Solved: Plateaued Ad Spend (Unlock Growth Levers!)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It sounds like you've hit the classic scaling plateau, which is honestly a good problem to have—it means you've found something that works. But you're right, just throwing more money at it and watching your returns diminish is a fast track to burning cash. It's a really common issue, but one that's solveable with a shift in thinking away from just 'increasing spend' to a more structured approach of unlocking new growth levers.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts based on my experience scaling campaigns for all sorts of businesses, from SaaS to eCommerce. The solution isn't about finding a magic button to press; it's about systematically removing the bottlenecks in your funnel, targeting, and creative that are capping your growth. Let's get into it.

We'll need to look at why simply increasing spend fails...

Before we get into solutions, it's important to understand *why* your ROAS is dropping as you increase spend. This isn't a sign that your ads are suddenly 'bad'; it's a predictable outcome of how ad platforms like Meta and Google work. Think of your target audience as a pond. When you start, the algorithm fishes for the easiest, most eager fish near the surface—these are the people most likely to convert. They're cheap to catch, and you get a fantastic ROAS.

But as you tell the algorithm to catch more fish (by increasing the budget), it has to work harder. It casts a wider net, going deeper into the pond to find users who are less interested, more skeptical, or further away from a buying decision. These users cost more to reach and convert, so your average cost goes up, and your ROAS inevitably comes down. This is called audience saturation. You're simply running out of the cheap fish.

The mistake most people make is trying to force the same ad, same offer, and same targeting to work on this colder audience. It won't. To scale profitably, you can't just push harder on the accelerator. You need to upgrade the engine. That means improving every component of your marketing machine: your financial understanding (LTV), your audience targeting, your ad creative, and your website funnel. This is how you make the *entire pond* more profitable, not just the easy fish at the surface.

I'd say you need to define your customer by their pain, not their profile...

This is probably the most critical mindset shift you can make. Forget the bland, demographic-based Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) you might have. "UK-based marketing managers aged 30-45 at companies with 50-100 employees" tells you almost nothing useful for writing compelling ads or finding sharp targeting. It leads to the kind of generic creative that gets ignored.

To scale, you have to stop defining your customer by *who they are* and start defining them by the *problem they have*. You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare. What keeps them awake at 3 AM? What's the one thing that, if it goes wrong, could get them fired or make them look foolish in front of their boss?

Let's make this real. I've run campaigns for B2B SaaS clients, and this is the difference:

• A bad ICP: "We sell to CTOs at tech companies."
• A nightmare-based ICP: "Our customer is a CTO at a Series B startup who is terrified of her best two engineers quitting because the internal development tools are clunky and slow. She knows this churn would kill her product roadmap and put their next funding round at risk."

See the difference? The second one gives you everything you need. You know exactly what language to use in your ads ("Stop losing top engineering talent to workflow friction"). You know what kind of pain points to agitate. It also tells you where to find them. This CTO isn't browsing a generic "tech news" site. She's probably listening to niche podcasts like 'Acquired' on her commute, reading newsletters like 'Stratechery', and is active in very specific Slack communities for engineering leaders. Your entire targeting and creative strategy flows from this deep understanding of their pain. Do this work first, or you have no buisness spending another pound on ads.

You probably should calculate your real breakeven point...

Right now, you're worried about ROAS dropping. But what if I told you that a lower ROAS at a higher spend could actually be far more profitable? The entire game changes when you stop asking "How low can my Cost Per Acquisition be?" and start asking "How high a CPA can I afford to acquire a great customer?" The answer is found in your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Most businesses have a vague idea of this, but very few calculate it properly. It's the bedrock of any scalable ad strategy. It tells you your absolute maximum allowable CPA. Knowing this number gives you the confidence to outspend competitors and weather the higher costs that come with scaling. I remember one campaign for a medical job matching SaaS client where we managed to reduce the cost per user acquisition from a staggering £100 down to just £7. Having a clear understanding of their maximum affordable CPA was what gave us the confidence to test and optimise so aggressively to achieve that result.

Let's break down the maths. You need three numbers:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): How much does a typical customer pay you each month?
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin after accounting for the cost of goods sold (COGS) or the cost to service that customer?
3. Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month?

The formula is simple: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Here’s an interactive calculator so you can see for yourself how these levers affect your LTV. Play around with the sliders. Notice how a small reduction in churn can have a massive impact on the value of each customer.

With an LTV of £10,000, a healthy 3:1 LTV:CAC ratio means you can afford to spend £3,333 to acquire one customer. Suddenly, a CPA of £200, £500, or even £1000 doesn't look so scary, does it? It looks like a profitable investment. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive scaling.

You'll need to expand your audience universe methodically...

Once you know how much you can truly afford to spend, the next step is to find new pockets of customers. Your current campaigns have plateaued because you've exhausted your initial audience. The solution is a structured testing framework to find new ones. A lot of people just randomly test interests, but there's a much more effective hierarchy to it.

I've mapped out the typical audience prioritisation we use for clients, particularly on a platform like Meta. The principle is that audiences closer to the final conversion action (e.g., a purchase) will almost always perform better than those further away. You build on what's already working.

Your job isn't to find one perfect audience. It's to build a portfolio of audiences that work. Start with what you have: retarget your website visitors, cart abandoners, and past customers. These are your cash cows. Then, build high-quality lookalike audiences from your pixel data – a lookalike of your 'purchasers' list is worth 10x more than a lookalike of 'all website visitors'. Only after you've maxed those out should you move into broader interest and behaviour-based targeting, always guided by your nightmare ICP research.

You should structure this properly within your ad account. Have seperate, long-term campaigns for each stage of the funnel (ToFu, MoFu, BoFu). Inside each campaign, you can then split test different audiences against each other in different ad sets. Turn off the ones that don't perform after they've spent enough to make a fair decision (e.g., 2-3x your target CPA). This methodical process will eventually uncover new, scalable audiences and reduce your reliance on the one that has currently plateaued.

We'll need to look at your creative and your offer...

When you scale to colder audiences, your old ad creative will start to fail. Why? Because the people who were already problem-aware and solution-aware have already converted. The new people you're reaching need more convincing. Your ad's job is no longer just to say "Here's the thing you want"; it's to make them *realise* they have a problem and that you are the only credible solution. This is where messaging frameworks become so important.

Instead of just listing features, you need to speak directly to their pain. For a B2B service, a great framework is Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS).

• Problem: State the nightmare directly. "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?"
• Agitate: Pour salt on the wound. Make them feel the pain. "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round?"
• Solve: Present your service as the clear way out. "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, I often use Before-After-Bridge.

• Before: Paint a picture of their current hell. "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out."
• After: Show them the promised land. "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going, and waste is automatically eliminated."
• Bridge: Position your product as the vehicle to get there. "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

Just as important as the ad is the offer on your landing page. The single biggest mistake I see in B2B is the "Request a Demo" button. It's arrogant. It asks a busy, important person to commit their time to be sold to. It's a high-friction, low-value CTA that kills conversion rates. Scaling spend into a page with a bad offer is like pouring water into a bucket full of holes.

Your offer must provide instant, undeniable value. For a SaaS, this is a free trial (no credit card). Let the product sell itself. For a service business, it could be a free, automated audit, a calculator, a short video training, or a free strategy session where you solve a small part of their problem for free. For instance, one campaign we ran for a B2B software client generated 4,622 registrations. A key factor in that success was presenting a compelling, low-friction offer that made it easy for prospects to sign up. You must earn the right to ask for their time or money by giving value first. A better offer leads to a higher conversion rate, which directly lowers your CPA and makes scaling profitable.

See for yourself how a small tweak to your landing page conversion rate can dramatically impact your costs. A 1% improvement isn't a small win; it's a huge lever for scale.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To break through your scaling plateau, you need a coordinated, multi-front strategy. It's not about doing one thing differently; it's about improving the entire system. I've summarised the main action points in the table below. This is your roadmap.

As you can probably tell, scaling isn't simple. It requires a deep understanding of platform mechanics, financial modeling, customer psychology, and a rigorous testing methodology. It's very different from just running a few campaigns that work at a small budget. This is often the point where businesses decide to bring in an expert pair of hands.

Working with a consultancy can help you implement this kind of systematic approach far more quickly and effectively, avoiding the costly mistakes that come with trial and error. We've helped numerous businesses, from software startups to established eCommerce brands, break through these exact plateaus and find new levels of profitable growth.

If you'd like to discuss how we could apply this thinking to your specific situation, I'd be happy to offer you a free, no-obligation strategy consultation. We can take a look at your ad accounts together and identify the biggest opportunities for you to scale profitably.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh