Solved: Finding a Meta Ads consultant who delivers results

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. I had a read through your situation and it sounds incredibly frustrating, but honestly, it’s a story I hear all the time. You're right to be wary. There are a lot of 'consultants' out there who can talk a good game but fall apart when it comes to delivering actual, measurable results. Wasting money on Meta ads that don't convert is a quick way to burn through your budget and your motivation.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and walk you through how I'd approach diagnosing a problem like this. It's rarely just one thing, but usually a chain of issues starting from the very foundation of the marketing strategy. Forget the Meta Ads interface for a minute, we need to start somewhere much more important.

We'll need to look at your offer first...

Tbh, this is the number one reason I see campaigns fail, long before we even get to audiences or ad copy. If the offer itself is weak, or not framed correctly, then even the best advertising in the world won't save it. You can have the perfect audience dialled in, but if what you're asking them to do feels like a chore or doesn't offer immediate, clear value, they just won't do it.

You mentioned ads not converting. My first question would be, what are you asking people to do? Is it a "Request a Demo" button? Because that's probably the most arrogant and high-friction Call to Action in all of B2B marketing. It presumes your prospect, who is likely a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do than schedule a meeting to be sold to. It screams "I want your time so I can pitch you". It offers them zero value upfront and positions you as just another vendor begging for a slot in their calendar. It's a conversion killer.

The job of your offer isn't just to get a lead, it's 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 them for free to earn the right to ask them to pay you to solve the whole thing.

So, what does a better offer look like?
-> If you're a SaaS company, the gold standard is a free trial or a freemium plan. No credit card details. Let them get their hands on the product. Let them experience the transformation themselves. When the product proves its own value, the sale becomes a formality. You stop chasing Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and start getting Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced. I remember one B2B SaaS client who we helped implement a proper free trial funnel. We then ran Meta ads to it and got them over 1,500 trials because the barrier to entry was suddenly gone.
-> If you're a service business, you need to bottle your expertise into an asset. This could be a free, automated audit tool (like an SEO audit showing top 3 keyword opportunities). It could be a 'Data Health Check' that flags issues. For a corporate training company, a free 15-minute interactive video module. For us, it's a 20-minute strategy session where we audit a failing ad campaign for free. The principle is the same: give real value first.

You also need to make your offer tangible and less risky. I've seen businesses transform thier results by productising their service. For example, one client wasn't just selling "brand film production"; they were a talented firm struggling to get customers. We helped them reframe it. They started selling a "1-Day Filming Process." It had a name, clear deliverables, and a defined timeline. This took a complex, scary service and made it feel simple, tangible, and safe for a buyer to invest in. Suddenly, their ads started working because the offer was clear and compelling.

I'd say you need to define your audience by their nightmare, not their demographics...

Once your offer is solid, the next question is who are you putting it in front of? So many businesses get this wrong. They come to us with a profile like "We're targeting companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees." Tbh, that tells me almost nothing of any real value. It leads to generic, bland advertising that tries to speak to everyone and ends up resonating with no one.

You have to stop thinking about demographics and start thinking about pain. You need to become an expert in your ideal customer's specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.

For example:
-> Your client isn't just a 'Head of Engineering'. She's a leader who lies awake at night terrified that her best developers are about to quit out of sheer frustration with a broken, inefficient workflow.
-> Your client for a legal tech SaaS isn't just 'a law firm'. The nightmare is a senior partner missing a critical filing deadline, exposing the entire firm to a multi-million pound malpractice suit and reputational ruin.

When you understand the *nightmare*, your entire approach to marketing changes. You know what language to use in your ads, what pain points to highlight on your landing page. Once you've isolated that specific problem, your next job is to find out where these people gather to complain about it. Where are their digital watering holes?
-> What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute? (e.g., 'Acquired' for tech founders).
-> What industry newsletters do they actually open and read every time? (e.g., 'Stratechery').
-> What SaaS tools are they already paying for? (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack).
-> What Facebook groups are they members of? (e.g., 'SaaS Growth Hacks').
-> Who do they follow on Twitter/X for industry insights? (e.g., Jason Lemkin).

This isn't just fluffy research. This intelligence is the literal blueprint for your entire targeting strategy on Meta. If you don't do this work, you have no business spending a single pound on ads, because you're just guessing. Doing this work is how you pre-qualify your audience before they even see your ad. For one client selling industrial products, we found a few very specific trade publications their ideal buyers all read. Targeting people with an interest in those publications on Meta was one of the keys to getting them high-quality B2B leads.

You probably should rethink your entire Meta targeting and campaign structure...

Okay, so you have a killer offer and you know your audience's deepest fears. Now we can finally talk about Meta. And here's an uncomfortable truth: you might be actively paying Facebook to find you the worst possible people.

If you've ever run a campaign with the objective set to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you have given the algorithm a very specific, and very dangerous, command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm, being the ruthlessly efficient machine it is, does exactly that. It goes and finds the users inside your targeting who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever buy anything. Why? Because their attention is cheap. No one else is bidding for them. You're literally paying to reach non-customers.

For any business that needs to see a return, you MUST use a conversion objective. That means 'Leads', 'Sales', or whatever your key business goal is. This tells the algorithm to find people within your audience who have a history of taking that specific action. It costs more per impression, but you're fishing in a pond full of buyers, not just viewers. We had a client in the recruitment space whose Cost Per User Acquisition was over £100. The first thing we did was switch their campaign objective from traffic to conversions and rebuild their targeting. Their CPA dropped to £7. It was that simple.

Once your objective is correct, you need a logical structure. A lot of people just throw a bunch of random interests into one ad set and hope for the best. I'd recomend a structured approach based on the marketing funnel. This allows you to speak to people differently depending on how familiar they are with your brand.

Here's a prioritised list of audiences I'd usually test, this is for an eCommerce account but the logic applies to pretty much any business:

You start with ToFu to get data. Use your research to build highly specific interest-based audiences. For instance, if you're targeting eCommerce store owners, don't target a broad interest like "Amazon". That's mostly shoppers. Target interests like "Shopify", "WooCommerce", or pages of popular eCommerce apps and influencers. Once you have at least 100 conversions (but ideally more), you can start building high-quality Lookalike audiences. Start with a Lookalike of your actual purchasers – they are your most valuable data source.

Then you hit them with MoFu and BoFu retargeting. This is where the real money is made. Someone who has visited your site is infinitely more valuable than a cold prospect. Someone who added a product to their cart is on the verge of buying. You need separate ad sets and separate messaging for these people. Don't be afraid to combine smaller retargeting audiences if your budget is limited, but always separate your hottest prospects (cart abandoners) from your general website visitors.

You'll need messaging that they can't ignore...

Having the right audience is only half the battle. You then need to hit them with a message that grabs them by the collar. Since you now understand their nightmare, you can use proven copywriting formulas to craft ads that cut through the noise.

For a service business, use Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS):
-> Problem: "Are your cash flow projections just a wild guess in the dark?"
-> Agitate: "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round of funding?" <
-> Solve: "Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

For a SaaS product, use Before-After-Bridge (BAB):
-> Before: "Your AWS bill just landed. It's 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out."
-> After: "Imagine opening your cloud bill and actually smiling. You see exactly where every single dollar is going, and waste is automatically eliminated."
-> Bridge: "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

This is how you get people to stop scrolling. You're not selling features; you're selling a solution to their most pressing problem. You're selling relief. We used a version of the BAB framework for a course creator client and generated $115k in revenue in just over a month because the messaging perfectly captured the transformation their students were looking for.

And you'll need to know your numbers to scale intelligently...

This brings me to your point about "measurable results" versus "vanity metrics". The ultimate measure of success isn't a low Cost Per Click (CPC) or even a low Cost Per Lead (CPL). It's your Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). But to understand what a good ROAS looks like, you need to know the most important number in your business: your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a great customer?" LTV gives you the answer. Here's a quick, rough calculation:

In this example, each customer you acquire is worth £10,000 in gross margin over their lifetime. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is often cited as 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer and still have a very healthy business. If your sales team converts 1 in 10 qualified leads, you can afford to pay up to £333 per lead.

Suddenly, a £50 CPL from Meta doesn't seem so bad, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to focus on acquiring high-value customers, even if they cost more upfront. Understanding this is what separates amateurs from professionals.

It's also important to have realistic expectations for costs. They vary wildly by country. Here are some very rough ballpark figures we often see for lead-gen style campaigns:

As you can see, costs can be much lower in developing countries, but the quality of leads is often significantly lower too. For most businesses, it's better to pay a bit more for a higher quality lead from a target market. For B2B or high-ticket sales, these costs will be much, much higher. We have a B2B SaaS client where a good CPL on LinkedIn is $22, which is fantastic for them given their LTV.

I know that's a lot to take in, so I've detailed my main recomendations for you in a table below. This is the general framework we use to turn failing accounts around.

As you can probably tell, fixing a failing ad account and finding a good consultant isn't about finding someone with a secret "hack". It's about finding a partner with a deep, strategic understanding of all these interconnected pieces. It's about building a solid foundation with the right offer and audience, and then executing flawlessly on the platform with the right structure, messaging, and metrics.

It is a lot of work, and it requires constant testing and optimisation. This is why many businesses ultimately decide to work with a specialist. It frees up their time and ensures their ad spend isn't being wasted, but invested intelligently towards growth.

If you'd like to go through your specific ad account and strategy together, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can apply this thinking directly to your business.