Nick Brown is the Founder and CEO of accelerate agency, a SaaS SEO & content agency. Working with enterprise and scale-up brands.
The price of Google paid search ads, also known as PPC, is skyrocketing. According to AdAge, it has increased in some sectors by 70%. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from some of my SaaS clients that they expect the cost of paid search to double in the next year.
When the cost of paid search goes up, the ROI naturally takes a hit, and any SaaS company relying too much on PPC for leads is vulnerable. Margins for paid search campaigns are now getting so tight that many campaigns that would have made sense in 2021 can’t be justified in 2022.
The factors driving up the cost of paid search are varied and complicated (the pandemic and the big social changes it caused have played a significant role), but one factor that I rarely hear mentioned is what I call “data dependency.”
Paid search, unlike organic SEO search, produces analytics that shows exactly what works and what doesn’t, removing all guesswork and doubt from the decision-making process. This is great, it truly is, but so many marketers have come to depend on this level of fine-grained analytic detail that they can’t imagine living without it. This encourages more people into PPC campaigns, which puts more pressure on prices.
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The sector with the biggest data dependency problem, in my opinion, is SaaS. I mean this as a compliment—like me, SaaS marketing teams prefer data-driven decision-making. But however much I love to make decisions based on hard data, sometimes the right decision can’t be proven in advance.
Before I get into how to solve this problem, let’s first examine how data dependency came about in the first place.
How Google Got Marketing Teams Hooked On Paid Search
In the early days of digital marketing, Google provided the same data for both paid and organic searches. Starting in 2008, however, Google started removing key information from organic searches on Google Analytics. This meant PPC campaigns were transparent about exactly what keywords were driving sales, while organic search campaigns started producing less and less data.
I can’t blame Google for this. PPC makes Google a lot of money, while organic search doesn’t bring in any direct revenue at all. Providing better data to paying customers encourages more people to pay, and that makes sense for Google.
For a lot of marketers, especially those working in SaaS, sticking with paid search was comfortable. PPC requires a lot less guesswork, and the ROI of every penny spent is easy to account for. Now that massively higher PPC is more expensive than ever before, however, the price of the analytic data that comes with it is effectively at an all-time high as well.
It’s time for all marketers—especially SaaS marketers—to rethink the way they do things.
Why SaaS Companies Need SEO
What puts many SaaS companies off of organic search through SEO is that it’s often impossible to know exactly what keyword search led to a sale. You can see that sales are up, and that, overall, you’re getting a good ROI on your marketing spend, but the precise detail you get from Google Analytics about paid search is often missing.
I understand why this puts people off, but should it? I tell my SaaS clients that if they can tolerate a little ambiguity, organic search campaigns will produce better ROI and reduce their marketing spend. If sales go up while the marketing spend goes down, isn’t that all that matters?
And yes, investing in organic search will reduce marketing spend over time. In a recent article, I explained how organic search campaigns take longer to get going, but once they are in place, they become more efficient every month.
Because these campaigns take time, there’s no time to start like the present. Knowing which target keywords are most likely to drive the most sales is difficult, so it’s best to have access to tools that can point you in the right direction. Semrush is a leading platform for telling you which keywords are the most popular for search, but be careful as these terms also tend to be the hardest to rank for. Finding keywords that are easier to rank for but that will still drive sales is a real skill.
Once you have your target keywords, it’s time to start producing lots and lots of high-quality content and start securing high authority links back to that content. In less competitive industries, it might be possible to do this without outside help, but in a highly competitive market like SaaS, most companies need agency support.
Manage With Less Precise Measurement
Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets managed.” This is one of my favorite business maxims because it’s so true, but as Larry Prusak pointed out in a 2010 Harvard Business Review column, Drucker’s maxim is often misinterpreted to mean “what can’t be measured isn’t worth managing.” If you only make business decisions when there is data to guide the decision, you’re going to miss a lot of opportunities.
By taking away several key metrics for organic search, Google effectively downgraded organic search in the minds of marketers who wrongly equate measurability with value. I understand why people think this way, I really do. I think if Peter Drucker was still with us today, however, he would say a better ROI beats analytic certainty every time.
But hey, here’s the good news: If you’re a SaaS company and you are struggling with the high costs of leads from paid search, there is a solution. Just get in touch with your friendly neighborhood SaaS SEO agency and get started on your organic search campaign today.
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Author: Nick Brown, Forbes Councils Member