TLDR;
- Your campaign objective is likely the main culprit. Optmising for 'Traffic' or 'Views' tells Meta to find the cheapest clicks, not quality visitors who will actually engage or buy.
- Broad targeting is probably hurting you. Without a huge amount of existing conversion data, you need to be way more specific, focusing on the deep-seated 'nightmare' problems your ideal customer faces, not just their demographics.
- The problem is almost certainly a mix of your objective, targeting, AND your offer. A 1-3 second visit time signals a massive disconnect between what your ad promises and what your landing page delivers.
- This letter contains a full breakdown of how to fix this, including a step-by-step audience targeting framework, how to calculate what you can truly afford to pay for a lead using our LTV calculator, and an interactive tool to gauge the strength of your offer.
- The most important piece of advice is to stop focusing on cheap clicks and start building a system that attracts high-intent customers by aligning your campaign objective with a hyper-relevant audience and an irresistible offer.
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out! I've had a look over the issue you're facing with your Meta Ads, and it's a frustratingly common problem. You're getting clicks, the numbers are going up, but nothing is actually happening on your site. It feels like you're just burning cash for ghost visitors.
The good news is that this is almost always fixable. The bad news, and I'll be blunt here, is that the root cause is a fundamental mismatch between what you're asking the Meta algorithm to do, who you're asking it to target, and what you're offering them when they arrive. You mentioned you don't think it's a page/content issue, but a 1-3 second visit time is a blaring siren that it's part of the problem. It's not one thing, it's the whole chain that's broken. I'll walk you through how we'd typically diagnose and sort this out.
We'll need to look at your campaign objective first... you might be paying for the worst possible audience
Here is the uncomfortable truth about platforms like Meta. When you set your campaign objective to "Traffic," "Reach," or "Video Views," you are giving the algorithm a very specific, literal command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price who will perform this one action."
The algorithm, in its infinite wisdom, does exactly what you asked. It's brilliant at it. It seeks out the users inside your targeting who are conditioned to click on anything shiny, who absent-mindedly watch videos, but who are least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever pull out a credit card. Why? Because those users are not in demand by serious advertisers. Their attention is cheap. By choosing these objectives, you are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product. It’s a false economy. You get what you pay for, and in this case, you're paying for fleeting, worthless glances.
The best form of brand awareness for most businesses isn't getting a million impressions; it's a competitor's customer switching to your product and raving about it. That only happens through conversion. Awareness is a byproduct of having a great product that solves a real problem, not a prerequisite for making a sale. That is why, to find visitors that will actually stay, engage, and buy, you should almost always switch your campaign to optimise for a conversion objective, like Leads, Sales, or Appointments. You need to tell Meta to find people who do the thing that actually makes you money, even if the cost per click is higher. A £2 click that converts is infinitely better than ten £0.20 clicks that bounce instantly.
I've seen this time and time again. I remember one client, a medical job matching platform, who was struggling with a £100 cost per user acquisition. By restructuring their campaigns on Meta and Google Ads to focus purely on high-intent conversion events, we brought that cost down to just £7. It's about quality, not quantity.
This flow chart below illustrates the trap you're currently in. You're stuck in the "Low-Intent Cycle," and you need to shift to the "High-Intent Path."
Low-Intent Cycle (Your Current Path)
Objective: Traffic/Views
You ask Meta for cheap clicks.
Algorithm's Action
Finds users known for clicking but not converting.
Resulting Traffic
Low-quality, disengaged users, accidental clicks.
Outcome
High bounce rate (1-3 sec visits), no conversions, wasted ad spend.
High-Intent Path (Where You Need to Be)
Objective: Conversions
You ask Meta for leads/sales.
Algorithm's Action
Finds users who have a history of converting for similar offers.
Resulting Traffic
Higher-quality, problem-aware users looking for a solution.
Outcome
Lower bounce rate, actual engagement, leads and sales.
I'd say you need to define your customer by their nightmare, not their demographic
You mentioned you "don’t apply super detailed targeting." This is the second major peice of the puzzle. Unless your Meta pixel has thousands of conversions and you're spending a huge budget, going broad is like trying to catch a specific fish by throwing a stick of dynamite in the ocean. You'll make a lot of noise, stun a few minnows, but you won't catch what you're after.
Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire made. "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" or "Women aged 25-40 who like yoga" tells you almost nothing of value. It leads to generic ads that speak to no one and attract the kind of low-intent clicks you're seeing. To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their **pain**.
You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your ideal customer isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of her best developers quitting out of frustration with a broken workflow. Your customer isn't 'someone who needs accounting software'; it's 'a founder who just wasted their weekend chasing reciepts and is terrified they'll mess up their VAT return.' Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state.
Once you've isolated that nightmare, everything changes. Your targeting becomes clear. You don't target 'finance sector'; you target people who are members of 'CFO corner' groups, who follow specific financial influencers, who have job titles like 'Financial Controller' AND an interest in SaaS tools like Xero or QuickBooks. You layer these interests to create a much more precise picture of the person you want to reach. This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. You have to do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads.
You probably should follow a clear audience structure...
Once you know who you're targeting, you can't just throw all your interests into one ad set and hope for the best. You need a structure. A lot of people I see just test random audiences that don't align with their objectives. The way we structure things is by thinking about the funnel. The further along in the funnel an audience is (or a lookalike of them), the better it will usually perform.
Here’s the priority list I'd typically use. Start at the top and work your way down as you gather more data.
| Funnel Stage | Audience Type | Specific Audiences (In Order of Priority) | When to Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| ToFu (Top of Funnel - Cold) | Prospecting | 1. Detailed Targeting (Interests, Behaviours based on ICP 'Nightmare') 2. Lookalikes of High-Value Customers (once you have data) 3. Lookalikes of Purchasers/Leads 4. Broad Targeting (only with a very mature pixel) |
To find new people who have never heard of you. Start here for any new account. |
| MoFu (Middle of Funnel - Warm) | Engagement Retargeting | 1. Video Viewers (50%+) 2. Social Media Page Engagers 3. Website Visitors (excluding purchasers) |
To re-engage people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a key action yet. |
| BoFu (Bottom of Funnel - Hot) | Conversion Retargeting | 1. Added Payment Info 2. Initiated Checkout / Filled out partial form 3. Added to Cart 4. Viewed specific high-intent pages |
To close the deal with people who are on the verge of converting. This is often your highest ROAS audience. |
| Post-Purchase | Customer Retention | 1. Previous Customers (for upsells/cross-sells) 2. Highest Value Previous Customers (for new premium offers) |
To increase the lifetime value of your existing customer base. |
For a new account, you start at ToFu with detailed targeting. You absolutely have to make sure you pick interests that are specific to your target audience. I remember one eCom client selling women's apparel whose initial broad targeting was delivering poor results. By focusing on more specific audiences, we helped them achieve a 691% return on ad spend across their Meta and Pinterest Ads campaigns. Specificity is everything.
As soon as you have enough data (at least 100 conversions, but ideally more), you build your BoFu and MoFu retargeting audiences. Then you create Lookalike audiences based on your best customers. Test, test, test. Turn off what doesn't work. Double down on what does. It's a process, not a lottery ticket.
You'll need to fix your offer... this is non-negotiable
This brings me back to the point you were sure wasn't the issue. A 1-3 second visit time isn't just a sign of bad traffic; it's a sign of a catastrophic disconnect between your ad and your landing page. Think of it as 'ad scent'. Your ad makes a promise, it creates an expectation. If the landing page doesn't instantly confirm that promise and show the visitor they're in the right place, they are gone. A single click is all it takes to leave.
Now we arrive at the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer itself. The "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. A generic "Download our eBook" can feel just as weak if the value isn't immediately obvious and overwhelming. 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.
Your ad needs to speak directly to the problems of your ideal customers. Let's imagine you sell fractional CFO services. Your ad shouldn't say "Expert Financial Services." It should 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." The landing page then needs to echo this exact language and immediately offer something of value, like a free 'Cash Flow Health Check' tool, not just a contact form.
You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing. For us, it's a free strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns. For you, it could be a calculator, a short video course, an automated audit tool. Something that provides instant value and demonstrates your expertise without demanding a sales call. This simple change can be the difference between a 1% conversion rate and a 10% conversion rate.
Use the simple calculator below to think about your current offers. Be honest. How much friction is involved for the user, and how much immediate value do they recieve? You'll see how quickly a high-friction, low-value offer kills your potential.
We'll need to look at the numbers that actually matter...
This all leads to a much more important question. The real question isn't "Why is my bounce rate high?" but "How high a cost-per-lead can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Lifetime Value (LTV).
If you don't know this number, you are flying blind. You're optimising for vanity metrics like clicks and impressions instead of profit. Let's run through a quick, simplified example. You need three peices of information:
- Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month/year?
- 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 your ARPA is £500, your margin is 80%, and your churn is 4%. That means your LTV is (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04 = £10,000. In this example, each customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. Now you have the truth.
With a £10,000 LTV, a healthy 3:1 LTV:CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio 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 now afford to pay up to £333 per qualified lead. Suddenly, that "expensive" lead from a hyper-targeted LinkedIn or Meta campaign doesn't seem so bad, does it? It looks like a bargain compared to the thousands of cheap, bouncing clicks you're getting now. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of cheap clicks.
Play around with the calculator below with your own numbers. It should give you a much clearer picture of what you can actually afford to spend to get a proper customer, not just a click.
You'll need a concrete plan of action...
Alright, that was a lot to take in. The key thing to relaise is that your problem isn't just "bad traffic". It's a systemic issue across your whole advertising approach. Fixing it requires a methodical, step-by-step process. You can't just tweak one thing and expect a miracle.
I've detailed my main recommendations for you below in a table that you can use as a checklist. This is the exact process we'd follow to turn your campaigns around from cash-burners into profitable growth engines.
| Phase | Action Item | Why It's a Priority | Your First Move Today |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Foundational Fix | Switch to Conversion Objective. Pause all 'Traffic' and 'Engagement' campaigns. Duplicate your best performing campaign and change the objective to 'Conversions' (or 'Leads'). | This is the most critical step. It changes the instruction you give Meta from "find cheap clickers" to "find people likely to become a lead/customer." | Log into Ads Manager, select a 'Traffic' campaign, click 'Duplicate', and in the new campaign settings, change the objective to 'Leads'. Set the conversion event to a form submission on your website. |
| 2. Audience Overhaul | Define ICP by Pain. Brainstorm 5-10 specific, urgent "nightmares" your ideal customer has. Then find interests, behaviours, or job titles that map to those pains. | Generic targeting gets generic, low-intent traffic. Targeting by pain ensures your ad resonates deeply with a smaller, more motivated audience. | Take a piece of paper. Write "My customer's biggest work-related fear is..." and complete the sentence 5 times. Use those answers to search for interests in Ads Manager. |
| 3. Offer Redesign | Create a Low-Friction, High-Value Offer. Stop asking for a demo or a call upfront. Build a simple, valuable asset (checklist, calculator, short video training) they can get instantly in exchange for an email. | It fixes the "ad scent" problem by delivering on the promise of help immediately. This builds trust and qualifies leads far better than a contact form. | Outline a 5-point PDF checklist that solves one small part of your customer's "nightmare". Create a new landing page offering it for free. |
| 4. Measurement & Scaling | Calculate Your LTV and Target CPL. Use the calculator in this letter to get a real number. This becomes your North Star metric for all ad spend decisions. | This stops you from optimising for the wrong things (like cheap clicks). It gives you permission to spend what's necessary to acquire a valuable customer profitably. | Gather your ARPA, Gross Margin, and Churn Rate. Plug them into the calculator and write down your Max Target CPL. This is your new budget limit per lead. |
| 5. Implementation | Launch & Test Methodically. Create separate campaigns for ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu. Start with your new pain-point audiences at ToFu. Run them for a few days until you have enough data, then make decisions. | A structured approach allows you to clearly see what's working and what isn't, so you can scale winners and cut losers without guesswork. | Build one new 'Leads' campaign targeting just one of your new pain-point audiences, sending traffic to your new high-value offer landing page. Set a small daily budget and launch it. |
As you can see, this isn't just about flicking a few switches in Ads Manager. It's about fundamentally rethinking your approach to paid advertising, from strategy and maths right through to the psychology of your customer. It takes a lot of work, expertise, and persistance to get right.
Running this process effectively—constantly testing creatives, refining audiences, analysing data, and making smart decisions—is a full-time job. It’s what we do all day, every day. We’ve managed campaigns for dozens of businesses, from SaaS startups to established eCommerce brands, and the principles are always the same: get the foundations right, and you can scale predictabley.
If you'd like to have a chat and go through your ad account together, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can take a direct look at your campaigns, your targeting, and your landing pages and give you some more specific, actionable advice based on what we see. It’s a great way to get a second pair of expert eyes on your setup and a clear path forward.
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
