How a SaaS Company Captured £494K Pipeline From Competitor Searches
A mid-market SaaS platform competing against Monday.com and Asana shifted from generic keywords to competitor capture campaigns. In Year 1, competitor campaigns became their highest-ROI channel, generating £494K pipeline while reducing CAC by 79%.
Pipeline (Year 1)
CAC Reduction
Qualified Demos
Demo-to-Close Rate (vs 10%)
The Challenge
What We Were Dealing With
Monday.com, Asana, and ClickUp were spending £50,000+ daily on Google Ads, dominating broad search volume. The client couldn't outbid them on generic 'project management software' keywords. Every pound spent fighting on those fronts was wasted — and the traffic quality was poor (early-stage researchers, not active switchers).
CRM data showed competitor searches converted at 22% (demo to close) vs 8% for generic — but Google Ads wasn't aware of this difference. No audience layering, no HubSpot integration, no exclusion strategy, and generic homepage landing pages for all traffic. CAC was unsustainable at £420 per demo.
Our Strategy
How We Did It
Competitor Capture Campaign Architecture
Created dedicated campaigns for each major competitor: 'Asana Alternative', 'Monday.com Alternative', 'ClickUp vs [Product]'. Each campaign had its own budget, landing pages, and bid strategy for visibility and control.
Custom Competitor Comparison Landing Pages
Built 5 competitor-specific comparison pages with feature parity tables, pricing differences, migration guides, and ROI calculators. CTR improved 34% and form fill rate increased 28% vs generic homepage.
Audience Layering: Intent + Fit
Layered in-market audiences, company size signals (mid-market), job title targeting (Head of Ops, Project Director, Scrum Master), and negations (existing customers, free-tier users) for higher-intent, lower-CAC traffic.
HubSpot-to-Google Value-Based Bidding
Connected HubSpot to Google Ads with conversion value tracking. Competitor demos (22% close rate) assigned higher values than generic demos (8%). Google learned to bid aggressively on high-converting sources automatically.
Exclusion Strategy
Excluded low-intent searches: '[Competitor] free trial', '[Competitor] review', '[Competitor] pricing', company news. Redirected budget from browsers and curiosity-seekers to high-intent alternative searches.
The Results
What We Delivered
Year 1: £494K pipeline from competitor campaigns (£41.2K/month average). 61 qualified demos/month from competitor searches. Demo-to-close rate 29% (vs 10% generic). CAC reduced 79% (£546→£214). 12.7x ROAS on competitor campaigns vs 3.1x on generic. Competitor channels represented 72% of total pipeline despite being only 46% of spend.
Pipeline (Year 1)
CAC Reduction
Qualified Demos
Demo-to-Close Rate (vs 10%)
Key Takeaways
Lessons From This Engagement
Intent beats budget
You can't outspend Monday.com on generic keywords. But you can capture their prospective customers on '[competitor] alternative' searches. Higher intent always beats bigger budget.
Demo quality matters more than volume
A demo that closes at 22% is worth 2.75x more than one at 8%. Value-based bidding fixes this by feeding closed-won data back into Google Ads.
Landing pages are part of bidding strategy
A custom comparison page vs a generic homepage gets completely different conversion rates. We saw 28% form lift from page customisation alone.
Exclusion is smarter than expansion
We reduced generic campaigns and reinvested in competitor campaigns. The best optimisation is cutting what doesn't work, not optimising what's broken.
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