The Ad Spend Black Hole: What I Learned Burning £1,000s on Google & Meta with 0 Conversions

If you're building a B2C startup and thinking, “Maybe I’ll just run some Google Ads to get early traction” — read this first.

Max, the founder of Adventuro, did exactly that. His platform helps people book real-world adventure sport experiences across the UK — everything from scuba diving and kayaking to skydiving and mountaineering. Think of it as a platform that fills the gap between "total beginner" and "seasoned pro" — a place for people who want to progress in their sports, not just dabble.

He started the company to solve a personal pain:

“Every time, without fail, it’s been a complete nightmare to find the right experience… You end up on a kayaking tour that’s really targeted at complete beginners or families. And that was always really frustrating.”

On a recent episode of The Levels Podcast — produced by Trophy, a platform helping companies build gamified customer experiences — Max walked through the reality of trying to grow a B2C startup using paid ads. It wasn’t pretty.

This is the inside story of what happens when you burn through thousands in ad spend… and nothing happens.

The Plan: Launch With Paid Ads

After building the MVP in 11 weeks, Max and his team launched Adventuro in summer 2023. The first booking came through on day one (from his brother, as it turned out), but they knew customer acquisition would be the real challenge.

So they did what many early founders do: set up Google and Meta ad accounts.

“We kind of focused a lot around paid ads. So we’d set up a Meta ads account, Google ads account — which was at this point quite new to me.”

They weren’t flying blind — Max had worked in travel consulting and had experience with high-level digital marketing strategy. But getting into the tactical weeds of setting up paid campaigns was new territory.

The Burn: Thousands Spent, Zero Conversions

The first few weeks were rough. Really rough.

“We spent, you know, a few thousand pounds and got no bookings from it. Same with Meta. So that was really frustrating.”

They were running specific, tightly-scoped campaigns — one campaign per activity, with custom landing pages and tailored image assets for each. It all looked like the right approach. But it didn’t work.

“We got quite a lot of clicks through, especially from the display side of Performance Max… but it didn’t enable us to deliver all of our products in an efficient way to the right customer.”

The result? July 2023 ended with just one real booking — the one from Max’s brother on launch day.

The Black Box Problem

One of the biggest challenges was the opaque nature of Google’s newer ad campaign types — especially Performance Max, which was still relatively new at the time.

“It’s quite a black box. And it still is a black box, really… You create assets and try and make them perform. But you only ever get a pretty superficial level of feedback from Google.”

That meant the team was spending money, but getting no real insight into why things weren’t converting.

Performance Max campaigns promise automation, optimization, and reach across all of Google’s channels, but when you're early, you don’t have enough conversion data for the system to optimize effectively. Max and his team were stuck in the early learning phase, watching the budget go up and the bookings stay flat.

The Pivot: From Overly Specific to Dynamic

By August, things started to turn around, but not because of better ad creatives. The breakthrough came from changing the structure of how they were running campaigns.

Instead of managing individual ads for each of their (then ~100) activities, they switched to dynamic search campaigns that fed all their listings into Google’s system and let it handle the matching.

“We found [dynamic search] to be a lot more effective than individual ads on individual activities… It becomes a complete nightmare to manage as well. As soon as you have, like, thousands of products on the platform, it would be impossible.”

With dynamic campaigns, Google could pair search terms with relevant listings automatically, and allocate budget based on what was performing.

And sure enough, bookings finally started to come in. August saw 50–60 bookings — the majority of which came from one high-performing kayaking tour in Cornwall.

The Budget Trap: Why Granularity Hurts Early

Why didn’t the original ads work, even though they were so specific?

Max now believes the problem was budget fragmentation. They had too many campaigns, each with a tiny slice of budget — not enough to trigger conversions or give Google the data it needed to optimize.

“If you split your budgets too much and have low budgets, then it just doesn't have enough leeway to kind of learn where the conversions are coming from.”

It’s a classic startup trap: trying to do everything well with limited spend, and ending up doing nothing effectively.

Lessons for Early-Stage B2C Founders

If you're thinking about paid ads for your launch, here are some takeaways from Adventuro’s journey:

1. Paid ads rarely work immediately. Expect to burn cash learning what works.
2. Avoid too much granularity early. More campaigns = more dilution.
3. Dynamic beats specific when you have volume. Let the algorithm learn across your full inventory.

Final Thought

Adventuro now brings in bookings every day, and paid ads are part of the mix — but Max had to learn the hard way that strategy on paper doesn’t always translate to conversions in practice.

So if your paid ads aren't working yet? You're not alone. Every founder steps into the ad spend black hole at some point.

The key is knowing how to find your way back out.

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