Solved: B2B SaaS PPC struggles with a small budget

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out.

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your situation. Read through your notes and it sounds like a classic B2B SaaS puzzle, especially when you're up against competitors with deep pockets. It's a tough spot to be in, but definitely not an impossible one.

The good news is, the solution probably isn't about outspending anyone or finding some magic bid strategy. It's about being smarter. Google telling you to just "up the budget" is the laziest advice going, and it's rarely the right answer. The real issue, from my experience, usually lies in three places: who you're talking to, what you're offering them, and where you're trying to have that conversation. Let's get into it.

We'll need to look at your ICP, not just your keywords...

Right, first things first. Let’s talk about your customer. You’re in a saturated market, which means shouting "we sell SaaS for X" into the void is like trying to get noticed at a rock concert by whispering. It just wont work. Your current approach, focusing on impression share for what I assume are fairly broad keywords, is the root of the problem. You're playing the volume game without a volume budget.

Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire probably made. "B2B companies in the tech sector with 50-200 employees" tells you absolutely nothing of value. It leads to the generic ads and vague targeting that are burning your cash right now. To stop setting money on fire, you must define your customer by their pain. Their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare.

You need to become an expert in that nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. For example, your Head of Sales client isn't just a job title; he's a leader staring at a flatlining sales chart, terrified of missing his quarterly target and having a very difficult conversation with the board. For a compliance SaaS, the nightmare isn't just 'needing to manage regulations'; it's a CEO waking up in a cold sweat about a multi-million pound fine that could cripple the company because someone missed a new policy update.

This is where the work begins. Before you spend another dollar on Google, you need to answer these questions with painful honesty:

-> What is the single biggest operational headache that your software solves?

-> Who in the organisation feels this headache most acutely? What is their job title?

-> What does this headache cost them? Not in money, but in stress, in wasted time, in political capital inside the company, in the risk of looking incompetent?

-> What is the 'before' state? Describe their day. It's probably chaotic, frustrating, full of manual work and uncertainty.

-> What is the 'after' state they dream of? It's probably calm, controlled, automated, and makes them look like a genius to their boss.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, your entire strategy changes. You stop buying keywords like "project management software" and start thinking about the specific, niche language your ICP uses. You can then find the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute, the industry newsletters they actually open, the SaaS tools they already pay for. Are they members of a specific LinkedIn group? Do they follow particular industry influencers? This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting and messaging strategy. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

In a saturated market, you don't win by being the loudest. You win by being the most relevant. And relevance starts with knowing the nightmare you're paid to end.

I'd say you need to fix your offer first...

Now we get to the second part of the puzzle, and frankly, it's the bit where most B2B SaaS companies fall flat on their face. The offer. Let me be brutally honest: the "Request a Demo" button on your website is probably the single biggest reason your conversions are so low.

Think about it from your nightmare ICP's perspective. They are busy, stressed, and drowning in their specific problem. They don't have time to book a 45-minute slot in their calendar to be subjected to a sales pitch from a company they've never heard of. It is the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes their time is less valuable than yours. It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor in a sea of sameness. In a crowded market, it's a death sentence.

Your offer’s only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. You have to solve a small, real problem for them for free to earn the right to ask them to pay you to solve the whole thing.

As a SaaS founder, you have an incredible unfair advantage here. The gold standard is one of two things:

1. A genuinely free trial (NO credit card details). Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them connect their data, invite a team member, and experience the 'after' state you defined earlier. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You aren't generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a salesperson to chase; you are creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced. We ran a campaign for a B2B SaaS client that struggled with demo requests. We switched the offer to a free trial and generated 1,535 trials on Meta Ads.

2. A freemium plan. Give away a core part of your product for free, forever. This removes all friction to entry. Once users are embedded in your ecosystem and start seeing the value, the upsell to a paid plan that unlocks more advanced features becomes a natural next step.

If for some reason you can't offer a trial or freemium, you are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool or asset that provides instant value. For a data analytics platform, it could be a free 'Data Health Check' that flags the top issues in their database. For a corporate training company, it could be a free 15-minute interactive video module on a key skill. You must give, give, give before you ask.

That "Maximize Conversions" bid strategy you're using? It's failing because you're giving it nothing to work with. The algorithm is smart, but it's not a mind reader. You're telling it "go find me people who will convert," but your offer is so high-friction that almost no one does. So the algorithm thrashes around, spending your tiny budget on random clicks, hoping to get lucky. By switching to a high-value, low-friction offer like a free trial, you'll start getting those conversions. Even if they are just trial signups, it's a signal. You're giving the algorithm the data it needs to learn who your customers are and find more of them. Your lack of conversions isn't a bidding problem; it's an offer problem.

You'll need a message they can't ignore...

Once you know their nightmare and you have an offer that provides real value, you can finally write an ad that doesn't suck. Most B2B ads are a laundry list of features and jargon. They are boring, self-obsessed, and completely ineffective.

Your ad needs to speak directly to the pain. The most effective framework for this is the Before-After-Bridge.

-> Before: You paint a vivid picture of their current nightmare. Use the exact language they would use to describe their frustration to a colleague.

-> After: You show them the promised land. The world where their nightmare is gone, and they are the hero.

-> Bridge: You introduce your product as the simple, tangible bridge that gets them from Before to After.

You don't sell a "workflow automation platform"; you sell the feeling of leaving the office at 5pm with a clear mind. You don't sell an "analytics dashboard"; you sell the confidence of walking into a board meeting with all the answers.

Let's imagine you sell a SaaS that helps agencies manage client projects. Here's how that might look in an ad:

See the difference? This ad doesn't talk about features. It talks about feelings, problems, and outcomes. It connects with the reader on an emotional level. This is what gets the click. And when that click leads to a landing page with a no-brainer free trial offer, you start to get conversions. This is how you compete in a saturated market without a massive budget.

We'll need to look at other platforms...

This brings me to your final question: "Is it even worth it to try and compete on Google, or should I put my efforts elsewhere?"

My honest answer: with a $2000/month budget in a saturated SaaS market, trying to win on Google Search is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Your venture-backed competitors are spending your entire monthly budget before lunch. They are bidding on every keyword under the sun, they have huge teams optimising campaigns, and they can afford to play the long game. You can't.

Google Search is a high-intent channel, which is great. But it's also an auction. And when the auction is full of bidders with bottomless pits of cash, the price of entry becomes astronomical. That <10% impression share isn't a sign you're doing something wrong; it's a sign that the cost-per-click for the keywords you want is simply higher than your budget allows. Throwing more money you don't have at it is madness.

So yes, you should absolutely put your efforts elsewhere. Specifically, I'd be looking at LinkedIn.

Why LinkedIn? Because it's not an auction for keywords; it's a directory of professionals. It lets you bypass the bidding war and go directly to your Nightmare ICP. Remember all that work we did defining them by their job title, industry, and company size? On LinkedIn, you can turn that profile directly into a targeting audience. You're not waiting for them to search for a solution; you're putting your (now brilliant) ad right in their feed while they're procrastinating.

The cost per click might be higher than some of what you see on Google, but the quality of the traffic is often lightyears ahead. You are guaranteed to be reaching the right kind of person. We've run many campaigns for B2B clients on LinkedIn and seen fantastic results. I remember one campaign for a software client where we were getting highly qualified leads from C-level decision makers for just $22 a pop on LinkedIn Ads.

Meta (Facebook/Instagram) can also work, believe it or not. People think it's just for B2C, but that's a myth. With the right strategy, it can be a powerhouse. We generated 4,622 registrations for a B2B software client at just $2.38 each using Meta Ads. The trick is to use their powerful lookalike audiences. Once you have a list of your best customers or a decent number of free trial signups, you can tell Meta "go find me more people who look exactly like these ones." It's incredibly effective and often much cheaper than LinkedIn or Google.

The point is, you need to stop playing on a field that's tilted against you. Google is your competitors' home turf. You need to find a different stadium where your small budget and smart targeting can actually make an impact.

You probably should rethink your budget and expectations...

Finally, let's talk about the numbers. Your question about bid strategies shows you're thinking about cost, but I think you're thinking about the wrong cost. The question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but rather "How high a Cost Per Lead can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?"

The answer to that lies in a metric that most small SaaS companies never bother to calculate: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the total profit you can expect to make from an average customer over the entire time they stay with you. Once you know this number, everything else falls into place.

Here's how you calculate it. It's simpler than you think.

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month? (Let's say for this example it's £250).

2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after server costs, support, etc? (Let's say it's 80%).

3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? Be honest. (Let's say it's 4%).

Now, the magic formula:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's plug in our numbers:

LTV = (£250 * 0.80) / 0.04

LTV = £200 / 0.04 = £5,000

Here's a table showing the calculation clearly:

In this example, each new customer is worth £5,000 in gross margin to your business. This number is your North Star. It tells you what you can afford to spend to get a customer.

A healthy business model aims for at least a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means for every £3 of lifetime value, you can spend £1 to acquire the customer. So, with a £5,000 LTV, you can afford to spend up to £1,666 to acquire a single new paying customer.

Suddenly, the game changes, doesn't it? If your sales process converts 1 in 10 free trials into a paying customer, you can afford to pay up to £166 for a single trial signup. That $22 (£18) CPL we saw on LinkedIn doesn't seem expensive anymore. It looks like an incredible bargain.

This is the math that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of cheap leads and allows you to invest confidently in channels that deliver real customers, even if the upfront cost seems high. Stop worrying about impression share and cost per click. Start focusing on your LTV:CAC ratio.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in, so I've put together a table summarising the main shifts in thinking you need to make. This is your roadmap away from burning cash on Google and towards building a predictable, scalable customer acquisition machine.

Following this plan isn't easy. It requires a fundamental shift in how you think about marketing, moving from a cost-focused mindset to an investment-focused one. It takes discipline to do the hard work of defining your ICP and crafting a truly valuable offer.

This is, of course, where expert help can make a huge difference. An experienced paid ads specialist can help you accelerate this entire process, avoid common pitfalls, and start seeing results much faster. We've done this for dozens of B2B SaaS companies, including those who felt just as stuck as you do now.

If you'd like to chat through this in more detail and have us take a look at your specific situation, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can dive into your campaigns and give you some more tailored advice on how to implement this strategy.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh