Solved: Scaling Ad Spend in San Antonio Without Losing ROAS

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It sounds like you've hit the classic scaling wall in San Antonio, which is a frustrating but very normal part of growing a business with paid ads. A lot of people think the answer is to just find a magic bidding strategy or a secret audience, but the truth is usually a bit deeper than that. When ROAS starts to drop as you increase spend, it’s a sign that the initial, easy-to-reach customers are tapped out, and your entire approach needs to evolve from just 'running ads' to building a proper growth engine.

I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts. Real, profitable scale doesn’t come from tweaking the campaigns you already have. It comes from fundamentally changing the maths of your customer acquisition, redefining who you’re actually talking to, and making your offer so good that it does most of the selling for you. Let's get into it.

The Scaling Paradox: Why Pushing More Spend Kills Your ROAS

First off, let's be clear about what’s happening when you increase your ad spend. You're telling the ad platform's algorithm (whether it's Meta, Google, or something else) to find more people to show your ads to, and to do it quickly. The algorithm's first move is always to go after the 'low-hanging fruit' – the people within your targeting parameters who are most likely to convert based on their past behaviour. These are your cheapest and most profitable customers.

But that pool of people is finite. Once you've spent enough to reach most of them, the algorithm has to work harder. It starts showing your ads to people who are a bit less likely to convert. Maybe they're not in 'buying mode' right now, or they're only peripherally interested. To reach them and to outbid other advertisers for their attention, your costs (CPM and CPC) start to rise. At the same time, because these people are less ideal, your conversion rate starts to fall. It's a double whammy: you're paying more for each click, and fewer of those clicks are turning into customers. The inevitable result? Your ROAS drops. This isn't a sign that your ads are 'broken'; it's a sign that your initial strategy has reached its natural limit.

Many businesses in this position make a critical mistake. They panic and either pull back on spend, or they try to broaden their appeal by switching to a 'brand awareness' or 'reach' campaign objective. This is probably the fastest way to burn your money. As I've explained to clients before, when you tell a platform like Meta you want 'awareness', you're giving it a very specific instruction: "Find me the cheapest possible eyeballs." The algorithm dutifully goes and finds people who never click, never engage, and certainly never buy anything. Why? Because their attention is not in demand, making it cheap to acquire. You are literally paying to reach the worst possible audience for your product. Profitable scaling requires the exact opposite approach: you need to get *more* precise, not less, and you need to keep your campaigns optimised for hard conversions like leads or sales, not vanity metrics like reach.

You're Asking the Wrong Question. It's Not About ROAS, It's About LTV.

This brings me to the most important mindset shift you need to make. The question "How do I increase spend without losing ROAS?" is a trap. It keeps you thinking small, focused on short-term efficiency instead of long-term growth. The real question, the one that unlocks scale, is: "How high a Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?"

The answer to that question lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). LTV is the total profit your business makes from any given customer over the entire time they do business with you. Once you know this number, everything changes. You're no longer guessing how much a lead is worth; you know exactly what you can pay and remain profitable.

Let's walk through the calculation. You need three pieces of information:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average amount a customer pays you per month or per year?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for cost of goods sold (COGS) or direct costs of service?
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? (If you measure annually, just divide by 12).

The formula is simple:

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

Let's imagine you run a subscription service in San Antonio. Your average customer pays £100 a 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

Suddenly, you have clarity. Each customer you acquire is worth £1,400 in gross margin to your business. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV:CAC ratio. In this case, that means you can afford to spend up to £466 (£1,400 / 3) to acquire a single new customer. If your sales process converts 1 in 5 qualified leads, you can afford to pay up to £93 per lead. That £50 lead from Google Ads that looked expensive when you were obsessed with a 4x ROAS on a single transaction now looks like an absolute bargain.

This is the maths that separates businesses that stagnate from those that scale aggressively. It frees you from the tyranny of cheap, low-quality leads and gives you the confidence to invest in acquiring high-value customers, even if the upfront cost is higher. To make this tangible for you, I've built a simple calculator below. Play with the numbers for your own business and see what your true LTV is.

Your Customer is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Armed with a clear understanding of what a customer is truly worth, the next step is to find more of them. This is where most businesses go wrong, especially when they're geographically focused like you are in San Antonio. They define their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) using sterile demographics. "Homeowners aged 35-55 with an income over $100k" or "B2B companies with 20-100 employees in the healthcare sector." This tells you absolutely nothing of value and leads to generic, boring ads that fail to connect.

To scale, you must stop targeting demographics and start targeting a problem state. You need to become an obsessive expert in your customer's specific, urgent, expensive, and career-threatening nightmare. Your customer isn't just a job title; she's a person terrified of something. Your product or service isn't a collection of features; it's the solution to that terror.

For example, if you sell IT services to small businesses, your ICP isn't "business owners in San Antonio." It's "the owner of a 15-person plumbing company who just lost a day's revenue because his server went down and his old IT guy isn't answering the phone." The nightmare is downtime, lost revenue, and unreliability.

If you're a B2B SaaS company selling project management software, your ICP isn't "marketing managers." It's "the marketing manager who just got torn apart by her CEO because a major product launch was delayed again due to poor communication between her team and the developers." The nightmare is missed deadlines, internal conflict, and looking incompetent.

Once you've isolated that specific nightmare, your targeting strategy writes itself. Where does this person go to find solutions? What podcasts do they listen to on their commute? Which industry newsletters do they actually read? What influencers do they follow on LinkedIn or Twitter? What other software tools do they already use and pay for? This intelligence is the blueprint for finding new audiences. Instead of just targeting "San Antonio" on Facebook, you can now layer on interests like "HubSpot users," followers of specific industry leaders, or members of relevant professional groups. This work is hard, but it's non-negotiable. If you haven't done it, you have no business spending another pound on ads.

Your Offer is Probably Broken. Let's Fix It.

Now we arrive at the most common point of failure in advertising: the offer. Even with the right targeting and LTV math, your campaigns will fail to scale if your call to action (CTA) is weak. The "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant CTA 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 high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor clamouring for their time. The same goes for a simple "Buy Now" for any considered purchase. It asks for marriage on the first date.

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 them for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing for a price.

What does this look like in practice?

• For a Service Business: Instead of "Free Consultation," offer a "Free [Your Service] Audit." A marketing agency could offer a "Free Ad Account Audit that will find £1,000 in wasted spend in 15 minutes." A financial advisor could offer a "Free Retirement Readiness Scorecard." These are tangible, valuable assets that solve a small problem and demonstrate your expertise. It's the same reason we offer a free account review; it gives a potential client a taste of the expertise they're buying.
• For a SaaS Company: The gold standard is a free trial or a freemium plan, with no credit card required. Let them use the actual product and experience the transformation. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You're creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced, not Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a sales team to chase down. I've worked with several SaaS clients, and the ones that scale fastest almost always have a frictionless, product-led entry point. For instance, I remember one campaign we worked on for a medical job matching platform. They were struggling with a Cost Per Acquisition of £100, but by implementing a more effective strategy, we were able to bring that cost down to just £7.
• For an eCommerce Business: Instead of just "10% Off," what value can you provide? A quiz that helps them find the perfect product? A detailed buyer's guide? A free sample with a small shipping fee? You have to de-risk the purchase and provide value beyond the transaction itself.

Your offer is the single biggest lever you can pull to improve conversion rates. A higher conversion rate means you can afford to pay more per click, which allows you to bid more aggressively and reach those more expensive, second-tier audiences without your ROAS completely collapsing. Fixing the offer is often the key that unlocks scaling.

Rebuilding Your Ad Account for Scale

Once your financial model is solid (LTV > CAC) and your offer is compelling, you need a machine to deliver it. Your ad account structure needs to evolve from a simple setup to a systematic engine for testing and scaling. I typically structure this around the marketing funnel: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

This flowchart illustrates a robust process for testing and scaling audiences. You don't just find one and hammer it; you constantly feed new ideas into the top and graduate winners down the funnel.

How this works in practice:

1. ToFu Campaigns: These are your prospecting campaigns. Their job is to find new customers. This is where you test all the new audiences you identified from your 'nightmare' ICP research. You'll also test lookalike audiences built from your best customers. You need to be ruthless here. Test an audience with a small budget. If it doesn't show promise within a few days (or after spending 1-2x your target CPA), kill it and test the next one.
2. MoFu Campaigns: These campaigns target people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a key conversion action yet. They've visited your website, watched a video, or engaged with a social post. The goal here is to nurture them, build trust, and move them towards a decision with different ad creative (e.g., case studies, testimonials, handling objections).
3. BoFu Campaigns: This is your highest-intent audience. They've added a product to their cart or started the checkout process. These campaigns are about closing the deal. The messaging should be direct, focused on overcoming last-minute hesitation with offers like free shipping, a limited-time discount, or a reminder of the core value proposition.

By separating your campaigns this way, you can tailor your messaging and budget allocation appropriately. You can afford to have a higher CPA in your ToFu campaigns because you know you'll convert a percentage of that traffic more cheaply through your MoFu and BoFu retargeting. This structured approach is far more robust and scalable than having a single campaign trying to do everything at once. It also requires constant creative testing. You should always have new ad copy and visuals being tested in your ToFu campaigns, using frameworks like Problem-Agitate-Solve or Before-After-Bridge to speak directly to your customer's pain.

My Main Recommendations for You

Scaling profitably in a specific market like San Antonio is entirely possible, but it requires a strategic shift. You have to move beyond simply optimizing your current ads and start re-engineering the underlying components of your growth strategy. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

Implementing all of this is a significant amount of work, there's no doubt about it. It involves a deep dive into your business metrics, some creative thinking about your customers, and a disciplined approach to testing and iteration in your ad accounts. It's a journey from being a business that 'does advertising' to becoming a business that has built a scalable customer acquisition machine.

This is often the point where founders or marketing managers realise they might benefit from some expert help. While you absolutely can do this yourself, an experienced partner can help you avoid common pitfalls, accelerate the process, and bring an outside perspective based on what's working for dozens of other businesses. This is precisely what we do for our clients.

If you'd like to have a more detailed chat about your specific situation in San Antonio, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial strategy consultation. We can take a look at your ad accounts together, discuss your LTV calculations, and map out a more concrete plan for you to scale. It's often the most valuable 20 minutes a business owner can spend on their marketing.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh