Composite company profile
A Series B HR tech company selling benefits administration and people-ops software to mid-market companies. ARR around $16M, ACV band $9K–$28K, five-person marketing team, paid media spend concentrated almost entirely in LinkedIn Ads for the prior two years.
The problem
Over 90% of paid budget sat in LinkedIn Ads. CPMs had climbed steadily for three straight quarters, frequency data showed the same target accounts seeing the same ads dozens of times per quarter with falling click-through, and Google Search spend was close to zero even though competitors were visibly buying high-intent bottom-funnel terms the client wasn’t touching at all.
- Frequency reporting inside the ad platform showed a meaningful share of the target account list had been served the same creative more than 40 times in a single quarter.
- A competitive keyword pull showed direct competitors bidding on comparison and alternative terms (“[competitor] alternative,” “benefits administration software”) that the client had never run a single campaign against.
- There was no retargeting layer at all — site visitors and content downloaders who didn’t convert on the first touch simply disappeared from the paid funnel.
What our team diagnosed
1. LinkedIn-only was an audience-saturation problem, not a LinkedIn-quality problem. The channel itself was fine; the client had been running the same broad job-title targeting against the same finite pool of buyers for two years without rotation or expansion.
2. Bottom-funnel Search demand existed and was being ceded to competitors by default, not because Search underperformed for this category, but because the client had simply never tested it.
Strategy MV3 shipped
- Rebalanced the channel mix from roughly 90/10 LinkedIn/Search toward a 55/30/15 split across LinkedIn, Google Search, and retargeting over a two-quarter transition.
- Built bottom-funnel Search campaigns around comparison, alternative, and category-evaluation terms, each paired with a dedicated landing page rather than the generic homepage.
- Added a full retargeting layer across site visitors, content downloaders, and webinar registrants who hadn’t converted.
- Replaced broad job-title LinkedIn targeting with account-based lists matched to the CRM’s actual ICP, cutting served-audience size but raising relevance.
Implementation
Rebuilt the full campaign structure across both platforms, added negative-keyword hygiene to the new Search campaigns, paired every campaign with its own landing page rather than funneling everything to one generic page, and closed the loop between ad platform UTMs and CRM opportunity data so cost-per-SQL could be measured per channel rather than estimated.
Outcomes
- Cost per SQL: down 38% blended across all paid channels within two quarters of the rebalance.
- LinkedIn frequency waste: average served frequency against the target account list dropped by more than half after the switch to account-based targeting.
- Search became the highest-intent channel by close rate, converting to closed-won at roughly double the blended paid average, despite carrying a smaller share of total paid spend.
- Retargeting recovered pipeline that had previously been lost after a single non-converting touch, contributing a meaningful share of total paid-sourced SQLs by quarter two.
Timeline
Six months from initial channel-mix diagnostic to the cost-per-SQL results above, phased over two quarters so the LinkedIn budget reduction didn’t create a pipeline gap while Search campaigns ramped.
Composite testimonial
“We had convinced ourselves LinkedIn was underperforming when the real problem was we’d been showing the same ad to the same people for two years. Splitting the budget out and finally showing up in Search for our own category name felt obvious in hindsight.”
Rachel, VP of Marketing
Services engaged
Growth AI retainer with a paid media component spanning LinkedIn Ads and Google Search.
How this profile is built
This is a composite profile, assembled from patterns and outcomes we’ve seen across multiple real engagements in this space, not a single named client. Figures above are directionally representative of the scenario, not a verified result from one account.
Ready to see if your channel mix needs rebalancing?
Book a discovery call and we will pull your actual frequency and spend data to see where the waste is. See also our Google Ads program and advertising services.
