How Plivo Doubled MQLs and Cut CPL—While Outrunning Competitors on Their Own Keywords

“They plugged right in, filled gaps, and helped crack our core channels.”

When Plivo, a cloud communications leader, came to TripleDart, they were bleeding leads to competitors, struggling with poor conversion rates, and lacked campaign clarity.

In under 14 months, we rebuilt their paid engine from the ground up - doubling MQLs, slashing CPL by 10%, and turning performance into a predictable growth channel.

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About Plivo

Based out of San Francisco, Plivo offers cloud-based communication APIs and omnichannel contact center solutions. 

Their platform helps businesses to integrate voice, SMS, and conferencing into web and mobile apps, primarily for healthcare, fintech, e-commerce, and SaaS.

As a growth-stage startup (seed-funded, $2.02M raised), Plivo’s ICP spans developers, product teams, and ops leaders looking for affordable, flexible alternatives to Twilio-like tools.

They partnered with TripleDart for short-term performance support, and as results came in, our collaboration evolved into a full-blown transformation of their PPC engine. Here’s how.

The Challenge: Low Conversion Rates

Before working with TripleDart, Plivo faced four core growth bottlenecks:

Misaligned Messaging

Their ads and landing pages lacked clarity in their USPs. Landing pages were too generic, built for SEO, not PPC.

Lost Value

Their primary pitch, "We are cheaper and provide better features," wasn’t consistently conveyed through the funnel. They weren’t showcasing high-impact content that could hold the attention of prospects.

Lost Brand Traffic

Competitors were bidding on their branded keyword “Plivo”, stealing 10-20 MQLs monthly.

Allocating Budget 

Plivo struggled with cracking budget allocation. They wanted to attract more enterprise customers, but because their budget allocation wasn’t structured, the results were unpredictable, and the CPCs too high.

TripleDart Reallocated Plivo’s Funds, Strategized Campaigns, and Changed Their Messaging

Here’s a quick timeline of our work with Plivo:

Budget (Re)Allocation

• Before coming to us, 52% of Plivo’s budget was spent in India, which generated 65% of their leads. The US followed second, with 25% of the budget. But here’s what we found: the US generated more revenue than India. We moved 60% of spend from India to the US after mapping revenue impact.
  
• Focused budget on competitor-alternative and pricing keywords with highest impression share and CPC efficiency.

Campaign Upgrades

Brand Campaigns

Plivo didn’t have a brand campaign and was losing 10-20 MQLs a month to their competitors. One of the first things we launched were high-intent brand campaigns to protect search share.

Lead Targeting

We passed the Google Ad Click IDs of MQLs back to Google Ads through Zapier. This helped us create dedicated conversion events focusing on targeting and bidding on high-quality leads rather than generic form submissions.

BOFU + Generic Mix

While we initially focused on BOFU content that led to a huge improvement in the quality of leads (such as pricing calculators and feature comparisons), we later expanded to generic vertical-based keyword themes (healthcare SMS, ecommerce voice alerts).

Granular Geo-Targeting 

Plivo’s conversion rates across geographies were low, and they were burning a lot of money trying to hit the right balance. We switched from country to city/state-level targeting using campaign insights and revenue data, doubling down on regions with high LTV.

Messaging

USP Showcase + Dedicated Landing Pages

One of Plivo’s biggest differentiators was their pricing. We focused on showcasing ROI and feature parity with cheaper pricing by building landing pages especially for PPC campaigns.

Personalized Competitor Messaging 

We noticed an interesting fact about Plivo’s prospects: many of them were second-time buyers who could potentially be impacted by alternative tools comparisons and pricing lists.

To tap into this, we crafted tailored messaging such as “Tired of Customer Support? Try Plivo for Free. Switch in 2 Weeks.” Guess what the result was?

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Competitor-Specific Landing Pages

We built pages that show Plivo’s benefits over competitors, such as pricing calculators, feature comparisons, and client testimonials.

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Results

Client Feedback

“It’s been over 8 months and the engagements with the Tripledart team feel like working with an extended team. They could smoothly plug into our existing team's structure and quickly fill gaps in our team. We leveraged their knowledge of SaaS marketing and built a structure for our go-to-market strategy. Their strong tactical/execution experience helped crack our focus distribution channels and set the product on a trajectory toward predictable revenue marketing efforts through performance channels.”

‍Narayanan Vyas,
Director of New Initiatives, Plivo

Conclusion

SaaS PPC is an art of balancing, allocating, and predicting. Solving Plivo’s performance marketing challenges required a mix of applying tested playbooks and experimenting with new ones. In the end, it was a rewarding experience for the client as well as our team.

We’ve done this time and again for over 250 B2B companies: take their biggest marketing challenges and solve them together. 

If you need a partner that truly owns your KPIs as their own and has the required expertise to navigate your marketing headwinds in 2025, let’s talk about what TripleDart can unlock for you.