In this interview, Luis Camacho discusses paid‑media tactics for B2B SaaS companies. He emphasizes that search (Google) consistently delivers the highest ROI because it captures active intent, yielding better conversion rates from trial to paid signup despite higher cost per lead compared to social platforms. Social channels like Facebook can provide cheaper leads, but those leads convert at lower rates, making overall CPA comparable. Camacho highlights the difficulty of attribution in long sales cycles, noting that pausing a channel for a month may not reveal its true impact when the buying process spans three‑plus months. He recommends high‑intent retargeting—targeting visitors of specific high‑converting pages or content—and turning top‑performing assets into lead magnets (e.g., whitepapers, ebooks). When evaluating a new SaaS client, he prefers an existing funnel to optimize rather than building from scratch, as prior data informs quick adjustments. For testing cadence, he warns against turning campaigns off too quickly; instead, allocate a meaningful budget (e.g., $5‑10k per channel per month) and run for at least a month to gather sufficient data. Key metrics to monitor include click‑through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), cost per lead (CPL), cost per acquisition (CPA), and aligning spend with the product’s lifetime value (LTV). He suggests using a rule of thumb—spending up to a third of LTV on acquisition testing—and stresses the importance of tracking human‑capital costs to truly understand lead cost. Overall, the conversation provides a practical framework for channel selection, attribution handling, funnel assessment, testing timelines, and budget sizing for SaaS paid‑media campaigns.
Chapters
So with paid media specifically, what channels are you generally finding the best success for B2B SaaS companies on an ROI basis, whether that's cost per trial, cost per demo, lead Lead basis? And cause I know you work with across, right? Like LinkedIn, you work with Facebook, you work with Google Ads. What are you seeing kind of better results with?
So better results we've always seen, and everybody's gonna, like anybody you ask is going to say the same thing, right? It's going to be search, um, for the very clear, um, reason that there's just intent, right? Like you have people that are actively searching for whatever it is you offer. Um, So it just, you're not going to get anything like you could potentially see more results, like what we've seen typically, right? Like we will see, you know, better CPAs or CPLs, right? Cost per leads on Facebook, which is cool. Um, but you still get a better actual conversion from say a free trial to a paid signup or from a lead to a paid signup from Google because they were already looking for that solution. Whereas Yeah, we have, you know, a 60% cheaper lead on Facebook, but they're not going to convert at as high a rate. So it's, you're still looking at the, you know, without the math involved, you're still looking at a very similar CPA essentially. So I, like, if we're going off vanity metrics only, right, but you said, obviously return on investment, definitely search. There's no doubt about it. Especially like it's harder too when you have really long sales cycles, because then things start to get foggy. Uh, your attribution models aren't going to be as clear as, you know, if you sign up and you start your paid account within 7 days, it's very different than if you sign up for a free trial and, or maybe not a free trial, but a demo, right? Where you don't have like a cutting date and you don't sign and you don't, end up signing up for another 3 or 6 months, then that's a very different story. Uh, and your attribution, you know, like reports are gonna, they're gonna trick you. Um, so you don't really know where things are coming from. You start to kind of lose track of, you know, which one is actually the more sustainable channel. And I feel like that's where we've had most of the, like, What do you call it? Like more difficulty with clients, right? It's really figuring out, and then they'll start to, you know, try to do cohorts by, okay, let's pause this campaign on Facebook and let's see how Google does alone.
Yeah.
But the thing is, when they tell you to pause it, you're pausing it for 1 month. But if they have a 3-month sales cycle, then you still kind of, you know, you don't really know. And maybe you're getting sales from Facebook that were signed up in the past 3 months. So it's, it's, it's a little foggy, but, um, definitely search is like the quickest win. The other one is retargeting, right? Like these are people that had previously been on the website. Um, and we do something that we call like high-intent retargeting. So we're not just retargeting people that have been on the website, you know, the past 90 days, right? Like if we're able to, and we have the data, we'll target people that have visited specific pages. Uh, and we'll ask this too of our clients is, Are there any blog posts or any pieces of content on your website that you have specifically seen, you know, lead to a higher conversion rate? Like, and this is a good exercise for anybody that's out there trying to figure out, you know, like, how can we get more, more signups? Uh, in reality, just go back specifically with paid rights, go back, look at your traffic, uh, the behavior and like the flow maps and see where are people dropping off? What's the, like, hottest content piece that you have on your website and just put that in front of more people. If you're seeing that this is converting at a 10% higher rate than all the other content, there's a reason for it. So make more marketing collateral from that, turn that into a white paper, turn it into an ebook and just distribute it as a lead magnet. And then you're going to see ideally a very similar conversion rate from those people, even if they're somewhat cold, given, you know, you have a good lead nurturing process.
Yeah, that makes sense. And then when you're coming into these, these new, you know, B2B SaaS companies, you're looking at their funnel and what they have in place. Generally, when you're coming in, what's the best strategy in most cases? Are you, you know, a newly set up campaign where you can start from scratch, or do you prefer coming in where they have a funnel and you can go and just optimize it?
Oh, definitely when they already have stuff going.
Yeah.
It makes the job way easier, right? Like a lot of times when, when companies, um, well, it depends though. Like if you come in and they have a pretty good grasp on what they're doing, it's really cool because you just take a look and see, okay, like what needs to be optimized here? Like what new things need to be set up? But sometimes it's very minimal compared to, you know, when you're going completely fresh. I mean, The setup is, it's time-consuming, but typically it's very straightforward. Um, but the only thing is you don't have anything to base off results from, right? In the past, like if a new client signs up and they have a lot of data that we can take a look at, we, you know, immediately know, okay, we need to turn this back on. We need to turn this off. Uh, we need to restructure this right here, or what do we do with this? When you don't have that, you're not really shooting blind in the beginning, but you just don't have like that baseline that I think most marketers would like to have, right? Because they have somewhere to base their judgment off of.
That makes complete sense. And then I know a lot of SaaS companies that when they set up their new campaigns there, I guess they're kind of struggling to establish like a baseline or measuring the performance mainly because I feel they change or they cancel or they modify campaigns way too early. In your opinion, how often should you be testing and modifying? And what kind of metrics should we really be paying attention to, whether it's general goals you want to achieve per campaign or just kind of general metrics, then you say, okay, we need to start making changes and start fine-tuning the campaign?
Right. So I think I think people, like, it's, it's, it's a hard— I feel like it's a loaded question because there's, there's so many different, like, scenarios. Um, but let's, let's say, like, I'm just trying to keep it as broad as possible, like, with what we see most often. Um, but for example, people definitely, I think, turn things way too— turn things off way too quick. Um, And that usually comes from a place of not having confidence in what they're doing. Right. Like, and typically, like, especially for earlier stage companies, like the founder will be the one messing around with, with like advertising stuff. He doesn't really, like, he's read a couple of blog posts. Um, he doesn't like, he just doesn't have confidence in what he's doing. So he won't wait it out too long before he kind of starts to feel that pain. Uh, you know, like, oh, I'm just losing money here.
Um, I want to get specific. Like, if you're looking at cost per lead, are you looking for cost per— like, are you spending $500 and you say, look, I'm getting zero conversions. I'm not getting— or is it the cost per CTR rate? Is it the CPC, the cost per click? And then you're like, okay, this is the CPC is just way too high. And, you know, I spent $1,000 and it's not worth it. Or like, what are you looking at?
It depends again, right? If your product is— so I can't— it kind of goes back to the lifetime value thing.
Mm-hmm.
Um, if, if somebody, you know, has a product, um, that has an LTV of $5,000 and they're spending money, I feel like I would be spending maximum a third of that to see if I get anything from it. Right. But the thing is like, it's a very long period of time. So the other thing is, I think the amount of budget that you're spending, the rate at which you're spending is important because somebody has LTV $5,000, they're spending $1,000 a month. Right. And for some reason, I don't know why, that's usually what people are spending when they first start off. Right. Oh, let's just throw $1,000 at this. Like, that's the magic number. Um, and when that doesn't work, they kind of pause things for a while and then they start scrambling at new things. But like you said, like usually I would be looking at cost per lead, right? Um, the thing with that is like the cost per lead for a $5,000 LTV product can sometimes be a little expensive and people don't realize that. Um, and the reason they don't realize is because they're usually not tracking that because they haven't done advertising in the past. Right. And a lot of at least products that I've worked with, they're not actually tracking their human capital, um, you know, as an expense. So they don't see the actual cost of a lead generated if they're not running advertising campaigns or something like that. So it's, it kind of, it puts it into a foggy, um, situation, I think, but I would like— Definitely pause too soon. Um, they don't let the campaigns run long enough. And when they do, like, they don't know what things to tweak because they're not, they're not, they're not, they don't understand what they're looking at. Right. Um, I think from a very starting point, like things that they should be looking at to see if their advertising, um, you know, efforts are being well taken by the audience is take a look at click-through rates. Like, um, you know, you, you're seeing whether or not people are resonating with this. If you, if you're seeing like, You know, 2, 3% click-through rates is doing okay. Like if you can get to like 5 or above that, you're probably in a really good spot. Um, aside from that, like you're looking at things like, you know, your cost per lead and stuff like that. But I would say people definitely pause things way too fast.
So, so what is the magic time? Like, so you mentioned, you know, say $1,000 a month for 3 months. Um, how long should they be waiting for? How much time should they wait to see that results and improvements before, you know, pausing it or shutting it off?
$1,000 for 3 months.
I would say like, it doesn't have to be that number. It can be general.
Yeah.
Okay. Let's say $10,000 and you're spending it in a month. If you've got $10,000, you want to spend it in a month.
I would say, you know, like $10,000 or $5,000 in a month. It's a pretty good amount of money in one channel, right? Like you, like, then you're saying $10,000 and spread it out between 3 channels is not a lot of money. Um, But yeah, like $10,000, $5,000 per channel. If you're spending that within a month, like, I think you have enough data to make a pretty educated decision whether something or not is working. Now, if you're spending more money than that, right? Like in some cases that tends to be like baby money, right? Like you're looking at big companies spending that in a month on a daily basis. If you are like, I think of money as a resource to speed things up. Right? You can throw $10,000 into one thing and learn very quickly whether or not it's gonna work. So I think if you have the capacity, like if you're a very well-funded SaaS company and you're able to like test things out that way, definitely do it because you're gonna figure things out faster and you're just buying yourself time essentially.
Mm-hmm.
But yeah, I think a month is a, it's like typically when we run experiments, Right. Uh, like it depends on, on traffic and stuff like that, but usually like a benchmark from, and you'll see this across the board on like, on things like Google or Facebook, right. They'll give you like, they'll pre-fill when it's over and it's usually that 4-week mark. So it's usually about a month. I would say it's a, it's a good enough testing period to, to find out whether or not something's working.
