Optimizing PPC Campaigns for SaaS Businesses

The software as a service (SaaS) field has been growing consistently for more than a decade. By the end of 2023, it’s projected to be a $195.21 billion industry.

Every year, we see a rollout of hundreds of new SaaS businesses (and innovative tools they offer). Many of those tools grow at insane rates, attracting thousands (or even millions) of users in their first few months of operation.

How do they do it?

Obviously, most SaaS businesses use a combination of marketing, advertising, and sales strategies to see those kinds of results. But one of the most promising channels is pay per click (PPC) advertising, primarily via Google.

How do you optimize a PPC campaign for a SaaS business effectively?

PPC Campaign Optimization: The Basics

Before we can begin optimizing a PPC campaign for a SaaS business, we need to know what “optimization” truly entails.

Optimizing a PPC campaign simply means making it more effective, but how do we do that?

We’ll cover some of the specific tactics that can help us achieve this goal in the sections that follow, but ultimately, we are working in service of the following goals:

Target more valuable people. First, we want our advertising campaign to target more valuable people. If you target the most general possible audience, you could conceivably reach 8 billion people, but the vast majority of those people won’t be interested in using your products. It’s typically much more effective to target a smaller number of people, if those people are perfectly suited to your product. Reducing our focus on poor targets and increasing our focus on good targets should improve our overall results tremendously.

• Increase impressions and clicks. Once our audience targeting is on point, we can increase impressions and clicks. Obviously, PPC ad performance is somewhat limited by what you’re willing to spend. Even so, if we optimize for a higher clickthrough rate (CTR), we can improve our quality score and eventually get better results.
• Reduce costs. Optimization is often a question of efficiency. Assuming your results remain the same or increase, any cost reduction you employ is a net benefit. That higher cost efficiency can take an existing campaign and help it yield better results or allow you to spend less on a campaign that’s already working extremely well. Either way, your company benefits.
• Scale. Once you have better PPC ad optimization in place, you can work on scaling that campaign. Assuming you can remain consistent in terms of ad quality, audience targeting, CPC, and other factors, increasing your budget should allow you to reach more people, increase conversions, and rapidly grow your business.

Establish a Baseline

Before we get too deep into PPC optimization tactics, we need to establish a baseline.

Take a moment to consider:

• Your ad budget. How much are you willing to spend on advertising? The more you spend, the more reach you can get – and the more competitive you can afford to be. That said, you can see amazing results even with a lean budget. What’s important is that you know what you’re working with initially.
• Total clicks needed. Next, think about how many clicks you’ll need to generate to hit your sales targets. This can be difficult to estimate, depending on how long you’ve been working on this campaign. If you want to win 100 new customers this month, and your conversion rate for a specific landing page is 2 percent on average, you’ll need to generate 5,000 visitors for that landing page to reach your goal.
• Target CPC. With these metrics, you can estimate your target cost per click (CPC). If your budget is $15,000 and you need to generate 5,000, your target CPC will be $3. With information, you can start effectively planning target keywords – or you may be motivated to tinker with the other variables in this equation.

Additionally, if you’ve practiced PPC advertising for this business already, gather up your existing data and perform an overall assessment. Have you been hitting your targets? In which areas does your campaign underperform or seem weak? Are there specific metrics that need to be improved?

Know Your Customers

One of the most reliable ways to improve your PPC ad campaign results in the SaaS industry is to better understand your target customers. With better market research and customer knowledge, you can target more appropriate keywords, improve your messaging strategy, and eventually make your efforts more cost efficient.

• Target demographics. You can start by evaluating your target demographics and making sure you’re targeting them with your chosen keywords and campaign settings. If you’re only trying to appeal to customers in Florida, there’s no reason to target people in California.
• The sales funnel. Understand where your best prospects fit into your sales funnel. Are these bottom-funnel buyers who are ready to make a purchase? Or top-funnel buyers who need time to get acquainted with the problem your product is trying to solve? There are no right or wrong answers here, but these differentiated targeting options require different approaches.
• Behavioral patterns, values, etc. Finally, work to understand how your target customers think, act, and engage with online ads. You can use this information to craft more effective advertisements – and increase your conversion rates too. For example, if you know your target demographics typically make logical decisions, rather than emotional ones, you can make more straightforward, logical pitches in your ads.

Increase Your CTR

The higher your quality score is, the better. Without getting into the mechanics of this dynamic, higher quality scores are associated with higher ad rankings and lower costs.

One of the best ways to improve your quality score is to increase your clickthrough rate (CTR) for individual ads. Incidentally, these strategies tend to also be effective for making a better impression with new leads and prospects.

Start with these tactics:

• Write compelling headlines. The headline is usually the first part of your ad that people see and read, so it’s responsible for forming first impressions and motivating actions. These headlines need to be as compelling as possible, offering accurate information and prompting users to take notice. Listing the benefits of your SaaS product or teasing prospects with a tempting offer could be exactly what you need. Make sure you experiment to figure out which types of headlines work best for your target demographics.
• Differentiate from other advertisers. Next, make it a point to differentiate your ads from those of other advertisers. The SaaS industry is rife with competitors, so the last thing you want is for your ads to be functionally identical to ads that your prospects and leads have seen thousands of times. There’s nothing wrong with learning from the successes of others, but you need to be proactive in making sure your ad copy is truly unique.
• Cater to your target demographics. From headlines to meta descriptions, all of your work needs to be focused on catering to your target demographics. Try to see this ad through the lens of your primary customers and use customer personas as tools for this evaluation. How would this group of people respond to this phrasing? Is there a stronger, more persuasive position that you could adopt? Oftentimes, there’s room for further optimization.
• Use stronger visuals. Increasingly, PPC advertisers are leaning on visuals to make a bigger impact. Unsurprisingly, people are drawn to visuals more than written words, so if you choose an appropriate and interesting image or video to associate with your advertisement, it’s going to make a bigger impact.
• Strategically optimize your meta descriptions. Don’t forget about the meta descriptions of your ads. The headlines typically get all the attention, but if your meta descriptions are misleading, bland, or poorly worded, they’re going to turn people away. Depending on your intentions and the nature of your audience, it might pay to optimize your meta descriptions with specific details about your product, lists of benefits for signing up, or even something humorous designed to make your ad stand out.

Create New Ads and Rotate

Many new PPC advertisers make the mistake of thinking that optimization is a one-way street – a clear and specifically directed path to one destination. Once you get to that destination, you can run the perfect ad over and over again and continue to see great results.

Unfortunately, this is not the case.

If you want your PPC ad campaign to remain relevant, you need to consistently create new ads and rotate them in. No matter how effective your previous advertising has been, it’s going to decline in effectiveness if you keep spamming the same people with it repetitively.

Cycling in new advertisements is a way to keep your ads looking fresh, a way to reach new types of people, and a way to effectively experiment and learn about potential new tactics. Never let your PPC ad campaign sit untouched for too long.

Use Negative Keywords and Audience Exclusions

If you want to improve your targeting further, consider using both negative keywords and audience exclusions. Both of these features are designed to reduce the likelihood of targeting irrelevant people.

When it comes to negative keywords, include any keywords that might interfere with your goal. For example, if you’re trying to advertise your paid software, you might include the word “free” as a negative keyword. After all, people searching for a free solution to their problem probably aren’t going to be willing to pay for yours.

Audience exclusions are very similar, but it might take some finesse to figure out which types of audience members are best to exclude.

Be Wary of Your Top Competitors

In any marketing or advertising environment, it’s important to be aware of your top competitors, so that you can effectively plan for them and differentiate yourself from them. On the simplest level, this can help you craft more unique, compelling advertisements that differentiate your brand from the other SaaS companies on your level.

You can also use this information to target people more strategically. For example, you can target people in a different phase of the sales funnel. It’s common for SaaS businesses to target people at the bottom of the funnel, since they’re much more likely to make a purchase. But if most of your competitors are targeting these demographics, your costs are going to increase. While it might mean targeting less immediately valuable customers, you can save a lot of money and make your advertising more effective by targeting people at the higher levels of the sales funnel.

Increase Your Remarketing Budget

Some of your most valuable prospects are going to be people who are already familiar with your brand and interested in your product. That’s why it usually pays to increase your remarketing budget, even at the expense of the rest of your PPC advertising campaign.

If you want to make your remarketing ads even more effective, segment your audience and use your ad copy to persuade them specifically. This is your chance to alleviate fears, address potential concerns, and speak to previous behavior you’ve seen from these users.

As you get more experience in remarketing, you’ll be able to increase your conversion rates steadily.

Experiment, Measure, and Improve

Finally, make a commitment to experiment, measure your results, and keep improving. There’s no surefire formula for the perfect PPC advertisement, and even if there was, it would quickly be rendered obsolete by changing audience attitudes, new market dynamics like emerging competitors, or new targeting or exclusion options available to you.

To be successful as a SaaS PPC advertiser, you need to keep moving constantly. The more you learn, and the more you optimize, the better results you’ll see.

Are you trying to scale up your SaaS business with the help of PPC advertising?

Do you need help optimizing or improving the effectiveness of your existing PPC ad campaign?

PPC.co can help. From conception to execution, and from experiments to solidified tactics, we’ll help you form and follow the best possible PPC path for your business.

Contact us today for a free proposal!

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Samuel Edwards

Chief Marketing Officer at PPC Agency

In his 9+ years as a digital marketer, Sam has worked with countless small businesses and enterprise Fortune 500 companies and organizations including NASDAQ OMX, eBay, Duncan Hines, Drew Barrymore, Washington, DC based law firm Price Benowitz LLP and human rights organization Amnesty International.

He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize search engine marketing (SEM) ROI. Connect with Sam on Linkedin.

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