SaaS PPC: The 9-Step Strategy for Trials, Demos and Pipeline

SaaS PPC means paying for ads on Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and other platforms to win trials and demos from software buyers, and judging every campaign by the pipeline and revenue it brings in rather than by clicks.

When I audit a SaaS PPC account, it usually looks fine on the surface, with decent click-through rates and a cost per lead nobody’s worried about, and then it falls apart the moment you follow those leads into the CRM. That gap is what I’ve written this guide to close, for marketing and demand gen leads at B2B SaaS companies who own the paid budget and want it to show up as pipeline, whether you’re running PPC for SaaS in-house or with an agency.

The 9-Step SaaS PPC Strategy at a Glance

1. Set goals from search demand: Before you spend anything, forecast how many conversions the searches in your category can bring in and what each one will cost.
2. Choose your platform mix: Start on Google Search, where buyers are already looking, then add Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn, Meta or Reddit as your deal size and buyers call for it.
3. Research high-intent keywords: Go after the searches people make when they’re ready to buy or comparing tools, and build your negative list on day one.
4. Build full-funnel campaigns: Keep brand, competitor and category campaigns separate, so the one that’s working can’t eat the budget the others need to prove themselves.
5. Allocate budget by funnel stage: Put most of the money on people already searching, keep a slice for testing, and don’t scale anything until its cost per opportunity holds.
6. Write ads and dedicated landing pages: Every campaign gets its own page, a trial page for product-led tools and a demo page for sales-led ones, never your homepage.
7. Move beyond MQLs with offline conversions: Send SQLs and closed deals from your CRM back to Google and LinkedIn, so they learn to find buyers instead of form fillers.
8. Run remarketing across the sales cycle: Keep showing up with proof, comparisons and demo offers while the buying committee decides, and leave your existing customers out of it.
9. Measure cost per opportunity and scale what works: Report pipeline by campaign, check the search terms every week, and decide what to scale, fix or switch off.

What Is SaaS PPC?

SaaS PPC is pay-per-click advertising for software companies, run on platforms like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads and Microsoft Ads, where the goal is trials, demos and recurring revenue rather than one-off sales.

On the surface it works like any other PPC account, where you pick keywords or audiences, set your bids and pay when someone clicks. But once that click lands, almost everything changes when you’re selling software, so here are the five things I’d want any SaaS PPC program to get right:

What it has to get right	What that means	Where it’s covered
Search demand	Knowing how many conversions the searches in your category can deliver, and at what cost, before you set a single bid	Step 1
High-intent keywords	Bidding on searches from people who are ready to evaluate or already comparing tools	Step 3
A full funnel	Separate campaigns for people who know your brand, people comparing tools and people still looking	Step 4 and Step 5
Dedicated landing pages	A page for every campaign that matches what the ad promised	Step 6
Remarketing	Staying in front of buyers through a sales cycle that can run for months	Step 8

How Is SaaS PPC Different From Regular PPC?

SaaS PPC is advertising for software, where a click starts a buying decision that can take months and is judged on the pipeline and revenue it creates, whereas regular PPC, like ecommerce, is judged on the sale that usually happens the same day.

The easiest way to see it is side by side:

	Regular PPC (e.g. ecommerce)	SaaS PPC
What a conversion is	A purchase	A trial, a demo request or a qualified lead
How long the decision takes	Minutes to days	Weeks to months, often with a buying committee
What a click costs	Usually a few dollars	About $13.75 for non-brand searches and $3.12 for brand, across the B2B SaaS accounts in our Google Ads benchmarks
What you measure	Revenue and return on ad spend	Cost per opportunity, pipeline and payback
Who signs off	One shopper	A champion, their boss, finance and sometimes IT

How to Build a SaaS PPC Strategy in 9 Steps

To build a SaaS PPC strategy, set goals from search demand, choose your platform mix, research high-intent keywords, build full-funnel campaigns, allocate budget by funnel stage, write ads and dedicated landing pages, send CRM data back to the platforms, run remarketing, and measure cost per opportunity.

And this is the order I’d run PPC for SaaS companies in, because each step leans on the one before it. Here’s the whole plan in one table, with the tools you’ll need for each step:

Step	What you do	Tools you’ll need
1. Set goals from search demand	Forecast impressions, clicks, conversions and CPL from search volume	Google Keyword Planner, spreadsheet
2. Choose your platform mix	Pick the channels that fit your deal size and buyer	Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Meta Ads Manager
3. Research keywords	Build brand, competitor and category keyword lists, plus negatives	Google Keyword Planner, Search Console, your sales calls
4. Build full-funnel campaigns	Set up brand, competitor, category and remarketing campaigns	Google Ads, LinkedIn Campaign Manager
5. Allocate budget	Split spend by funnel stage and set a testing budget	Our free SaaS PPC budget calculator (below)
6. Write ads and landing pages	One ad set and one landing page per campaign	Landing page builder, ad platforms
7. Set up offline conversions	Pass SQLs and closed deals from the CRM back to the platforms	HubSpot or Salesforce, Google Ads, LinkedIn
8. Run remarketing	Build audiences by stage and exclude customers	Google Ads, LinkedIn, Meta
9. Measure and scale	Report pipeline by campaign and decide what to scale, fix or stop	CRM reports, Google Ads search terms report

Step 1: Set Goals From Search Demand

You start with how many people are actually searching for what you sell, because that decides how many conversions Google Ads can bring you and what each one’s going to cost.

Let me show you how we work it out, with example numbers for one group of category keywords. Read it top to bottom, because each line feeds the next:

What you work out	How	Example
Search volume	Monthly searches for the keywords you’ll bid on, from Keyword Planner	20,000
Average CPC	Keyword Planner’s bid range, or your own account data	$8
Impression share	The share of those searches your ad will show for, which your budget and the competition decide	50%
Impressions	Search volume × impression share	10,000
CTR	How many people who see the ad click it	3.6%
Clicks	Impressions × CTR	360
Conversion rate	How many clicks turn into a demo or trial	4%
Conversions	Clicks × conversion rate	About 14
CPL	Spend (360 clicks × $8 = $2,880) ÷ conversions	About $200

So in this example, you’re looking at about 14 conversions a month at roughly $200 each, for around $2,880 in spend, and that’s a goal you can actually hit. If you need more than that, the chain tells you exactly which lever to pull, whether it’s more keywords, a bigger share of the searches, a better CTR or a better conversion rate. And when your CEO or CFO asks why you’re spending on ads, a forecast built from real searches is a lot easier for them to trust than a number someone picked.

Now, that $200 buys you a demo, and not every demo turns into a customer. So the next thing I’d check is what a customer actually costs you and what they’re worth over the time they stay with you. Here’s the same example carried through, for a product that charges $500 a month:

What you work out	How	Example
Customers	Conversions × your demo-to-customer rate (say 1 in 5)	About 3
Cost per customer	Spend ÷ customers ($2,880 ÷ 2.9)	About $1,000
Customer lifetime value (LTV)	Monthly price × the number of months your average customer stays	$500 × 18 months = $9,000
LTV to cost per customer	LTV ÷ cost per customer	About 9 to 1

So you’d be spending about $1,000 on ads to win a customer who’s worth around $9,000 to you, which is a goal worth chasing. Keep in mind that’s ad spend only, so add your team or agency cost before you take it to finance. And if the ratio comes out close to 1 to 1, the forecast is telling you search won’t pay back at these numbers, and you’d want a better conversion rate or a different channel before you spend. What I wouldn’t do is start from this number and work backwards, because you’ll land on a cost per click the market won’t sell you.

Now, this chain only works on search platforms like Google and Microsoft Ads, where people are already looking. Nobody’s searching on LinkedIn, Meta or Reddit, so those work differently, and I’ll go through each one in the next step.

One more thing before you spend a dollar. In my experience, a SaaS company isn’t really ready for paid until it has a clear reason someone would pick it over the alternatives, and enough budget and patience for a proper three-month test. And if your product costs less than about $40 to $50 a month, the clicks usually cost too much for PPC to pay back. If you don’t have those yet, I’d honestly hold off, or you’ll spend the budget figuring out the basics.

Step 2: Choose Your Platform Mix

For most B2B SaaS companies, I’d start on Google Search, because the people searching there already have the problem and they’re out looking for a tool. Then you add platforms based on who you sell to and how big the deal is.

Something I tell clients a lot is that the bigger the deal, the more the channel mix matters. If your product’s low-ACV, one channel can be enough, but a high-ACV deal gets decided by a committee, and you won’t reach a whole committee on one channel.

Here’s how I think about each of the other platforms.

Microsoft Ads

Microsoft Ads is the one I see SaaS teams skip most, which is a shame, because it’s the same kind of search as Google, from people already looking for a tool, and it’s often a lot cheaper. On one account, the same category keyword cost $18.16 a click on Microsoft and $61.61 on Google, and Microsoft actually sent more clicks on that term.

I’d add it once Google’s working, and judge it the same way you judge Google, on conversions and cost per opportunity. Microsoft’s Google Import tool copies your Google campaigns straight across, so it doesn’t take long to set up, though I’d still go through the bids, budgets and anything it flags as skipped once it’s done.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn is where you can reach the exact people who sign off on your deal, by job title, company size, industry or a list of target accounts. But people aren’t on LinkedIn to buy software, so I’d treat it as an awareness channel, where the job is to keep your brand in front of your ICP until they’re ready to look.

That means you judge it on reach and frequency inside your target accounts, and on the pipeline it helps along, instead of form fills. I’d add it when you sell to a buying committee or a named account list, and once your search campaigns are already catching the demand that’s out there.

Meta

Meta can work for B2B SaaS, which surprises a lot of people. It behaves a lot like Performance Max, with high volume, lots of cheap leads, a few really good ones in there and plenty of junk to filter through. Next to Google you’ll usually get fewer great leads from it, but even with the spam, its cost per qualified lead can still come in lower, which is why it’s worth a test.

Two things decide whether it works. The first is a team that’s okay filtering through some spam to get that lower cost, because if every junk form fill is going to drive your sales team crazy, it’s probably not your channel. The second is tight targeting, which means running it on an outside list of the right companies instead of a wide-open audience. And the number to judge it on is what a qualified lead costs you, because lead volume on Meta will always look good.

There’s a bonus people forget, too. Brand awareness on Meta can send people over to Google to look you up, and that tends to show up as more brand searches, better click-through and more conversions on your search campaigns.

Reddit

Reddit can work too, as long as you treat it the way you’d treat LinkedIn. It’s where practitioners talk about the tools they use, so it’s a good place to get in front of them, but it’s an awareness channel. Judge it on reach and on the pipeline it helps along, and don’t expect it to book demos on the last click.

Step 3: Research High-Intent Keywords

So which keywords should you actually pay for? The ones people type when they’re close to a decision, like these:

• “[category] software for [industry]”, such as “expense management software for startups”
• “[competitor] alternative”, such as “Expensify alternative”
• “[competitor] pricing”, such as “Ramp pricing”

What I’d leave to your SEO and blog are the broad, educational terms like “what is project management”, because they bring in lots of cheap clicks and almost no pipeline.

Before you build anything, I’d sort the list like this:

Keyword type	Example	What it’s for
Brand	“[your brand] pricing”, “[your brand] login”	Protecting your own name
Competitor	“Expensify alternative”, “Ramp vs Brex”	Catching buyers who are already comparing tools
Category	“expense management software for startups”	Buyers who know what they need but not who to buy from
Negative	“free”, “jobs”, “course”, “template”, “login” (on non-brand campaigns)	Keeping out searches that will never buy

Here’s what competitor ads look like when someone searches “hubspot alternative”. Close and Lightfield are both bidding on HubSpot’s name, and both ads open by pitching themselves as the switch:

And here’s a category search, “crm software for small business”. The boxed ad matches what the searcher typed, CRM tools for small businesses, while the ads around it are for cleaning software and recruitment tools, which is what it looks like when other advertisers’ keywords are too broad:

The best keyword ideas usually come from your own sales calls and support tickets, because that’s where buyers describe the problem in their own words. Search Console and Keyword Planner then help you with volume, and Keyword Planner also gives you a rough idea of what each term costs.

How Google matches your keywords to searches

Before you build the negative list, you need to know how Google matches your keywords to what people search. There are three match types, and each one lets in more searches than the one before:

Match type	What it shows your ad for	Example for “expense management software”
Exact	Searches that mean the same thing as your keyword	“expense management software”, “software for expense management”
Phrase	Searches that include your keyword’s meaning, with other words around it	“best expense management software for startups”
Broad	Anything Google thinks is related	“how to track receipts”, “expense report template”

Most teams are surprised by how many irrelevant searches phrase and broad match let in, which is why I’d build the negative list on day one, before you spend anything. I’ll show you what those searches end up costing further down.

Step 4: Build Full-Funnel Campaigns

Once you’ve got your keyword groups, give each one its own campaign and its own budget, because inside one campaign, Google sends the money to whatever’s converting cheapest, so the other ad groups never get enough spend to show what they can do.

We saw exactly this on a client account. One ad group was spending well and turning demos into customers, so the campaign looked healthy, but the two other ad groups in that campaign had barely run. Once we split all three into their own campaigns, the other two finally got the budget to prove themselves.

Here’s how one of the accounts we manage is set up now, with brand, competitor and generic campaigns all split out, and each one running on its own daily budget:

This is the SaaS PPC setup I’d start most accounts with:

Campaign	Funnel stage	What it targets	What the ad offers
Brand	BoFu	Your own name, plus “[brand] pricing”, “[brand] reviews”, “[brand] alternatives”	Demo or trial
Competitor	MoFu to BoFu	“[competitor] alternative”, “[competitor] vs [you]”, “[competitor] pricing”	Comparison page, then demo or trial
Category	MoFu	“[category] software”, “[category] for [industry]”	Trial, demo or product tour
LinkedIn awareness	ToFu	Your target accounts and the job titles in the buying committee	Brand, proof and content ads
Remarketing	All stages	People who visited but didn’t convert	Proof, case studies, demo offers

Across the accounts we manage, brand and competitor campaigns bring in more leads than generic ones, and it makes sense when you think about it, because nothing shows more intent than someone typing your name or a competitor’s. So treat your own brand like a competitor and cover every angle of it.

That also answers something I get asked a lot, which is what to do when competitors bid on your brand. Run your own brand campaign so you’re the first result for your name, and send those clicks to a page that answers the comparison they’re probably making.

How LinkedIn and search work together

Your search campaigns can only catch people who are already looking, and in most categories, that’s a small share of the companies that could buy from you. LinkedIn ads are how you reach the rest. You keep your brand in front of your target accounts while they aren’t looking yet, so when someone there finally starts searching, your name’s already familiar, and they’re more likely to search for you or pick your ad over a competitor’s.

So I’d run them as one system. LinkedIn keeps your account list seeing you, search catches those accounts when they start looking, and remarketing on both keeps you in front of the people who’ve already visited. You’ll usually see it working in your brand searches, which go up as more of your ICP sees you on LinkedIn.

SaaS PPC Campaign Templates for Trials by Funnel Stage

If you’re running trial campaigns, here are the templates I’d copy:

Stage	Campaign	Example search	Ad promise	Landing page
MoFu	Competitor	“[competitor] alternative”	Why teams switch, side by side	Comparison page
MoFu	Category	“customer success software”	See it with your data in 10 minutes	Trial page with a product video
BoFu	Brand	“[brand] pricing”	Plans and a free trial	Pricing page
BoFu	Remarketing	Visited pricing, didn’t sign up	Start free, no card needed	Trial signup

Should you use Performance Max, broad match or smart bidding?

Quickly, what each one is:

• Performance Max: one campaign that runs your ads across Search, YouTube, Display and Gmail at once.
• Broad match: shows your ad for anything Google thinks is related to your keyword.
• Smart bidding: lets Google set your bid in every auction, based on how likely it thinks the click is to convert.

Google will push all three on you, and they can work, but only once the account’s feeding them the right signal. Think about how smart bidding learns. It optimizes for whatever you count as a conversion, so if that’s every form fill, it gets really good at finding people who fill in forms.

So I’d start with exact and phrase match on manual or target CPA bidding, get your CRM sending qualified leads and deals back to Google first, and only then test broad match and Performance Max against your best campaigns.

Step 5: Allocate Budget by Funnel Stage

Where should the money go? Mostly on people who are already searching, because that’s where pipeline comes from fastest, and I’d keep a smaller share back for testing new campaigns and channels.

Here’s the order I’d fund a Google-first SaaS account in, until the data tells you otherwise:

Campaign	How I’d fund it
Competitor	First, because these searchers are already comparing tools and close to buying
Category	Next, since this is where buyers who know what they need but not who to buy from show up
Brand	Only as much as your brand search volume needs, because you can’t buy more searches for your own name
Remarketing	A steady amount, to stay in front of the people your other campaigns already paid to bring in
Testing	A small slice for new campaigns or channels, so you’re always learning something

Your search demand forecast already tells you the total, because it gives you the spend behind the conversions you’re aiming for. If you’d rather not do it by hand, we’ve built a free SaaS PPC budget calculator that runs the whole chain for you, from search volume down to CPL and monthly spend:

What if you only have $3,000 to $5,000 a month?

Then keep it small and focused. I’d put all of it on Google, with a brand campaign if you have brand search volume, one or two competitor campaigns and one category campaign, and I’d leave LinkedIn for later, because its costs will eat a small budget before you’ve learned anything.

Don’t scale past the ceiling

This is something we learned when we were managing about $500K a month in paid spend. Once we pushed past what the market could give us, there just weren’t more buyers searching. So the extra budget went into bidding harder for the same people, and clicks that used to cost $30 started costing $70. We were paying a lot more and getting almost nothing extra for it.

So before you raise a budget, check two things. Look at impression share, which tells you how many of the available searches you’re already showing for, and auction insights, which shows you who you’re bidding against. If you’re already showing for most of the searches, more money won’t find you new buyers, so only scale the campaigns whose cost per opportunity has held steady.

Here’s the auction insights report from one of the accounts we manage. The “You” row is your own impression share, which here is about 27%, so there’s still plenty of search left to buy. When that number’s already high, extra budget mostly means outbidding the same competitors for the same people:

Step 6: Write Ads and Dedicated Landing Pages

Every campaign needs its own landing page, and that page should pick up exactly where the ad left off. Say the ad promises “the Salesforce alternative for small teams”. Then the page should open with that line, show the comparison and make the next step obvious. And please don’t send paid traffic to your homepage, because the visitor has to go hunting for what the ad promised, and you’re paying for every one of them while they do.

What the page asks for comes down to how you sell:

	Product-led (PLG)	Sales-led
Main conversion	Free trial or freemium signup	Demo request
What the page needs	A short signup, a product video or interactive tour, no card needed	Proof for the buyer: case studies, security, integrations, pricing guidance
What you optimize for	Trials where people actually start using the product	Demos that get booked and held, then SQLs
Biggest leak	People who sign up and never use the product	Demo requests that never get booked

Here’s what a product-led page looks like, from Close. The headline says what the product does, the signup is one email box or a Google sign-in, and the product itself sits right underneath, so you can see what you’re getting before you try it:

And here’s a sales-led one, Gong’s demo page. There’s no menu to wander off into, just the promise, one short form to book a demo, and the customer logos underneath as proof:

Free trial, demo or freemium: which should the ad push?

Here’s how I’d decide:

If your product…	Push…
Can be set up and show value in under a day, and costs under around $50 a month	Free trial or freemium
Needs setup, data or integrations before it shows value	Demo, or a guided trial
Sells to a buying committee at a high ACV	Demo, with a product tour for the people who aren’t ready to talk

Whichever one you push, make the demo easy to book. On one account we manage, a quarter of the qualified leads never booked a call because there weren’t any demo slots in the next 48 hours, so they just dropped off, and these were people we’d paid to bring to the page. Once we asked the team to open demo slots from the same day, the number of demos went up straight away.

Step 7: Move Beyond MQLs With Offline Conversions

Here’s the problem with optimizing for form fills. If Google and LinkedIn only ever see form fills, they’ll keep finding you more people who fill in forms, whether or not those people ever buy. The fix is offline conversions. You send what happened after the form, like SQLs, opportunities and closed deals, from your CRM back to the ad platforms, so they learn which clicks actually turn into revenue.

Here’s how you’d set it up:

• Capture the click ID: Google gives every click an ID (the GCLID) and LinkedIn passes its own click data, so store them in hidden form fields and send them into your CRM with the lead.
• Pick the stages that matter: that’s usually SQL, opportunity and closed-won, and each one becomes its own conversion action in Google Ads.
• Connect the CRM: HubSpot and Salesforce both connect to Google Ads and LinkedIn and send these stages back for you, or you can upload them on a schedule.
• Allow for the lag: a demo might not become an opportunity for three weeks, so give the platforms time and don’t judge a campaign on its first week.

Here’s what that looks like in one of the accounts we manage. These two custom goals are built from HubSpot lifecycle stages, one for MQLs and one for SQLs and customers, so the campaigns can be judged on the stages that actually matter:

If you’re getting fewer than about 30 demos a month, the platforms won’t have enough to learn from yet. So until the volume builds up, I’d give them something smaller to learn from instead, like pricing page visits or started trials, the kind of things people usually do before they buy.

This is the step that changed the most for a CRM company we worked with. They were spending around $80K a month on Google Ads, and the dashboards looked great, with lots of traffic and clicks, but the leads weren’t moving down the funnel.

So we cut the campaigns that weren’t working, switched off search partners, removed device traffic that never converted, rebuilt the structure and rewrote the ads and landing pages around what their buyers actually wanted. They went down to around $29K a month and got the same number of sales-accepted leads, and this time those leads kept moving through the pipeline.

When sales says the leads are bad

You’ll hear this at some point, and it’s usually fair. What I’d do is set up a short loop between marketing and sales, where you agree on what a good lead looks like, go through the last week’s paid leads together every week, and write down why each bad one was rejected. Those reasons tell you which keywords to add as negatives, which campaigns to cut, and which disqualified stages to feed back to the platforms.

Step 8: Run Remarketing Across the Sales Cycle

Most people won’t buy from you on their first visit, and in B2B SaaS that’s normal, because a deal can take weeks or months and usually more than one person has to say yes. So remarketing is how you stay in front of them while they think it over.

What you show them should depend on how far they got the first time:

What they did	What to show them
Read a blog post or guide	A related template, calculator or case study
Visited a product or comparison page	Customer proof and a side-by-side with the competitor they’re looking at
Visited pricing but didn’t sign up	A trial offer or a demo with a specific outcome
Started a trial but didn’t activate	Help getting set up, a quick-start video or an onboarding call

On LinkedIn you can go a step further and retarget whole target accounts, so the rest of the buying committee sees you too. And remember to leave your existing customers out of every remarketing list, or you’ll end up paying to show them ads for something they already use.

Step 9: Measure Cost per Opportunity and Scale What Works

If I could judge every SaaS PPC campaign on just one number, it’d be cost per opportunity, which is what you spent divided by the qualified opportunities it created. Cost per lead and click-through rate can look great on campaigns that never produce a single deal.

This is what I’d put on the one-page report you send leadership every month:

Metric	Why it matters
Pipeline and revenue by campaign	Shows which campaigns actually pay for themselves
Cost per opportunity	Shows whether the conversions you forecast are turning into pipeline
Brand vs non-brand results, reported separately	Brand traffic is cheap and converts well, so mixing it in makes the whole account look better than it is
CAC payback in months	What finance cares about
What changed and why	The fixes, tests and budget moves behind the numbers

Here’s an example of what that one page can look like:

Decide whether to scale, fix or stop each campaign

Start with the search terms report, and look at it every week. It’s the most ignored report in Google Ads, and across the accounts we’ve audited, teams regularly spend 50 to 60% of their budget on searches that were never going to buy.

Then, for every campaign, you’re making one of three calls:

• Scale it: cost per opportunity is under target and has held there for at least a month.
• Fix it: the clicks are right but the conversion rate or lead quality isn’t, so you work on the landing page, the offer or the follow-up.
• Stop it: it’s had a fair budget and a fair amount of time, and it still isn’t creating opportunities. The same goes for single keywords, so a keyword with 50 or more clicks and no conversions is usually one to pause.

Here’s what that looks like when it goes wrong. A CMO once told us they’d spent $120K on paid and made $90K back, so we dug into the account, and we found four problems:

• Leads that never booked: a quarter of their best leads never got on a call, because there weren’t any demo slots in the next 48 hours.
• Broad match and search partners: the new campaigns ran on both, and they’d pulled in 90% more irrelevant traffic.
• Chasing the top spot: on their best campaigns, the cost per click had jumped from $9.40 to $21.20 to win top-of-page positions.
• Searches that weren’t buying: 45% of the searches they were paying for had nothing to do with buying.

We fixed the demo scheduling, paused broad match and search partners, and put the budget back on buyer-intent searches. After that, ARR from paid went from $70K to $150K, while spend only went from $100K to $130K.

What to do when search can’t scale any further

Sometimes you just can’t scale search any further. On another account, we raised Google spend by 25% and pipeline didn’t move at all, because we’d run out of category searches to buy.

So we changed the plan. We kept search on a lean budget to catch the people already looking, and moved the rest to LinkedIn, to reach the right accounts before they ever started searching. We judged LinkedIn on reach and the pipeline it helped along, instead of form fills.

Two months later, ARR had grown from $105K to $238K, and the average deal had gone from $2.5K to $7.3K a month.

What Does the First 90 Days of SaaS PPC Look Like?

The first 90 days of SaaS PPC go to setting up tracking and launching the campaigns closest to a purchase, then adding the rest, and by the end you should know which campaigns to scale, fix or stop.

Here’s how I’d plan it:

When	What you do	What you should see
Days 1 to 30	The search demand forecast, tracking and offline conversions, negative list, brand and competitor campaigns, landing pages	Demos or trials from brand and competitor terms
Days 31 to 60	Category campaigns, remarketing, the weekly sales feedback loop	A first read on cost per demo by campaign
Days 61 to 90	Move budget to what’s working, test a second channel if search is maxed, cut what isn’t	Cost per opportunity by campaign, and a clear scale, fix or stop list

What to set up before you spend anything

Before the first campaign goes live, I’d go through this short version of our SaaS PPC checklist and tick off every item:

• Conversion tracking firing on every form, trial signup and booking
• A hidden field that stores the click ID and passes it into the CRM
• CRM stages for SQL, opportunity and closed-won that marketing and sales both agree on
• A negative keyword list for jobs, free, course, login and other searches that won’t buy
• A dedicated landing page for every campaign
• Demo slots that can actually be booked within a day or two
• Your existing customers uploaded as an exclusion list

Why Isn’t Your SaaS PPC Working?

When SaaS PPC isn’t working, it’s usually because the budget is going to searches that will never buy, the cost per click is using up the budget too early in the day, the platforms are optimizing for form fills, or spend has been pushed past what the market can give.

You’re Paying for Searches That Will Never Buy

This is the one I find most often. Even with phrase and exact match, Google lets in plenty of searches that have nothing to do with buying your product, and if nobody looks at the search terms report, they keep adding up. Across the accounts we’ve audited, it’s normal to find half or more of the budget going on terms like these.

Here’s what that looks like in an example search terms report for an expense management tool. The rows in red are searches that were never going to buy, like “free expense tracker app” and “expensify login”, and in this example they’ve eaten about half the spend:

How to Fix It: Review the Search Terms Every Week

The fix is simple, if a bit boring. Go through the search terms report every week and add every search that would never buy as a negative keyword, and you’ll see the money move back to the searches that matter. If a lot of the bad searches come from broad match, switch those keywords to phrase or exact match too.

Your Cost per Click Is Using Up the Budget by Noon

A Series A/B SaaS company came to us after its qualified leads dropped by 70%. The team had been changing ads, landing pages and bids all at once, so nobody could tell what had broken. When we looked at only the campaigns that used to work, week by week, the cause was the cost per click. It had shot up, so the daily budget ran out by around noon and the ads only showed for about 20% of searches.

How to Fix It: Cap Your Bids So the Budget Lasts the Day

Stop changing everything at once, and look at the campaigns that used to work on their own, week by week. If the cost per click has jumped and impression share is dropping because of budget, set bid caps. For that company, the caps brought the cost per click down, the budget lasted the full day, and the clicks and leads came back.

The Platforms Are Optimizing for Form Fills

If the only conversion you track is “form submitted”, the bidding algorithms will go and find people who love filling in forms, students, job seekers and competitors included.

How to Fix It: Send Qualified Leads Back From Your CRM

Set up offline conversions, so your CRM sends SQLs, opportunities and closed deals back to Google. Once the platforms can see which clicks became pipeline, they start bidding for more people like those, and fewer form fillers.

You’ve Scaled Past the Ceiling

There’s only so much search volume in any category, and once you’ve bought most of it, extra budget mostly just pushes your cost per click up.

How to Fix It: Hold Search Steady and Add a Channel

If impression share’s already high and cost per opportunity keeps climbing, I’d hold search where it is. Then put the next dollar into a channel that reaches buyers before they search, like LinkedIn, and judge it on reach and the pipeline it helps along.

How Much Does SaaS PPC Cost?

Running SaaS PPC usually costs $4,000 to $5,000 a month with an agency, $4,500 to $6,500 for an in-house team, and around $10,000 for a hybrid setup, on top of what you spend on the ads themselves.

These are the averages I’ve seen from working in-house, with agencies and now running one, for a SaaS company that’s already scaling:

Model	What you get	What you pay for	Typical cost
In-house	A paid media manager and a specialist	Two salaries: $3,500 to $4,500 for the manager and $1,000 to $2,000 for the specialist	$4,500 to $6,500 a month
Agency	An account manager, a specialist and an analyst	One monthly retainer	$4,000 to $5,000 a month
Hybrid	An in-house team working with an agency	Salaries plus a retainer	Around $10,000 a month

If you’re still going from zero to one, I’d go with an agency and an account manager, which usually costs $3,500 to $4,500 a month. When you’re just starting, you don’t know yet whether PPC will work for you, so it makes more sense to test it with an agency than to hire a team for it.

What to ask a SaaS PPC agency before you hire one

If you’re comparing SaaS PPC agencies, I’d ask these five questions on the first call:

1. How will you track pipeline? You want to hear them talk about offline conversions, cost per opportunity and a plan for your CRM.
2. Who’ll actually work on our account? Ask how senior they are and how many other accounts they’re juggling.
3. What would you do in the first 30 days? A good answer starts with tracking and a PPC account audit, before they launch anything.
4. Do we keep the ad accounts? You should, along with all their history.
5. What does a monthly report look like? Ask to see a real, anonymized one, and check it shows pipeline as well as clicks and leads.

How PipeRocket Runs SaaS PPC

We run PPC for B2B SaaS companies around a forecast built from real search demand: we set a target cost per opportunity, connect your CRM so the platforms learn from pipeline, and report what each campaign brings in every month. If your paid spend isn’t showing up in pipeline, we’ll audit your PPC account and show you what to fix first.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is SaaS PPC?

SaaS PPC is pay-per-click advertising for software companies on platforms like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads and Microsoft Ads, aimed at trials, demos and recurring revenue. It’s judged on cost per opportunity, pipeline and payback rather than on clicks.

How do you run PPC for a SaaS company?

To run PPC for a SaaS company, set goals from search demand, choose your platforms, research high-intent keywords, build separate brand, competitor and category campaigns, give each one a dedicated landing page, send CRM data back as offline conversions, run remarketing, and measure cost per opportunity.

Is PPC worth it for SaaS?

PPC is worth it for a SaaS company when the searches in its category can bring in customers for a lot less than they’re worth over their lifetime, and the company can run a proper three-month test. It works best for products with a clear category that people already search for.

How much should a SaaS company spend on PPC?

A SaaS company should set its PPC budget from a search demand forecast: search volume, impression share, CTR and conversion rate tell you the clicks you’ll pay for and the conversions they’ll bring in.

How much does SaaS PPC cost?

SaaS PPC usually costs $4,000 to $5,000 a month with an agency, $4,500 to $6,500 for an in-house manager and specialist, or around $10,000 for a hybrid, plus your ad spend. Companies still testing PPC often start with an agency account manager at $3,500 to $4,500 a month.

Is PPC better than SEO for SaaS?

PPC brings in demos and trials within weeks and stops when you stop paying, while SEO takes months to build but keeps bringing in buyers without paying per click. Most SaaS companies use PPC to capture demand now and SEO to build a cheaper channel over time.

Should you run SaaS PPC in-house or with an agency?

Run SaaS PPC in-house when you have someone senior enough to own tracking, budget and reporting, and use an agency when you need that experience quickly or don’t have the volume to justify a full-time hire. Either way, someone inside the company should own the pipeline numbers.

How long does SaaS PPC take to show results?

SaaS PPC usually shows its first demos and trials within the first few weeks, but you need around three months to know which campaigns create pipeline, because B2B deals take weeks to move from demo to opportunity.

What should you do when competitors bid on your brand?

When competitors bid on your brand, run your own brand campaign so you hold the top spot for your name, and point those clicks to a page that answers the comparison the searcher is probably making.