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Scaling a SaaS product is hard. Long sales cycles. Multiple stakeholders. And a sales team crying out for better leads.
We're Lever, a PPC agency built by marketers who've been in-house at B2B SaaS scaleups. Google Partner, over £50M in managed ad spend and deep experience scaling B2B businesses across the UK and internationally, with senior specialists on every account.
Lever's team has run paid acquisition in-house at PayPal and Zettle before moving agency-side. That background shaped how we work: a four-stage process we call The Lever Method, applied to every account we run.
CAC reduction within the first two quarters for clients who move from click-based optimisation to ICP-aligned, SQL-based optimisation, without reducing spend.
Efficiency gains come from better targeting and measurement, not smaller budgets. That takes an agency fluent in both Google's technical requirements and the SaaS market itself, before you scale. Google's own documentation on offline conversion imports sets out how uploading enhanced lead data back into Google improves reporting and optimisation, provided the account feeds it clean CRM data.
Every engagement starts with a structured audit: what's working, where budget is being wasted, and what better performance would actually look like. For SaaS specifically, that means going past campaign data into conversion tracking, CRM connectivity and landing page performance, because a Google Ads account that looks healthy on CPA is usually hiding a measurement problem later in the sales cycle. You get a light version of this as part of the proposal, before you've committed to anything.
Our campaign structures are built around two primary angles.
1. Query intent: we tier search terms into high, medium, and low intent, so budget flows toward buyers closest to a decision while still capturing earlier research demand where it makes commercial sense.
2. Channel intent: search captures active demand, paid social reaches buyers before they're searching, and each channel does what it's best suited to. Campaigns are then structured by intent tier, so the account reflects how buyers behave rather than how your product team organises features. We resolve tracking, conversion signals, and bid strategy before launch, not after.
Campaigns are then structured by intent tier, so the account reflects how buyers behave rather than how your product team organises features. Tracking, conversion signals and bid strategy get resolved before launch, not after.
We use AI tooling to analyse the existing account at keyword and ad group level, and to research how your buyers describe the problem when they're in market. That feeds directly into ad copy, keyword selection, and audience build. Structure adapts to commercial reality: if you need to grow in one market, hold steady in another and stay dark in a third, the account is built that way. If buyers use different terminology across the UK, US and DACH, so do the keywords. Nothing goes live without your sign-off on copy and keywords. Most accounts are live within the first week.
Where CRM data is connected, campaign activity matches real pipeline, so optimisation weights toward what drives revenue rather than what looks good in the platform.
The difference is the layer on top. AI surfaces patterns; it takes years of experience to know what to act on, what to ignore, and what the data isn't telling you. We assess every recommendation before it becomes a change.
Additionally, we work across AI search on the paid and organic side. AI Max, ChatGPT Ads and automated bidding are reshaping paid search, while AI Overviews and LLM assistants are reshaping how SaaS buyers shortlist vendors. We run both, so paid strategy accounts for where AI surfaces are already sending (or withholding) demand.
Most performance marketing funnels show a single path from awareness to purchase. That works for businesses with one buying motion, but SaaS usually has two running at once: self-serve users who sign up and decide alone, and sales-led buyers who never touch a trial and need six people to agree before anything is signed.
The stages have the same names, but almost nothing else about them is the same. Same keyword, same click, entirely different economics, which is why running one campaign structure across both is the most common cause of CAC inflation we see in our SaaS client accounts.
YouTube and Display to problem-aware personas.
Measured on branded search lift and direct signups.
LinkedIn reach at named ICP accounts.
Measured on audience demographic quality and engagement.
Google and Microsoft Search on solution-aware and “best tool for X” terms.
Measured on visit-to-trial rate.
Google and Microsoft Search on solution-aware and “best tool for X” terms.
Measured on qualified leads.
Competitor and alternative-to terms, pricing page retargeting.
Measured on trial starts and cost per activated trial.
High-intent and competitor terms, retargeting of integrations and security pages.
Measured on demos that reach qualified opportunity stage, not just demos booked.
Customer Match lookalikes and in-product upgrade nudges.
Measured on expansion ARR per paid touch.
Account-based retargeting for new business units and seats.
Measured on net revenue retention influenced by paid.
YouTube and Display to problem-aware personas. Measured on branded search lift and direct signups.
LinkedIn reach at named ICP accounts. Measured on audience demographic quality and engagement.
Google and Microsoft Search on solution-aware and “best tool for X” terms. Measured on visit-to-trial rate.
Google and Microsoft Search on solution-aware and “best tool for X” terms. Measured on qualified leads.
Competitor and alternative-to terms, pricing page retargeting. Measured on trial starts and cost per activated trial.
High-intent and competitor terms, retargeting of integrations and security pages. Measured on demos that reach qualified opportunity stage, not just demos booked.
Customer Match lookalikes and in-product upgrade nudges. Measured on expansion ARR per paid touch.
Account-based retargeting for new business units and seats. Measured on net revenue retention influenced by paid.
In self-serve, it's optimising to signups and letting bidding chase the cheapest ones, which fills the funnel with trials that never activate.
In sales-led, it's optimising to leads when a large share never reach opportunity stage, so bidding learns from a signal that isn't correlated with revenue.
Both are measurement problems, not budget problems.
Most SaaS companies run both motions, but not in equal weight, and the weighting shifts as you grow. That's what the pricing tiers below reflect.
ROAS is the wrong lens for subscription revenue — a customer acquired in month one is still paying in month twenty-four. This models the full chain, budget → clicks → trials → customers, then out across their lifetime, so you can see the month your ad spend turns profitable.
What you should spend on paid media depends entirely on where you are. An early-stage SaaS proving one channel needs a different budget, a different channel mix and a different definition of success than a scale-up running three markets. Here's how pricing structure looks depending on where you are, what we charge, what we'd expect the media budget to be at each stage, and how both change as you grow.
You're running your first paid channel, or your first serious one, and need to prove it works before anyone signs off more.
Not included: LinkedIn, paid social, organic/GEO, multi-market structure.
Spend is already meaningful but CAC is drifting, lead quality is inconsistent, or nobody can tell which campaigns produce revenue.
Not included: LinkedIn ABM, international expansion.
High ACV, long multi-stakeholder sales cycles, named target accounts. One market, but the deals are big and the funnel is slow.
Not included: multi-market localisation, creative production.
More than one market, more than one currency, and a channel mix that has to change by region.
Not included: programmatic media buying, creative production.
All fees exclude VAT. Ad spend is paid directly to the platforms and never marked up, and Google and Microsoft add the 2% UK Digital Services Tax on top of media. Tracking implementation is a one-off at £100/hour and has to be completed before campaigns go live. No fixed-term contracts, monthly rolling, one month's notice.
Different ARR, different sales motions, different markets. What doesn't change is how we measure their success: qualified pipeline and CAC, not clicks.
Trial signups were growing, but the team couldn't tell which ones were worth chasing. We built a performance strategy around trial activation and low-cost acquisition rather than signup volume.
A white-label payment gateway based in Riga had invested in paid media for years without being able to optimise it. A previous agency had left the campaigns poorly managed. We audited the account, implemented enhanced conversion tracking to fix attribution and bidding, and shifted the campaigns toward lead quality rather than volume.
Sprintlaw's Google Ads account ran entirely on automated campaign types, with no strategy behind it, spending budget on Google's terms rather than the business's. We rebuilt the campaign around buyer intent over six weeks. Sprintlaw has since doubled monthly ad investment, and paid has overtaken every other channel for new business revenue.
Every client is different, ROI will depend on their economies of scale, market opportunity and so much more. However, we have achieved 3x'd ROAS for a client in 6 weeks and have taken another SaaS client from $100k ARR to $3m.
Between £5,000 and £10,000 a month is enough to prove one channel properly. Below that, smart bidding rarely gets the conversion volume it needs to learn, and you'll spend three months generating data instead of pipeline. Multi-channel accounts with LinkedIn ABM alongside search typically sit at £15,000 to £40,000. Multi-market accounts run £40,000 to £100,000+. Our management fee is £1,500 a month while media is under £15,000, then 10% of media, plus £500 a month when additional channels are added. Full breakdown on our pricing page.
Yes, at £5,000+ a month in media and provided you have product-market fit. Pre-PMF, paid rarely helps: bidding needs conversion volume to optimise against, and if your trial-to-paid rate is still moving month to month you'll be optimising toward a target that isn't stable. We'll tell you honestly at proposal stage if that's where you are, and what to fix first.
Yes. We build international PPC account architecture across EMEA, North America and APAC, structured by market rather than bolted onto a UK account. That means currency handling, region-specific compliance, and persona localisation rather than translated ad copy. It also means the channel mix changes by region: self-serve motions often work in the US where category awareness is higher, while the same product frequently needs a sales-led motion in EMEA and APAC. Multi-market accounts typically run £40,000 to £100,000+ in monthly media.
Yes, including sales motions above £500,000. The change for enterprise accounts is what bidding optimises toward, for cycles running 60 days and longer, attribution windows and conversion lag settings need configuring deliberately rather than left at default.
Google Ads and Microsoft Ads carry high-intent search demand and are usually primary. LinkedIn handles ABM to named accounts. Meta comes in when the audience case supports it, not by default. Microsoft is consistently underused in B2B SaaS: CPCs run materially cheaper than Google with comparable intent, which is why we mirror campaign structure across both rather than treating it as an afterthought.
Self-serve optimises toward activated trials, because a signup that never activates costs you money twice. Enterprise optimises toward demos that reach a qualified opportunity stage. While there is inevitable overlap in the two funnels, qualifying users early (small budget vs large for example) allows you to build user journeys that keep CAC efficient for self-serve and concentrate on quality and premium bidding on enterprise. Without a clear strategy paired with a clear user journey, one motion's cheap conversions drag bidding away from the other's valuable ones, which is the most common cause of CAC inflation we see in SaaS accounts.
Lead volume usually moves within three to four weeks. Lead quality takes longer, typically six to eight weeks, because downstream conversion data has to accumulate before bidding can optimise against it. Sprintlaw's account went from roughly 20% of leads qualifying to 39%, with ROAS moving from 0.8 to 2.3 in 6 weeks. Meaningful CAC movement generally lands within two quarters.
Yes. We won't manage campaigns running on unreliable measurement, because optimisation against bad data actively destroys budget rather than merely wasting it. If your tracking is incomplete, we implement it first at £100 per hour as a one-off.
Yes, and it's most of what we do. We start with a full audit to identify wasted spend and structural issues before changing anything, and we preserve historical data and CRM integrations through the transition. Spell Payments came to us after a previous agency left their campaigns poorly managed. After an account rebuild and enhanced conversion tracking, cost per lead fell 20% and revenue grew 300% year on year.
It works differently. If your product isn't cited when a buyer asks an LLM for options in your category, paid is compensating for a discovery gap. For that reason, we run SEO and AI visibility alongside paid.
Michéal has spent 10+ years leading B2B paid acquisition for SaaS, FinTech and marketplace companies, including in-house roles at PayPal and Zettle before founding Lever. He has managed £50M+ in ad spend across Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Meta, and writes regularly on SaaS PPC benchmarks, CAC measurement and multi-channel budget allocation.
Lever Digital is a Google Partner and a 2026 UK Paid Media Awards finalist.
