Solved: LinkedIn Ads Not Working in Copenhagen? (Data Inside)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I've had a look at your situation with your LinkedIn ads in Copenhagen. It's a common story, and honestly, the issue is rarely just about the ad settings or the location. It's usually a bit deeper than that. When campaigns underperform, especially on an expensive platform like LinkedIn, it’s almost always a symptom of a disconnect in your core strategy—your audience, your offer, or your message.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a framework for how I'd approach an 'audit'. Instead of just looking at your click-through rates, we need to pull back and look at the whole picture. Let's get into it.

We'll need to look at your ICP... it's a nightmare, not a demographic

Right, let's be brutally honest. If your targeting approach starts and ends with "businesses in Copenhagen," you've already lost. That's not a strategy; it's just pointing a very expensive ad platform at a map. Forget the sterile, demographic-based profiles for a minute. "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" tells you absolutely nothing of value and leads to generic, boring ads that speak to no one.

To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their pain. Their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Think about it. Your Head of Engineering client isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of her best developers quitting out of frustration with a broken workflow. For a legal tech SaaS, the nightmare isn't 'needing document management'; it's 'a partner missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the firm to a malpractice suit.' That's the stuff that gets them searching for a solution at 10 pm on a Tuesday.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, your entire approach to targeting changes. You can find the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute, like 'Acquired'; the industry newsletters they actually open, like 'Stratechery'; the specific SaaS tools they already pay for, like HubSpot or Salesforce. Are they members of the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Do they follow people like Jason Lemkin on Twitter? This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy on LinkedIn. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads. It's a foundational step that most people skip, and it's probably a big reason your ads aren't performing.

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

Now we get to the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. I'd bet my house that your main call to action is something like "Request a Demo" or "Contact Us". The "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do than book a 30-minute slot in their diary to be sold to. It's incredibly high-friction, offers zero immediate value, and instantly positions you as just another commoditised vendor fighting 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 must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

What does that look like in practice?

• If you're a SaaS company: The gold standard is a free trial (with no card details needed) or a freemium plan. Let them actually use the product. Let them feel the transformation. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You aren't 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 a service business: You are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, content, or asset that provides instant value. For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated SEO audit that shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities. For a data analytics platform, it could be a free 'Data Health Check' that flags the top issues in their database. For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free. We give away real value up front.

Your current offer is a gate. You need to build a bridge instead. A great offer makes expensive LinkedIn clicks worthwhile because the conversion rate skyrockets. A bad offer makes even cheap clicks a total waste of money. This is likely another major reason for your poor ROI.

You'll need to master the maths of growth

This brings me to the next point. You're worried about ROI, but how are you even measuring it? Most businesses I talk to have a vague idea of what a lead 'should' cost, but they've never done the actual maths. The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead 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).

Without knowing your LTV, you're flying blind. You're making decisions based on gut feel, not data. Let's run through a quick example. You need three bits of info:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month? Let's say it's £500.
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? Let's say it's a healthy 80%.
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? Let's say it's 4%.

Now, the calculation is simple:

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

LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04

LTV = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000

In this scenerio, each customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This number changes everything. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is typically 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer and still run a very profitable business. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £333 per qualified lead.

Suddenly, that £150 lead from a CTO on LinkedIn doesn't seem expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of cheap, low-quality leads. Before you spend another krona in Copenhagen, you need to work this out.

You probably should create a message they can't ignore

Once you know who you're talking to (their nightmare) and what you're offering them (a high-value, low-friction solution), you need to write ad copy that actually connects. Generic, feature-led copy is the default for most B2B ads, and it's why they get scrolled past. Your ad needs to grab them by the collar and say, "I understand your exact problem."

There are a few simple frameworks that work wonders:

• Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS): Perfect for high-touch service businesses. You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep. Your ad would say, "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark? Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round? Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."
• Before-After-Bridge (BAB): Ideal for a B2B SaaS product. You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of relief. Your ad would say, "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out. Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated. Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

Notice how none of these ads lead with features. They lead with the customer's pain. They show empathy and then present the solution. This is how you stop the scroll on a crowded feed like LinkedIn. People don't buy products; they buy better versions of themselves, and your copy needs to reflect that transformation.

You'll need a proper LinkedIn Ads strategy

Okay, now that we've fixed the foundations—your ICP, your offer, and your message—we can finally talk about the LinkedIn platform itself. With the right strategy in place, LinkedIn's targeting capabilities are incredibly powerful, but you have to use them with precision.

Targeting with Precision

Based on your 'nightmare ICP' work, you can now build highly specific audiences. Don't just target by industry. Layer it. For example, if you're targeting that Head of Engineering who's worried about developer churn:

• Job Titles: Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering, CTO, Engineering Manager.
• Company Size: 50-200 employees (where this problem is often most acute).
• Industries: Software, IT Services, Financial Services.
• AND Member of Groups: 'LeadDev', 'Software Architecture Group', etc.
• AND Skills: 'Agile Methodologies', 'Scrum', 'Software Development'.

You can also upload a list of target companies you'd love to work with and target the decision-makers there directly. The goal is a narrow, highly relevant audience, not a broad one. It's better to reach 5,000 of the right people than 50,000 of the wrong ones.

Campaign Objectives and Ad Formats

Your campaign objective should align with your business goal. If you need leads, use the "Lead Generation" objective. From there, you have two main choices:

• LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms: These are pop-up forms that pre-fill with a user's profile data. They are very low-friction and tend to generate a higher volume of leads at a lower cost. The downside? The lead quality can be lower because it's so easy to submit. You'll need a solid follow-up process to qualify them.
• Website Landing Page: This sends users to a dedicated page on your site. The cost per lead will almost certainly be higher, but the leads you get will be more qualified because they've had to make a greater effort and have seen more of your messaging.

Which one is better? I'd test both. I usually run sponsored content campaigns for lead generation, testing image and video ads against both Lead Gen Forms and a dedicated landing page to see which delivers the best balance of cost and quality. Speaking of which, one campaign we worked on for a B2B software client targeting decision-makers achieved a Cost Per Lead of just $22 using these exact principles. It is possible when the strategy is sound.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To pull all this together, here’s a summary of what a proper audit and strategic overhaul would look like. This is the main advice I have for you to implement.

As you can see, a proper 'audit' goes way beyond just looking at your campaign settings. It's about stress-testing every part of your customer acquisition funnel. Fixing these foundational issues is what will ultimately improve your return on investment, not just tweaking a few bids and budgets in Copenhagen.

Getting this right takes expertise and a lot of testing. It's a process of building a solid strategic foundation and then methodically testing your assumptions on the platform. Many businesses waste tens of thousands trying to figure this out through trial and error. Working with someone who has done this many times before can shortcut that expensive learning curve significantly.

We offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can go through your ad account together and apply some of these principles directly to your campaigns. It could be a really helpful next step for you.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh