S6E15 – Why Your Paid Ads Aren’t Working — And How to Fix Them (From $50M+ in Pipeline) with Patrick Cumming

Are you wondering Why Your Paid Ads Aren’t Working, Well Before spending a single dollar on paid advertising, you need to ask one critical question: Do you have product-market fit—or at least clear signals of it? In a recent podcast episode, Patrick Cumming, Head of Marketing at KlientBoost, emphasizes that paid advertising, especially paid search, is not a shortcut to growth. If your product doesn’t already have demand, paid search will likely drain your budget without meaningful returns. Instead, companies should assess how much of their total addressable audience they can effectively saturate with the budget they have. Success in paid advertising isn’t just about targeting the right people; it’s about delivering the right message in a way that resonates deeply with your audience.

Breaking the Myths of SaaS Advertising

Patrick breaks down several misconceptions SaaS founders often have when it comes to running ads:

One common myth is that the buying journey is linear. In reality, the journey is anything but—it’s complex, fragmented, and filled with multiple touchpoints. Another false belief is that showing your ads too frequently annoys prospects. Patrick argues it’s better to risk being slightly annoying than to be completely forgotten. Lastly, many believe that a large audience is necessary to make advertising work. Patrick counters this by explaining that smaller, highly-targeted audiences often deliver better results, especially for early-stage SaaS companies with limited budgets.

Why Most SaaS Ads Fail

Many B2B SaaS ad campaigns fall flat because of misaligned targeting, insufficient frequency, and weak creative. Patrick introduces the concept of “whispering in the Grand Canyon”—a situation where your message is technically live, but it’s not reaching the right people with enough repetition to make an impact.

To avoid this, he recommends reaching at least 80% of your target audience with a minimum of 10 ad exposures over one or two sales cycles. Additionally, ad creative should be relatable, clear, engaging, memorable, and capable of building meaningful associations with your brand.

When’s the Right Time to Run Ads?

Timing is everything when it comes to paid advertising. If you’re in an existing category where there’s already demand, paid search ads can be effective quickly. However, if your company is creating a new category or offering a product for which there’s no existing demand, Patrick suggests delaying paid ads.

In these cases, companies should focus on non-scalable, feedback-rich activities like cold outbound outreach, attending industry events, and engaging in online communities. These efforts can help you validate your product-market fit before scaling your reach with paid media.

Scaling Ads Without Burning Cash

Many companies fall into the trap of thinking that doubling their ad budget will double their results. Patrick warns against this linear thinking. Once your current demand pool is saturated, increasing your spend often results in diminishing returns.

Instead, companies should understand what each advertising platform excels at. For example, Google Ads are best for capturing existing demand, not generating it. Misusing platforms for objectives they aren’t built for will result in wasted spend and underwhelming performance.

Your Game Plan for Profitable Paid Ads

For those serious about investing in paid media, Patrick outlines a strategic approach. Start by analyzing your existing customer data to refine your targeting. Use Google Ads to capture high-intent, high-conversion keywords.

If you’re building a new category and demand is low, use paid social platforms with a long-term view. Focus on saturating smaller, well-defined audience segments rather than casting a wide net. Smaller segments allow for deeper connections and more consistent exposure, increasing your chances of conversion over time.

The Power of Creativity in Ad Campaigns

Creativity is often the make-or-break factor in ad performance. Patrick outlines five pillars for effective ad creative: relatability, clarity, engagement, memorability, and the ability to build the right associations. He stresses that there’s no perfect formula, but companies should continuously experiment and iterate. Without compelling creative, even the best targeting strategies will fall short.

The Importance of Tracking and Measurement

No ad strategy is complete without robust tracking. Patrick emphasizes the need for offline conversion tracking and CRM integration to get a true view of campaign performance. Using platforms like DreamData, companies can gain insights into the full user journey and understand how ads contribute to pipeline and revenue, not just clicks.

Data-driven attribution helps teams understand what’s working and what’s not—allowing for smarter budget allocation and optimization.

Paid Ads and Organic Search: Better Together

Patrick also explores how paid ads can complement your SEO efforts. While organic search is a high-ROI channel, it takes significant time to build. Insights from paid search campaigns can inform SEO strategy, particularly in identifying high-converting keywords with low competition.

Additionally, paid social can increase brand awareness, which boosts brand-related search volume and overall organic performance. When done well, paid and organic efforts fuel each other for sustainable growth.

Preparing for the Future of Paid Advertising

As data privacy regulations tighten and ad platforms become more opaque, tracking is only going to get harder. Patrick advises SaaS marketers to return to the fundamentals: build strong, recognizable brands and create ads that are bold, differentiated, and memorable.

In a world where data is limited, brand becomes the most powerful lever you have.

Final Thoughts

Patrick’s closing advice is clear: Be bold in your advertising. Don’t shy away from creativity or experimentation. Deeply understand your audience and craft messaging that speaks to their specific pain points and goals.

If you’re just starting out, make sure there’s existing demand before diving into paid ads. Once you begin running campaigns, use the data and insights to inform not just your paid strategy, but your broader go-to-market approach, including content, SEO, and sales outreach.

Paid advertising isn’t a growth hack—it’s a tool. Use it wisely, and it can become one of your most powerful growth engines.

Key Timecodes

• (0:00) – Introduction: Patrick on product-market fit and paid ads
• (0:54) – Guest Introduction: Joran introduces Patrick Cumming
• (1:41) – Common Myths: Patrick discusses myths about SaaS paid ads
• (2:53) – Small Audience Strategy: The benefits of targeting a small audience 
• (3:16) – B2B SaaS Ad Campaigns Failures: Reasons why ad campaigns fail
• (4:35) – Reach and Frequency: Importance in marketing strategies
• (5:48) – Ad Creatives: Patrick’s five-step framework for effective ads
• (7:49) – Audience Targeting: Importance in ad campaign success
• (8:40) – When to Start Paid Ads: Timing and prerequisites for running ads
• (10:19) – Experimentation: The challenges of creating new market demand
• (11:45) – Scaling Mistakes: Common errors when scaling ad campaigns
• (13:13) – Platform Usage: Using Google Ads and social media effectively 
• (15:27) – Cold Audience Challenges: Issues with targeting cold audiences
• (16:00) – Building a Paid Ads Strategy: Framework for starting a campaign
• (17:00) – Analyzing Data: Importance of understanding existing customers
• (18:18) – High Intent Keywords: Starting point for Google Ads
• (19:21) – Budget and Audience Saturation: Maximizing ad spend efficiency
• (20:21) – Account-Based Marketing: Strategy for focusing on target audiences
• (21:36) – Case Study: Successful strategy for a small audience segment
• (23:57) – LinkedIn Revenue Attribution Report: Measuring ad performance
• (25:26) – Correlation in Ads: Understanding ad impact beyond direct attribution
• (27:54) – Tracking and Measurement: Challenges and importance in ad campaigns
• (29:08) – Attribution Tools: Using Dream Data for understanding ad influence
• (31:35) – Trust in Ads: Importance of trusting ad performance over time
• (33:04) – SEO vs. Paid Ads: Balancing organic and paid strategies
• (35:45) – Future of Marketing: Preparing for changes in tracking and privacy
• (38:14) – Bold Advertising: Patrick’s advice for standing out in paid marketing
• (39:10) – Advice for SaaS Founders: Tips for reaching 10k MRR
• (41:51) – Scaling to 10M ARR: Strategies for growing a successful SaaS business
• (44:38) – Expanding Channels: Using tools like Primer and Metadata
• (46:42) – Contact Information: How to connect with Patrick Cumming
• (48:04) – Closing Remarks: Joran wraps up the episode

Transcription

[00:00:00.160] – Patrick

If there’s not existing demand, you almost want to already have either strong product market fit or at least strong product market fit signals before you start running ads. And especially paid search, like if there’s not existing demand already paid search is just, you just set the money on fire. You can’t just say, okay, I’m going to put 10k into paid ads and then I’m going to increase the investment when I start seeing a return. That’s a recipe for value. What you need to say is, okay, we have 10k to play with. What’s the maximum audience segment we can afford with that? 10k to fully saturate. If your ad creative isn’t resonating with the audience or that it’s not grabbing their attention, then it doesn’t matter how good your targeting is and how often you get the ads in front of people, they’re not going to remember who you are.

[00:00:54.020] – Joran

We’ve never been able to make paid ads work for us. That is something you hear a lot when you’re talking to SaaS founders. So today we’re going to talk about why your paid ads aren’t working and how to fix this. My guest is Patrick Cumming. He’s the head of Marketing at KlientBoost. KlientBoost is a performance marketing agency. They say they can squeeze more ROI from your paid ads and other marketing channels and is currently helping over 250 clients in SaaS or E Commerce. Next to running the marketing department, Patrick is the co host of the podcast Client Booth Kitchen B2B Marketing show where they share bit sized marketing recipes. Before joining KlientBoost, he has been at different agencies where he gained more insights from the kitchens of many B2B brands and their marketing strategies. And if he’s not in a kitchen of a SaaS company, he will be in an actual kitchen as he loves to cook as well. Let’s dive in. Welcome to the show Patrick.

[00:01:41.660] – Patrick

Thanks for having me dude.

[00:01:42.860] – Joran

We’re going to dive right in. What are the biggest myths SaaS founders believe about running paid ads specifically on Google and LinkedIn?

[00:01:50.780] – Patrick

Yeah, that’s a good question. And it’s hard to narrow the this down because I think there’s so many myths out there. Probably the most dangerous myth is that the buying journey is linear so that a user is going to click an ad, they’re going to go to a landing page and then they’re going to book a demo and then they’re going to convert to a customer. I think the world we live in now the buying journey is much more complex and has more touch points. You know, it’s, it’s almost like I’ve seen lots of diagrams where it’s, it’s kind of described as just a jumble. And that’s really how the buying journey is. So they need to optimize for that. Another one that I hear a lot is if your prospects see your ads too many times, you irritate them. My counter is always it’s better to have one irritated prospect than a hundred almost customers. And I would actually say it’s to some degree better to annoy them a little bit, then at least you’ll be remembered. So it’s much more likely that you’re going to actually make it to that kind of vendor shortlist when somebody’s looking for a new solution.

[00:02:53.230] – Patrick

And then probably the final one I would say is that you need a big audience to do it. And I would actually say on the flip, sometimes it can work much better with a small audience. Especially for those younger SaaS companies with smaller budgets, a small audience is ideal because you just won’t have the available resources to effectively target a big audience anyways.

[00:03:16.040] – Joran

Nice, nice. And we’re going to dive deeper into some of the things you just mentioned. One other mistake a lot of SaaS companies make. Like, why do most B2B SaaS ad campaigns fail to actually generate real ROI, in your opinion?

[00:03:30.440] – Patrick

Yeah, that’s a good one. And actually so on the Clydebu’s Kitchen podcast, I recently did an episode exactly on this. I have it in a hierarchy of like top to bottom, what I think are the top reasons. The number one, especially for younger SaaS companies, is targeting. And that can be targeting multiple different perspectives. Right. You could just be targeting the complete wrong audience because you just don’t have the kind of skin in the game to really deeply understand who is the ideal prospect for me or who is the actual decision maker at this company that I need to go after. But then another mistake that they’ll make is just targeting too many people as well. And so what that looks like is they’ll go after their entire total addressable market when they again, just don’t have the resources to actually effectively penetrate that market. And that will just lead to, we call it like whispering in the Grand Canyon. Nobody’s going to hear you and it’s not going to be effective. So I would say that’s probably the biggest place. But then also cascading down from that, it’s really a reach and frequency problem.

[00:04:35.680] – Patrick

So we have this saying Internally at Client Boost marketing is really just a game of reach. It’s about reaching as many target prospects as possible as often as possible. So you’re remembered as they transition from out market to in market. Yeah, I typically recommend companies shoot for. It’s very difficult to do. But of Your total audience, 80% audience penetration, your ads are reaching 80% of the audience. You go and after and then at 10 AD frequency minimum. So that means they’re seeing at least 10 ads, usually over one to two sales cycles. If you say an average sales cycle is 60 days, you’d want 80% of your audience seeing an ad 10 times or having an opportunity to see an ad 10 times over that period. And then probably the there’s a few more, but probably the other one that’s most common is also just creative. So if your ad creative isn’t resonating with the audience or that it’s not grabbing their attention, then it doesn’t matter how good your targeting is and how often you get the ads in front of people, they’re not going to remember who you are. And so what I typically recommend to companies is to use like a.

[00:05:48.490] – Patrick

I have this five step framework. An ad needs to hit in order to be effective. First one and most important is just that it’s relatable. And by that it means that it needs to relate to, you know, a common pain point that the audience suffers or a common scenario that they undergo. They need to read the ads and be able to see themselves in the ad. So that’s really important. It also just needs to be clear and you would be surprised how many ads you read and you just have either no idea what the company does or no idea what they’re even trying to say. Right. The other one is engaging. So you want them to see the ad and want to engage with it. I think that’s important. They want to look at it and be like, yep, that’s me. I’m going to engage with this because it speaks to me. And then the final two is they’re kind of together but separate at the same time. But it needs to be memorable. So you want to create an ad that gets remembered, but it’s not just enough to be remembered. You also need to make sure it’s remembered for the right thing.

[00:06:50.890] – Patrick

So the final piece is building associations. You want to make sure it’s memorable for the product you serve. An example I use of this is there’s tons of people that go viral on TikTok that go viral on. I was on Facebook yesterday I very rarely go on Facebook, but I was looking for a new bed on Facebook Marketplace and so I had a quick scroll through the feed and there’s so many posts with a hundred thousand likes that are just random people that’s not associated to anything and not going to make anybody any money. So it’s really important to have that correct association. I’m always thinking when it comes to advertising of 95% of your market, around 95% is going to be out market at any one time and around 5% is going to be in market. So you can’t only optimize for these people because you won’t have a future pipeline. That’s why it’s really important to get that association correct so that when these people move in market, you’re the first company that comes to mind, or at least one of the companies that comes to mind.

[00:07:49.490] – Joran

Nice. Targeting the right audience, not showing your ads enough creative. These are the mise en place of being in a kitchen. The preparation of actually running the ads.

[00:07:59.650] – Patrick

Yeah, for sure. And that’s interesting because if we come back to the number one fails, that’s probably one area a lot of companies fail at too. Right. Which is not getting that planning stage done correctly. So they’re not deeply trying to understand the audiences, they’re not trying to deeply understand those pain points because they’re so obsessed with speed and trying to get things out quickly and actually just, yeah, taking that extra time to plan, prep and think about what you want these ads to achieve can be super effective.

[00:08:28.670] – Joran

One thing I see a lot is when SaaS companies start out, they think like, we’re going to start running paid ads and get our first clients, but they don’t know the right audience. What is, in your opinion, the actual good moment to start with running paid ads?

[00:08:40.990] – Patrick

That’s a good question and difficult to answer because it’s not always cut and dry and you are going to make some mistakes. And I think that’s, that’s actually probably one pre. Prerequisite I would say is that you should definitely avoid any information or people that are telling you there’s an exact formula you can follow that’s going to work every single time. It’s different for every business. There’s some best practices that you’ll typically start with. But yeah, what I would say is it really depends on the stage of your company and the category within which you are operating. So if you’re a B2B SaaS and you are operating in an existing category that already has demand, that’s probably an ideal situation to be in from a paid ads perspective because you can launch something like paid search ads on Google Ads immediately and there’s going to be demand for your product which providing you have a decent landing page, a decent offer, you should be able to start generating pipeline and inbound very quickly. The more challenging problem is young SaaS companies that are trying to create a new category where there isn’t existing demand. That’s the really tricky problem and depending on the amount of budget that they have, I sometimes will even just steer them away from paid ads because you have to do so much experimentation and you have to iterate so much and fail so much before you find exactly the right way to talk about this product, exactly who you’re talking to, that you will almost Definitely throw maybe 70% of your ad budget straight in the bin.

[00:10:19.340] – Patrick

And so with those companies I actually say it’s probably better that you start with something that’s more of a, more of a time intensive strategy but not a money intensive strategy. So that’s something like Cold Outbound for example, getting yourself to events, joining online communities, trying to have those non scalable one to one conversations with different people. Because this is something I always say about SaaS founders is like I love working. I didn’t get to do it too much when I was on the client side because you would normally be working with you know, a head of marketing or CMO or something like that. But when you get the. There are occasional times where I’d work directly with the SaaS founder and they’re so passionate about their products that I would think man, I wish I could just distill the way you talk about your product and just inject it into every single campaign. If we can get you on a call with somebody that has a deep need for products, you go to be able to sell it. So you really want to focus on that as opposed to paid ads? To be honest, yeah.

[00:11:16.180] – Joran

And in the end as you mentioned, if you’re creating a new market, the non scalable channels get you a lot of feedback on creating market. You probably want to have those conversations rather than.

[00:11:24.740] – Patrick

Yeah, I would almost say if there’s not existing demand, you almost want to already have either strong product market fit or at least strong product market fit signals before you start running ads. And especially paid search, like if there’s not existing demand already, paid search is just. You just set the money on fire.

[00:11:45.640] – Joran

Let’s go back to when paid ads are going to be good for a SaaS brand and let’s Say they have some initial success, they have started to run some paid ads. It’s super hard to skill them sometimes. What is the number one mistake SaaS companies make while trying to scale the payback campaigns?

[00:12:01.040] – Patrick

Yeah, the number one mistake they make is they think budget will scale pipeline linearly. So if you, if you are currently getting, I don’t know, let’s take a 15k a year SaaS where you’re willing to pay 1k to acquire a customer. So you’ve got a 1k cap for a 15k average deal value. And so they are currently getting, I don’t know, maybe 10 deals a month. Close deals a month from paid search and they think, okay, I want to get that to 20. If I just double my budget I’ll be able to get, you know, 20, 20 closed deals a month. And sometimes that can work. Depends on how much demand there is in the market. But most of the time most SaaS companies have squeezed the existing demand so much that what happens is they double their budget and then all that happens is that CAC just doubles. They don’t actually get any new customers because there isn’t any existing demand to capture. So I’d say that’s the biggest mistake. And I’ve also seen brands do that on paid social like LinkedIn ads as well, which is just never going to work because that’s much more of a demand generation channel where you’re really optimizing for future pipeline as opposed to pipeline right now.

[00:13:13.140] – Patrick

So you’ll double your budget, but you’re probably not going to see the fruits of that double budget for maybe six months. It’s more effective to double the LinkedIn ads budget probably than the paid search budget, but it has a longer lag time. Big mistake they make is not using the ad platforms for what they’re best at. Google Ads, especially for long sales cycle B2B SaaS companies, if your sales cycle is plus six months, you have a reasonably high average deal value, say above 5k. Really Google Ads is only going to be good at demand capture for you and trying to use it for demand generation is just not going to work. And so what companies will do is that they’ll create a pool of keywords that are based on anything my ICP might search as opposed to anything somebody in market who is also my icp, my search. And the truth is, you know, I think of Google Ads as kind of it’s a jobs to be done channel. So when you go into Google Ads you already know what the end outcome that you want from that search is going to be. And so if somebody tries to patent interrupt you, it’s there’s maybe a point zero one percent of the time that’s going to work but other 99.99% that’s not going to work because you are just not in the mind frame of breaking the, the, the goal of what you had in getting to this platform.

[00:14:36.510] – Patrick

So I’d say that’s the biggest mistake not using the platforms for what they’re best at. And that also happens on paid social as well where they’ll launch demo request ads to a cold audience and expect to immediately begin inbound pipeline from day one. And it just doesn’t work because again if we just remember that 95% of your audience is out market any one time 5% is in market, it’s just, just pure probability. It’s very unlikely that your ads are even going to reach enough in market prospects for that to work. And you also don’t have enough skin in the game for them to be interested enough in your brand, familiar enough with your brand, trust your brand enough to go from a cold LinkedIn ad to book a demo. Unless you do something absolutely exceptional, which can happen. But I wouldn’t. Miracles and hope are not strategy.

[00:15:27.730] – Joran

Even if they follow your five step framework. Relatable, engaging, memorable building associations, no magic is going to happen even with that.

[00:15:35.180] – Patrick

Yeah.

[00:15:36.220] – Joran

So we’ve been talking about the mistakes quite a bit. Right. So I guess we now know why a lot of paid ads aren’t working. We turn things around a little bit. As a company, I now think I still want to invest money into paid ads. I still want to build like a profitable paid ads strategy, maybe even from the ground up. What would you recommend? How should they start? Do you have a framework, a step by step process or something which could help them?

[00:16:00.300] – Patrick

Yeah, for sure. The first place to start is to analyze the data that you have available about your existing customers. Customers as much as possible to learn, make sure you’re targeting the right people. So it’s not about you trying to intuit who you think you should talk to get the concrete data, who’s reaching out to the sales team. So that’s the number one. You definitely want to be targeting them because that’s either going to be the decision maker or the person influencing the decision maker. For most SaaS companies, probably the person reaching out is most likely going to be the person that did the research. In some instances it’s probably the case that they maybe got somebody to do research for them beforehand. In which case you need to find out who, what job titles are doing that research and reach out to them. We’re fortunate because we have GONG which summarizes all the calls. I do this at least every quarter, but sometimes more frequently you just go through all the closed one deals of the last quarter and look at every GONG summary to find out what are the biggest problems people are having when they come to us, what are the services that they want.

[00:17:00.860] – Patrick

Looking for different information that I can use to inject into those ad campaigns. So I’d say that’s the fundamental first place to start is make sure you’re going into building it with really strong data because otherwise it’s very expensive to experiment and you still need to experiment. Right? That’s how to start. I think from there I tend to recommend much more simplified account structures for companies starting out. So definitely the first place to start for me is always Google Ads over LinkedIn ads. And the reason I say that is that’s the best place to find existing demand right now. It’s the best place to, if there is existing demand, convert that demand so that you can actually start generating ROI from the get go. And so that would be my typical recommendation. And I would say don’t use that paid search channel for anything other than high intent keywords. And when I say high intent keywords I mean something where there’s very clearly buying intent within that keyword. And so if we take an example of maybe like a HR tool for an industrial manufacturing company, say that’s what you do. I would be looking for examples of people searching for that exact keyword on Google and then I would be looking for different variations of it.

[00:18:18.380] – Patrick

So like HR tool, HR software, HR solution, HR platform. Because that keyword is so specific and so long tail, that’s a very strong signal that this is an in market buyer. And so that would be the first place I would start if there’s definitely no demand. Again I would say probably avoid paid ads. But if you’re really insistent, maybe you’ve had a ton of injection from like series A or whatever and you’ve got some cash to play with to get to the next revenue milestone, then I would go for paid social with a view that it’s probably going to take six months to for me to see any sort of return. And I would typically recommend choosing an audience segment you can afford to fully saturate. And the way to find that out is you’ve got to reverse engineer the math of how those paid ads are going to work. So you can’t just say, okay, I’m going to put 10k into paid ads and then I’m going to increase the investment. When I start seeing a return, that’s a recipe for failure. What you need to say is, okay, we have 10k to play with.

[00:19:21.790] – Patrick

What’s the maximum audience segment we can afford with that 10k to fully saturate. And so I’d be doing that math as well. And that’s probably one of the most difficult decisions for SaaS companies to make because they get major FOMO, especially when they’re young and every piece of revenue is important. They’re worried if they don’t target every single potential prospect, they’ll get none. Actually, the reverse is true. When you try and target everybody with a small budget, you have that effect we talked about earlier, which is whispering in the Grand Canyon. You actually end up not making enough noise to be effective. And then, you know, three months go by, six months go by and then they’re saying, tried that, didn’t work, onto the next strategy.

[00:20:01.170] – Joran

Yeah. So I guess what a lot of people use as terminology is account based marketing. Right. So I guess like this is also what you’re referring to. So you have your total addressable market. You take a chunk of that and then coming back to what you said before, make sure you have the 10 AD frequency minimum and then you can spend the budget on that segment to saturate them, as you call it.

[00:20:21.630] – Patrick

Yeah, exactly. I’m thinking back to a project I worked on last year. It wasn’t completely from scratch. They turned LinkedIn ads on and off a couple times and paid search on and off a couple times, but never really been able to make it work. And so what we ended up doing for them is interesting. So we started, we actually started with a paid search strategy and that it was interesting because that looked really, really hot on paper. So there was a lot of demand for the, that they offered and we were getting loads of leads. The cost per lead was stupidly low. So $20 cost per lead. And this was for like a kind of 10 to 15k a year SaaS product. So it’s a decent, a decent size. But then actually this is an interesting one because this is another mistake. And so when they came to us, they didn’t have offline conversion tracking in place. And so what offline conversion tracking is. Offline conversion tracking is a way for you to take CRM data and send that signal back into your ad platform so that you can understand not only who’s filling out forms but who’s filling out forms and converting to different pipeline stages like MQL, SQL, maybe TQL for some SaaS companies and then you know, opportunities and closed one.

[00:21:36.790] – Patrick

And so you’ll be able to see what in the ad platform is actually driving value. It’s interesting because we initially allocated quite a lot more budget to Google Ads. After the first three months we saw, okay, none of this is even converting to qualified opportunities, let alone revenue. And so what we did is we took the budget completely away from paid search, put it all into LinkedIn ads and went for a really small audience segment. Tiny. It was account based marketing list and it was, I think there was about 13,000 people on it. So that’s tiny, like a really tiny audience. But we were able to fully saturate that whole audience. I mean we were getting like 10 plus frequency audience penetration was probably in the region of like 70 to 80% which is insane. It was a strong strategy from that perspective. And then I worked closely with the head of marketing there and we back and forth a lot on really deeply understanding what are the key pain points. How can we get that into the ads that we’re running? Because the interesting thing was the audience that they were most relevant for were like, they were quietly unsatisfied, but they weren’t really looking for new solutions.

[00:22:48.330] – Patrick

But when the SDRs could talk to them they were like, yeah, we hate this about the existing product and we hate this about the existing products and we hate this. They’re just not aware that other solutions exist. There’s this category giant that’s been in the space for years and hasn’t innovated. We set up a strategy where what we wanted to do was generate interest with high audience frequency cold targeting and janky ads. We did loom videos of the head of marketing. So it’s not even sort somebody that’s like an equivalent job title, just talking about different features in the product. And then we supported that with document ads which were addressing like industry trends. They were addressing some like upcoming big changes in the industry and how to respond to it. And so we’re generating some positive association because this was and when I say like janky content, it was very rough around the edges. One of these document ads had, it just had a big rubber duck as a picture on the front just to generate some attention. But it worked really well. And then we would retarget those users with Legion formats. And it was interesting because we did get some buy from the Legion formats.

[00:23:57.060] – Patrick

It wasn’t huge, but where we saw the most impact was we would hear from the SDR teams that now when they were going on to calls, people had seen these ads and they were saying, oh yeah, we saw this video, we saw this document. They were more receptive to jumping on a call with these SDRs because we’d done this warming process. And then probably the other thing which is coming back to more mistakes that companies make is what we did is we used the LinkedIn Revenue Attribution report to measure the performance of it as opposed to using like first and last touch attribution. So for anyone that doesn’t know this first and last touch attribution essentially either measures the first click or the last click as the most important touch point point and then attributes all the credit for winning a lead to the platform of the first or last touch. And actually what we know to be true is that there’s lots of touch points that happen in the middle that are way more important. And that’s what this LinkedIn revenue attribution report does is it looks at what is the total value of pipeline for companies on this target account list that had either multiple impressions or engagements with ads.

[00:25:09.080] – Patrick

It was interesting because we saw way more influence revenue but also it was some somewhere in the region of I think 3 or 4k higher average deal size. If somebody had seen an ad vers didn’t see an ad and LinkedIn has the data to show that they would also convert faster.

[00:25:26.140] – Joran

That’s interesting. So you can know the difference between people seeing the ad and versus not and then you can actually calculate. Would it make sense to go beyond the small market you chose?

[00:25:35.940] – Patrick

Exactly. And it’s interesting you say that because that’s honestly how I’d recommend companies to scale. Right. Is do this with one small segment first and then move on to the next segment. Could be like scale industries, could be scale regions, could be scale job titles. But that’s if you’re going to start small and scale, that’s how you do it with a small segment as opposed to trying to do it by starting with a small budget and a big audience. And scale, that’s definitely going to.

[00:26:01.480] – Joran

Are you struggling to find a cost effective and scalable marketing channel? Check out where it is. We help you to have other people recommend your SaaS and you would only pay them when they deliver you paid clients, making it a very cost effective and scalable marketing channel. Want to learn more? Go to getreadytas.com so summarize a little bit what you said. Analyze data available. Start with Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads focus on a certain market saturated and then connect your Google Ads platform with your CRM to figure out who actually converts and I guess to what values this. Now I make it sound super easy in 30 seconds. Like what are some common challenges SaaS companies are going to run into when they even want to try to set this up?

[00:26:42.790] – Patrick

Yeah, if we skip past the just understanding the audience having product market fit, if we just assume that those have been resolved because we’ve already talked about them a little bit, I would say the number one is tracking and measurement tracking will probably be the biggest because they won’t know how to do it and it’s pretty complicated. Fortunately, SaaS companies also usually have pretty technically minded intelligent people. So there should be somebody in your company that can figure that out. The main thing is coming back to that offline conversion tracking. You absolutely need to have offline conversion tracking in place. I would not even recommend start running ads if you don’t have offline conversion tracking in place because you won’t know what’s driving value and you won’t be able to make the best decisions or feed those platforms the best data. To optimize optimally, you’re going to need bulletproof tracking on your website. Make sure you’re using conversion APIs on LinkedIn and meta enhanced conversions. Google Ads server side tracking, you can capture it. I think it’s somewhere in the region like 20 to 30% extra conversions you’ll capture with server side tracking. That would be the first challenge is bulletproof tracking and then measurement.

[00:27:54.760] – Patrick

So I think Google Ads generally I’m pretty happy for companies to measure that using first or last touch attribution to some degree because it is more of a demand capture channel. It depends on the company because we can get away with it at client boost because we have from the conversion to closed one on Google Ads that’s around, around 60 days for us. And Google Ads has a 90 day conversion window. But there are some companies where from first conversion to closed one is 12 months, 18 months. So that’s from demo request to becomes a customer. The attribution window in Google is only 90 days. So you’re not going to see, you’re not going to correctly attribute the stuff that’s actually working. And so for that reason I kind of recommend to a lot of companies they need some form of measurement tool that bridges the gap of things they can’t see. Especially important for something like paid social, where oftentimes the people that are going to buy and aren’t necessarily the ones engaging with ads. With the rise in kind of people rejecting cookies, ad blockers, just general like Safari, which I think doesn’t even track users or whatever.

[00:29:08.360] – Patrick

It’s also much harder for these ad platforms to connect users to the conversion. So I think I was looking at some research recently that estimated on average you probably only see about 70% of total conversions in ad platforms. I don’t have data on this, but my gut tells me for long sales cycle B2B’s I think that’s probably even less. I think it’s probably more like 50%. So yeah, you’ll need some form of tool to bridge that gap. I tend to recommend Dream Data is pretty good for it. So Dream Data is a hybrid between, it’s called data Driven Attribution. But what they can do is they have a complex machine learning algorithm within their attribution software that will track the full user journey over, you know, up to two years. So I’ve seen some deals in the most recent analysis I did for us where the first ad impression was like two years ago. And so what Dream Data can do is it can analyze all of your deals to understand what’s the likelihood that an ad view does or does, doesn’t increase the likelihood that somebody is going to convert, for example. And then it can give you a influenced value figure so that you can really understand what’s actually influencing value and what isn’t.

[00:30:23.440] – Patrick

That’s not perfect because it’s not an unflawed system, but it allows you to make more considered decisions in terms of where to place your budget, which channels to scale, what’s working and what’s not working.

[00:30:34.680] – Joran

Yeah. Would you say why a lot of paid ads aren’t working for SaaS companies right now is they’re not measuring everything which is happening from the paid ads, which is if you say 50 to 70% is being tracked right now, then they could be profitable, they could actually generate revenue. You just don’t know about it.

[00:30:51.860] – Patrick

Yeah, and there’s lag time as well. Right. So this is something I’ve seen a couple of big named influencers. I’m not going to name names but people would definitely know who they are bragging they turned off their ads at the beginning of the year and they actually grew for the following three months. And that makes total sense to me because if you. So if we go. So if I just think of client based, our own conversion to pipeline to closed one stats. So from conversion to closed on paid social, that’s 100 days for us. So if I turned off paid social today. I’m not going to actually see the drop in performance for a hundred days on Google Ads. It’s 60 days. So if I turn off Google Ads today, I’m not going to see the drop in performance for 60 days. So there’s also the fact that you don’t even see the day.

[00:31:35.480] – Joran

Yeah.

[00:31:35.800] – Patrick

Until it’s almost too late and then you’ve got to build back up and that usually takes twice as long. What I do say to a lot of companies is you have to trust a little bit. If you turn on and have the best quarter you’ve ever had and the growth rates above what your growth rate was previously for the year, that’s also a signal to pay attention to, even if you can’t directly attribute. You also tell companies to look at correlation. When I first broke into marketing, I was working with a company where we were running programmatic display ads. And this wasn’t actually a B2B SaaS company that was selling hardware as opposed to technology. And what we could measure was that whenever we ran programmatic ads, there was an exact equivalent uplift in revenue from the website. But there was no attribution 0. Like there was no revenue attributed to these programmatic ads because that is, I guess, more of a brand salience channel building positive associations. So you remember it it and then you come back to it later. And so they ended up canceling the contract and cutting the programmatic ads because the CEO just didn’t believe it worked because he couldn’t see the direct attribution.

[00:32:44.830] – Patrick

We have three years of data. There’s an exact uplift and decrease in revenue. You need to pay attention to that. It’s telling you the truth. Nice.

[00:32:53.790] – Joran

What is your approach view on. Because I know you also help clients with SEO, so what is your view on paid social or paid search versus organic traffic?

[00:33:04.380] – Patrick

Yeah, a loaded question. Especially now in the age of AI. For us, SEO is still organic. Search is still pound for pound the highest ROI channel that we have per client boost. It’s like to an insane degree, right, because. But it took a lot of work to get there. We have a huge library of content on the website. It’s monstrous. Like it’s ginormous. And it took a lot of work and it took a lot of time, took a lot of time to write, took a lot of time to build the domain authority. And it takes, once you get it to a point, it takes less to maintain it. But we actually didn’t maintain it enough for maybe the 18 months prior to me jumping into this head of marketing role and we did see a huge dip as a result. And so we then went back and did a kind of optimization strategy and were able to reclaim quite a lot of SERPS positions. But most SaaS companies aren’t in that position. That my POV is organic search can definitely work. It’s going to take longer unless you’re in a not very competitive market. So if you’re going to have to hyper niche keywords that there’s not a lot of competition for, you probably could make it work.

[00:34:13.200] – Patrick

The way I would approach it is I would start with paid search and use learnings from paid search to influence the SEO strategy. And when it comes to paid social, again these things aren’t really an either or for me and it does depend on the actual situation. But paid social is going to enhance your SEO efforts, especially on paper because a lot of the organic traffic that you get is going to be coming from brand name searches. And brand name searches don’t increase by accident. They increase because your brand becomes more popular. And so paid social is one of the ways that you do that as well. And SEO also uses kind of brand strength as a signal when ranking anyways. So it’s my POV isn’t either or it’s just you have to analyze it within the specific situation that you’re in. So if I had to give a rule, if there’s low competition, high value keywords probably makes more sense for a SaaS company to focus on SEO right now because it’ll be cheaper and give them a better return than paid ads. But if that’s not the case, it would be much better to go with paid ads and then use insights from paid ads to feed into an SEO strategy that they can then afford to do a little bit slower over a longer period of time.

[00:35:27.330] – Joran

Yeah, because in the end paid search is going to help you to experiment quicker, get the learnings quicker and then you can build like a proper SEO foundation. What is like a big risk or maybe big opportunity looking now. I guess with all the things going on with AI 2025, what should we prepare for?

[00:35:45.570] – Patrick

Tracking will get harder. Privacy concerns are growing, so more people are adopting ad blockers, more browsers are becoming privacy first. Just in general, it’s getting harder to track people. On top of that, ad platforms are also becoming more of a black box and trying to retain more of the information for themselves. Especially because you know that’s it’s like IP for them that they can productize and make more money from. So it doesn’t make sense for them to give as much data to advertisers because they want you to be dependent on them. And so that makes it very, very difficult, especially for Facebook. And Google Ads make most of their money from e commerce, the black box. Things like Tmax or broad audiences on Facebook do not work for B2B SaaS companies at all because there’s not big enough markets or enough data being fed into the algorithms to make them work. And so trying to work around that is very difficult. And what it means is marketing fundamentals and brand strength are going to be huge, huge differentiators going forward. So it’s almost like the biggest risk is that you become too reliant on pushing buttons in platforms when really what you should be reliant on is deeply understanding your audience, knowing that it pains, gains and jobs to be done, and creating like really memorable bold advertising assets and programs that kind of encapsulate that deep understanding of the audience and do that in a way that makes the audience like really love and trust your brand.

[00:37:23.450] – Patrick

That’s always been huge, but that’s especially huge now. I think if I was a young SaaS, I wouldn’t be waiting until 5 million ARR or 10 million ARR to start thinking about brand. I would be doing it from day one. And that doesn’t mean you have to do huge brand stuff from day one, like try and, you know, do a billboard on Times Square or get a Super bowl ad. But it does mean that you should be strategically thinking about how do I want to want the audience to think of me? And also thinking about trying to put out a very consistent message that’s hitting some of those five creative, I guess, steps that I talked about earlier.

[00:37:59.050] – Joran

We did a lot of podcasts regarding brand to brand authority, creating brand positioning with April done. Check those episodes out. I’m going to ask the most difficult question. If you had to summarize your best advice on paid marketing in one or two sentences, what would it be?

[00:38:14.570] – Patrick

Oh, that’s tricky. Just don’t afraid to be bold and be really bold. You can’t err on the side of bold enough. And so as an example, some of our best performing ads are like goofy cartoons with a conversation between a CMO and their existing agency that’s underperforming, that is performing insanely well, or just really crappy memes that look like they’ve been marked up on Microsoft paint. They look terrible, but they get loads of engagement because it speaks deeply to the audience. It works really well, yeah, I think there’s this common phrase that’s maybe overused, but most B2B ads are beta boring. And so when everybody else is zigging, you really need to zag. And don’t be afraid to do that. That would be my biggest piece of advice.

[00:38:56.330] – Joran

Nice. Thanks. We’re going to start closing things off. Final two questions. The famous questions. When we talk about growing a B2B SaaS company, what kind of advice would you give SaaS founders just starting out and growing to 10k monthly recurring revenue?

[00:39:10.250] – Patrick

I would come back to that big question, is there existing demand for your business product? If the answer is no, it’s easy to find out. If there’s existing demand for your product, you’re going to be, people are going to be googling it. So that’s where I would go. I’d set up a Google Ads account. I go into the Google Ads keyword planner and I would type in as many variations of what I thought somebody who was interested in my product would search as possible to find out if there’s existing demand. If there is existing demand, that’s a good position to be in. And so I would go after those high intent keywords. Whatever budget I could afford. I would reverse engineer the math just to make sure. Okay, Google will tell you the average cost per click is. You can then use some industry benchmarks to understand what’s the average conversion rate for my industry to kind of estimate, okay, if I get this many clicks, I should get this many leads. I know my pipeline conversion rates, so if I get this many leads, I should get this many opportunities. That’s not perfect match math, by the way.

[00:40:06.600] – Patrick

And there’s lots of professional marketing academics that will tell you not to do that. When you’re a young B2B SaaS, that’s the best you got. So that’s what you’ve got to do. And then optimize as you go. If there is no existing demand, I would just say don’t use ads. I would say don’t use ads at all. Do something different. LinkedIn thought leadership events, build a newsletter, SEO even. But you’ll just, you’ll waste too much money early on. If you’re really super intent on having some paid ads live, maybe just a high intent retargeting campaign with anyone who’s not an ICP for you excluded from that audience. So for us, for example, for our retargeting campaigns, we have loads of exclusions, like anyone that’s not a manager is excluded. Any companies, any companies below 10 employees or below 1 million ARR is excluded because it’s just not an ideal fit for us. There’s also some other industry exclusions that we do. Like how we target an audience of high intent prospects is like 5,5700, like super small. For most B2B sasses SaaS companies it’ll be even smaller than that. So you can saturate that with a very small audience and I would just do that with very strong offer.

[00:41:17.300] – Patrick

So I’d look at whatever all of your competitors are offering, beat it. And then also have some ads that just handle common objections that you get and also what the cost of inaction is. So what is the cost that somebody’s paying by not using your product? Product have some ads around that as well and that can work really well. But again, that’s only if you’re super intent on running ads. If there’s not existing demand, I would say yeah, leave the ads alone.

[00:41:40.950] – Joran

Nice. Let’s assume now we pass 10k mor and we’re going to make a huge step towards 10 million ar. We can assume there’s going to be a product market in demand here. What kind of advice would you give a SaaS founder here?

[00:41:51.750] – Patrick

Yeah, I think for this one like 10 million ARR sound system big, right? And to some degree it is, but it’s not so big that you just have endless pools of money to spend. So the first thing is this is not an excuse to try and target your entire tam, especially if you’re not allocating the right amount of budget to do that. So I think at this stage what I would probably be doing is looking at what segments are working right now. Look at how can we scale those segments. So you know, if, if, if we’ve already run some paid ads, is it, is there enough existing demand for us to be able to, to increase spend on Google Ads? That’s easy to work out because you can just look at something called search impression share. Let’s say you’ve got a campaign with all of your core high intent keywords. If your search impression share is 10%, that means you’re not showing up for 90% of user searches. On those terms you can probably scale that a lot more. Right? Theoretically you can scale it so that you show up 90% of the time. Not always possible in a high competition ad market, but there’s at least some room, some wiggle room there.

[00:43:01.670] – Patrick

On the paid social side, I would probably be looking to implement a couple of additional smaller segments. Again, not going for the small tam and you can do this. A really good way to do this is to rank your actual existing customers into tier lists, look at okay, which industries and job titles are the highest value for us, are the easiest to work with, have the fastest sales cycles, have the lowest acquisition costs, and then build a kind of tier list of okay, it makes most sense to go after this segment right now. Even though we could service these segments. That’s the challenge. Yes you could, but you just want to do best bang for your buck. So I would go forward the most valuable segment, implement them first, and then steadily start scaling new segments as opposed to trying to go do everything all at once. And I think also at this 10 million mark, that’s when you can start experimenting with some channels outside of just Google Ads and LinkedIn ads where most B2B SaaS companies will typically start. That’s when you can invest in a tool like primer or metadata that gives you LinkedIn level targeting for meta ads and Google Ads.

[00:44:12.340] – Patrick

And then you can, and then you can start actually getting more audience penetration. Because this is again another myth that B2B founders love to say. Which is my audience isn’t on Facebook or Instagram and I’m like there’s what, 3 billion users or something? I guarantee you your audience is on there. You just need to be able to target them. You’re going to need a third party audience builder to do that. That’s the time when you can start also scaling channels as well.

[00:44:38.280] – Joran

I think I saw a post that LinkedIn has 31 million users and Facebook has 3 billion billion. So it can’t be true. They’re not going to be on Facebook.

[00:44:46.140] – Patrick

Yeah, exactly. They definitely are.

[00:44:47.540] – Joran

Nice. Let me try to see if I can summarize. So if we talk about paid ads, only 5% is now in market. Paid ads help you to come on mind on for the other 95%. Why your paid ads actually generating ROI. You’re not targeting the right audience, you’re not showing your ads enough. So increase your frequency, focus On I guess 10 AD frequency minimum. And look at your sales cycle. It’s better to have one irritated prospect than 100 nut customers not having creatives. They need to be relatable, clear, engaging, memorable, building associations. Nut tracking. The offline conversions have bulletproof tracking in place. Only 50 to 70% is tracked by the paid ad platforms. And this topic will become a higher priority even in 2025. If you are creating a new market, you might not even want to run paid ads as you need to experiment too much which will cost you too much money. So make sure you have product, market fit and demand first. If you are going to run ads, analyze the data you have available. Find the actual decision maker. The biggest problems go through call recording CRM notes. Make sure you go after that.

[00:45:51.440] – Joran

Start with Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads. Focus on high intent keywords, focus on a certain market, saturate them with a great offer. Connect your Google Ads platforms with your CRM to figure out who actually converts and again not everything will attribute to the ads but it will help the SDRS to come in hot. So tracking will be super important when trying to scale budget, won’t scale pipeline linearly and keep using the platforms what they are best at. Find the segments to go after and double down on organic search. It still works. It will take longer but leverage the learning from your paid search into your SEO campaigns and focus on low competition high value keywords and for 2025 and beyond brand will become more important in the future. Be memorable, be lovable, be trusted and you can’t be too bold with what you’re doing. All your work.

[00:46:37.680] – Patrick

Perfect man. Yeah, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

[00:46:40.440] – Joran

If people want to contact you Patrick, how can they do?

[00:46:42.520] – Patrick

I’m super active on LinkedIn. I think it’s at Patrick Dash James dash Cumming on LinkedIn if you want to follow me on there. Also have our own podcast now that’s kind of 10 episodes in I think at the moment. So you can find that on Spotify, Klein Boot Boost Kitchen and then also have a newsletter, the Client Boost Kitchen newsletter. I run that we you can either find that on the Client Boost website, clientboost.com forward/kitchen or you can actually I’d also cross post it on LinkedIn so you can sign up to that on LinkedIn usually, usually it comes out every Friday so yeah those are the main places and I would say always down to educate and help out and share information. So if anyone out there’s struggling with paid advertising ads DMs are always open and I am more than happy to help people problem solve paid ads issues in that channel.

[00:47:33.920] – Joran

So we’re going to make sure people can find you. So we’re going to link towards your LinkedIn profile, we’re going to link towards your podcast and link towards the newsletter so they can just click in the show notes and get there. For people listening if you haven’t done so please just leave us a review in the platform you’re listening right now. It just helps us to boost the algorithms. I don’t think I have to explain why. And I guess if you’re listening on Spotify just answer the poll we always put in there. Always love to hear what you thought of this episode and what you’ll be doing next time. Patrick again, thanks for coming on.

[00:48:04.100] – Patrick

No problem. Thanks for having me dude.

[00:48:05.580] – Joran

Thank you for watching this show of the Grow your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end so I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel if you like this content. Feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show. If you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reditus, feel free to reach out as well. But for now have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.