Google Ads for B2B SaaS When No One Ranks Anymore
No one wants to pay Google—but the time when you publish an article and buy a bunch of backlinks is over.
Even Google itself doesn't know what it's doing with search ranking. The harsh truth: It's time to pay for users if you want to scale—or even test—your future unicorn company.
Here's how to get things done:
1️⃣ As we're operating in a B2B niche, there's no better way to start selling than not to use Google Ads. Yes, you can use cold emails or Reddit/Product Hunt/directory releases. But there are two major downsides to this.
First, it's hard to see if there is a problem with demand. If no one answers your cold emails, you don't know if it's because you set it wrong or no one is interested in your product.
Second, deciding whom to target for cold outreach or where to post will work only if you already know your customer, and the number of those users is enough to spread the cost. Hence, Google Ads is one of the most logical but not-so-cheap ways to validate your idea and get initial sales fast. But there's a problem.
2️⃣ Google is not your friend. Yes, apart from being the most incentive-reach sales channel, there's nothing left on the positive side of running ads there. Google gets money when someone clicks on your ad, not when you make money. Prepare yourself for a constant battle between your budget and the algorithm's greediness.
As a starter, you need to turn off all Google optimizations and enhancements you will see. Google Ads Display Network? No, thank you. Automatic creation of ads based on your url? Skip. Smart rotation of titles? No, next time. Think of it like driving an old manual car—if you’re not fully in control, you’ll blow your budget.
3️⃣ Keywords matter a lot. To give you an impression of how Google treats you, it still shows your ads using “close match” keywords even if you tell it not to do so (by enclosing keywords in squared brackets). You need to limit your keywords to high intent only. Selling cold email solutions? Do not use “cold email”; use “cold email tool”. Even in this case, you'll see a lot of surprising variations in peoples' searches and question the sanity of humanity.
4️⃣ Negative keywords matter even more. Free, how, download, trial, FAQ, and all other variations of non-paying students should be removed from seeing your ads. Here I exported 369 Google Ads negative keywords that we use for our B2B SaaS.)
And since we're selling a B2B solution, we need to adjust the bid to -100% for all tablets and phones. No one will book a demo sitting in a loo. Oh, and don't forget to click on that hidden geolocation checkbox to target people only by presence, not by presence and interest.
5️⃣ To know who came from where and which keyword they clicked, tick two dropdowns in campaign settings and set Campaign URL options to `{lpurl}?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign={_campaign}&utm_term={keyword}_{matchtype}`. Now you’ll see what’s going on. Did I say to install Microsoft Clarity for session replays? You’ll thank yourself later.
6️⃣ There should be a lot of you. Your goal is to dominate as much real estate on a Google results page as possible. That means adding all possible assets to your ads—callouts, sitelinks, pricing, and structured snippets. Just take a look at this example: this entire block is one single ad. That's the level you want to play with.
7️⃣ In spending money with Google, you can go two ways. Both are quite miserable from the beginning.
You set up your SaaS conversions—signup, trial, paid subscription—then choose "Maximize Conversions" as your campaign strategy. What happens? You start seeing $20 clicks from “I'm just hanging around” guys, burning your ad budget until Google learns enough to give you an appropriate cost per lead.
Or you set the same conversions but go with "Maximize Clicks" to get the lowest possible traffic. Then you cross your fingers, hoping to generate at least 15 conversions in a month to switch back to "Maximize Conversions". Which way to suffer is up to you and your available budget.
8️⃣ After a week of watching your money flowing to Google and maybe some conversions, B2B SaaS companies usually see two problems.
First, there's not enough traffic for your keywords. Second, there's a product in the B2C space for which your ads are also showing. Explaining how to deal with those two will take quite a long time, and we'll leave it for another article.
With all those downsides, I still believe Google Ads is the fastest and most honest way to test your business ideas and maybe get initial sales. At the end of the day, there’s no making money in business without putting some in first. It’s just how the game works.
P.S. Bonus point on competitors.
Don't be shy—gather all your competitor brand names and run ads like "Unhappy with [competitor_name]?" Just make sure it isn't trademarked, and be prepared for them doing the same with you.
Follow the signals →
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→ Try ReverseMails for reverse email lookups and B2B contact enrichment. Whether you’re building your ICP or warming up cold leads—it’ll give you the full picture.