Solved: Determining Best ROI & Need Ad Spend Consultant?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

It's completely normal to feel a bit lost on whether your ad spend is actually working. It's probably the most common question we get. You're pouring money in, you see some numbers, but connecting that spend to a real return on investment can feel like a bit of a dark art sometimes. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on what I've seen work for other businesses. This might help you figure out if you're on the right track or if an expert eye could make a difference.

Honestly, the fact you're asking this question already puts you ahead of many people who just keep spending without ever stopping to analyse it properly.

We'll need to look at your real numbers, not just ad spend...

Before we even touch your ad campaigns, the first and most important thing is to get a handle on what a customer is actually worth to you. So many businesses I talk to are obsessed with getting the lowest possible Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), but they have no idea how high a CPL they can actually *afford* to acquire a great customer. Without this number, you're flying blind.

The key here is calculating your Customer Lifetime Value, or LTV. It sounds complicated but the basic version is pretty straightforward. You just need three bits of info:

-> Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's a typical customer worth to you each month? Let's use an example and say it's £500.

-> Gross Margin %: After your costs of servicing that customer, what's your profit margin? Let's say it's 80%.

-> Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month, on average? This can be a tricky one to face, but it's vital. Let's say it's 4%.

Now, the calculaton is simple:

In this example, every single customer you bring in is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over there lifetime. That's a powerful number.

So what does that mean for your ad spend? A healthy ratio for LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is often cited as 3:1. This means you want to spend no more than a third of your LTV to acquire a customer. With a £10,000 LTV, you can comfortably spend up to £3,333 to get a new customer and still have a very healthy business. If your sales team or your website converts, say, 1 in 10 qualified leads into a paying customer, you can afford to pay up to £333 for a single *qualified lead*.

Suddenly, a lead from LinkedIn that costs £250 doesn't seem so expensive anymore, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that separates businesses that stagnate from those that scale aggressively. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to focus on acquiring real value.

I'd say you need to diagnose where things are going wrong...

Once you know what you can afford to spend, the next step is to diagnose the campaigns themselves. It's like being a detective. You have to look at the data and see where the "crime" is happening. Where are potential customers dropping off?

I'd look at your funnel metrics. This applies to eCommerce, SaaS, services, pretty much anything.

-> Are your Click-Through Rates (CTR) really low and your Cost Per Click (CPC) really high? If people aren't even clicking your ads, the problem is likely your ad creative or your copy. The message isn't landing. It isn't grabbing attention or speaking to a real pain point. Your ad needs to deliver a message they can't ignore. For example, you don't sell "fractional CFO services," you sell a good night's sleep. Your ad should be about the *problem*: "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark? Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis?" That's a message that gets a click.

-> Do you get lots of clicks and traffic to your site, but very few people go deeper, like to a product or service page? This usually points to a targeting problem. You're getting the wrong people to your site. They click out of curiosity but quickly realise your offer isn't for them. Or, the message on your landing page doesn't match the promise in your ad, so they feel a disconnect and leave.

-> Do you get lots of people viewing the specific product or service, but nobody adds to cart or fills out a form? Now the problem is likely on that page itself. For an eCommerce store, it could be poor product photos, a lack of descriptions, or uncompetitive pricing. For a service business, it could be that your offer isn't compelling enough, or the page doesn't build enough trust. It might be missing testimonials, case studies, or clear deliverables.

This all comes back to having an offer that is built to solve an audience's specific, urgent pain. So many campaigns fail because the offer is weak or there's simply no real demand. I've seen founders build amazing products with loads of features, but they struggle because they never nailed down *who* it was for and *what urgent problem* it solved. A successful offer is for a specific audience, it solves an urgent fustration for them, and it's packaged clearly. I remember one client, a video production company, that stopped selling "brand films" and started selling a "1-Day Filming Process" to talented firms struggling to get customers. It's the same service, but the new packaging made it tangible, less risky, and a direct solution to their pain.

You probably should scrap 'Request a Demo'...

This brings me to what is possibly the single biggest failure point I see in B2B advertising: the offer itself. Specifically, the "Request a Demo" button. It has to be the most arrogant Call to Action ever created.

It presumes that your prospect, who is likely a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do with their time than schedule a meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction and offers them zero immediate value. It instantly frames you as just another vendor begging for a moment of their time. You need to delete it. Seriously.

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 have to solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the bigger problems for a fee.

So what do you do instead?

-> If you're a SaaS company: The gold standard is a free trial or a freemium plan, with no credit card details required. Let them use the actual product. Let them experience the transformation. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You stop generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for your sales team to chase, and you start creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced. I've seen this work wonders. For example, we helped one B2B software client get over 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each by driving them to a really smooth, valuable trial experience.

-> If you're a service or consultancy: You are not exempt from this rule. You have to bottle your expertise into a tool or an asset that gives instant value. For a marketing agency, it could be a free, automated SEO audit. For a data analytics platform, a 'Data Health Check'. For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's offering a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit a company's failing ad campaigns and give them actionable advice on the spot. It proves our expertise and builds trust far more effectively than a sales pitch ever could.

You'll need a better way to find customers...

So, you've got your LTV, you've diagnosed your funnel, and you've fixed your offer. Now you need to get it in front of the right people. This is where so much ad spend is wasted on poor targeting.

First, you have to change your mindset. Forget the sterile, demagraphic-based profile like "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees." That tells you nothing useful and leads to generic ads that speak to no one. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a demographic; it's a nightmare. It's a specific, urgent, expensive problem.

Your client isn't a "Head of Engineering". She's a leader terrified that her best developers are about to quit because they're so frustrated with a broken workflow. Your client isn't a law firm that 'needs document management'. It's a partner who has nightmares about missing a critical filing deadline and getting the firm sued for malpractice. Once you define the nightmare, you can find where those people hang out online. What niche podcasts do they listen to? What industry newsletters do they actually read? What SaaS tools are they already paying for? That is the intelligence that fuels a winning targeting strategy.

With that mindset, here’s how you approach the platforms:

On Google Ads, you need to focus on keywords that show clear intent. For an outreach tool, you don't just bid on "lead generation". You bid on "software for lead generation" or "contact info finding tool". This way, you're only showing up for people who are already problem-aware and solution-aware. They are pre-qualified by their search. For example, we helped one software client get 3,543 users at just £0.96 per user by focusing entirely on these high-intent keywords.

On Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Ads, you need to be even more careful. First, an uncomfortable truth. If you run a campaign with the objective set to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are literally paying Facebook to find you the worst possible audience. You're telling the algorithm "find me the cheapest eyeballs", and it will find you people who never click, never engage, and certainly never buy. Their attention is cheap for a reason. For any business that needs to see a return, your objective should almost always be a conversion-based one, like Sales, Leads, or Signups. Let the algorithm do the heavy lifting of finding people who are likely to *act*.

When it comes to audience selection, you need a structure. This is the prioritisation I usually follow for an eCommerce account, but the logic applies to almost any buisness:

For a new account, you start at the top with detailed targeting to gather data. Then as soon as you have enough conversions (at least 100, but more is better), you build your hot retargeting audiences and your high-quality lookalike audiences. You test, test, test. You turn off what doesn't work and scale what does. This disciplined approach is how you find pockets of performance. It's how we reduced one client's Cost Per Acquisition from a painful £100 down to just £7 for a medical job matching SaaS.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in, so I've put the main recomendations into a table to make it clearer. This is the framework I'd use to start analysing and optimising your ad spend.

So, do you need a consultant?

The honest answer is, maybe. You can absolutely take the ideas above and try to implement them yourself. For some business owners, that's the right path. But as you can probably tell, this stuff gets deep, fast. It's not just about setting up an ad; it's about understanding business math, psychology, strategy, and the ever-changing technical details of each ad platform.

An experienced consultant or agency doesn't just bring knowledge; they bring speed and pattern recognition. They've seen these problems dozens of times across different industries. They know which levers to pull and in what order. They can implement a framework like the one above in a matter of days, not months, and can help you avoid the costly mistakes that come from learning on your own dime.

Having run campaigns that have generated everything from $22 B2B leads on LinkedIn for a software client to a 1000% return on ad spend for an eCommerce subscription box, we've built a deep understanding of what works and, more importantly, what doesn't. This process of analysis, strategy, and optimisation is what we do all day, every day.

If you'd like to have a chat about how these principles could be applied specifically to your business and your ad account, we offer a free, no-obligation initial strategy consultation. We can take a look at your current campaigns together and give you some concrete, actionable feedback. It's the best way for you to get a taste of the expertise you'd be getting if you chose to work with a professional.

Either way, I hope these thoughts have been helpful and given you a clearer path forward.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh