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Parallax provides industry-leading resource management software to professional service companies. By late 2022, Parallax had been advertising on Google for over a year with little tangible results. Leads were inconsistent, and measurement was uncertain. That’s why they approached Uproer. We conducted a strategy development project to help Parallax turn their Google Ads account into an efficient driver of high-value leads.
Our audit attributed low lead volume to inconsistent spend and a campaign strategy that underserved key segments of the resource management market. As we began our partnership, we shifted focus to prioritize high-impact searches from customers looking for resource planning software, to address user pain points, and to educate up the funnel with audience-building efforts. To date, we’ve seen impressive results. Months under Uproer management are highlighted in blue.
Parallax’s Challenge: How to Find a Niche in SaaS-Focused Search
In paid search for SaaS, your niche is incredibly important. It determines who you compete against, how much you bid, what content you need to create, and how you organize your campaigns. Like many SaaS companies, Parallax’s biggest challenge was finding a niche. Professional services automation is a big pond to play in, and there are a lot of fish.
Prior to working with Uporer, the account targeted a wide range of keywords across the PSA space. There was also a spattering of outbound display efforts and other campaigns that had driven up costs and CPA. Luckily, as we began our partnership, Parallax’s overall marketing strategy was getting a refresh.
Together with our internal contacts, we identified “resource management” and “capacity planning” as the most important and most lucrative areas for focus. As we launched our new Google Ads campaigns, we allocated most of our budget towards these non-brand segments. And in the last twelve months, we’ve expanded iteratively and intentionally into other areas.
The Importance of Conversion Feedback
One other problem for SaaS companies is conversion actions. A lot of PPC strategies will rely on pageviews, catchall form submission events, button clicks, or resource downloads to measure success. These are proxy metrics. They don’t tell you—or Google—anything about the quality of the leads you’re driving.
From the get-go, we set a course to focus only on qualified leads for Parallax. That means we wanted Google to fire a conversion only when the lead in question is qualified by sales. Of course, this is easier said than done. Conversion tracking takes time and patience. So we worked with Parallax to outline a phased approach to updated conversion actions.
This approach migrated the account from landing page “proxy leads” to verified Hubspot leads and, eventually, to qualified leads over several months. To support this effort, we built and cycled through a series of conversion actions including:
- Google Tag Manager event listeners for Hubspot forms
- Zapier integrations for qualified leads
This allowed us to train Google’s bidding strategies on each more qualified conversion action until we were ready to focus only on qualified leads! And as we dialed in reporting, we were able to see strong improvements in lead quality and quantity.
How to Report on Revenue & ROAS for PPC
Revenue reporting for SaaS companies is also huge. If you can’t prove you’re driving attributable revenue, you can’t justify increasing budgets or testing new campaigns. Knowing this, we focused on building a durable and trustworthy reporting framework that shows us exactly where our efforts are driving leads and revenue.
In our bi-weekly conversations with Parallax, we tie all of our efforts back to the business-level outcomes that our points of contact care about. We always focus agendas and meetings on ROI, lead quality, and revenue over the nitty gritty tactics and optimizations.
If there are relevant tests or opportunities to spend additional budget, we’ll discuss those too. But our secret to successful reporting is to avoid the self-aggrandizing fluff and focus on the money.
The Results
Taken together, our approach to account structure, reporting, and management have driven significant improvements over the last year!
We increased our share of search, conquested competitor terms, and drove tangible revenue increases.
- 1,213% YOY increase in PPC-generated “closed won” revenue
- 737% increase in PPC-generated opportunity revenue (including lost opportunities)
- 581% YOY increase in PPC-generated contacts
- 434% increase in “closed won” revenue ROAS
- 146% increase in PPC-generated deals
- -8% decrease in Google ad spend
- -86% decrease in our cost per lead
- -21% decrease in our cost per deal
- +296% increase in average deal size
Want to learn more about Uproer's paid search approach? Book an intro call today!
