SaaS
Payback is a duration. Everything else is a ratio you can argue with.
Demand capture and creation for B2B software, measured on payback duration rather than lead volume.
11 months
CAC payback period achieved
B2B SaaS
The problem
Your conversion event and your revenue event are separated by months. That gap produces two failures that reinforce each other.
The first is that bidding algorithms optimise towards whatever you can hand them quickly, which is usually a form submission — so they find people who submit forms. Cost per lead falls, volume rises, sales-accepted rate falls further, and the marketing dashboard reports an improvement that pipeline does not corroborate.
The second is a hard platform constraint that rarely gets mentioned. Google’s click-to-conversion import window does not extend indefinitely, so on a genuinely long sales cycle you cannot import closed-won revenue back against the original click at all. Any agency promising to optimise your paid search directly to closed revenue on a nine-month cycle is describing something the platform will not do.
Considerations
What we account for
Optimise to the deepest stage that still has volume
This is the central trade-off and it deserves to be made explicitly rather than by default. Deeper stages carry better signal and less volume; shallower stages carry more volume and more noise. We find the stage — usually sales-accepted lead or opportunity created — that sits inside the import window and still produces enough events per week for the bidding algorithm to learn from, then weight the values by historical close probability.
Judge cost per qualified lead against contract value, not against a benchmark
Cost per sales-qualified lead in isolation means nothing. As a proportion of average contract value it means a great deal, and it travels across categories in a way that published benchmarks do not. A figure that is comfortable at a six-figure contract value is ruinous at a five-figure one. We set the ratio with you at the start so target-setting stops being a negotiation about whose benchmark to use.
Close the loop properly and keep it closed
Click identifiers stored against the record in your CRM, stage changes pushed back as valued offline conversions, and the pipeline monitored for breakage — because these integrations fail silently and are usually discovered a quarter later. Note that Google is migrating this upload path to its Data Manager API during 2026, which will break existing implementations that are not moved across. We track that rather than discovering it.
Triangulate what you cannot attribute
A significant share of a B2B software purchase happens where no tracking reaches: peer conversations, communities, podcasts, events. We add a self-reported attribution question at the demo request and treat it as one input among three, alongside platform reporting and CRM data. It is not truth, but it consistently surfaces demand creation that click attribution attributes to whichever brand search happened last.
Services
What we run here
PPC Advertising
Paid search and shopping, managed against margin rather than platform-reported ROAS.
Performance Marketing
Cross-channel budget allocation decided by measured contribution, not platform self-reporting.
Customer Acquisition
Acquisition economics modelled to payback period, then media bought to fit.
Lead Generation
Optimised to pipeline and closed revenue, not to form submissions.
Campaign Management
ROI-focused campaign planning, pacing and review run as an operating rhythm.
Frequently asked
Can you optimise our paid search to closed-won revenue?
Not directly, on a long cycle, and it is worth being clear about why. Import windows are finite; a deal closing in month seven cannot be attributed back to the original click through the platform. What we can do is optimise to a mid-funnel stage weighted by its historical probability of closing, which is the honest version of the same objective.
Our MQL numbers are strong but sales are unhappy. Where do we start?
With the definitions, in writing, agreed with sales before any media changes. In most cases the marketing-qualified stage has become a volume target rather than a diagnostic, and the sales-accepted stage — the actual handshake — is not instrumented at all. Fixing the instrumentation usually settles the argument faster than fixing the campaigns.
We are product-led. Does this apply?
Yes, with different events. Product-qualified signals replace form submissions as the conversion, which is generally a better signal and a harder integration. The trade-off between depth and volume is the same, it just moves into your product analytics rather than your CRM.
Is LinkedIn worth it at our contract value?
It depends on the ratio rather than on the platform. LinkedIn’s cost per click is high and rises sharply with seniority targeting, so it tends to work at higher contract values and struggle at lower ones. We would model it against your average contract value before spending, not after.
Start with the audit.
It has a defined scope and a defined deliverable, and it is deliberately separable from anything that follows. If the audit says your current setup is fine, that is a legitimate outcome and we will say so.