Solved: Poor Ad Performance in Athens (The Real Reason)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I had a look over your question about struggling with top of funnel advertising in Athens. It's a really common problem, and honestly, most of the standard advice you'll read online about "building brand awareness" is why people end up burning through their budget with very little to show for it. You're right to focus on the lack of qualified leads, thats the real metric that matters.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on how we approach this. The short answer is you need to stop thinking about 'awareness' as the goal and start thinking about 'customer acquisition' from the very first ad someone sees. It's a mindset shift that changes everything. Below I've outlined the exact strategy we use to build top of funnel campaigns that actually generate leads and sales, not just empty clicks and impressions.

I'd say you need to forget 'brand awareness' for a bit...

This is probably the most common mistake I see. Buisnesses are told they need to 'build their brand' and 'increase awareness', so they go onto Facebook or Instagram, select the "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" campaign objective, and set a budget. It feels productive because the numbers look great—you'll reach thousands of people in Athens for a few euros. But here's the uncomfortable truth you need to hear: you're actively paying the platform to find you the worst possible audience.

When you tell Meta's algorithm to "find me the most people for the cheapest price", it does exactly that. It goes out and finds the users in your targeting pool who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever buy anything. Why? Because these users aren't in demand. No other advertiser is bidding for them because they don't convert. Their attention is cheap. So you get what you pay for: cheap, low-quality impressions on people who will scroll right past your ad without a second thought.

True brand awareness, especially for a smaller business, isn't a pre-requisite for a sale; it's a byproduct of making sales. People become aware of your brand when their friend uses your service and raves about it, or when they see a case study of how you helped a similar company. Awareness comes from demonstrating value and solving problems, not from shouting into the void with reach campaigns.

So, the very first change you need to make is to switch all of your top-of-funnel campaigns to a conversion objective. Whether it's 'Leads' or 'Sales', you need to tell the algorithm "go find me people who are likely to take this specific, valuable action". It will be more expensive on a per-impression basis, but you'll be fishing in a pond full of potential customers instead of a sea of indifferent scrollers. This single change is probably the biggest lever you can pull right now to start seeing more qualified leads coming through.

We'll need to look at who you're actually trying to reach...

Your post mentions reaching "new customers in Athens." This is a good start, but it's far too broad to be effective. The key to powerful advertising isn't just about location; it's about psychographics and, more importantly, pain. You need to stop thinking about your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) as a demographic and start thinking of them as a person living through a specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare.

Forget sterile descriptions like "small business owners aged 30-50 in Athens." That tells you nothing useful and leads to generic ads that speak to no one. Instead, you need to become an expert in their problem. What keeps them awake at 3 AM? What's the one thing in their business that, if it went wrong, could be a career-threatening disaster? Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Let's make this practical.

• If you sell accounting software for freelancers (B2B), your ICP isn't "freelancers in Greece." The nightmare is "staring at a shoebox full of receipts the week before the tax deadline, terrified of a massive fine." Your customer is in a state of chaos and anxiety.
• If you're a high-end personal trainer (B2C), your ICP isn't "affluent men in Kolonaki." The nightmare is "a successful 45-year-old executive who just got a scary health report from his doctor and realised all the money in the world can't buy back his health if he doesn't act now." Your customer is facing their own mortality.
• If you're a marketing agency (B2B), your ICP isn't "eCommerce stores with 10+ employees." The nightmare is "the founder seeing her sales plateau for the third month in a row, watching competitor stores grow, and feeling the crushing weight of her team's salaries on her shoulders." Your customer is feeling the pressure of potential failure.

Once you've defined this nightmare with brutal clarity, your targeting and ad copy write themselves. You're no longer targeting "business owners"; you're targeting people who have shown interest in "tax software" AND are admins of Facebook Business Pages. You're no longer creating an ad that says "Get Fit With Us"; you're writing an ad that says, "That doctor's appointment was a wake-up call. Here's a 3-step plan for busy executives to reclaim their health."

This deep understanding of their pain is the blueprint for your entire strategy. Do this work first, or you'll continue to burn money on ads that are fundamentally irrelevant to the people you're trying to help.

You probably should rethink what you're offering them...

This brings us to the most common failure point in all of advertising: the offer. Even with the right campaign objective and the perfect audience, your ads will fail if what you're asking them to do is wrong. The "Contact Us for a Quote" or "Request a Demo" button is probably the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, who is busy and sceptical, has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It's a high-friction, low-value request that immediately positions you as just another commodity vendor.

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. The lead is the byproduct of you providing value upfront.

So, what does a good offer look like?

• For a SaaS Company: A no-credit-card-required free trial or a genuinely useful freemium plan. Let them use the actual product and feel the transformation. A Product Qualified Lead (PQL) who has already experienced value is infinitely better than a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) who just downloaded a PDF. I remember one campaign for a medical job matching SaaS client where we managed to reduce their Cost Per User Acquisition from £100 down to just £7. A powerful, frictionless offer is often a critical part of achieving such drastic improvements.
• For a Service Business (like an agency or consultancy): You must bottle your expertise into an asset. This could be a free, automated website audit that identifies their top 3 SEO issues. For a financial advisor, it could be a 'Retirement Readiness Calculator'. For us, as a B2B ad consultancy, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns. We give away our best advice for free, which proves our expertise far more than any sales pitch ever could.
• For an eCommerce Business: This might be a detailed buyer's guide ("The 5 Mistakes People Make When Buying X"), a quiz to help them find the perfect product, or a compelling first-purchase discount that removes the risk of trying you out.

Your ad copy should then be built around this high-value offer, using a proven framework. Dont just list features. Speak to their pain.

Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS): "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark? (Problem) Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while competitors raise another round? (Agitate) Download our free '5-Point Cash Flow Health Check' and get clarity in the next 10 minutes. (Solve)"

Before-After-Bridge (BAB): "Before: Staring at a confusing Google Ads dashboard, wondering where your money is going. (Before) After: Opening a simple, one-page report that shows your exact Return on Ad Spend and top-performing campaigns. (After) Our free Ad Account Audit is the bridge that gets you from chaos to clarity. (Bridge)"

Fixing your offer is not a minor tweak. It is the core of your entire top-of-funnel strategy. A great offer can make even average ads work, while a poor offer will cause even the best-targeted campaigns to fail.

You'll need to understand your numbers to scale this properly...

Okay, so now we're running conversion campaigns, targeting our ICP's nightmare, and using a high-value offer. The final peice of the puzzle is the math. How do you know if it's working? How much should a "qualified lead" actually cost?

Most buisnesses get this wrong. They obsess over lowering their Cost Per Lead (CPL) as much as possible. But the real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but rather "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

LTV tells you the total profit you can expect to make from an average customer over the entire duration of your relationship. Once you know this number, you can make much smarter decisions about your advertising spend. Here's how you calculate it:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you typically make from one customer, per month or per year?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after deducting the direct costs of servicing that customer (cost of goods sold)?
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month? (If you have a one-time purchase business, you'd calculate this differently, based on repeat purchase rate, but for now let's assume a recurring model).

The calculation is simple: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's use an example. Say you run a subscription service for €100/month (ARPA). Your gross margin is 70%. And you lose 5% of your customers each month (churn).
LTV = (€100 * 0.70) / 0.05
LTV = €70 / 0.05 = €1,400

In this example, each customer is worth €1,400 in gross profit to your business. A healthy rule of thumb is to aim for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to €1,400 / 3 = ~€466 to acquire a single new customer and still have a very profitable business. Now, let's say your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a paying customer. This means you can afford to pay up to €46.60 for each qualified lead.

Suddenly, a €30 lead from a perfectly targeted ad doesn't seem expensive anymore, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads. It allows you to confidently invest in your top-of-funnel because you know exactly what a good outcome is worth.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Pulling this all together, here is the step-by-step process I would recommend you follow to fix your top-of-funnel advertising and start generating the qualified leads you need. This isn't a list of quick hacks; it's a fundamental strategic shift in how you approach customer acquisition. It takes more work upfront, but the results are sustainable and scalable.

As you can see, this is a much more involved process than just boosting a few posts. It requires a deep understanding of your customer, a strategic approach to your offer, and a firm grasp of the financial metrics that drive your business. It's a lot to take on, and getting any one of these peices wrong can unfortunately cause the whole system to fail.

This is where having an expert partner can make a significant difference. We've run this exact playbook for numerous clients across different industries, from B2B software companies to high-growth eCommerce brands. We help businesses cut through the noise and implement strategies that are built for profitability from day one.

If you'd like to have a chat and walk through how this strategy could be specifically applied to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can take a look at your current campaigns and give you some more tailored, actionable advice.

Either way, I hope this detailed breakdown has been genuinely helpfull and gives you a new way to think about your advertising.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh