In this interview, PPC specialist Dylan Hey discusses how SaaS companies should measure and manage paid search and social campaigns. He stresses the importance of focusing on business‑critical conversion actions—trial sign‑ups and demo bookings—rather than high‑volume micro‑conversions like page visits. Hey recommends committing to a minimum three‑month, ideally six‑month, testing window before making major changes, because low spend and sparse conversions make early tweaks noisy. He advises keeping the account structure simple, testing one or two variables at a time, and avoiding the temptation to launch dozens of ad groups with minimal budget. The conversation also covers when PPC may not be a good fit: products with low lifetime value (under $1,000), weak backend data, poor nurturing or remarketing flows, and low trial‑to‑paid conversion rates. For all SaaS businesses, he argues that a remarketing and lead‑nurturing workflow is essential to capture prospects who abandon the funnel. Throughout, Hey ties top‑level metrics in the ad platforms to downstream outcomes tracked in CRM systems, emphasizing data‑driven optimization over superficial click‑through numbers.
Chapters
And then, so I know a lot of SaaS companies, maybe when they're setting up their campaigns, they struggle establishing like a baseline and measuring the performance effectively, mainly because I feel they they change or they leave it as is or they cancel or they modify the campaigns too early. They don't give it enough time to gather data. From your perspective, how often should you be testing and modifying the campaigns and what kind of metrics or standards or general objective per campaign are you looking at before you make the change?
Yeah, it's a really great question and it is a challenging one to answer because it really depends on amount that's being spent, how campaigns are split, lots of variables. But to give some pieces of advice, one thing that I would say is that if, like, make sure the metrics that you're focusing on are metrics that are actually important to the business because a lot of times we'll come into an ads account and we'll see that if you log into the Google Ads account, the Facebook Ads account, and you see the overview screen that most people are frequently visiting, they'll see the number of conversions and it might be like a nice high number and the cost per conversion might be nice and low, but if those conversions are let's say micro conversions, so you're setting your conversions as pricing page visitors or demo booking page visitors, et cetera, and not focusing on the metrics that actually are real kind of important conversions, that's one thing to note. So everyone has a different approach to this, and of course different campaigns have different conversion objectives. I'm not saying it's not valuable to be tracking those micro conversions, but make sure when you're making budgeting decisions, optimization decisions, you're making those off the back of metrics that are actually important. So usually in the SaaS world, that is trial signups and demo bookings. I would say purchases, but a lot of the time people don't have enough— in the SaaS world, people don't have enough volume to be really optimizing towards purchases. In the ecommerce world where there's gonna be hundreds of purchases or thousands, tens of thousands of purchases every single day, it gives Google, it gives Facebook, the other platforms enough data to really know what's going on.
Most of—
Depending on the size of the SaaS company, of course, if they're low ticket, low value but high volume, they might have that. But usually we're looking at demo booked and trial signup as the decisions that we're making optimizations in the ads accounts off the back of.
Yeah.
But then we'll be looking in the backend, like in our tracking sheets and everything else, we'll be looking at, okay, which of these campaigns have then led to actual people getting on calls? What stage are they at? How much pipeline has been generated in Salesforce or wherever else, et cetera? So often we'll make the optimization decisions in the accounts on those top-level metrics of conversions, but then we'll be cross-referencing that with what happens in the backend. Now, to answer the question in terms of like how often should you be changing things, how much time should you wait to see results? We always say, of course, we try and— when you're running ads, you want to get results as quickly as possible. I always say to anyone, if they're considering running ads themselves, working with somebody, a freelancer, agency, whatever it may be, you really should commit at the very minimum to a 3-month Ideally, I would say like a 6-month test period too, just because if you're— let's say most people might begin, if they're tentative and just starting ads for the first time, they might spend like $5,000 a month or $10,000 a month maybe. And if you're spending that over 3 months, that's really not that much money to collect a huge volume of data to make decisions off the back of. And what we'll see often is people will be tweaking their campaigns so often that each campaign might only have 1 or 2 conversions and if you think about it, if you zoom out for a second and you only have 1 or 2 conversions in the campaign, it's not really enough to tell you anything and the whole reason why people start running paid ads is yes, we want more signups, more revenue, but you want to identify a scalable channel and you want to know what's working and why it's working and if you have this big spread of campaigns or different ad groups or ads that have just 1 conversion, no conversions, you don't actually learn anything whatsoever.
Yeah.
So we always tell people to actually Try and adjust things at the beginning as little as possible. There'll be a lot of learning that goes on. That's kind of a whole process in itself. But if you're the kind of person that you're gonna run ads and you're gonna spend a few thousand a month, it's much better to go with a really simple account structure rather than try and be too complex. That's something a lot of people make the mistake. They'll start with a low budget and they'll try and test like 5,000 different things at the same time. You're much better to test one or two things and figure out what works that way than spread yourself too thinly.
Makes sense. And is there any instances and certain types of B2B SaaS companies that you see where you think running or setting up a PPC campaign isn't even a good strategy to consider for your marketing?
Yeah. I think everybody at the very minimum should have a remarketing flow and a nurturing flow set up for whether it's signups that don't convert to paying customers or people that are in the signup phase and haven't converted yet, or maybe even if people have entered card details, for example, but then dropped off like a typical ecommerce abandoned cart style. I think everyone should have those set up at the very least, just purely because if we think about the buying process for someone that's buying software, they'll look at your website, they'll leave, they'll look at some review sites, they'll probably look at competitors, they might see competitor ads. You wanna give yourself a chance by following up with them. So I would say everyone should have remarketing at the very minimum. Now, I don't think it makes sense for everybody to be running ads though. I think if you have If you have a product with a low LTV, then it doesn't really make sense. If your LTV is maybe a couple hundred dollars or less than $1,000, it can become challenging to really see great returns from paid ads. You just have to question whether or not that's a good channel to look into. And then the other thing I would say, we touched on a little bit earlier, most people when they approach us and say, hey, look, we wanna work with you, we wanna run ads, a lot of the times we have to turn them away Not because— it's not because they're not willing. They want to spend money. They want to run the ads. But if your backend systems aren't good, if you have no understanding of your data whatsoever, if you don't have good nurturing flows, if your trial-to-paid conversion rate is really low, if your process for like, okay, someone's— maybe you have a higher-ticket product and you're doing sales calls. If the close rate from discovery call and then to demo call and then demo to trying the product and then closing. If those rates are really, really low, you should probably focus on those things first before you look at running ads. So those are the kind of usual pushbacks as to companies that I don't necessarily think it makes the most sense for.
Cool. So you said LTV below $1,000. How would you say now, how does the marketing campaign, would you change and affect how you approach it if the LTV values are different? I don't know, $1,000, $5,000, or $10,000? What is it? How does it look differently?
Yeah. So usually the thing that we have to consider is, let's say, if we even go larger numbers than that too. So some of the clients that we work with are selling to the enterprise. Their software will be like a mid-six figures annual recurring contract. Now for those guys, of course, we need to have a different approach to someone who is maybe a $59 a month software or $99 a month software. And so usually what that looks like is that often the larger your LTV, usually that means the longer your sales cycle or the more complex your sales cycle. And that usually means there are more people involved in the buying process. They're like larger companies, et cetera. And with those kinds of companies, we have to approach paid slightly differently. Usually the things that change is just leveraging more content within our campaigns. So more of those, guides, ebooks, but then also content that's answering common objections and tailoring in our campaigns based on the stages that your prospects are at. So people like, you can use some tools like Segment. A lot of people know we use an alternative called Customer Labs, which is a SaaS product I really love actually, like an early stage company out in India that has a Segment alternative. And so we can use tools like that to serve different ads to people based on what stage they're at within the CRM. So let's say you have HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever it may be. We can serve different ads to someone who is in the discovery stage versus someone who's already had a demo and is now trying out the product. So when we get to those larger values, we start looking at more segmentation of our campaigns and more content versus if it's lower LTVs and a faster buying process, usually it's just our remarketing flows being set like usual and then we tend to get pretty aggressive with expecting people to sign up on first click after they've seen our ads. If we look at the more enterprise focus, very rarely does it happen where we serve an ad, someone clicks the ad, they sign up or book a demo straight away. When we go and look into analytics, like there was a case today, for example, where one of our customers are like— LinkedIn has this product called LinkedIn Elevate, which they're sunsetting, and one of our enterprise customers is like a perfect alternative to that tool. So we're going pretty aggressive on bidding against LinkedIn Elevate keywords right now. And there was an example today where someone saw the ad, they clicked through, They spent some time on the website, they left the site, they then came back 20 minutes later and then converted to booking a demo, and it shows as like an organic conversion, not a paid ads conversion, even though we know that paid had a huge role. So it's just thinking about how the role of paid media fits into the wider marketing team and strategy depending on how your customers buy. That's like how you then adjust campaigns based on deal sizes.
