Solved: Struggling with Vienna ROAS Increase (Key Insight Inside)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It sounds like you've hit a very common, and very frustrating, wall that a lot of businesses face when they try to scale their advertising. It’s one thing to get a good ROAS on a small budget, but maintaining it as you spend more is a completely different challenge. The good news is, the problem usually isn't about just finding a magic ad setting, but about making some strategic shifts in how you approach the whole process. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on this.

What you're experiencing is a sign that you've likely saturated your most immediate, high-intent audience. To grow further, you can't just shout louder (i.e., spend more); you need a much smarter, more structured approach. We'll need to look at who you're really targeting, what they're truly worth to your business, and what you're actually offering them.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, let's get to the heart of it. The first reason most ad campaigns fail to scale is because they're targeting the wrong people, or rather, they're defining "the right people" in a completely useless way. Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire made. "Companies in the finance sector in Vienna with 50-200 employees" tells you absolutly nothing of value. It leads to generic, boring ads that speak to no one and get ignored by everyone. 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. That's your true Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). 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. Your prospect isn't looking for 'AI implementation services'; he's scared of his competitors launching an AI-powered feature that makes his own product look ancient overnight. The nightmare isn't 'needing document management'; it's 'a partner missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the firm to a malpractice suit.' Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state.

When you understand the nightmare, your targeting and your messaging completely transform. You're no longer broadcasting a generic sales pitch; you're whispering a solution into the ear of someone who is desperate to hear it. This is the difference between an ad that gets scrolled past and an ad that gets clicked because it feels like it's reading the prospect's mind.

So how do you find these people? Once you've isolated that nightmare, you find their watering holes. What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute, like 'Acquired' or a local Viennese tech show? What industry newsletters do they actually open, like 'Stratechery' or a German-language equivalent? What SaaS tools do they already pay for, like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Personio? Are they members of the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Do they follow specific influencers on LinkedIn or Twitter? This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. You can use these as interest targets on platforms like Meta or as conversation points in your ad copy. Do this work first, or you have no business spending another single euro on ads. This isn't about finding a bigger audience; it's about finding a *better* one, one that is pre-qualified by their pain.

I'd say you need to know your numbers: Calculating Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Now that we've started thinking about who to target, we need to address the metric you mentioned: ROAS. While ROAS is useful, fixating on it is a classic trap that keeps businesses from scaling. 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: Lifetime Value (LTV). If you don't know this number, you are flying blind.

LTV tells you what a customer is actually worth to your business over the entire duration of your relationship. When you know this, you can make much smarter decisions about how much you're willing to spend to acquire them. The calculation itself is quite simple. You just need three pieces of information:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month or per year?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for cost of goods sold (COGS) or cost of service?
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The formula looks like this:

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

Let's run through a quick example. Let's say your average client pays you €500 a month (ARPA), your gross margin is 80%, and you lose 4% of your customers each month (Churn). The calculation would be:

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. Now, the industry standard for a healthy business is a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to €3,333 to acquire a single customer and still have a very profitable model. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to €333 for a single qualified lead.

Suddenly, that €150 lead from a LinkedIn campaign doesn't seem expensive, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of cheap, low-quality leads and an obsession with short-term ROAS. When you try to scale, your cost per result will almost always go up. That's okay, as long as it stays well below what you can actually afford to pay. To make this more concrete for your business, I've built a small calculator for you below.

You probably should create a message they can't ignore

So, you know who you're targeting (someone with a specific nightmare) and you know what they're worth to you (your LTV). The next piece of the puzzle is what you actually say to them. Your ad copy and creative are not just filler text; they are the bridge between their problem and your solution. Generic copy gets generic results, which means low ROAS when you scale.

Your ad needs to speak directly to the nightmare we identified earlier. There are a few tried-and-tested frameworks for this.

For a high-touch service business, like a consultancy, you deploy Problem-Agitate-Solve. 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 in Vienna 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." You state the problem, you twist the knife by describing the negative consequences (agitate), and then you present your service as the solution.

For a B2B SaaS product, you use the Before-After-Bridge. 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. (Before) Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated. (After) Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first €1,000 in savings today. (Bridge)" You paint a picture of their current painful reality, show them a much better future, and position your product as the vehicle to get them there.

For high-ticket physical products, like complex equipment, you attack the feature-obsession head-on. Don't just state the spec; state its consequence. "Our new mass spectrometer has a 0.001% margin of error. So what? So your lab can publish results with unshakeable confidence, securing more funding and attracting top talent that other labs can only dream of." Features are meaningless until you connect them to a tangible, desirable business outcome.

The common thread here is that none of these ads talk about the company or how great they are. They talk about the customer and their problems. That's the only thing the customer cares about, and it's the only way to cut through the noise and get their attention. Your current ads are probably too focused on you, your service, your features. Flip it around. Make it all about them, their pain, and their desired future state. You'll see a big differance.

You'll need to delete the "Request a Demo" button

Now we arrive at the most common, and most lethal, failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. I can almost guarantee that your website and landing pages end with a call to action like "Request a Demo," "Contact Us," or "Book a Consultation." This is, without a doubt, 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 calendar to be sold to. It is high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as a commoditised vendor, just another person asking for their time.

When you're trying to scale, friction is your enemy. You need to make it as easy as possible for someone to experience the value you provide. 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 give them a win, for free, before you ever ask for their money.

For SaaS founders, this is your unfair advantage. The gold standard is a free trial (no credit card required) or a freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation for themselves. When the product proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You aren't generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a sales team to chase; you are creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced and asking to buy.

If you're not a SaaS company, 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 a corporate training company, it could be a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' for new managers. For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free of charge. You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve their bigger problems for a fee. Replace "Request a Demo" with an offer that gives, rather than takes, and your conversion rates will improve dramatically, which in turn will help your ROAS as you scale.

We'll need to look at your campaign structure...

Finally, let's talk about the ads themselves. Even with the perfect ICP, LTV calculation, messaging, and offer, your campaigns can fail if they're structured incorrectly. One of the most common mistakes I see is businesses running the wrong type of campaign for their goals.

Here is the uncomfortable truth about so-called "awareness" campaigns on platforms like Meta or LinkedIn. When you set your campaign objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific, and very dangerous, command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, being a ruthlessly efficient machine, does exactly what you asked. It seeks out the users inside your targeting who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever pull out a credit card. Why? Because those users are not in demand. 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 surefire way to get lots of impressions and vanity metrics, but a terrible way to get customers.

Awareness is a byproduct of having a great product that solves a real problem, not a prerequisite for making a sale. The best way to build your brand is to get people to actually use your product or service. Therefore, you should almost always be running campaigns that optimise for a conversion event that is as close to the final sale as possible. That means optimising for Leads, Trials, Appointments, or Purchases. This tells the algorithm to go and find people who have a history of taking these valuable actions. It will cost more per impression, but far less per actual customer.

To scale effectivly, you need to structure your campaigns around the different stages of the customer journey. We usually think about this in three stages: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu). You need seperate campaigns and messaging for each.

By splitting your campaigns this way, you can tailor your message. ToFu audiences get ads focused on their pain point. MoFu audiences get case studies or testimonials. BoFu audiences get ads with a direct call to action for your high-value free offer. This structured approach prevents you from showing the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time, which is a massive cause of wasted ad spend and poor ROAS.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Scaling ad spend is not a tactical problem; it's a strategic one. You can't just increase the budget and hope for the best. You need to strengthen the foundations of your entire marketing approach. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below in a table to give you a clear, actionable plan to follow.

I know this is a lot to take in, and it represents a significant shift from just tweaking bids and budgets in your ad account. This is the kind of strategic work that separates businesses that successfully scale from those that hit a plateau and burn through their cash. It requires a deep understanding of marketing principles as well as the technical aspects of the ad platforms.

Implementing this correctly can be challenging, and it's often where expert help can make a huge difference. If you’d like to have a chat about how these principles could be specifically applied to your business in Vienna, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can look at your current setup and provide some more tailored advice.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh