensive to reach per person, but infinitely more likely to have the exact nightmare you solve. This is the only audience you should be trying to get in front of.

I'd say you probably need to delete the "Request a Demo" button

Now we arrive at the second most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. The "Request a Demo" or "Contact Us" button is perhaps the most arrogant and self-serving Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes that your prospect, a busy, stressed-out decision-maker, has nothing better to do with their time than book a 30-minute slot in their calendar to be sold to by a stranger. It's an immediate red flag. It screams, "I want to take your time before I provide any value." It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as a commoditised vendor, no different from the ten others in their inbox.

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 solve a small, real piece of their problem for free, right now. This is how you earn their trust and attention. This is how you build a retargeting audience that is already warmed up and sees you as a credible expert.

If you're a SaaS company, this is your unfair advantage. The absolute gold standard is a free trial (no credit card required, ever) or a generous freemium plan. Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them experience the transformation firsthand. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a simple 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 and asking you how to pay. When you get the offer right, the results follow. I remember one campaign for a B2B software client where we targeted decision-makers on LinkedIn. By presenting them with a valuable, low-friction offer instead of a generic demo request, we were able to generate leads at just $22 each, which was a fantastic result for that industry.

But what if you're not a SaaS company? You are not exempt from this rule. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, content, or asset that provides instant, tangible value. Here are some ideas:

• For a marketing agency: Don't offer a "free consultation." Offer a free, automated SEO audit that instantly shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities and where their competitors are beating them.
• For a data analytics platform: Don't offer a demo. Offer a free 'Data Health Check' where they can upload a small data sample and your tool flags the top 5 critical issues in their database.
• For a corporate training company: Don't offer a brochure. Offer a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' for new managers. Give them a genuine skill they can use immediately.
• For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy: We offer a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free. We solve a real problem and demonstrate our expertise, which is far more powerful than any sales pitch.

You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve their entire problem for a fee. This high-value, low-friction offer is the magnet that pulls your nightmare ICP out of the noise of LinkedIn. When people engage with this offer, they are telling you, "I have the problem you solve." This is the only audience you should be spending money to retarget. Anyone else is a waste of time and money.

You'll need to understand the numbers before you spend another penny...

Okay, this is where we seperate the amateurs from the professionals. The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but rather "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). If you don't know this number, you are flying blind and will always make decisions based on fear (i.e., trying to get the cheapest leads possible) instead of logic.

Cheap leads are almost always worthless leads. The £5 lead from a developing country is useless. The £250 lead from a CTO who downloaded your state-of-the-industry report and fits your nightmare ICP perfectly is a bargain. But you can only know that if you've done the maths.

Let's break it down. You need three metrics:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month on average?
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? Be honest. This is after all costs to service that customer.
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? (Calculate this as 1 / average customer lifetime in months).

Now, the simple calculation that should be on a whiteboard in your office:

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

Let's run an example. Say you're a SaaS business:

• ARPA = £500/month
• Gross Margin = 80% (0.80)
• Monthly Churn = 4% (0.04)

LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04
LTV = £400 / 0.04
LTV = £10,000

In this example, each customer you acquire is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This is your truth. This number sets you free from the tyranny of cheap leads.

Now, we can determine your target Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). A healthy, sustainable LTV:CAC ratio for a growing business is typically 3:1. This means you have enough margin to reinvest in growth and still be profitable. So:

Max Allowable CAC = LTV / 3 = £10,000 / 3 = £3,333

You can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single new customer. Let that sink in. Now, let's work backwards. If your sales process converts 1 in every 10 qualified leads into a paying customer (a 10% lead-to-customer rate), you can calculate your max allowable CPL:

Max Allowable CPL = Max CAC / 10 = £3,333 / 10 = £333

Suddenly, that £250 lead from a highly-targeted LinkedIn campaign doesn't look expensive at all, does it? It looks like an incredible bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent scaling. It allows you to confidently outbid your competitors who are still desperately trying to get their CPL below £50 because they haven't done this fundamental work.

Use the calculator below to find your own numbers. Play with the sliders. This is the most important ten minutes you will spend on your marketing strategy this year.

Finally, we can talk about structuring your retargeting properly...

Right, now that we've fixed your foundations—you know who you're targeting (by their nightmare), what you're offering them (a low-friction, high-value solution), and what you can afford to pay (based on LTV)—we can actually build a retargeting structure that works.

Forget just lumping all "website visitors" into one audience and hitting them with the same ad. That's lazy and ineffective. You need a tiered approach that mirrors a real sales conversation, escalating commitment and messaging based on how engaged the prospect is. We'll split this into three classic stages: Top-of-Funnel (ToFu), Middle-of-Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom-of-Funnel (BoFu).

Tier 1: ToFu (Top-of-Funnel) - The First Handshake

This isn't retargeting, this is your initial targeting. But it's crucial for what comes next.

• Audience: This is your cold audience, built from your "Nightmare ICP" research. On LinkedIn, this means layering targeting options: Job Title + Industry + Company Size + specific LinkedIn Group Memberships + maybe even followers of certain Company Pages (like competitors or complementary software). Be specific. An audience of 50,000 highly-relevant people is a million times better than an audience of 2,000,000 vaguely interested people.
• Campaign Objective: You MUST use a conversion objective. Do not use "Brand Awareness" or "Reach". You are telling LinkedIn's algorithm to find people within your target audience who are most likely to take a specific action.
• The 'Conversion': The conversion event here is a view of your landing page for your low-friction offer, or even better, the completion of that offer (e.g., submitting their email for the audit tool).
• Ad Message (The Hook): Your ad copy needs to speak directly to their nightmare. Use the Before-After-Bridge framework.
  • Before: Describe their current world of pain. "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out."
  • After: Paint a picture of the promised land. "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated."
  • Bridge: Introduce your offer as the way to get there. "Our free Cloud Cost Forecaster is the bridge that gets you there. In 60 seconds, find your top 3 hidden cost savings."

The sole job of this stage is to filter the massive pool of potential prospects down to a much smaller group of people who have raised their hand and said, "Yes, I have that problem." These are the people who now enter your retargeting funnel.

Tier 2: MoFu (Middle-of-Funnel) - Fanning the Flames

This is your first layer of actual retargeting. These people have shown interest but haven't yet committed to your main offer.

• Audience:
  • Website visitors from the last 30 days (excluding those who converted on your low-friction offer and those who visited your final sales/pricing pages).
  • People who watched 50%+ of your ToFu video ad in the last 30 days.
  • People who engaged with your Company Page in the last 30 days.
  You group these together to build an audience of sufficient size.
• Campaign Objective: Still a conversion objective, driving them back to your low-friction offer landing page.
• Ad Message (The Agitation): They've seen you once, but they got distracted. Your job now is to remind them of their pain and build trust. Use the Problem-Agitate-Solve framework.
  • Problem: State the nightmare again, maybe from a different angle. "Still manually reconciling invoices at the end of the month?"
  • Agitate: Pour salt on the wound. Make the problem feel more painful. "That's not just a waste of time. It's how errors slip through, leading to cash flow crises and stressful board meetings."
  • Solve: Re-introduce your low-friction offer as the painkiller. "Our 5-Minute Invoice Reconciliation Checklist helps you spot the top 3 errors fast. Get it free."
  This is also a great place to use different creative, like a customer testimonial video or a short case study graphic that proves you can deliver results.

Tier 3: BoFu (Bottom-of-Funnel) - The Ask

This is your most valuable audience. These people have engaged with your low-friction offer. They've received value from you. Now, and only now, have you earned the right to ask for their time.

• Audience: People who have converted on your low-friction offer in the last 90 days (e.g., downloaded the checklist, used the calculator). You definately want to exclude anyone who has already booked a call or become a customer.
• Campaign Objective: Lead Generation or Website Conversions, optimised for booking a sales call/demo.
• Ad Message (The Logical Next Step): The tone shifts here from education to invitation. They know they have the problem, and they know you have a solution. The message should be direct, confident, and focused on the outcome of a conversation.

  "Glad you found the Invoice Reconciliation Checklist helpful. That checklist solves the symptom. On a 20-minute call, we can show you how to eliminate the root cause of the problem for good. We'll build you a custom roadmap to automate 80% of your AP process. Book a time that suits you."

  This is where you finally send them to your "Request a Demo" or "Book a Call" page. By waiting until this stage, the conversion rate on that page will be exponentially higher than it was when you were sending cold traffic to it. You've earned the click.

This tiered structure ensures you're having the right conversation with the right person at the right time. It's more work to set up than a single, lazy retargeting campaign, but it's the only way to build a predictable and scalable lead generation machine on LinkedIn.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This is a lot to take in, I know. But fixing your LinkedIn ads isn't about finding a magic button in the campaign manager. It's about getting the fundamental strategy right. Below is a table that breaks down the exact steps you need to take, in order.

Following this process transforms your advertising from a cost centre into a predictable, scalable growth engine. Each step builds on the last. Skipping the first few steps is why your retargeting isn't working now. It's not about the buttons you press in LinkedIn Ads Manager; it's about the thinking you do before you even log in.

As you can probably tell, this is a complex and time-consuming process. It requires deep strategic thinking, copywriting skills, financial analysis, and technical campaign management expertise. Getting it right can change the trajectory of your business. Getting it wrong can be a very expensive way to learn a hard lesson. I remember one client we worked with had their Cost Per Lead reduced by 84% on LinkedIn simply by restructuring their campaigns and offer along these exact lines.

If you'd like to walk through how these principles could be applied specifically to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can take a look at your current setup and give you some actionable advice you can implement straight away. It’s a chance for us to demonstrate our expertise and for you to get some valuable, unbiased feedback.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh