Solved: Low UK Google Ads CVR (The Nightmare-Based Fix)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts on your Google Ads performance in the UK. It’s a common problem, seeing a lower conversion rate than you’d like and struggling to make the ROAS figures work. But honestly, from my experience, when campaigns aren't converting, the problem is rarely just the ads themselves. It's usually a symptom of a deeper issue in the strategy.

You're right to focus on improving your return, but looking only at the Google Ads platform is like a doctor only looking at a patient's little finger when they've come in with a headache. The real issue often lies in what happens before and after the click. We need to look at the entire system, from who you're targeting, what you're saying to them, and what you're asking them to do. Let's get into it.

We'll need to look beyond the ads...

First things first. When you say your conversion rate is low, what you're really saying is that somewhere between someone seeing your ad and them becoming a customer, there's a massive leak. Pouring more money into ads is like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it by turning the tap on full blast. It's expensive and it doesn't fix the fundamental problem. We need to find the hole.

Think about the journey your potential customer takes. It looks something like this:

1. They have a problem and search for a solution on Google.
2. They see a bunch of ads, including yours (Impressions).
3. Something about your ad catches their eye, so they click it (Clicks).
4. They land on your website (Landing Page Views).
5. They read your page and decide to take the action you want them to (Conversions).

A "low conversion rate" can be caused by a failure at any stage. You need to look at your metrics to diagnose where the biggest drop-off is happening. For example:

• Lots of Impressions, but low Click-Through Rate (CTR)? This points to a problem with your ad itself. Either your ad copy isn't compelling, you're targeting the wrong keywords (meaning you're showing up for irrelevant searches), or your offer isn't appealing to the people who see it. Your message isn't resonating with the searcher's intent.
• Good CTR, but people leave your website immediately (high bounce rate)? This is a classic sign of a disconnect. The promise you made in your ad doesn't match the reality of your landing page. Maybe the ad promised an "easy solution" but the landing page is a wall of confusing technical text. Or maybe your website is just slow, poorly designed, and untrustworthy. I've seen countless campaigns fail because the landing page looked like it was built in 1999.
• People spend time on your site, but don't convert? This is where it gets interesting. They've clicked, they've landed, they're reading... but they're not taking the final step. This is almost always an issue with your offer. You're asking for too much, too soon. The value exchange isn't clear, or the risk for them feels too high.

The journey is a funnel, and at each stage, you lose people. The trick is to plug the biggest leaks first. The visualisation below shows this process. Most businesses focus all their energy on the top of the funnel—the ad—without realising the real money is lost further down.

I'd say your Ideal Customer Profile is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic...

This leads us to the most fundamental part of any advertising campaign, and the bit most people get disastrously wrong. Who are you actually trying to sell to? If your answer is something like "Small businesses in the UK with 10-50 employees," then you've already lost. That's a demographic, not a customer. It tells you nothing about their needs, their fears, or their motivations.

To stop burning cash on ads that speak to everyone and therefore no one, you have to define your customer by their pain. More specifically, you need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Let's make this real. Imagine you sell project management software. A demographic approach would target "Marketing Managers in London." A nightmare-based approach targets the Marketing Manager who just had a disastrous product launch because the design team missed a deadline they never knew about, and now her boss is questioning her ability to manage her team. She isn't looking for "project management software"; she's desperately searching for "how to stop projects going off the rails" or "tool to improve team communication." Your ads and your website need to speak directly to *that* nightmare, not to the generic job title.

For a B2B SaaS product, the nightmare isn't 'needing better data analytics'; it's 'the CEO asking for a report on last quarter's performance in the board meeting and you have no idea how to get the data, making you look incompetent.' See the difference? One is a feature, the other is a visceral, emotional problem. People buy solutions to their nightmares.

How do you find this nightmare? You talk to people. Read online reviews of your competitors (especially the one-star ones). What are people complaining about? What problems keep coming up? Read forums in your niche. Listen to the language your actual customers use when they describe their problems. This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire targeting and messaging strategy. If you haven't done this work, you have no business spending another pound on Google Ads.

You probably should rethink your offer...

Once you know who you're talking to and what their nightmare is, you have to present them with an offer they can't refuse. And I can tell you right now, for most B2B companies, that offer is NOT "Request a Demo." This is probably the most common and catastrophic failure point in the entire funnel.

The "Request a Demo" button is an incredibly arrogant Call to Action. It presumes that your prospect, a busy decision-maker whose nightmare you're supposed to be solving, has nothing better to do than schedule a 30-minute meeting to be sold to by one of your reps. It's high-friction, it provides zero immediate value, and it instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor clamouring for their attention. It's a huge ask, and it's why your conversion rates are probably so low.

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 have to solve a small, real piece of their problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing for money.

What does this look like in practice?

• For a SaaS company: The gold standard is a free trial with no credit card required. Let them use the actual product. Let them experience the transformation from their "before" state (the nightmare) to the "after" state (relief and success). When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You're no longer chasing "Marketing Qualified Leads" (MQLs); you're generating "Product Qualified Leads" (PQLs) who are already convinced.
• For a service business or agency: You're not exempt. You have to bottle your expertise into something that provides instant value. For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated website audit that uncovers their top 3 SEO opportunities. For a data analytics consultancy, it could be a 'Data Health Check' that finds the biggest issues in their database. For us, as a paid ads consultancy, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns and give actionable advice. The principle is the same: give value first.
• For a high-ticket product: Offer a detailed buyer's guide, a case study that breaks down the exact ROI a similar company achieved, or an interactive calculator that helps them quantify the cost of their current problem.

You need to lower the barrier to entry so much that it feels like a no-brainer for them to engage. Stop asking for their time and start giving them value. This single shift in thinking can have a more dramatic impact on your conversion rate than any amount of tweaking keywords or ad copy.

You'll need to get your messaging right...

Okay, so now you know their nightmare and you have a low-friction, high-value offer. The final piece of the puzzle before the click is the ad copy itself. Your ad needs to grab them by the collar and say, "I understand your exact problem, and I have the solution."

Generic, feature-led copy doesn't work. No one cares that your software "leverages AI-powered synergy." They care about what it does for *them*. Two powerful frameworks I use constantly are Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) and Before-After-Bridge (BAB).

Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS):

1. Problem: State their nightmare directly. Hit the nerve.
2. Agitate: Pour salt on the wound. Remind them of the consequences of not solving the problem. What happens if they do nothing?
3. Solve: Introduce your high-value offer as the clear, simple solution.

For a fractional CFO service, instead of "Expert Financial Strategy," you'd write:

• (P) "Are your cash flow projections just a wild guess?"
• (A) "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round of funding?"
• (S) "Get a clear financial roadmap for a fraction of a full-time hire. Download our free Cash Flow Projection template to see where you stand."

Before-After-Bridge (BAB):

1. Before: Describe their current world—the world of their nightmare.
2. After: Paint a picture of the world once their problem is solved. What does it look and feel like?
3. Bridge: Position your offer as the bridge that gets them from Before to After.

For a B2B SaaS product that monitors cloud spend, instead of "Manage Your Cloud Costs," you'd write:

• (Before) "Your AWS bill just landed. It's 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out."
• (After) "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see exactly where every pound is going, and waste is automatically eliminated."
• (Bridge) "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

This kind of messaging works because it's rooted in emotion and transformation, not just features. It connects your solution directly to their pain, which is the only thing they truly care about. People buy from people, not from faceless corporations with perfect grammar.

We'll need to calculate what you can actually afford to spend...

This is where we get to the heart of your ROAS problem. Most businesses are obsessed with lowering their Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) as much as possible. They see a £50 lead and panic. But this is completely the wrong way to think about 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 a metric that surprisingly few businesses track properly: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Your LTV tells you the total amount of profit you can expect to make from an average customer over the entire duration of your relationship. Once you know this number, everything changes.

Here’s how you calculate it (a simplified version for a subscription business):

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average amount a customer pays you each month? Let's say it's £200.

2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for the cost of goods sold (COGS) or cost of service? Let's say it's 75%.

3. Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of your customers cancel their subscription each month? Let's say it's 5%.

Now, the calculation is simple:

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

In our example: LTV = (£200 * 0.75) / 0.05 LTV = £150 / 0.05 LTV = £3,000

In this scenario, each new customer you acquire is worth £3,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. Now, a healthy rule of thumb for sustainable growth is a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to a third of your LTV to acquire a customer. In this case, that's £1,000.

Suddenly, that £50 lead doesn't seem so expensive, does it? If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £100 per lead and still be wildly profitable. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads from broad, untargeted campaigns and allows you to focus on acquiring high-value customers who are a perfect fit for your business, even if they cost more upfront.

Use the calculator below to get a feel for your own numbers. This simple exercise can completely reframe your entire advertising strategy.

I'd say you need to fix your campaign structure...

Finally, let's talk about the ads themselves. Armed with a deep understanding of your customer's nightmare, a high-value offer, compelling messaging, and a clear grasp of your unit economics, you can now build Google Ads campaigns that actually work. The key here is intent.

Google Search is powerful because you can capture people at the precise moment they are looking for a solution. But not all searches are created equal. You must structure your campaigns to focus on keywords that signal high commercial intent, rather than broad, informational queries.

Think about it like this. Someone searching for "what is project management" is just kicking tyres. They are in research mode. Showing them an ad for your software is probably a waste of money. But someone searching for "best project management software for small agencies UK" is much further down the buying funnel. They know they have a problem and are actively evaluating solutions. This is a high-intent keyword, and it's where you should be focusing your budget.

You need to "pre-qualify" your audience through your keyword selection. Target keywords that express a specific user need that you solve. For example, if you sell accounting software, bidding on the broad keyword "accounting" is a recipe for disaster. You'll get clicks from students, people looking for jobs, and people searching for free information. But bidding on "Xero alternative for construction companies" is laser-focused. The user has pre-qualified themselves as knowing the market (Xero), having a specific need (for construction), and actively looking for an alternative (you).

This is also why running campaigns with an "awareness" or "reach" objective is often a terrible idea for businesses that need to see a return. Just like on Meta, telling the algorithm to "find me the most people for the cheapest price" means Google will show your ads to the users least likely to take any meaningful action, because their attention is cheap. You need to tell the algorithm what you actually want by setting your campaign to optimise for conversions, like leads or sales. This signals to Google to find users who exhibit behaviours similar to people who have converted in the past.

The chart below illustrates this spectrum of intent. Your goal should be to concentrate your ad spend on the right-hand side of this spectrum, where the users are closest to making a purchasing decision. It's better to get 10 clicks from highly-qualified, high-intent searchers than 100 clicks from curious researchers.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know that's a lot to take in. The core message is that fixing your Google Ads conversion rate requires a holistic approach. It’s not about finding one "magic" keyword or ad copy trick. It's about building a coherent system where your targeting, messaging, offer, and business goals are all perfectly aligned. To make it more actionable, I've broken down my main recommendations for you in the table below.

Working through these steps methodically will transform your advertising performance. It shifts the focus from just "running ads" to building a predictable engine for acquiring high-value customers. It's not easy, and it requires a deep dive into your business that goes far beyond the Google Ads interface.

This is precisely where expert help can make a significant difference. I remember one client, a medical job matching platform, came to us with a similar problem. Their cost to acquire a new user on Google Ads was over £100, which was completely unsustainable. By taking this holistic approach—redefining their audience, sharpening their offer, and restructuring their campaigns around high-intent keywords—we were able to bring that cost down to just £7 per user. Getting an outside perspective from someone who has seen these patterns across hundreds of accounts can quickly identify the biggest leaks in your funnel and implement the strategies needed to fix them. It's about applying a proven framework rather than guessing and wasting money.

If you'd like to go through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy consultation. We can take a look at your current campaigns and landing pages together and I can give you some more tailored advice on what your biggest opportunities for improvement are. It's a great way to get some immediate clarity and a clear plan of action.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh