Sales & Conversion
Personas
Ecommerce
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Last year, I watched a client burn through €10,000 in Facebook Ads with a "decent" 2.5 ROAS while their inventory sat in warehouses. On paper, everything looked fine. The metrics were green, the dashboard was pretty, and the campaign was "performing." But here's the thing - those numbers were lying.
Most businesses think wasted ad budget means low click-through rates or expensive keywords. That's surface-level thinking. The real waste happens when you're running profitable campaigns in fundamentally wrong channels for your product. You're optimizing the hell out of tactics while your strategy is completely off.
I've seen this pattern across e-commerce stores and SaaS companies - pouring money into channels that will never deliver sustainable growth because of a basic product-channel mismatch. The worst part? These campaigns often show "positive" metrics that mask the underlying problem.
In this playbook, you'll learn:
Why "good" ROAS can still mean wasted budget
How to identify product-channel fit before launching campaigns
The attribution lies that hide your real conversion paths
My framework for choosing channels based on customer behavior, not industry hype
When to cut profitable campaigns that are actually holding you back
This isn't about tweaking ad copy or adjusting bid strategies. It's about fundamentally rethinking how you approach growth and user acquisition.
Industry Reality
What every marketer thinks they know about ad optimization
Walk into any marketing conference, and you'll hear the same advice repeated like gospel. Every agency, every guru, every "growth hacker" will tell you the exact same playbook for reducing wasted ad budget:
Optimize your targeting - narrow down your audience, use lookalikes, test different demographics
Improve your creative performance - A/B test ad copy, try different images, refresh creative regularly
Bid smarter - use automated bidding, optimize for conversions, adjust based on performance
Track everything - implement proper attribution, use UTM parameters, analyze the funnel
Scale what works - increase budget on winning campaigns, pause underperforming ones
This advice isn't wrong - it's just incomplete. These tactics work beautifully when you're already in the right channel. But most businesses skip the fundamental question: Should we be running ads at all for this product?
The industry has convinced everyone that paid advertising is a volume game. More data, more tests, more optimization. But what if the channel itself is the problem? What if your product needs time to be discovered, not pushed? What if your customers make decisions over weeks, not minutes?
The conventional wisdom assumes all products can be sold through the same funnel. Click ad, visit landing page, convert. Reality is messier. Some products sell better through patient discovery than urgent promotion.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
Here's a story that changed how I think about ad budget. I was working with an e-commerce client who had over 1,000 products in their catalog. Their Facebook Ads were running at 2.5 ROAS - not amazing, but profitable enough to keep running. The client kept asking me to optimize the campaigns, improve the creative, tighten the targeting.
But something felt off. After analyzing their customer behavior, I realized the fundamental problem wasn't the ads themselves. It was the mismatch between how people wanted to shop their products and how Facebook Ads work.
Their customers needed time to browse, compare products, and discover items they didn't even know they wanted. These weren't impulse purchases - they were considered decisions that happened over multiple sessions. But Facebook Ads demand quick decisions. You have seconds to capture attention and drive an immediate action.
The more I dug into their analytics, the clearer it became. Their best customers were coming through organic search - people who had the time and intent to explore their full catalog. They'd spend 15-20 minutes browsing different categories, comparing options, reading descriptions.
Meanwhile, their Facebook traffic had terrible engagement metrics. High bounce rates, low time on site, shallow page views. Even when people converted, they often returned items or had lower lifetime value compared to organic customers.
This wasn't a campaign optimization problem - it was a product-channel fit problem. We were forcing a browsing-heavy product experience into a decision-forcing advertising format. No amount of creative testing or audience refinement would fix that fundamental mismatch.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Instead of optimizing those Facebook campaigns, I convinced the client to try something counterintuitive: pause all paid advertising and redirect that budget toward SEO and content creation. The goal was to meet customers where they actually wanted to engage with the brand.
The Experiment: From Paid Traffic to Organic Discovery
We took their €3,000 monthly Facebook budget and invested it in:
SEO-optimized product pages with detailed descriptions and comparisons
Content that helped people discover products they didn't know existed
Technical SEO improvements to support a large product catalog
Long-tail keyword targeting for specific product searches
The key insight was understanding their customer journey. People weren't searching for their brand - they were searching for solutions to specific problems or looking for particular types of products. We needed to be there when they were ready to explore, not when Facebook decided to show them an ad.
Building a Discovery-First Strategy
Instead of interrupting people with ads, we created touchpoints throughout their natural discovery process. This meant:
Mapping the real customer journey - understanding how people actually found and evaluated their products
Creating content for each stage - from problem-aware to solution-aware to vendor-aware
Optimizing for exploration - making it easy to browse, compare, and discover related products
Tracking engagement over conversion - measuring time on site, pages per session, return visits
The shift required patience. SEO doesn't deliver overnight results like paid ads. But within 4 months, we saw significant changes in both traffic quality and customer behavior. People were spending more time on the site, exploring more products, and making larger orders.
This experience taught me that reducing wasted ad budget isn't always about optimizing ads - sometimes it's about recognizing when advertising itself is the wrong tool for the job.
Channel Diagnosis
Start with product-channel fit before optimizing tactics. Ask: Does this channel match how customers actually want to discover and evaluate my product?
Attribution Reality
Most attribution models lie. Track the full customer journey, not just last-click conversions. Your best customers often touch multiple channels before converting.
Customer Behavior
Study how your best customers actually found you. Don't assume they behave like your ad traffic. Different channels attract different buyer mindsets.
Budget Reallocation
Sometimes the best optimization is moving budget to different channels entirely. Test organic strategies before scaling paid campaigns.
Within 4 months of shifting from paid ads to SEO investment, the results were clear:
Organic traffic increased 300% - from visitors who were actively searching for their products
Time on site doubled - from 2 minutes to over 4 minutes average session duration
Pages per session increased 60% - people were actually exploring the catalog
Return visitor rate improved 40% - customers came back to complete purchases
But the real validation came from revenue quality. While total revenue took 2-3 months to recover to previous levels, the customers we acquired through organic search had:
Higher average order values (35% increase)
Lower return rates (24% decrease)
Better lifetime value metrics
The kicker? When we eventually tested Facebook Ads again 6 months later, they performed better because we now had quality organic traffic to create lookalike audiences from. The SEO investment had improved our paid advertising, not replaced it.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experiment completely changed how I approach "wasted" ad budget. Here are the key lessons that now guide every client engagement:
Good metrics can hide bad strategy - A 2.5 ROAS isn't automatically worth celebrating if you're in the wrong channel entirely
Product-channel fit comes before optimization - No amount of tactical improvement can fix a fundamental strategic mismatch
Attribution lies more than it reveals - Facebook claiming credit for SEO-driven conversions taught me to look beyond platform reporting
Customer behavior trumps industry best practices - How your specific customers want to buy matters more than what works for other businesses
Patience beats urgency for complex products - Some products require discovery time that paid advertising can't provide
Channel integration works better than channel isolation - SEO made our eventual paid campaigns more effective
Budget reallocation is often better than optimization - Sometimes moving money entirely is the right call
The biggest takeaway? Stop asking "How do I optimize this campaign?" and start asking "Should this campaign exist at all?" Most wasted ad budget comes from being in the wrong place, not doing the wrong things in the right place.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies looking to reduce wasted ad budget:
Test organic content and SEO before scaling paid campaigns
Focus on trial quality over trial quantity in paid campaigns
Use paid ads to amplify proven organic content, not replace it
Track activation rates by traffic source, not just conversion rates
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores struggling with ad efficiency:
Analyze customer journey length before choosing ad formats
Test SEO for discovery-heavy product catalogs
Compare customer lifetime value by acquisition channel
Consider paid ads for remarketing, organic for acquisition