Most SaaS paid search accounts optimise toward the wrong event. They chase trial starts, hit the target, and the sales team still has nothing worth calling. I run SaaS campaigns against what happens after the signup, because that is the only number your board cares about.
The pattern repeats across almost every SaaS account I audit.
Google optimises for whatever you tell it to. Point it at free trial starts and it will find you people who love free trials. Point it at qualified pipeline and the whole auction behaviour changes.
One CAC number across paid, organic and outbound tells you nothing about whether paid search deserves more budget. Without channel-level attribution you are guessing with real money.
Bidding on rival brand names feels productive and quietly burns spend at terrible conversion rates unless the offer and landing page are built specifically for that intent.
A $40 per month self-serve plan and a $40K annual contract need completely different bids, funnels and landing pages. Running them together drags both down.
The campaign is one part. The measurement and the conversion path are what make it work.
Before anything gets scaled, the data has to be right. GA4 and Google Tag Manager audited and rebuilt where needed, conversion actions deduplicated, Meta CAPI or server-side tagging where it applies, and offline conversion import so the platform optimises toward revenue instead of form fills.
Trial to qualified to closed-won mapped back into the ad platforms, so bidding optimises toward revenue. This usually means offline conversion import from your CRM, which most accounts simply do not have.
Paid traffic dies on a bad page. I build and iterate the landing pages the campaigns point to, so the conversion path is one system instead of two vendors blaming each other. Fixed scope, tied to the campaigns, not open-ended web design.
Search captures existing demand. LinkedIn reaches the job titles that never search. I run whichever mix your motion actually needs rather than defaulting to all three.
A Looker Studio dashboard tied to your real conversion data, plus a written read on what changed and why. No 40-tab spreadsheet, no vanity metrics, no 'impressions are up' as a headline.
If your CRM cannot yet tell paid search which leads became opportunities, that is the first thing we fix. Everything downstream depends on it.
Some engagements have verified public numbers. Others are longer-running or confidential roles where I can speak to scope and approach but not exact percentages. I would rather show you the real mix than invent a case study.
Roughly $20K per month in Google Ads spend, in a market with $45 to $80 CPCs.
Ongoing role as Senior Paid Media Manager, leading strategy and a growing paid media team in a heavily regulated industry.
I go through the account, the tracking and the conversion path and tell you what is actually broken. You get the findings whether or not we work together.
Tracking, conversion actions and structure get corrected first. Optimising on top of bad data just makes you confidently wrong.
Campaigns, ad copy, audiences and landing pages built around how your buyers actually search.
Weekly optimisation against the metric that matters to your business, with a monthly written read on what moved and what is next.
Long-form writing on this topic from the blog.
Both, but the honest answer is that paid search rarely works well below a certain spend floor. If you are spending under roughly $5K per month there is usually a cheaper way to find your first customers. I will tell you that on the call rather than take the retainer.
Yes, and in most SaaS engagements this is the highest-impact thing we do. Offline conversion import lets the platform bid toward qualified pipeline instead of raw signups. It works with HubSpot, Salesforce and most modern CRMs.
Tracking and structure fixes show up within the first few weeks. Meaningful CAC movement usually takes one to two full sales cycles, because the feedback loop is only as fast as your pipeline. Anyone promising results faster than your own sales cycle is selling you something.
Either. Some clients bring me in to run paid search directly. Others keep their agency and use me as the person who audits the work and asks harder questions. Both are legitimate.
A short form beats a long discovery call. Give me the basics and I will come back with a straight read on whether I can help, usually within one business day.
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