A SaaS paid acquisition agency built for B2B SaaS past $1M ARR with a working product and a sales cycle that no platform attribution model captures correctly. We rebuild the paid program from ICP signals down. LinkedIn for awareness. Google for capture. Capterra and G2 for comparison-stage buyers. Retargeting tuned to a 90 to 140 day buying journey, not a 7 day attribution window.
Average across nine SaaS engagements past month four. Composite paid-attributed CAC.
Conversion from marketing qualified to booked demo. Better targeting beats more spend.
First channel live in week one. Optimization kicks in week three. Measurable CAC delta by week four.
The retainer isn't one thing. It's six programs under one team, sequenced by what your stage needs. The audit picks the sequence. Most engagements use four of the six in the first 90 days.
| Program | Time to impact | What it ships | Suits SaaS that |
|---|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn Ads | Weeks 4 to 8 | Sponsored content, lead gen forms, conversation ads, document ads. ICP-targeted at the company-size + role + intent level. | SaaS targeting accounts above $30K ACV. LinkedIn pays for itself fast at mid-market and enterprise. |
| Google Ads | Weeks 2 to 6 | Search campaigns on commercial intent, branded protection, comparison terms, retargeting display. | Buyers Google their problem. Most SaaS has 200+ commercial intent keywords with positive ROAS. |
| Capterra & G2 | Weeks 4 to 8 | Category placement, sponsored profiles, review-stage paid plays. Bottom-funnel intent at the comparison stage. | Mid-market SaaS in established categories. Hot comparison-stage buyers ready to act. |
| Retargeting | Weeks 6 to 10 | Sequenced retargeting across LinkedIn, Meta, Google. 14-day, 30-day, 60-day cohorts mapped to sales cycle stage. | Any SaaS with at least 5,000 monthly site visitors. The cheapest converting channel in the stack. |
| Sponsored newsletters | Weeks 8 to 12 | Placement in SaaStr, Lenny's Newsletter, The Hustle, OpenView. Curated audience, AI-cited platforms. | SaaS with a strong angle or original data. Brand and demand combined in one play. |
| Reddit & community | Weeks 6 to 10 | Promoted posts on niche subreddits, sponsored community placements. Often AI-cited because Reddit is heavily crawled. | DevTools, AI-native and technical SaaS. Where engineers actually research vendors. |
Paid is the fastest lever to move. It's also the fastest way to waste a quarter if the fundamentals aren't there. We say no often.
The depth of each phase varies by engagement. The shape doesn't.
We pull six months of CRM data and rebuild your conversion model by stage. Source-of-truth gets shipped to a warehouse view. Platform attribution becomes an input, not the truth.
We rank candidate channels by intent fit, budget pay-back and operational lift. You'll end the week with two channels picked and a written reason for every channel we cut.
Modular ad creative tuned to your ICP. We ship 12 to 20 ads in the first batch, all based on the sales-call language. No agency stock. No "delight" copy.
Account lists, lookalike seeds, keyword maps. We rebuild these from sales-call transcripts, not from competitor audience grabs.
Bid strategies that match your funnel reality. Daily budget envelope set against the model. We cap, we don't chase.
Warehouse pipes CRM events back to the ad platforms. Bidding learns on real conversions, not platform-attributed proxies. This is where the CAC drops.
Every Monday we kill the lowest performing 20% of the spend and reallocate. The kill list lives in the dashboard. You see it before the call.
Operator-level on every platform. You can ask why we picked each one.
Most SaaS paid acquisition agency dashboards report 40+ metrics and obscure the ones that matter. We report eight. The CFO can read them in two minutes.
No vanity metrics. No platform-attributed ROAS that overcounts. No "we hit 4 million impressions" if zero closed. Eight numbers your team can defend in a board meeting. See the full reporting cadence →
$3M ARR HR SaaS with paid CAC drifting past $4,200. We rebuilt their attribution model, found two channels lying about ROI, killed both. Pricing page CRO did the rest.
DevTools client running paid on the wrong audience. We turned off LinkedIn and Meta in week three. Reallocated to high-intent Google search on platform-engineer queries.
More on the audit call. We bring a few of these up before you do.
$20K monthly is the floor we recommend. Below that the channels we'd pick don't have enough room to learn. We've broken this rule once. We won't again.
No. We charge a fixed retainer per the pricing page. Percent-of-spend incentivises agencies to grow the spend, not the return.
Three weeks is the typical kill cycle. Some channels we kill in week one. The audit usually tells us which channels we'll turn off before the engagement starts.
Demand Gen sometimes. Pmax rarely. The reporting is too opaque to course-correct quickly enough on SaaS funnel signals. There are exceptions but they need scale.
We rebuild it in your warehouse during weeks one and two. By week three the bidding learns on real conversions. This is the single biggest CAC lever in most engagements.
Both. Modular ad system with 12 to 20 ads shipped in the first month. In-house designers and copy. No freelance.
Yes. About half our engagements are hybrid. We define the split in week four so nobody steps on each other's bids.
We re-plan in week eight if signal is off. The KPI guarantee from the retainer applies. That's happened twice in 15 years.
A SaaS paid acquisition retainer in our pricing model sits at $7,500/month minimum with a six-month commitment. The retainer covers strategy, campaign build, weekly optimisation, attribution rebuilds and warehouse reporting. Recommended ad spend at $1M ARR sits between $15,000 and $25,000 monthly across LinkedIn, Google, Capterra and G2. At $5M ARR it scales to $35,000 to $60,000. We do not mark up your media buy. You see the platform invoice. We charge for the work, not the spend. The audit and roadmap engagement is fixed-fee at $18,000 if you want a paid acquisition plan without the retainer commitment.
Send your URL. We'll come back with a written read on which channels we'd run, which we'd kill and which lever moves first.