SaaS PPC Strategies,Trends, And Challenges in 2024

According to Gartner, the SaaS industry grew from $31 billion to $161 billion between 2015 and 2022, a 420% increase in seven years. Moreover, the sector is expected to reach $195 billion by the end of 2024. 

On one end, such growth is good news and shows the rapid adoption of cloud-based SaaS software programs by other firms. But it also indicates an increased influx of newer SaaS businesses, peaking of existing ones, and a higher level of competition to get your target audience’s attention.

This means there’s a chance you’ll hit the hard wall when it comes to:

• Acquiring new customers.
• Scaling your business beyond borders.
• Generating satisfactory revenue despite increased customer acquisition costs.

And remember, no lead means no sales. If there’s no sales, there’s no way to keep your business running.

The next thing? Bankruptcy!

We’ve worked with dozens of SaaS businesses and understand how unpleasant any of these scenarios can be, especially for those relying on lead generation via SEO only. 

That’s where SaaS PPC advertising comes in.

In this article, we will break down what SaaS PPC is, how it can help you scale your SaaS revenue, and how you can create a successful PPC campaign for efficient lead generation.

What is SaaS PPC?

SaaS PPC, or Software-as-a-Service pay-per-click, is a digital marketing strategy in which you advertise your SaaS product or services on platforms like Google and pay a certain amount whenever someone clicks your ads.

Let’s break it down:

• Imagine you own a Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM).
• You register on the Google ads platform and create campaigns to promote your product.
• When Google displays your CRM product to a fitting audience, they are likely to just view and pass or click.
• If they click the ad, Google charges you a certain amount.
• If they don’t click the ad and merely view it, Google won’t charge you

So, SaaS PPC is fundamentally different from pay-per-view advertising, where you are charged for every 1000 people who view your ads, even if they take no expected action.

Before proceeding, understand that Google Ads is not the only platform for PPC ads. Other channels include Microsoft’s Bing ads, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. 

Most importantly, each advertising platform charges a different cost-per-click, some as little as $0.40 per click and others as high as $10 per click, depending on different factors. You can read more about different PPC channels and their respective costs in our B2B PPC article.

Why is PPC Important for SaaS Companies?

79% of businesses say PPC is extremely beneficial for their business, while another 79% plan to increase their ad spending in the following year. Here’s why:

Proactive And Quality Lead Generation

If you ask any random SaaS owner about their challenges, generating leads will top the list. That’s not surprising, given that SaaS leads are often company leaders, ranking executives, and well-informed decision-makers who are top of their craft in their respective niche.

So, it takes a lot to actually get their attention, especially in a busy market where your competitors have kick-ass products in their arsenal, and everyone claims to be a self-made and record-proven expert.

Lead generation is also a big challenge owing to the primary use of SEO. While that’s a great approach, the internet is already oversaturated, and search engine algorithms change occasionally. That makes it more difficult to scale up your website on the front page, generate enough visibility, and attract leads.

SaaS PPC cuts through these barriers and delivers your product right to the doorstep of your target audience instead of waiting for them to come. Moreover, PPC generally generates twice as much leads compared to SEO.

Higher Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total amount of revenue you can expect to generate from a customer over the duration of their relationship with your business. 

Let’s say customer A pays $200 per monthly subscription to your SaaS product. If the customer uses your product for a maximum of one year without any change in subscription cost, then the CLV is $2400.

The higher your average CLV, the less you need to acquire new leads and the lower your customer acquisition cost.

So, how does SaaS PPC affect your CLV?

First off, SaaS PPC leads convert 50% more than organic leads. That gives you a better head-start compared to SEO. 

Secondly, PPC encourages careful and granular-level messaging right from the start, which ensures your leads are aware of your offerings inside out.

That means you need not worry about your customer ditching you for competitors midway because of miscommunication in your value proposition and brand messaging.

All these combined lead to longer customer retention, which results in higher CLV.

Steady Flow Of Revenue

The SaaS market, just like any other market, is influenced by seasonal changes and recessional trends. This is especially true if your main channel for lead generation is SEO—coupled with the ever-changing search engine algorithms.

Anything that affects your lead generation flow will also directly affect your conversions, sales, and revenue. If your revenue dips, you will have less capital to budget for marketing. Reduced marketing effort leads to less revenue the next season. And the cycle continues.

However, that’s not the case with SaaS PPC. Regardless of algorithm changes, seasonal trends, and market disruptions, you can always reach your target audience and communicate your products.

With proper messaging, keeping your leads funnel filled becomes effortless. More quality leads mean more sales, which in turn means more revenue and sufficient capital to fund the next campaigns. This leads to a sustained flow of revenue.

Reasons Why Your SaaS PPC Campaigns Fail And How To Fix

“I invested 10% of my company revenue in PPC but failed to get results”

That’s a common complaint from SaaS brands that have previously tried pay-per-click advertising. While SaaS PPC is not rocket science, this doesn’t mean you can just scramble in and expect results. There are some steps you must follow religiously (which we will discuss in the next section).

After analyzing dozens of brands, we found out that the majority of SaaS PPC campaigns fail because of poor outreach strategies and ineffective campaign management. Beyond these two, there are other reasons, such as:

Extremely Narrow Targeting

Targeting is a buzz concept in the advertising world. The general belief is that the narrower your target is, the more likely you are to connect with your ideal customer.

However, this comes with a disadvantage. A narrower target means a low supply of leads and high demand from multiple bidders like you and your competitors.

Source: Poweredsearch

This inadvertently leads to a higher cost-per-click. Another way to understand the concept of narrow targeting is auction bidding.

Assume there’s a sapphire vase, one of its kind, wooed by almost 100 bidders. 

The auctioneer, therefore, has to throw an open bid, where each bidder calls a price higher than the last until there’s no more call. At this point, the final cost is already monumental and would normally be sufficient for tens of similar vases on a normal day.

In the end, you either spend more to get less—or simply opt out if the expenses supersede the return. To solve this, you have to strike a balance between those who are your ideal audience and those who are not necessarily your core prospects.

Targeting The Wrong Audience

While this point is often reiterated, most SaaS brands still miss it, especially if they leave their PPC campaigns to a new in-house PPC team that lacks the required experience and strategy. 

Sometimes, you might also end up targeting an audience that is too broad. An excessively broad audience puts you at risk of generating a large percentage of leads that do not align with your brand product.

Both mistakes lead to inappropriate ad spending, reduced lead generation, low-quality leads, poor conversion rates, and low returns on investment.

Besides choosing the wrong audience, you could be focusing on keywords that do not really matter or are too difficult. If it’s the latter, you’re likely going to spend more per click.

Lack Of Baseline CPC

Quite a number of PPC marketers and SaaS owners say their first-aid CPC (cost-per-click) is way too expensive. 

Eventually, they either pause the ad, delete it to create another one, switch platforms entirely, or reduce ad spending to save money. 

That’s like snapping the wings of your campaigns even before they fly at all.

Ideally, you’re supposed to agree on a baseline CPC for your ads. This could be a range with a lower and upper limit or just an average figure with some expected variations.

Also, leaving your campaigns on a test run for a week or two before making any changes is advisable. Advertising platform algorithms often take a while to acclimatize themselves to your preferences and collect enough details on your target audience. 

After a week or two, your campaigns are expected to start recording more targeted results, higher return on ad spend, and lower CPC compared to before. However, only a few campaigns survive until this point due to fear of losing too much money.

Generic Ad Copies And Blunt Creatives

We get it! There are tons of sophisticated AI writers out there that supersede even ChatGPT. However, they are still a few years away from writing like the most experienced copywriters out there.

Your ad copy carries the main message. So, it’s a big mistake to even invest less in it just because you want to save cost or join the AI trend.

The same applies to your creatives—videos, flyers, animations, and landing page design. They all create a lasting impression on your target audience. Blunt creatives won’t move the needle or evoke your high-level leads to take action, even if your targeting hits the bullseye.

Low-Quality Score

Quality score is a rating used by Google to determine the relevance of your keywords and ads in PPC campaigns. The more relevant your keywords and ads are to the audience you’re targeting, the higher your quality score. A higher quality score translates to lower cost-per-click and higher ad rank.

Google calculates this score based on four major factors:

• Your click-through rate (CTR).
• The relevance of each keyword and ad text.
• Quality of your landing page and overall relevance.
• Your past Google Ads account performance.

Now, here’s the problem. Most PPC campaigns perform poorly in all the factors mentioned above, and this results in a low-quality score. So you end up spending more money to achieve minuscule results.

This results in cost-ineffectiveness which might eventually force you to pause your campaigns till you have enough budget.

How to Create a Winning SaaS PPC Campaign

SaaS PPC marketing yields an average ROI of $2 for every $1 invested and an $8 return if you use Google ads network. Of course, it’s also possible to get zero results if you don’t set up your campaigns properly.

Remember what I said at the start of this article? While SaaS PPC is no rocket science, it’s not something you can garbage in and garbage out or scramble your way into. You need to do it well.

To ensure your campaigns bring in good results, we will share some of the primary steps we employ at TripleDart.

Define Your Goals And Objectives With Appropriate KPIs

You’ve probably heard this a million times. We’re not fans of repetitions as well, however, setting a goal is way too vital, and it’s worth reiterating if you ever want a successful SaaS PPC campaign.

Yes, the generic goal of every paid ad campaign is to generate leads and revenue. But you have to be more specific such as quantifying the results you want, setting a deadline to meet each milestone, and KPIs to measure the performance. Overall, it has to be SMART.

Here’s an example for a CRM SaaS brand:

• Specific: Increase CRM free trial sign-ups.
• Measurable: Achieve a 20% increase in sign-ups, maintaining CPA under $50.
• Achievable: Utilize targeted keywords and optimized ad copy.
• Relevant: Supports CRM business growth objectives.
• Time-bound: Achieve within three months.

Summary of goal: Focus on increasing CRM free trial sign-ups by 20% in three months through targeted PPC strategies, maintaining a CPA under $50, and aligning with overall business growth goals.

To effectively create a goal and set objectives, you’ll need to attach certain key performance indicators to track your input and output. In the example used above, cost-per-acquisition (CPA) was used to quantify capital investment. Other metrics like cost-per-click (CPC), return on ad spend (ROAS), and customer lifetime value (CLV) are also important. Check out more KPIs here.

Understand Your Target Audience And Create A Persona

In the SaaS industry, your target market is other companies that need your product, whereas your target audience is the decision-makers or buying groups of these companies.

• First, you should research all the companies that could use your solution. For instance, a CRM solution will benefit sales and marketing firms, e-commerce companies, real estate agencies, financial services, healthcare providers, and IT and software companies.
• The next step is to narrow the list down and choose a micro-audience—not necessarily too narrow, but not too broad, either. This could be just e-commerce companies or real estate agencies. Even if your product is built to handle different spectrums of businesses, you still have to target each spectrum separately for personalization reasons.
• Once you have a list of your target companies, find out their decision makers, such as CEOs, execs, shareholders, and managers. Look for where they spend time online, what they do, personal quirks, and all. They are the audience who you will primarily target as a representative of the company behind them.
• Gather their demographics, behavioral, and psychographic (interest and preferences) details. Then use it to formulate a buyer persona.

Primarily, it’s best to divide your audience into three categories based on your buyer persona:

• Your ideal customers.
• The not-so-hot prospect who is 50% likely to become your ideal customer later.
• The borderline prospect who is not an ideal customer but has a link to your ideal customer.

The messaging strategy for each is different. Take your not-so-hot prospects as an example. They need proper nudging with top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) ad messaging and middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) nudging. Sending them bottom-of-the-bottom (BOFU) ad content will likely yield no results. The reverse is the case for ideal customers who are at the core of your targeting.

Conduct Analytic Keyword Research

Knowing your target audience makes it easy to find out which keywords search terms they use when looking for solutions to their official or organizational problems.

At this stage, choose a B2B SEO tool like Ahref or SEMrush and do a general search on your company’s primary keyword. For a CRM brand like Salesforce, their primary keyword is CRM.

Once you put that in, you should get tons of related search terms that your prospects use online. Dig each term for search volume, difficulty, and other relevant branch-offs. Then export them into a spreadsheet for use in your campaigns.

To choose the right keywords:

• Focus on relevant terms related to your SaaS product and target audience.
• Prioritize keywords with high search volume and low competition.
• Find comparison and alternative keywords such as “X vs Y” or “Best X”
• Consider long-tail keywords for specificity and lower CPC. According to our B2B SEO statistics compilation, these keywords perform 2.5x better.
• Analyze competitors' keywords for insights and opportunities.

You can also explore sites like Qoura, AlsoAsked, Google’s PeopleAlsoAsked, and Reddit for search queries by your ideal customers.

Choose An Appropriate Channel

The most popular ad platform is Google Ads, which generates over 39% of ad revenue. Social media ad platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest follow suit, with Facebook ad groups generating the most.

There are over 120 other advertising platforms besides Google, such as Outbrain, Citreo, and Microsoft’s Bing ads. Each platform has its perks. For instance, Microsoft has an audience of older people over 50 years, Facebook has over 3 billion active users, and Google has the largest internet coverage.

Each of these platforms also has a different CPC. You have to consider this in your decision-making process.

Note that there’s no hard-fast rule against omnichannel marketing—using more than one channel. In fact, most leading SaaS businesses use at least three channels, mostly Social media, Google, and Bing. This increases your audience coverage and boosts lead generation.

But it’s advisable to scale up from a single channel and build a robust strategy before moving to another.

Determine Your Most Relevant Bidding Strategy And Baseline CPC

PPC bidding strategy revolves around CPC and CPA.

To determine which one is the most relevant bidding strategy for your PPC campaign, consider several factors crucial to achieving your goals efficiently, such as budget constraints and the industrial competition level.

If you aim for immediate visibility and are in a highly competitive market, a cost-per-click (CPC) strategy might be suitable. This strategy allows you to control spending while aiming for top ad placements. 

Alternatively, if your focus is on maximizing conversions within a set budget, a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) strategy could be more effective, leveraging data-driven insights to optimize bids for profitability. 

Understanding your audience's behavior and journey through the sales funnel will also help you decide whether to prioritize clicks or conversions. 

• Behavior: Different audience segments will interact with your ads differently. Some may click on ads out of curiosity or to gather information, while others may click with a stronger intent to purchase.
  
• Sales Funnel Journey: The sales funnel represents the stages a potential customer goes through before making a purchase, from awareness to consideration and finally to decision-making. At each stage, the intent of the customer varies. For example:
  

• Top of Funnel (TOFU): Customers at this stage are usually in the awareness phase. They might click on ads to learn more about your product or service.
• Middle of Funnel (MOFU): Customers here are considering their options. They may click on ads for comparisons or detailed product information.
• Bottom of Funnel (BOFU): Customers at this stage are ready to make a purchase. They are more likely to convert from a click into a sale.

Based on where your audience is in the sales funnel, you can adjust your bidding strategy:

• If targeting customers at the TOFU, prioritize clicks to drive traffic and awareness.
• For customers at the MOFU and BOFU, prioritize conversions by adjusting bids to maximize the likelihood of completing a purchase.

You should also set an expected or acceptable CPC. Let’s assume the average CPC in the finance industry is $0.50, and you offer a finance SaaS program. You should create an upper limit below which any fluctuation is permissible—for instance, a maximum of $0.70 for a normal industry average of $0.50 per click.

Design Ad Copies And Other Creatives

Your copies and ad creatives portray your brand identity and value proposition. It tells your ideal customer at first sight if your product is even worth considering in the first place. For instance, you’d definitely expect big brands like Salesforce to have their ways with words in such a way that each sentence evokes a sense of camaraderie or loyalty.

Anything contrary to this will negatively influence Salesforce’s target audiences, who initially had high expectations for the reputable solution provider. The same thing applies to other creatives like flyers, videos, and animations.

So, it’s important to ensure your content is consistent with the value you provide and your market reputation. Instead of trying to save costs through AI writers, invest in experienced human copywriters to craft lines that move the needle.

Give your creatives to reputable designers who know the worth of every ink and can infuse a thousand words in each stroke.

Most importantly, ensure each output aligns with your brand’s identity, across all channels of advertisement.

Design A Responsive Landing Page

Once leads click your ad, the second place of contact and the most important place to form an impression is your landing page. That’s where they get more details about your brand offering, and it can just be your homepage, product page, or a specially designed page.

Whatever it is, you have to do it well. Otherwise, leads will bounce right after landing. Cases like long loading time, poor mobile responsiveness, lack of proper contrast, unaesthetic design, and complex navigations are the main culprits in this.

Optimal landing pages should have the following:

• Clear Headline and Sub-headings
• Compelling Visuals and Mobile-Friendly Design
• Fast Load Speed
• A Strong Call-to-Action (CTA)
• Benefit-oriented and customer-centric Copy
• User-Friendly Navigation
• Social Proof (Testimonials, Reviews)
• Security Badges/Trust Signals from trusted sites
• Pricing Information or prompt to get a quote.
• Live Chat Option at all times.

Introduce Negative Keywords And Launch Campaign With Split Testing

Before going live, use negative keywords to tell ad platforms you don’t want your ads to be shown for certain search terms. This will help you save costs and prevent unwanted clicks.

Once everything is in place, review your campaigns for errors or updates, then launch them. 

Here’s where you wait. Most analytic tools take a few days or a week before showing tangible data that can quantify your ad results. The Google Ads platform report usually displays your average CPC a few hours after launch or from the second day.

Track Performance Metrics And Optimize Campaigns Consequently

If the ad is performing according to your expectations, continue monitoring and finding ways to improve each campaign on the fly.

If it’s performing otherwise, maybe the CPC is too high, or you’re not getting results, the first thing is not to adjust the ad budget or pause the campaign. Instead, see what could be going wrong, like extremely narrow audience targeting, few positive keywords, too many negative keywords, insufficient time for proper performance tracking, and so on.

Then, fix the issues appropriately. But ensure you allow enough time for your ad campaigns to run before making any changes. Remember I mentioned how ad algorithms take some time to acclimate to your ad settings?

Challenges in SaaS PPC and How to Overcome Them

SaaS PPC is no smooth ride, especially if you’re just starting out. But it’s also not a bumpy ride either if you know how to roll over the pit stops ahead. Here are some challenges most SaaS business owners or marketers face with SaaS PPC campaigns and how to overcome them.

• Lack Of Experienced In-house PPC Team: The first problem is gathering a team of experienced in-house PPC team members—from managers, designers, and copywriters to remarketing specialists and data analysts. In a good number of cases, SaaS owners end up recruiting a jack-of-all-trade and self-acclaimed specialists to handle all the roles.

For other non-B2B SaaS companies, this approach might work, but not for you. SaaS PPC requires pinpoint expertise and specialization. Ideally, you need a person for each task if you want good results.

• Overcrowded SaaS Market: Thanks to artificial intelligence, the SaaS industry keeps growing at lightspeed. Nowadays, different SaaS startups spring up globally to poach the same customer group. 

This means you have to continuously evolve your strategy and look for new ways to better connect with your prospects before others reach them. But that’s extremely difficult to do.

• Budget Constraints And Management: This might not be an issue for existing and well-established SaaS companies like Hubspot and Salesforce. However, newly starting brands might face issues gathering enough capital to run steady SaaS PPC ads, especially if you’re doing it in-house.

Hiring an intermediate PPC specialist costs around $64,000 yearly, and a copywriter costs close to $71,000 yearly. We’ve not even mentioned the cost for your designers and other members of the SaaS PPC management team.

Solution: Hire a reputable SaaS PPC agency. These people have the required expertise, specialists, operational tools, and experience-backed strategies to cut through the oversaturated market and scale your campaigns for significant results. Moreso, it costs way less to hire an agency for your PPC management compared to building an in–house team.

SaaS PPC Trends in 2024

There’s no “forever” blueprint for SaaS PPC. Every day, SaaS marketers find new methods to reduce ad spending and increase revenue. If you want to stay atop your game in the industry, then you’ve got to proactively follow-up these trends while implementing whichever one is possible.

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising refers to using digital automation to buy and sell ad spaces. Interestingly, campaigns launched with programmatic advertising enjoy granular-level targeting and reduced ad spending due to more effective data use.

The overall market value of programmatic advertising exceeded $200 billion in 2023, and Statista estimates an increase to $300 billion in 2026.

Thanks to the rapid tech and AI advancements, we expect this automated approach to advertising to become mainstream among marketers in the next few years. So, now is the best time to join the train.

Ad Retargeting

Just because a prospect did not click your ad the first time does not mean they don’t have interest in the solution you offer. Sometimes, you need to keep showing up in front of them until the need clicks. 

That’s where retargeting comes in. While it’s not a new concept in marketing, this method is gaining even more popularity among SaaS owners because they deal with longer sales cycles, unlike B2C brands, which often expect instantaneous results.

You can utilize ad retargeting strategies to position yourself as the first thought in your audiences’ minds.

Non-branded Creatives

We’ve all heard or implemented UGC, fully known as user-generated content, at one point in time. The concept is to let your existing customers do the talking while using a certain hashtag on platforms like Twitter.

Similarly, non-branded creatives are not created by you. This usually includes previous or existing customers’ screenshots, personal reviews, and video clips highlighting the use of your product. The only difference is that your customers are not the ones posting them directly to their social handles or platforms.

Instead, they share the content with you, and you use it in your ad creatives. This approach captures more attention and generates quality clicks.

AR And VR SaaS PPC Marketing Channel

Augmented Reality allows potential customers to visualize software interfaces in real-world scenarios via mobile devices, while Virtual Reality offers virtual demos, training sessions, or tours, providing immersive experiences that enhance understanding of the product's capabilities and benefits.

Most importantly, VR advertising helped marketers achieve revenue of $166 million in 2023, which is expected to reach $174 million by the end of 2024.

These technologies create more engaging and memorable ads, differentiating SaaS companies in a crowded market. And they’re expected to become a core part of advertising in the next few years as more people embrace AR and VR tools.

Kickstart Your SaaS PPC Campaigns with TripleDart

As profitable as SaaS PPC is, it takes a good knowledge of what works and what doesn't to actually pull off a successful campaign. That means it’s literally possible to throw your money in and get disappointing results. This is especially true for in-house marketing teams filled with disconnected members and self-acclaimed SaaS PPC managers.

If you want value for your investment, then you have to focus on choosing a B2B PPC agency. Why?

• They have the experience-rich perspectives to scale your campaigns.
• They’ve worked for different B2B brands, small or large, and come across different lead generation challenges.
• They’ve tested dozens of PPC strategies and found out what works best.
• B2B PPC agencies have high-end tools to assist your campaigns already.

Psst…

No long research to find your dream PPC agency. We’re right here.

At TripleDart, our team of B2B PPC marketing specialists and managers is always available to handle your PPC campaigns.

“TripleDart has been a dream partner. The team is intelligent and responsive and delivers what they promised. We have made huge progress in our growth marketing efforts with TripleDart.” – Drew Wallace, Head Performance Marketing at SpotDraft.

Ready to find out how we achieve jaw-dropping results for our partners? Schedule a call below.

FAQ

What is SaaS PPC? 

SaaS PPC (Software-as-a-Service Pay-Per-Click) is a digital advertising model where SaaS companies bid on keywords and pay for each click their ads receive. These paid ads appear on search engines, social media, and other online platforms to attract potential customers to their software solutions.

Why is PPC important for SaaS companies? 

PPC is crucial for SaaS companies because it drives targeted traffic to their websites, increases brand visibility, and generates high-quality leads. It allows SaaS businesses to reach potential customers actively searching for software solutions, leading to higher conversion rates.

What are the best PPC platforms for SaaS marketing? 

The best PPC platforms for SaaS marketing include Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, and Bing Ads. Google Ads are ideal for capturing search intent, LinkedIn Ads target professionals and decision-makers, Facebook Ads offer broad audience reach, and Bing Ads provide additional paid search engine exposure.

What are the key metrics to track in SaaS PPC campaigns? 

Key metrics to track in SaaS PPC campaigns include click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), conversion rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), and customer lifetime value (CLV). These metrics help measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and optimize performance.

Why should I use a PPC agency for my SaaS company? 

SaaS PPC requires specialized expertise, strategic planning, keyword research, ad creation, and performance analysis tailored to meet your business needs. But this experience-rich approach is not something you can get with an in-house team. At TripleDart, our team of PPC specialists has the necessary resources to manage your campaigns for better ROI and help you redirect your time to core business activities.

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