What conversion rate should you expect from PPC for a SaaS?
Expect 2–5% of paid clicks to sign up on a focused landing page and about 0.5% of clicks to become paying customers. That rate decides the highest click price you can afford.
A realistic pay-per-click (PPC) funnel for B2B SaaS looks like this: 3.5% of clicks register, 70% of those start a trial and 22% of trials pay. End to end, about 0.54% of clicks become customers. Remarketing can lift that to around 0.83%, while wrong keywords or a leaky page push it below 0.4%. The full model is in our article on typical SaaS conversion rates.
Turn the rate into a maximum click price: allowable CAC × click-to-customer rate. Take a €49 a month product that customers keep for eight months, a lifetime value of €392. With a 3× return target, you can pay about €130 per customer. At 0.54% click-to-customer, that allows roughly €0.70 per click, while B2B search clicks often cost €3.50–9. That is why many early SaaS teams find, as our PPC setup guide puts it, that the maths does not work yet.
PPC fits low-priced, self-serve products where people buy without talking to anyone. Once a deal is worth more than about $500, personal outreach converts 3–5× better than automated campaigns, according to when to sell through PPC and when to go personal. Meetcatcher fits that higher-value case: instead of paying for clicks, you get a short call with a decision maker at a company that fits your product.
Check PPC before you spend
- 1Calculate allowable CACStart from lifetime value and divide by your target ratio, usually 3. Compare it with typical B2B CAC.
- 2Assume 0.5% click to customerUse a pessimistic baseline until you have your own data. Optimistic rates are how PPC budgets disappear.
- 3Work out your maximum CPCMultiply allowable CAC by the click-to-customer rate. This is the most you can pay per click and still profit.
- 4Check real pricesLook up keywords in a keyword planner. Long-tail phrases such as a CRM for small architecture studios can cost €2.50 where a broad term costs €18.
- 5Fall back to remarketingIf the numbers do not fit, run ads only for people who already visited your site. €10–20 a day keeps you in their memory.
If your maximum CPC is far below market prices, move the budget to channels that start with a conversation rather than a click, and keep ads for remarketing until the numbers work. For LinkedIn specifically, see how LinkedIn Ads compare with Meetcatcher.