An AI SaaS company had no paid channel and a lead volume number to hit by year end. The demand existed, but it belonged to the broad category rather than to a unique product like theirs. Finding the right audience at volume was the whole problem.
ⓘWe do not publish client names. Every figure on this page is a percentage change taken from the client's live Google Ads, Meta Ads and HubSpot reporting.
Impact in 3 months
01 The opportunity
The client partnered with EverClif to launch performance marketing. Nothing was running yet, but a lead target for the year was already set, which meant the channel had to reach a working state fast rather than be discovered slowly.
Before the engagement began we ran a detailed demand analysis and handed over a first plan with a budget and an impact forecast attached. Building the annual goal was a joint exercise. The client brought what the business needed, we brought what the market could realistically supply at a given spend. Both sides signed up to the same number.
The analysis found real demand, but it sat at the level of the broad category. The product itself was novel in how it was built and in the problems it solved. A large share of that category demand would never convert. The challenge was not whether the market existed. It was identifying the slice of it that matched this product, and then reaching that slice at volume.
02 The solution
The plan started at keyword level. We forecast what it would take to hit the annual goal from Google Ads alone, then set the budget against that, and treated Meta Ads and LinkedIn Ads as experimental channels funded out of what was left. That gave the programme one channel accountable for the number and two channels free to fail cheaply.
Google Ads launched first and stayed the priority. From there it ran as a sequence of rapid experiments to find the campaigns worth betting on — optimising what was working, pausing what was not, and rebuilding campaigns from a redrawn strategy. All of it ran in parallel rather than in phases.
Meta Ads came next and took off after a first round of optimisation, which is not the usual outcome for a product this specific.
The tech stack was the part that decided whether any of it would work. Ad platforms optimise towards whatever you feed them, and a form fill is a poor thing to feed them. Connecting HubSpot to both Google Ads and Meta Ads pushed the offline outcome, what happened to a lead after it arrived, back into the platforms, so bidding and audience targeting could optimise for lead quality instead of lead count.
Ad platforms optimise towards the signal you give them. Sending the qualification outcome back from the CRM is what turned targeting from a guess into a feedback loop.
03 The impact
The opening goal was lead volume. Between the first full month of the programme and the end of the lead-based measurement period, the daily lead rate grew more than five-fold while the cost of each lead almost halved, growth and efficiency moving in the same direction rather than trading off against each other.
| Metric | Change |
|---|---|
| Leads per day | +467% |
| Cost per lead | −48% |
Source: Google Ads. First full month of the programme against the final period measured on the same lead event.
Then the goal moved deeper. Leads were arriving in volume, so the target was shifted from leads to qualified meetings to raise the standard of what counted. Conversion tracking on both platforms was switched over to the CRM's qualification event on the same day, and the offline sync meant both Google Ads and Meta Ads could bid towards it directly.
Because a meeting is a deeper and more expensive event than a lead, nothing before the switch is comparable to anything after it. The meetings figures below are measured entirely inside the new basis, comparing the first complete week to the most recent one, with Google Ads and Meta Ads combined.
| Metric | Change |
|---|---|
| Qualified meetings per week | +48% |
| Cost per qualified meeting | −23% |
| Media spend | +14% |
Source: Google Ads and Meta Ads, both reporting the same CRM qualification event. First complete week of the measurement window against the latest complete week.
We start every engagement with a demand analysis, a budget and an honest impact forecast. No pitch deck, no commitment.