"I recently helped a Series A B2B SaaS company achieve a 20.91% increase in QoQ pipeline sourced from paid search while DECREASING spend by 34.05% QoQ.
Here’s how you can do the same in 7 easy steps ⬇️
1) Export a report from your CRM on all keywords that have driven pipeline over the past 12 months. Hubspot makes this super simple.
2) Export a report from Google Search and Bing Search Ads on all keywords and spend.
3) Put all of the data into a Google Sheet that includes the following columns:
- Keyword
- Count of Deals
- Pipeline
- Pipeline to Spend Ratio
- CW Revenue
- CW Deals
- Revenue to Spend Ratio
- ACV
- Ad Spend
- Ad CAC
- Ad CAC Payback (Months)
4) Not all of the keywords you are bidding on will show up on the CRM report. Populate the information for the ones that do.
5) Now you can see which keywords are actually driving pipeline AND revenue. From there, you can prioritize.
We started by cutting all keywords that didn’t produce any pipeline. Anything that didn’t show up on that list was paused.
If budgets are really tight, then you can make cuts for the really inefficient keywords based on the pipeline:spend ratio.
6) Once you’re down to pipeline producing keywords, you want to look at Impression Share. If it’s IS lost to budget, add more fuel to the fire by increasing budget.
If it’s IS lost to rank, there are several different things you can try: Adjusting your bidding, ad copy, and the landing page are the three things I would try first.
7) Now you’ve cut the bleeders, doubled down on the winners, and can create a path forward to see if there are additional high-intent phrases you can slowly test and prove out.
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Every B2B marketing team is looking to get more efficient with their paid media spend.
One of the best places to start is with your paid search spend.
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PS: This is for a relatively mature paid search account with 12+ months of data.
PPS: This assumes the right tracking is in place and UTMs are set up across the Google Search Ads/Bing Search Ads accounts."