SaaS has a second requirement on top of budget: enough conversion volume to learn from. If you close four deals a quarter, no bidding algorithm can optimise to closed won, and we will build the account around an earlier signal instead — or tell you paid is not your channel yet.
This is the whole game in SaaS paid acquisition. Everything else is detail.
Tell Meta to find you leads and it will find you the people most likely to fill in a form. Those are not the people most likely to buy enterprise software. Within a fortnight your cost per lead is down, your sales team is furious, and the pipeline has not moved. The platform did exactly what it was asked.
Both Google and Meta accept conversions uploaded from your CRM. We send back the stages that matter — qualified, opportunity, closed won — with values attached, so the bidding learns from outcomes rather than intentions. This is the single highest-leverage piece of work in most SaaS accounts and it is routinely skipped because it needs a CRM integration rather than a campaign change.
Closed won is the truth, but if it happens forty times a quarter it is too sparse to optimise against. The craft is picking the earliest event that correlates strongly with revenue and occurs often enough to feed the algorithm — often "qualified by sales" or "demo attended" rather than "demo booked". We work that out from your own funnel data, not from a template.
A default seven-day click window is meaningless for a ninety-day sales cycle. The ad that started the deal will not get credit for it, which means the channel that actually generates your pipeline can look like your worst performer. We set windows to your real cycle length and cross-check against self-reported attribution on the form, because for considered purchases that free-text field is often more honest than the model.
Treating a self-serve trial funnel and an enterprise demo funnel the same way is a common and expensive mistake.
Free signups are cheap and mostly worthless. The event worth optimising to is activation — the moment a user does the thing that predicts retention, which is different for every product and which you probably already know internally. We push that event back to the platforms and let the bidding chase users who actually switch the product on.
A booked meeting with a five-person company and one with a five-thousand-person company are not the same conversion. Sending value with the conversion — expected deal size by segment — lets value-based bidding pull toward the accounts your sales team wants. Without it you optimise toward whoever books most easily, which is usually the smallest.
Competitor terms, category terms, "alternative to" and "best X for Y" queries convert at rates paid social rarely reaches, because the intent is already formed. Paid social is better used to create demand and to stay present across a long consideration window. Getting this split wrong in either direction is the most common structural error we find.
In ecommerce the constraint is margin. In SaaS it is cash — how long you are prepared to wait to get the acquisition cost back.
If a customer repays acquisition cost in five months, you can spend far more aggressively than a business waiting eighteen. The right ceiling on cost per acquisition comes out of payback tolerance and churn, not out of a benchmark article. We will ask for gross margin, churn and average contract value, and if you do not have them to hand, working them out is part of the first month.
Blended CAC hides everything. Self-serve and enterprise, SMB and mid-market, one region and another — these have genuinely different acquisition costs and genuinely different lifetime values. A blended number that looks acceptable often contains one segment subsidising another that should be switched off.
Some SaaS products cannot be acquired profitably through paid channels at their current price and churn. That is a finding, not a failure, and you deserve to hear it in month two rather than month eight. We would rather lose the retainer than keep billing against a channel that will not work.
A real audit of your live campaigns — structure, tracking, creative and where the budget is leaking. Free, no obligation, and yours to keep even if you never work with us.
HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive are the ones we work with most, and anything that can fire a webhook or export on a schedule can be made to work. What matters is not the CRM but whether your team updates stages reliably. If they do not, fixing that comes first.
Sometimes, and sometimes not. With a long cycle you optimise to an earlier proxy event and accept that the feedback loop is slow, which means you need patience and enough volume. If you close a handful of deals a year at high value, targeted outbound and events usually beat paid media, and we will say so.
Yes, where the targeting justifies the cost. LinkedIn is expensive per click and worth it when job title or company size genuinely defines your buyer. Often the better structure is Google search for existing intent with LinkedIn used narrowly for a specific segment.
We will tell you exactly what is wrong with them and write the copy direction. Build and design we scope separately or hand to your team. A lot of SaaS paid performance is constrained by the page, not the account, and pretending otherwise wastes your money.
Weekly, in writing, in pipeline terms — cost per qualified opportunity and pipeline generated against spend, not impressions and clicks. If your CRM data is not yet good enough to support that, getting it there is the first month's work.
No. And a cost per demo guarantee is an especially bad thing to accept in SaaS, because it is trivially achieved by generating demos nobody should have taken.
Account structure, tracking and the gap between your form fills and your pipeline — in writing, within two working days.