Google Ads
for SaaS.

Most businesses selling on Google Ads get the sale, or the enquiry, within minutes of the click. Software doesn't. Someone in Newcastle searches 'job management app for electricians', clicks your ad, starts a trial, pokes around for a week, then pays on day 16 or doesn't pay at all. The click and the money are weeks apart.

That gap is where most SaaS accounts go wrong. The trial signup happens straight away, so it's the easy thing to count. Google's automated bidding then does exactly what it's told: it finds more people who start trials. Students, competitors, people comparing ten tools, people who'll never get past the first screen. The cost per trial looks great. The paid customers don't arrive.

Google's own best practice for bidding to a value is to choose a goal with a relatively short conversion delay and to pick a single stage of your funnel to bid on. A free trial puts those two ideas in tension. The deeper the stage, the better the signal and the longer the wait. The tool below shows where your account sits.

Put in your trial length, how long people usually take to pay after it ends, and how often you send paid conversions to Google. It works out the delay and tells you which action to make the bid goal.

Two limits matter. The first is the conversion window: how long after a click Google will still credit a conversion to it. Google lets you set click-through windows from 1 to 30, 60 or 90 days depending on the conversion source, with 30 days as the default. A 30-day trial with a 30-day window means anyone who pays on day 31 simply doesn't count.

The second is the click ID itself. When you upload offline conversions, Google says it only keeps the GCLID for 90 days, and a conversion older than your window is rejected too. If your sales cycle runs past 90 days, which happens with annual plans signed after a long evaluation, upload an earlier event that does fall inside it.

Then there's processing. Google says imported conversions typically take less than 12 hours to process, but a click less than 6 hours old can't be uploaded yet. None of this is hard. It just has to be designed in on day one: when someone signs up, save the GCLID against their account, not just in a cookie, so that when they pay three weeks later your billing system can send it back.

Google Ads splits conversion actions in two. Primary actions are reported in the Conversions column and used for bidding. Secondary actions show up in 'All conversions' and don't steer bids. That split is the most useful switch a SaaS account has.

A sensible set-up for most software companies looks like this. Trial signup: secondary, so you still see it. Your activation event, the moment the product has done one real job for them: primary while paid customers are too few to learn from. Paid customer: primary once it reaches about 15 a month, with the plan value attached. Google's guidance also says to upload conversions frequently, ideally daily, so automate it once the manual version works.

What counts as activation depends on the product. For rostering software it might be a published roster. For accounting software, a first invoice sent. For a booking system used by Central Coast physios, the first real booking made by a patient. Pick the one that best separates people who pay from people who don't, then check it against last quarter's customers.

Look at the search terms in any SaaS brand campaign and you'll find people typing your name plus 'login', 'sign in', 'app', 'download' or 'support'. They're customers trying to get to work. If the ad catches them and they end up signing in, some set-ups count that as a conversion, and the brand campaign looks like the best thing in the account.

Add those words as negative keywords to the brand campaign, and make sure your login page is the top organic result for them. Then the brand campaign's numbers mean something: people who knew your name and were thinking of buying, not people who already have.

'Alternatives' searches are some of the best intent in software. Someone typing a competitor's name plus 'alternative' or 'vs' is shopping. Google's trademark policy says it does not restrict trademarks used as keywords, so you can bid on those searches. Using the competitor's trademark in your ad text is different: Google reviews complaints and may restrict it, and the restriction generally applies on an ongoing basis.

Australian law adds a second test. The ACCC says comparisons can mislead when they're inaccurate or don't compare products fairly. 'Cheaper than [competitor]' needs to be true for the plan most buyers would compare, today, including GST. The safest ad says what you do, and lets the landing page do the comparing, with a dated, honest table. The SaaS SEO page covers how to write that comparison page.

Expect these clicks to cost more and convert to trials less often than brand clicks. Judge them on paid customers, over at least one full trial cycle.