Practice · B2B software
Form fills are not pipeline.
The account that produces the cheapest leads and the account that produces the most revenue are rarely the same account. We build for the second one, which usually means the headline cost per lead goes up.
- Accounts run
- 14
- Longest relationship
- 45 months
- Channels
- Google · LinkedIn · Bing
- Measured on
- Pipeline, then revenue
The structural problem with B2B paid
Bidding algorithms optimise towards the conversion you report, and in B2B the conversion you can report immediately – a form submission – is a weak proxy for the thing you want. Feed the platform form fills and it will find you people who fill in forms: students, competitors, job seekers, and buyers with no budget.
The fix is unglamorous and it is most of the work. Get qualification signal out of your CRM and back into the ad platforms as offline conversions, so the algorithm learns which clicks became opportunities rather than which became emails.
How we structure a SaaS account
Category terms carry the budget
People searching for what your product does, described the way they describe it rather than the way your positioning deck does. This is where most durable pipeline comes from and where the most careless keyword research is usually found.
Comparison and alternatives are the highest intent you can buy
"X vs Y" and "alternatives to X" queries come from people mid-evaluation with an active budget. They convert better than almost anything else and they are usually the most under-invested part of a SaaS account.
Brand is defence, and it is reported separately
Cheap, high-converting, and completely uninformative about whether the account is working. Blending it into the headline cost per lead is the single most common way B2B accounts flatter themselves.
LinkedIn earns its price through targeting or not at all
Clicks cost several times what Google charges. That is worth paying when you need job function, seniority or a specific company list and no other channel offers it. It is not worth paying to reach a broad audience more expensively.
What we fix first
Almost always the measurement. In most B2B accounts we inherit, the conversion being optimised towards includes newsletter signups, demo requests and contact-form spam weighted identically, with no connection to the CRM at all. Until that is separated and valued, everything downstream is guesswork with a budget attached.
Questions people actually ask
- How do you measure success if the sales cycle is six months?
- By instrumenting the stages you can see now and treating them as leading indicators – qualified-lead rate by campaign, opportunity rate, and eventually closed revenue fed back into the platforms as offline conversions. Optimising towards raw form fills in a long-cycle business reliably buys you more of the wrong meetings.
- Is LinkedIn worth the CPC?
- When the targeting is genuinely unavailable elsewhere, yes. Clicks cost several times what Google charges, so it earns its place through precision – job function, seniority, company list – not through volume. For most SaaS accounts it is a supporting channel, not the main one.
- What about competitor bidding?
- Worth doing deliberately and measured separately. It is expensive, converts worse than category terms, and the traffic is often researchers rather than buyers. Where it earns its keep is on comparison and alternatives queries, where intent is genuinely commercial.
- Should we gate content?
- Rarely, and less often than most SaaS marketers assume. Gating a guide converts the small fraction who want it enough to give an email, and hides it from everyone else including AI answer engines. If a lead magnet must be gated, gate the tool or the assessment, not the article.
- How do you handle low conversion volume?
- Move the optimisation event up the funnel until there is enough of it to learn from, then use value rules and offline conversions to weight quality back in. An account generating eight MQLs a month cannot support target-CPA bidding on MQLs, and pretending otherwise produces erratic spend.
- Do you do ABM?
- The paid layer of it – company-list targeting across LinkedIn, Google customer match and demand-side platforms, coordinated with whatever your sales team is doing. The orchestration and content side stays with you or your ABM platform.
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Start with the audit.
We go through your accounts, tracking and funnel, then send back what we would change and in what order. About five working days, no charge, no call required to get it.