Solved: Website & Ads not Performing for Grounding Relief

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out about your store. I've had a look at your website and your situation, and I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance. It's a common problem to see early ads struggle, and you're right to suspect it's a mix of the website and the ad strategy. Often, fixing the website first is what unlocks performance in the ads, because all the traffic in the world won't help if the destination doesn't convince people to buy.

Below are my detailed thoughts. It's a bit of a long read, but I wanted to give you a proper breakdown of where I think the issues are and how you might go about fixing them. We'll cover who you should be talking to, what you should be saying, why your website is likely the main bottleneck, and then how to structure your ads for better results.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, let's get the biggest and most common mistake out of the way first. Most businesses, especially in the e-commerce space, define their customers with vague, useless labels. They'll say something like, "we're targeting women aged 35-55 who are interested in health and wellness." Tbh, that tells you absolutely nothing. It describes millions of people, most of whom will never buy your product. It leads to generic ads with weak messaging that get ignored, and you end up burning through your budget talking to the wrong people.

You need to stop thinking about demographics and start thinking about nightmares. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. A deep, frustrating, and persistent problem that they are actively, and perhaps desperately, trying to solve. Your customer isn't just "interested in wellness." Your customer is probably a 48-year-old woman who hasn't had a proper night's sleep in five years. She wakes up every morning feeling like she's been hit by a bus, with stiff joints and a low-level hum of anxiety that never quite goes away. She's tried melatonin (gave her weird dreams), magnesium (didn't do much), and a new mattress (cost a fortune, changed nothing). She's scrolling through her phone at 2 AM, miserable and exhausted, looking for something—anything—that might give her some relief. That is her nightmare.

Or maybe your customer is a 55-year-old man, a former athlete who now lives with chronic inflammation in his knees. It stops him from playing with his grandkids or going for a long walk. He's fed up with taking painkillers and is looking for a natural alternative. He's skeptical of "woo-woo" remedies but is willing to try something if it's backed by some logic or science. His nightmare is the loss of his active life and the fear of it getting worse.

When you define your customer by their pain, everything else becomes clearer.

• Your Messaging: You stop talking about the features of your product ("conductive materials," "reconnecting with the Earth") and start talking about the solution to their nightmare ("imagine waking up feeling refreshed and without that nagging ache in your back").
• Your Targeting: You stop targeting the broad interest "Wellness." Instead, you target interests like "Fibromyalgia," "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome," "Insomnia," "Arthritis Foundation," or people who follow experts who talk about inflammation and sleep science. These are much more specific and filled with people experiencing the nightmare you can solve.
• Your Website: Your site stops being a simple product catalogue and becomes a resource that builds trust and demonstrates that you understand their specific problem better than anyone else.

Before you spend another pound on ads, sit down and write a one-page document describing this person's nightmare in excruciating detail. What have they tried before? What are they most afraid of? What does a "good day" look like for them? What are their doubts and skepticisms? This document is the foundation of all your marketing. Without it, you're just guessing, and guessing is a very expensive way to run a business.

Your message needs to be one they can't ignore

Once you understand your customer's nightmare, your next job is to craft a message that grabs them by the shoulders and says, "I understand, and I can help." Right now, your headline is "Reconnect with the Earth's natural energy." It's a nice thought, but it's passive and vague. It describes a feature of your product, not a benefit for the customer. People in pain don't buy "natural energy"; they buy pain relief, better sleep, and a return to the life they want to live.

The most effective copywriting framework for a product like yours is the Before-After-Bridge. It's simple but incredibly powerful.

1. The Before State: This is their nightmare. You describe their current reality, full of pain and frustration. You need to agitate the problem so they feel understood.

2. The After State: This is their dream outcome. You paint a vivid picture of what life looks like once their problem is solved.

3. The Bridge: This is your product. You introduce it as the simple, logical way to get from the "Before" to the "After."

Let's apply this to your grounding mat.

Instead of: "Our Grounding Mat reconnects you with the Earth's energy."

Try this:

• (Before) "Tired of waking up with that familiar ache in your joints? Another night of restless sleep leaving you foggy and irritable all day?"
• (After) "Imagine waking up feeling deeply rested, your body feeling looser, and your mind clear and calm. Ready to take on the day with energy you haven't felt in years."
• (Bridge) "Our Grounding Mat is the bridge. By simply sleeping on it, you tap into the Earth's natural anti-inflammatory properties, helping to calm your system and promote restorative sleep. It's the simplest way to get from restless nights to refreshed mornings."

This structure works because it starts with the customer's world, not yours. It shows empathy first, then presents the solution. This should be the structure for your ad copy, your website headlines, your product descriptions, and even your emails. To make it even more concrete, here's how you could structure a product description using this framework:

Notice how the call to action includes a risk-reversal (a 90-night trial). For a product that people might be skeptical about, this is absolutley essential for building the trust needed to get that first sale.

You'll need to fix your website... It's the real problem

You said you felt like it might be your website, and I have to be blunt: you are absolutely correct. Right now, your website is the weakest link in your entire business, and it's where most of your ad budget is going to die. Sending paid traffic to the current site is like pouring water into a bucket full of holes. You need to patch the holes first. The core problem can be summed up in one word: trust.

You're selling a product related to health and wellbeing. It makes claims—even subtle ones—about improving sleep, reducing pain, and enhancing a person's quality of life. This is a high-trust sale. People are inherently skeptical, especially with concepts like "grounding" which are not yet mainstream. Your website has to work incredibly hard to overcome that skepticism, and at the moment, it's not. It looks and feels like a generic, slightly rushed Shopify store, which immediately raises red flags for a savvy online shopper.

Here are the specific areas you need to fix, in order of priority:

1. Social Proof is Non-Existent: This is the single biggest issue. I can't find a single customer review or testimonial on any of your product pages. When I see a product that claims to improve my health but has zero reviews, my immediate assumption is either a) no one has ever bought it, or b) the people who did buy it didn't like it. Both are fatal to a sale. You have 12 orders—that's 12 potential reviews. You should be personally emailing every single one of those customers, offering them a discount on a future purchase, or even a small gift card, in exchange for an honest review (with a photo if possible). You need to get those reviews onto your product pages ASAP. Until you have them, your conversion rate will be crippled.

2. The 'About Us' Story is Generic: Your "Our Story" page says your mission is to "bring the profound benefits of grounding to people everywhere." It's corporate-speak and tells me nothing. Why did you start this company? Did you have a personal experience with grounding that changed your life? Did a family member find relief? People connect with stories, not mission statements. Tell your story. Be vulnerable. A photo of the founder and a heartfelt account of your journey will build more trust than a thousand generic sentences. This is particularly important for a niche wellness brand.

3. Product Photography Lacks Authenticity: The photos are clean, but they're sterile. They look like stock images. You need to show real people using the products in a real home environment. A photo of the mat on a nicely made bed. Someone's feet actually on the mat while they work at a desk. A shot of the pillowcase on a pillow that someone is actually sleeping on. This helps potential customers visualise the product in their own lives. Better yet, get User-Generated Content (UGC). Encourage those first 12 customers to send you photos of how they use their products. Real, slightly imperfect photos from real customers are often more persuasive than glossy professional shots.

4. Product Descriptions Sell Features, Not Benefits: As we covered in the last section, your descriptions are very tecnical. "Made from durable, conductive PU leather" and "Features a 15-foot cord." So what? You need to translate every feature into a benefit.

• "Durable, conductive PU leather" -> "A soft, comfortable surface that's built to last, delivering the Earth's gentle energy night after night."
• "15-foot cord" -> "A long, convenient cord that reaches easily from your bed or desk to any standard wall outlet, so you can set it up anywhere in your room without hassle."

To visualise the trust gap, think of it like this. Your website needs to fill a 'trust battery' for every visitor. Right now, many components are running on empty.

Do not spend any more significant money on advertising until you have made substantial progress on these points. At a minimum, you need to get 5-10 real customer reviews on your main product pages and rewrite your About Us story. These two changes alone could dramatically improve your conversion rate.

We'll need to look at your leaky ad funnel...

Once you've started patching the holes in your website, you can begin to look more critically at your ads. The beauty of digital advertising is that the data tells you a story about where things are going wrong. You mentioned you feel the ads could use work, but "work" can mean a lot of things. We need to diagnose the specific point of failure. Think of your customer's journey from seeing an ad to making a purchase as a funnel. We need to identify where the biggest leak is.

You can do this by looking at a few key metrics in your ad account (whether it's Meta, Google, etc.). Here's a simple diagnostic framework:

Problem 1: Low Click-Through Rate (CTR) and High Cost Per Click (CPC)

• Diagnosis: This is an ad problem. Specifically, your ad creative (the image or video) and your ad copy are not compelling enough to make people stop scrolling and click. The message isn't resonating with the audience you're targeting. Your ad is being ignored.
• Solution: You need to test completely different ad creatives. Instead of just a product shot, try a short video of someone talking about how their sleep has improved (a testimonial). Try an image that depicts the "Before" state (a frustrated person awake at night). You also need to test different ad copy based on the Before-After-Bridge framework we discussed. Test headlines that call out the pain point directly, like "Can't shake that morning stiffness?"

Problem 2: Good CTR, but very few 'Add to Carts'

• Diagnosis: This is a product page problem. People are interested enough in your ad's promise to click, but when they land on your website, something is putting them off. The promise of the ad is not being fulfilled by the reality of the landing page.
• Solution: This goes back to all the website trust issues we just discussed. The lack of reviews, weak product descritpions, and sterile photography are likely the culprits. They click the ad hoping for a miracle cure, and they land on a page that doesn't give them the confidence to buy. You need to beef up the product page with testimonials, better copy, and a strong money-back guarantee to bridge this gap. You should also check your pricing—are you competitive? Is the value clear for the price you're asking?

Problem 3: Lots of 'Add to Carts', but very few Purchases

• Diagnosis: This is a checkout process problem. People want to buy your product, but something is stopping them during the final steps.
• Solution: The most common issues here are unexpected shipping costs. Are you surprising them with a high shipping fee at the very end? If so, you should consider offering free shipping (and just build that cost into your product price). Other issues could be a clunky checkout flow that asks for too much information, or not offering the payment methods people prefer (like PayPal or Shop Pay). Go through your checkout process yourself on both desktop and mobile and see if there are any points of friction. An abandoned cart email sequence is also absolutley essential here to recover some of those sales.

Here's a simple flowchart to help you visualise this diagnostic process:

By systematically analysing your data, you can move from "my ads aren't working" to a precise diagnosis like "my ads have a good CTR, but the product page conversion rate is less than 1%, so I need to focus all my energy on improving the trust and messaging on that page." This is how you make real progress.

I'd say you need to calculate what you can afford to spend

This might seem like jumping ahead, but it's a critical mindset shift. Most new store owners are terrified of ad spend. They see it as a pure cost and try to get their cost per purchase as low as humanly possible. The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) go?" but rather "How high a CPA can I afford to acquire a valuable customer?"

The answer lies in understanding your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the total profit you can expect to make from a single customer over the entire course of their relationship with your business. Once you know this number, you can make much smarter decisions about your ad budget.

The calculation is simpler than it sounds. You just need three numbers:

1. Average Order Value (AOV): How much does the average customer spend in one transaction? Let's say your grounding mat is £50 and the pillowcase is £30, and some people buy both. Your AOV might be around £65.

2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin after accounting for the cost of the goods themselves? Let's assume a healthy 60% margin for your products.

3. Purchase Frequency / Repeat Rate: How many times will a customer buy from you in a year? For your products, this might be low. Maybe 10% of customers come back to buy a second product as a gift or for another room. So, on average, a customer makes 1.1 purchases per year.

Now, let's calculate a simplified LTV.
LTV = (AOV * Gross Margin %) * Purchase Frequency
LTV = (£65 * 0.60) * 1.1 = £42.90

This means, on average, each new customer you acquire will generate about £42.90 in gross profit for your business. Now you have a powerful number. A common rule of thumb is to aim for a 3:1 LTV to CPA ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to a third of your LTV to acquire that customer.

Maximum Affordable CPA = LTV / 3 = £42.90 / 3 = £14.30

Suddenly, you have a clear target. If your ad campaigns are bringing in customers for less than £14.30, you're running a profitable operation that you can scale. If your CPA is £30, you know you're losing money on every sale and need to fix your funnel or your margins. This math frees you from the anxiety of "is my CPA good?" and replaces it with the certainty of "is my CPA profitable?"

Use the calculator below to play with your own numbers. See how changing your average order value (by bundling products) or improving your margin can dramatically increase how much you can afford to spend on ads.

You probably should build a profitable ad strategy...

Alright, so we've defined our customer by their pain, crafted a message they'll respond to, started fixing the leaky website, and calculated what we can afford to spend. Now, and only now, can we talk about building an ad strategy that actually works.

For a product like yours, I would recomend starting with Meta (Facebook and Instagram) because of its powerful interest targeting capabilities. Here's a simple, effective structure to start with, broken down into two main campaigns.

Campaign #1: Prospecting (Finding New Customers)

The goal here is to reach people who have never heard of you but are highly likely to be suffering from the nightmare your product solves. Your campaign objective should be set to 'Sales' or 'Conversions', optimising for the 'Purchase' event. Don't use 'Reach' or 'Traffic' objectives; you're telling the algorithm to find you cheap clicks, not buyers.

Inside this campaign, you'll create several 'Ad Sets', each testing a different audience. This is where your ICP research pays off.
DO NOT target broad interests like "Health," "Wellness," or "Spirituality."
DO target specific, pain-based interests. Here are some ideas to test, each in its own ad set:

For your ad creative in this campaign, you must lead with empathy and the problem. Use video if you can. A simple, authentic-looking video of someone (could be you!) talking to the camera: "I used to wake up every single morning with this awful stiffness in my back, and after just a week of sleeping on this, the difference was incredible..." This is far more powerful than a slick, corporate ad.

Campaign #2: Retargeting (Bringing People Back)

The reality is that 98% of people who visit your website for the first time will not buy. That's normal. The job of the retargeting campaign is to stay in front of them, build more trust, and give them a reason to come back and complete their purchase. This is often where the majority of your sales will come from.

Your audiences here are much simpler:

• Website Visitors (Last 30 Days): Anyone who has visited your site but hasn't purchased.
• 'Add to Cart' (Last 14 Days): These people are highly interested. They just needed an extra nudge.

The messaging in your retargeting ads needs to be different. They already know who you are, so you don't need to re-introduce the problem. Instead, focus on overcoming their final objections and building confidence.

• Show Testimonials: Create simple ads that are just a screenshot of a glowing 5-star review. Let your customers do the selling for you.
• Answer FAQs: Create an ad that addresses a common question, like "How does grounding actually work? Here's the simple science."
• Highlight Your Guarantee: Remind them of your risk-free trial. "Still on the fence? Remember, you can try the Grounding Mat for 90 nights. If you're not happy, we'll give you a full refund. No questions asked."
• Offer a Small Discount: For the 'Add to Cart' audience, you can try a small, time-sensitive offer like "Looks like you forgot something! Complete your order today and get 10% off with code COMEBACK10."

By splitting your strategy into these two campaigns, you create a complete system: Prospecting fills the top of your funnel with qualified potential customers, and Retargeting converts them into paying customers at the bottom of the funnel.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

I know this is a lot to take in, but the good news is that your situation is very fixable. You've got a product in a growing niche with passionate potential customers. You just need to fix the fundamentals of your messaging and your website's trustworthiness before you can effectively scale with paid ads.

Working through all of this—the deep customer research, the copywriting, the website optimisation, the technical ad account setup, and the ongoing analysis—takes a significant amount of time and specialised expertise. It's a full-time job in itself. While you can definitely implement these changes yourself over time, working with an expert can obviously accelerate that process dramatically and help you avoid costly mistakes along the way. For one of our eCommerce clients, a subscription box company, applying these same principles of deep audience understanding and rigorous funnel optimisation on Meta Ads led to a 1000% return on their ad spend. This kind of result becomes possible when the foundational elements we've discussed are correctly in place.

If you'd like to chat through this in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can take a deeper look at your ad account and website together and map out a more specific plan of action. It could be a really helpful next step for you.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh