A SaaS company's
first 30 days.

Most 30-day marketing plans start with content and ads, because that's the visible part. For software, that's backwards. Until you can tell which ad found a paying customer, every decision about ads and content is a guess dressed up as a report.

So the plan starts with the plumbing, then the sign-up, then the product's first session, and only then the spend. It's twenty tasks, five a week. Some take ten minutes. A few need a developer for an afternoon. Tick them off below; ticks are saved in this browser.

Write down your activation event first: the one action that shows the product worked for someone. Then make sure every new account stores the click ID it arrived with. Google says it only keeps the GCLID for 90 days, so a payment on day 20 can only be matched if day 1 saved the ID.

In Google Ads, make the deepest action with enough volume primary. Google says primary actions are used for bidding, while secondary actions are reported in All conversions but not used for bidding. In Meta, send both StartTrial and Subscribe, which Meta defines as when a person applies to start a paid subscription. The SaaS Google Ads page has a tool for the timing.

Read your sign-up and pricing pages as a sceptical buyer. Does it say, before sign-up, that the trial becomes a paid plan, when, and for how much? In August 2026 the Federal Court found eHarmony misled consumers about automatic renewal, cancellation and its 'free' membership.

Then test cancelling. From 1 July 2027 the Unfair Trading Practices Act requires an easy way to cancel, online if sign-up was online. If cancelling today means emailing support, fix it now, not next June. In NSW, NSW Fair Trading enforces the Australian Consumer Law alongside the ACCC.

Finally, check your product emails. Any that push an upgrade are marketing, and the ACMA says the unsubscribe must be honoured within 5 working days and must not require an account login.

Sign up for your own product on a phone, as a stranger, and time how long it takes to reach the activation event. Write down every place you hesitated. That list is your week.

Add sample data so the product can show itself working before a buyer moves their own data in, and publish how migration works. Data migration was the top cause of trouble for disappointed Australian software buyers, at 41%.

Check the trial is long enough. The most common trial length is 14 days, used by 62% of products in the 2026 Conversion Report. If a real set-up for a Sydney accounting practice takes three weeks, a 14-day trial ends before they've seen it work.

Clean the brand campaign first: add 'login' and 'sign in' as negatives so existing users stop counting as new demand. Then try one campaign on 'alternatives' searches, pointed at an honest comparison page.

Exclude paying customers from social prospecting, and update your review site profiles with current prices and plans, because AI tools read them as current. The AI search page explains why.

Last, book a cohort review for about day 60. Take this month's trials and count how many reached activation and how many paid, by channel. That's the number to plan the next quarter on.

Resist the urge to launch everything in week four. One search campaign and one set of exclusions is enough to learn from. Five new campaigns at once means none of them gets enough budget to tell you anything, and you won't know which change moved the numbers.

By now you should know your real trial-to-paid rate, which channels bring people who pay, and where new users get stuck. Use those three numbers to set the budget on the SaaS budget page, and pick one test for next month: one change, one number to judge it on, one date to look again.