Talking each weekend with different CMOs and prospects is a goldmine to get an immediate picture of the B2B SaaS industry. I won’t deny that uncertainty is what characterizes most of the B2B SaaS industry right now. Traditional paid media budgets are holding steady or going down and new programs are scrutinized in detail if ROI is not immediately visible.
Pipeline is shrinking and most teams blame the channels. They test new formats, hire a new agency, add tools, change bidding strategies. But the channel isn’t the problem, the playbook is.
B2B buyers changed how they buy. But during my audits I see most paid media strategies didn’t follow or haven’t seen these changes. The gap between how buyers behave today and how most companies are trying to reach them is where budget gets wasted and makes you think paid ads are inefficient.
How the B2B Buyer Changed
The textbook B2B buying journey used to start with awareness. A buyer would find your services or solutions by clicking an ad, checking your website, downloading a whitepaper, entering a paid funnel sequence, and they will eventually raise their hand for a demo whenever they are ready to buy. Paid media was there to introduce the brand awareness and capture the demand that followed.
That journey still exists but it’s been compressed and front-loaded.
Why?
Simply because buyers today use AI to research, compare vendors, and build a shortlist before they ever land on your website. By the time someone visits your pricing page, they’ve already done the work your paid funnel used to do. They know who the main players are. They’ve seen the comparison articles. They have a rough sense of where you sit on price, positioning, and fit.
Two things follow from this directly: Less volume but higher intent.
Volume at the top of the funnel is drying up. Fewer people click on awareness ads because fewer people need that step. They’re already informed before the click. And when visitors do show up, intent is higher. Someone landing on your site today isn’t in discovery mode. They’re in validation mode. They’re not asking “what is this?” They’re asking “is this the right one?”
Most paid media strategies are still built for the old buyer. They put the budget into capturing demand that no longer builds the way it used to, and they miss the buyers who show up ready to decide.
We are seeing this across many of our clients right now. Highly qualified leads entering the inbound pipeline but far less volume than six months ago. And when those leads do show up, deal velocity is faster. By the time they get to a first call, they have already sped past the whole first part of the funnel.
They know the category, they know the main players, they know roughly where your product sits in your category. I like to call them the new “disciplined” B2B buyers. They did all the homework before reaching out and filling a form on your website. But don’t misunderstand me. The buying journey didn’t disappear.
The top of the funnel moved somewhere most paid media strategies can’t see, into a mix of different platforms, AI research, Reddit, communities and network recommendations that leave no click trail.
You Can’t Win on One Channel Anymore
You get so many of your ICP’s activities in different platforms that could potentially be the one convincing your buyer to finally move forward with your company. That makes it impossible to bet on one channel and work in silos.
You need Demand gen, BOFU and retargeting on all the relevant platforms, for example Reddit, LinkedIn, Youtube and Google Ads. This doesn’t mean investing more in ad budget but pacing more your demand gen and existing demand paid efforts over the different platforms, rather than separating like the old playbook the demand gen for paid social and capture demand on Google Ads.
Brand awareness plus middle and bottom-funnel campaigns used to be the whole trinity of paid strategy ( TOFU-MOFU-BOFU) because buyers came to you at different stages. You could catch them early, mid, and late. When buyers enter later in the journey, the middle drops out.
On paid search you’re left competing on branded terms with people who are already comparing you to two other vendors. You can win those clicks but you’re not creating new demand, you’re just capturing what’s left.
Moreover, high intent keyword campaigns are not anymore where you capture most of the existing demand ready to buy. Since most of them will not convert from an originated click on these keywords, the CPL among SaaS categories is higher and conversion rate is decreasing.
The pipeline shrinks not because the campaigns stopped working but because fewer people are entering the funnel through the channels those campaigns cover.
Breaking the Frontier Between Paid Search and Paid Social
Paid search is not only for capturing demand and paid social is not only for demand gen. That separation is the old playbook. The new one is about being present across all the platforms your buyer is active on and using what each platform does best, not siloing them by funnel stage.
Some of the strategies that have worked best for us lately:
Google Ads Demand Gen with YouTube. Google Ads is a great channel for demand gen using Demand Gen campaigns with YouTube inventory for both cold audiences and retargeting. Cold audiences with In-Stream placement and custom segments built from category search terms and competitor URLs. Retargeting with In-Feed for warm audiences who have already visited your high-intent pages. We covered the full data behind this in our YouTube Ads article but the short version is: 11 conversions at under $1,000 each for a manufacturing ERP client, from a channel most B2B advertisers only use for brand awareness.
Reddit Ads for BOFU retargeting. Reddit Ads work well with bottom-funnel offers for retargeting. We pay around $2.50 per retargeting click for our clients. Client quotes and testimonials in carousel format, and ungated case studies, consistently outperform other formats. The CPCs are low enough and the intent signals strong enough that it belongs in every serious B2B retargeting stack, particularly for AI tools and solutions targeting developer and IT job functions.
LinkedIn video product tours as a demo driver. LinkedIn video ads showing a real product tour are one of the most effective formats we have tested for driving demo requests from warm audiences. Not a brand video, not a corporate explainer. A real walkthrough of the product focused on a specific pain point. Using Thought Leader Ads format from the founder profile, it’s a winning combination.
The point is not to be everywhere. It’s to make each channel do what it does best and make sure they work together rather than in isolation.
(Smart) Retargeting Everywhere
Retargeting made the same assumption: someone visited your site, they didn’t convert, show them an ad and bring them back. That logic worked when a visitor who didn’t convert was probably just distracted, not undecided. B2B SaaS isn’t a hotel booking. The visitor who leaves your pricing page without converting isn’t doing so because they forgot about you. They’re still comparing. Retargeting them with the same “book a demo” call to action doesn’t address the actual reason they left.
The job of retargeting is no longer to chase the click. It’s to stay present until the buyer is ready.
That changes the offer entirely. Instead of pushing “book a demo” at every touchpoint, retargeting should deliver content that matches where the buyer actually is: still comparing, still validating, looking for proof that you’re the safer or better choice. Ungated case studies, customer quotes, buyer comparison guides and customer interview content. Not gated lead gen. The buyer already knows who you are. Give them the content that moves them from “maybe” to “yes” and focus less on getting your demo form filled with your retargeting layer.
A buyer who visits your pricing page and doesn’t convert should encounter your brand in more than one place in the week that follows. A customer testimonial on LinkedIn. A comparison guide on Reddit a few days later. A case study on Google Display the following week. Same buyer, same journey, three different formats, three different moments.
That means running retargeting across Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads and Reddit Ads at minimum. LinkedIn reaches them during professional browsing. Reddit reaches them when they’re researching community discussions. Microsoft Ads captures intent on Bing. Google Display maintains visibility across the web.
Reddit Ads are particularly underused for B2B retargeting. We run retargeting on Reddit for multiple clients including Getuplead itself, paying around $2.50 per retargeting click. Client quotes and testimonials in carousel format, and ungated case studies, consistently outperform other formats. The CPCs are low enough and the intent signals strong enough that it belongs in every serious B2B retargeting stack. We have seen this work consistently for AI tools and solutions targeting developer and IT job functions.
Attribution Is Harder Than It Used to Be
On the zero-click era and the multiplication of sources of information, you won’t be able to maintain the same amount of leads and metrics like before on all your channels.
TOFU converts less on LinkedIn since you can find the information on Claude or ChatGPT. People click less and content consumption is taking over conversion. You read, you learn, you are informed without the need to fill a form. Google Ads is not anymore where your buyer will come to book a demo as a first interaction.
Research from Rand Fishkin and Datos found that around 60% of people using Google Search already know the brand they are looking for and the search is purely navigational. Search and search ads are no longer the discovery channels they were a few years back. They are increasingly confirmation channels for buyers who already made up their minds somewhere else, through Reddit threads, AI tools, community recommendations and private Slack groups. If your paid media strategy is built entirely around search, you are showing up at the end of a journey you had no part in.
This is the one that does the most damage.
We run Google Ads for Cyance, an intent data platform with a typical sales cycle of around six months. We launched a new search campaign to support a product feature launch. After two months, conversions were not promising: only two demos booked, both above the client’s target cost per demo. The campaign looked like it wasn’t working.
We kept it running. In month three we pulled the HubSpot data and found three additional demos booked by contacts who had interacted with the campaign in the previous three months but never converted through Google Ads directly. Google Ads had given itself zero credit for those three conversions. The contacts had clicked the ads, left without converting, and came back through other channels weeks later.
The campaign wasn’t failing. It was working on a timeline that last-click attribution was structurally incapable of measuring. If we had cut it at month two, we would have spent the budget and received none of the return, not because the campaign failed but because we evaluated it too early on the wrong metric.
We call this the halo effect. The campaign builds brand recognition that surfaces weeks later through other channels. Last-click attribution never captures it. The budget gets reallocated based on a metric that couldn’t see what the campaign was doing. The final proof, when it comes, usually comes from the sales team. Prospects mention a video they saw weeks before they ever searched for the brand. That signal never shows up in a conversion column.
How to Measure It Properly
The new playbook only works if your measurement catches up to it. Most setups are built for last-click attribution which means they’re structurally designed to undercount everything outside branded search and bottom-funnel demand capture..
One approach we like is using a site visitor ID tool like Vector or Snitcher to understand who is clicking on paid search ads but then being attributed to organic search or direct in the CRM. This reveals the people who find a product for the first time through non-brand paid search but come back to the site during a later session. Once the data is collected you can export it, filter by UTMs, and run a quick lookup against new leads in the CRM. There are more automated ways to do this but it’s an easy way to build a proof of concept and make better paid search budget decisions.
Another important point for measurement is that every lead entering your CRM should carry advertising identifiers from both first touch and last touch at minimum. First touch tells you what introduced the buyer to your brand. Last touch tells you what triggered the conversion. Without both, you’ll keep over-investing in last-touch channels and under-investing in the campaigns that built the awareness that made the last-touch click possible.
No single platform can tell the full story. Google Ads doesn’t know what happened on LinkedIn. LinkedIn doesn’t know what happened in your CRM. GA4 doesn’t know what your sales team heard from prospects on calls. The patterns that reveal how your paid media is actually performing only become visible when you layer everything together: CRM, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads, Search Console, GA4 and external attribution platforms. The real story only becomes visible when you have the full picture.
Patience Over Big Push
One thing the new playbook requires that most teams resist: patience. Give any campaign targeting new audiences a minimum of three months before making a judgment call. The buyers these campaigns reach aren’t ready to convert in a couple of weeks. The conversion, when it comes, will happen through branded search or a retargeting click weeks later. Kill it after a month and you’ll never know whether it worked. A lower daily budget held for three months beats a higher daily budget cancelled at six weeks.
It’s easy to look at the new B2B buyer and see a harder sales environment. Less top-of-funnel volume, more informed buyers, longer timelines, harder attribution.
Reframe it. A buyer who has already done their research and built a shortlist before they visit your site is a buyer who is close to a decision. The companies that adapt their paid media to meet that buyer where they actually are, with the right content, across the right channels, measured the right way, have a significant advantage over the ones still running the 2018 playbook.
The ones still chasing every visitor with a “book a demo” banner will keep blaming the channels.
If you’re ready for an honest assessment of what is and isn’t working with your account, that’s what we do at Getuplead. Let’s talk.
