Ads are too expensive

From speaking to lots of business owners, there’s a typical marketing pattern that comes up time and again. It goes something like this:

• Ads are too expensive, so they look at SEO.

• SEO takes time, so they look at AI SEO.

• Social feels hard, so they ignore it.

• Website conversion is unclear, so they change the offer.

• The offer doesn’t instantly work, so they pause the campaign.

• Then they start again somewhere else.

It can be any mix of marketing activity. Email marketing, flyers, social media groups, networking, paid ads, whatever. We call this Goldilocks Syndrome.

It’s the habit of moving from one marketing option to the next, looking for the thing that feels just right. The problem is that the first option might not have been wrong, it might just have needed a bit more work.

Paid advertising is one of the clearest examples. A business runs ads and finds the cost per sale looks too high. Confidence drops, and the channel gets labelled as too expensive or not viable. At that point, a lot of business owners move onto something else. Maybe SEO would be better? Maybe organic content would be cheaper? Maybe another platform would bring in better customers?

Sometimes that’s true, but often the business hasn’t worked out what the advertising actually needs to achieve.

If a customer spends £25 and it costs £40 to acquire them, the numbers look bad on the surface. But that doesn’t tell you the full story. What is the margin? Do they buy again? Do they join an email list? Do they come back at Christmas, before holidays, during events, or when they run out? What is that customer worth over six months or a year?

Without those answers, nobody really knows whether the ads are too expensive. They only know that the first transaction doesn’t feel comfortable.

Businesses usually make poor decisions around this point in the process. They pause the ads before understanding the economics or they change the creative, the audience, the offer, the website and budget all at once. Then, if the results move, they don’t know what caused it and the campaign becomes impossible to read.

Before deciding that advertising is too expensive, you need to understand what you can afford to pay for a customer, what happens after the first sale, and whether the rest of the marketing system is helping or hurting the campaign.

Otherwise, the decision to pause the ads may feel sensible, but it is still being made without enough context.

Ads can be expensive, but so can walking away from them too early without understanding what needed fixing.

The advertising channel isn't always to blame, sometimes it’s the work that has or hasn’t been done around it.