Solved: Scaling Google Ads in the UK (Data Inside)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It sounds like you’ve hit a scaling plateau, which is a really common problem, so don't worry. A lot of businesses get to a point where just adding more spend to their Google Ads campaigns starts to deliver diminishing returns and kills their ROAS. It's frustrating.

Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on my experience. The fix usually isn't about finding some magic keyword or bidding strategy. It's often a bit more fundamental than that. It’s about changing how you think about growth and what you're willing to pay for it.

You probably should stop thinking about ROAS (for a minute)...

This might sound a bit contrarian, but the first thing I'd do is stop obsessing over maintaining a specific ROAS figure. Chasing a fixed ROAS is often the very thing that prevents you from scaling. Why? Because it forces you to only focus on the cheapest, easiest conversions, and you've likely already captured most of those.

The real question isn't "How can I keep my ROAS at 5x?" but "How much can I actually afford to pay to acquire a customer and still be very profitable?" To answer that, you need to know your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Once you know what a customer is truly worth, you can make much smarter decisions about what you spend to get them.

Let's run through a quick, hypothetical calculation. It’s the single most important bit of maths for any business that advertises.

-> Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's a customer worth to you each month? Let's say it's £400.
-> Gross Margin %: What's your profit on that? After your costs of servicing them. Let's say 75%.
-> Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? Let's be conservative and say 5%.

The calculation is simple:

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

LTV = (£400 * 0.75) / 0.05
LTV = £300 / 0.05 = £6,000

In this scenario, each customer is worth £6,000 in gross margin over their lifetime. This is your new truth. A healthy business can typically sustain a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. With a £6,000 LTV, that means you can afford to spend up to £2,000 to acquire a single new customer. Suddenly, a lower ROAS doesn't seem so scary, does it? It actually looks like an opportunity.

This calculation frees you from the tyranny of short-term ROAS and lets you invest in growth agressively and intelligently.

We'll need to look at who you're actually selling to...

When you first start with Google Ads, you target the most obvious, high-intent keywords. Things like "[your service] near me" or "buy [your product] online". This is the low-hanging fruit. The reason scaling gets hard is that you exhaust this pool of active searchers. To grow further, you can't just find more of the same people; you have to create new demand.

This means you need to stop thinking about your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) as a demographic ("companies in the UK with 50-100 staff") and start thinking about it as a *problem state*. What is the specific, urgent, expensive nightmare that your product or service solves? Your ad campaigns need to target that pain, not just a job title.

For example, you don't sell 'data backup services'. You sell a solution to the 'CTO who lies awake at 3 am terrified of a ransomware attack wiping out a decade of company data'. You don't sell 'recruitment services'; you sell a solution to the 'Head of HR who is losing their best talent to competitors because their hiring process is too slow'.

Once you define the nightmare, you can find where these people congregate online *before* they type a search into Google. What niche newsletters do they read? What industry influencers do they follow on LinkedIn? What software do they already use? This intelligence is the blueprint for your next level of targeting, moving beyond simple keyword matching.

I'd say you need to improve your funnel before you spend another quid...

No amount of clever ad scaling can fix a leaky bucket. Before you increase your ad spend, you need to make sure your website and offer are optimised to convert as much traffic as possible. Every small improvement here has a massive downstream effect on your profitability and ability to scale.

Think about it: if you can double your website's conversion rate from 2% to 4%, you have effectively halved your cost per acquisition. This means you can now afford to bid twice as much for the same clicks, pushing out competitors and reaching a wider audience, all while maintaining your target CAC. A better funnel is a scaling superpower.

This often starts with your offer. Is a "Contact Us" form really the best you can do? This is a high-friction, low-value request. Instead, can you offer something of genuine value upfront? A free audit, a valuable downloadable guide, an automated tool, a short strategy session? We find a free, no-obligation account review works wonders for us to demonstrate expertise. You need to solve a small part of their problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

I remember one B2B software client achieved 4,622 registrations at $2.38 Cost Per Registration. It made all the difference.

You'll need a better campaign structure to actually scale...

Once your funnel is solid, you can turn your attention back to Google Ads. A scaling structure looks very different from a startup structure. You need to move from a handful of ad groups to a more sophisticated, tiered system designed for discovery and exploitation.

This means segmenting your campaigns not just by keyword theme, but by user intent and stage of awareness. Here's a structure we often implement for clients looking to scale:

-> Discovery Campaigns: Use Broad Match keywords paired with smart bidding. The goal here isn't immediate ROAS; it's data collection. You're letting Google's AI find new, unexpected search queries that convert. It's your R&D department for keywords. It feels a bit scary to let go of control but it's neccessary to find new pockets of growth.

-> High-Intent Campaigns: This is where your proven winners live. Take the high-performing search terms from your Discovery campaigns and move them here as Phrase or Exact Match keywords. You allocate the majority of your budget to these campaigns because they are predictable and profitable. This is your cash cow.

-> Performance Max Campaigns: Once you have solid conversion data, PMax can be a powerful scaling tool. Feed it with your best creative assets, audience signals (based on your pain-point ICP), and let it run across the entire Google network. It can tap into inventory on YouTube, Display, and Discover that you can't reach with Search alone.

-> Retargeting Campaigns: Don't neglect the people who visited your site but didn't convert. A simple RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) campaign that bids higher for previous visitors can be hugely effective. You can also run Display or YouTube retargeting to stay top-of-mind.

This tiered structure allows you to systematically find new opportunities with your discovery campaigns, exploit them for profit in your high-intent campaigns, and then expand your reach even further with PMax, all while capturing lost leads through retargeting. This is how you build a resilient, scalable advertising machine.

You'll need to expand beyond Google...

Finally, there's a hard truth about scaling on a single platform: eventually, you will hit a ceiling. There is a finite number of people searching for your solution on Google at any given time. Once you've captured the majority of that intent, your costs will inevitably rise as you fight for the remaining scraps.

The next stage of growth is diversification. Taking your learnings, your perfected offer, and your pain-point ICP and applying them to other platforms. This doesn't just give you more reach; it gives you a different kind of reach. For many UK businesses, especially in B2B, the next logical step is LinkedIn Ads. We worked on a campaign for a software client where we were able to get leads from B2B decision makers for just $22 CPL on LinkedIn, something that would have been much harder on Google.

For other businesses, it might be Meta (Facebook/Instagram), where you can create demand rather than just capturing it. One of our eCommerce clients saw a 1000% Return On Ad Spend from their Meta campaigns by targeting the right interests. The key is not to abandon Google, but to build a portfolio of channels. This makes your growth more resilient and allows you to scale far beyond what a single platform could ever offer.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

As you can see, scaling effectively is less about tweaking bids and more about a holistic strategy that encompasses your business model, your customer understanding, and your marketing funnel. It's a complex process with a lot of moving parts, and getting it right requires deep expertise and a lot of hands-on experience.

This is where working with a specialist consultancy can make a significant difference. We do this stuff day in, day out, and can help you implement these kinds of advanced strategies much faster and more effectively than going it alone. We can help you build the models, redefine your targeting, and restructure your accounts for profitable growth.

If you'd like to have a chat about how we could apply this kind of thinking to your specific situation, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can take a look at your current campaigns and give you some more tailored advice on how to break through your current plateau.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh