The State of SaaS PPC 2025 Report

Feeling the ground shift beneath your performance marketing strategy in 2025? You're not alone. 

While everyone's talking about winning strategies and tips, we wanted to know what's really happening in the trenches of SaaS PPC.

So we did something about it.

We reached out to performance marketers around the world—the ones with their eyes glued to the dashboards—to understand what’s changing and how they’re adapting. The results? Let’s just say they’re more than just interesting.

About This Report

The PPC landscape in 2025 looks nothing like it did just a few years ago:

• Buyer journeys have morphed into complex webs of touchpoints
• CPCs continue to climb
• GenAI has fundamentally altered search behavior

Remember when Performance Max campaigns and AI bidding felt revolutionary? They're now table stakes. Today's edge lies in AI agents making real-time decisions, signal-based targeting replacing traditional methods, and hyper-personalization reaching a level of precision once thought impossible.

The ecosystem is witnessing a change unlike anything it’s ever seen.

In the middle of this transformation, we needed a ground-level view. How are performance marketers responding? What’s actually working?

To find out, we surveyed a diverse group of PPC professionals. This report uncovers what they’re doing and what it means for the broader SaaS PPC ecosystem.

Demographics and Methodology: Who We Surveyed

We gathered insights from performance marketers across a range of roles, company sizes, and geographies.

1. Breakdown by geography

2. Breakdown by funding stage

3. Breakdown by Annual PPC budget

This diversity ensures that the insights reflect the broader SaaS PPC ecosystem. 

Now let's dive into what these marketers are actually doing.

Survey Findings: Inside the Minds of Performance Marketers

1. Budget Trends and Channel Adoption

In uncertain times, how are companies adjusting their marketing spend? 

1. Budget Changes Year-over-Year

71% of respondents reported stable or modestly increased budgets (by 10–25%) year-over-year.

This restraint doesn't reflect a lack of confidence as much as strategic caution in an evolving landscape. Most are reallocating budgets across platforms and campaign types to test what works best in a shifting landscape.

2. Platform Preferences

• ​​Google still dominates, with 95% of marketers advertising on it. With up to $8 ROI for every $1 spent, it’s not surprising.
  75% say it generates the most pipeline, and 80% say it offers the best ROI.
  

• LinkedIn follows, with 70% of marketers using the platform to run ads. Its appeal: B2B influence. Four out of five LinkedIn users directly influence business decisions and wield twice the purchasing power of average internet users.
  
  
• Meta platforms round out the top three, thanks to their massive user base—over 3 billion users—and relatively lower CPM to remain relevant despite not being purpose-built for B2B.

2. Google Ads Strategy

1. Google Ads Campaign Types

Despite all the platform's innovations, Search Campaigns remain the backbone of most Google Ads strategies. In a year when acquisition costs continue rising across channels, search intent has become the strongest indicator of purchase readiness. Queries are becoming increasingly BOFU, making search campaigns particularly effective for demo bookings and sign-up conversions.

Performance Max is the second most widely used campaign type as it resonates well in today's fragmented customer journey. As buyers research across multiple touchpoints, Performance Max provides consistent messaging across those touchpoints without requiring separate channel management.

2. Keyword Match Type Trends

Broad match has gained significant ground due to improvements in Google's machine learning capabilities and deeper integration with Smart Bidding strategies.

Phrase match remains the most consistently used option, offering that sweet spot between control and reach that many marketers still prize.

3. Bidding Strategy Breakdown

Maximize Conversions dominates for good reason. It drives the most demo bookings and sign-ups by using automated bidding optimized specifically for lead generation goals.

Maximize Clicks maintains relevance for early-stage SaaS campaigns focused on building visibility, driving traffic, or testing new keywords before committing to conversion-focused strategies.

Maximize Conversion Value has gained traction as it prioritizes high-revenue or high-LTV leads by optimizing bids based on expected deal value.

3. LinkedIn Ads Strategy

While Google maintains its crown, LinkedIn has established itself as the clear second choice for B2B SaaS marketers, with special relevance for higher-ticket offerings.

1. LinkedIn Format Adoption Rates

Single Image Ads continue as the cornerstone of most LinkedIn strategies, offering versatility across the full funnel from awareness through conversion. 

Document Ads reflect the value of downloadable content in complex B2B journeys; however, their engagement rates have taken a hit compared to last year.

But the real story of 2025 is the emergence of Thought Leader Ads as LinkedIn's dark horse. According to LinkedIn, these ads deliver a 1.7x higher click-through rate and 1.6x higher engagement compared to standard single-image campaigns.

This is an example Thought Leader Ad:

To read more about TL ads, check this guide out

Our clients' results suggest even greater potential. We've consistently seen CTRs 4-6 times higher when Thought Leader Ads are properly executed. This has transformed them from an experimental format to a potent strategy for many B2B SaaS companies.

4. Team Structures

How are PPC teams structured in 2025?

1. PPC Team Structures

Currently, 62% of companies maintain dedicated internal PPC teams, while 38% distribute these responsibilities more broadly. 

Companies with specialist teams report more complex strategies than those where PPC is handled as part of other initiatives, but at the cost of higher expenditures on salaries.

These internal teams excel at maintaining brand consistency and institutional knowledge, but many report struggles in exploring uncharted territories as they lack the expertise required. 

This challenge explains another significant finding:

2. Agency Adoption

A majority—55% of respondents—now work with specialized agencies, either exclusively or alongside internal teams. This shift toward the agency model isn't surprising given the current environment. In times of change, agencies like TripleDart possess the required expertise to navigate, having helped several other clients steer similar situations.

5. Reporting and Attribution

If there's one area where SaaS marketers continue to struggle in 2025, it's connecting the dots between marketing activities and business outcomes.

1. Full-funnel reporting implementation

Comprehensive measurement remains elusive for many organizations, with only 43% reporting successful implementation of full-funnel reporting. This gap underscores the ongoing challenge of connecting top-of-funnel marketing activities to bottom-of-funnel revenue outcomes, particularly in complex sales cycles.

The cross-channel visibility picture is only marginally better:

2. Cross-channel Reporting

Only 57.5% of companies have implemented effective cross-channel reporting. 

Those who have cracked this code report substantially better overall PPC results, suggesting this capability delivers a meaningful competitive advantage.

3. CRM Integration

The relatively high rate of CRM integration reflects growing recognition that successful measurement requires connecting online campaign data to offline sales outcomes. Companies that haven't yet implemented this integration cite technical challenges or organizational siloes as barriers to implementation.

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4. Attribution Models

Data-driven attribution has gained substantial traction as platforms have improved these capabilities and as marketers have become more comfortable with algorithmic approaches to measurement.

Multi-touch models remain popular for their balance of sophistication and interpretability. Meanwhile, single-touch models are mainly present in organizations with less mature measurement infrastructures. Most organizations track these attribution models using tools like Google Analytics 4 or HubSpot.

6. Software and AI Adoption

AI and automation are redefining the PPC toolkit.

1. AI & Automation Adoption

AI for Ad Copy Creation:

A substantial 77.5% of marketers now use AI for ad copy creation in some capacity. This has been a hot topic of discussion for marketers worldwide: where and how do we use AI?

Click Fraud Protection:

Surprisingly, specialized fraud prevention tools show relatively low adoption rates. This suggests a lack of awareness of click fraud issues—a concerning gap considering the rising CPCs. For companies with larger budgets, this represents an area ripe for optimization.

PPC Management Tools:

PPC management tools present an interesting picture: half of the respondents rely primarily on native platform tools rather than third-party solutions. This can either be seen as satisfaction with platform-provided capabilities or as an opportunity for third-party vendors to communicate their value better.

Among specialized platforms, Metadata emerges as the most widely adopted, reflecting its focus on B2B use cases.

Competitive Intelligence Tools:

Semrush leads adoption, followed by Ahrefs and SpyFu. Many organizations use multiple tools in combination to gain comprehensive insights.

7. Performance Results

With all these evolving strategies and tools, the fundamental question remains: are SaaS PPC campaigns hitting their targets in 2025? Results show a mixed picture.

1. Performance Outcomes

While many companies achieved their pipeline objectives, a significant portion also fell short, highlighting the challenges in the current competitive landscape.

Companies that met or consistently exceeded their goals cited three success factors:
- strong alignment between marketing and sales teams
- clear definition of target audiences
- proper measurement that enables continuous optimization

2. Year-over-Year ROI

The 20% of companies reporting decreased ROI almost universally cited increased competition and rising CPCs/CPMs as the primary factors affecting performance. This shows how important it is to continuously innovate and optimize to maintain results as the competitive landscape intensifies.

8. Challenges and Pain Points

Several clear themes emerged from our research regarding the challenges that PPC professionals are facing in 2025.

1. Top PPC Challenges

1. Messaging

Messaging development presents two primary challenges: understanding evolving audience preferences and differentiation from competitors.

Most respondents attribute the first challenge to increasingly complex user behaviour. In fact, “No one actually knows what’s working” was a common comment we received. 

The second challenge of differentiation reflects market saturation in many SaaS categories. Almost every SaaS niche is saturated with numerous companies, making it difficult to stand out. 

This highlights the need to bring out original ideas that just can't be replicated.

2. Targeting and ICP Definition

Top Targeting Challenges

Data limitations—both internal quality and external availability—remain top barriers. Platform capabilities present the second most common obstacle, particularly for niches with specific technographic targeting requirements.

3. Creative Bottlenecks

Top Creative Bottlenecks

Resource constraints and approval workflows emerged as the most significant barriers to effective creative production. Companies successfully addressing these challenges cited three strategies: streamlined approval processes, template-based approaches for faster creation, and strategic use of AI tools to accelerate production.

4. Rising Cost

The vast majority of respondents report increasing costs and competition across advertising platforms. This trend is most pronounced in mature markets like North America and Europe, but even emerging markets are experiencing accelerating competition.

Future Outlook: What's Next for SaaS PPC

We asked our respondents to share their perspectives on how the PPC ecosystem will evolve going forward. Five clear themes emerged:

AI integration will expand beyond creative. While AI for content creation has seen strong adoption, we expect this technology to spread into other aspects of campaign management. The efficiency gains in audience development, budget allocation, and performance analysis are too significant to ignore, making expanded AI adoption almost inevitable for competitive marketers.

First-party data will become increasingly valuable. As third-party data limitations continue to tighten due to privacy regulations and platform changes, companies with strong first-party data assets will gain substantial competitive advantages. The ability to use your own customer information for targeting and measurement will become a critical differentiator.

Channel diversification will increase. Google and LinkedIn will maintain their dominant positions, but more companies are exploring emerging channels to reach audiences in less competitive environments. This isn't about abandoning proven platforms but rather supplementing them with strategic investments that offer lower costs and less saturated attention.

Measurement sophistication will create a competitive advantage. The gap between companies with advanced attribution capabilities and those with basic tracking will widen. Organizations that can effectively connect marketing activities to revenue outcomes will outperform those using fragmented or simplistic measurement approaches, allowing for more efficient budget allocation and strategy refinement.

Creative quality will become a primary performance driver. As targeting capabilities become more standardized across advertisers within the same industries, creative quality and message resonance will increasingly determine campaign success. The algorithmic advantages early AI adopters enjoyed are normalizing, placing renewed importance on compelling, differentiated creative.

Strategic Opportunities: What are the Areas to Focus on for PPC?

Based on both survey findings and our experience with hundreds of SaaS clients, several strategic opportunities emerge for marketers looking to stay ahead of the curve:

1. Human + Machine Synergy: Finding the right combination of automation and human oversight represents a big opportunity, particularly in areas such as bidding strategies and audience targeting. Use AI for data-intensive tasks while maintaining human direction for strategy and creative decisions.
   
   
2. Tighter Cross-Functional Alignment: Organizations with tight integration between marketing, sales, and product teams consistently report better performance outcomes. When PPC campaigns are informed by sales feedback and product insights, both messaging relevance and lead quality improve. This becomes increasingly important as buying cycles grow more complex.
   
   
3. Channel-Specific Creatives: Moving beyond platform-agnostic creative to channel-optimized assets shows a strong correlation with better performance. Recognizing that audience mindsets and format requirements differ significantly between platforms allows for more relevant messaging and better engagement across the customer journey.
   
   
4. Comprehensive Measurement Ecosystems: Connecting online campaigns to offline outcomes through robust integration between advertising platforms, analytics systems, and CRM infrastructure enables more effective optimization. While challenging to implement, this connected view provides the foundation for data-driven decision making that drives meaningful ROI improvements.
   
   
5. Testing Emerging Channels Strategically: Allocating a portion of the budget to emerging platforms can yield outsized returns through lower competition and costs. A structured approach to testing new channels, with clear success metrics and intentional learning goals, can identify valuable opportunities before they become crowded.

Tech Investment Priorities for 2025

For marketing leaders planning technology investments in 2025, five categories show particular promise for delivering meaningful returns:

1. Attribution and measurement infrastructure.

Given the persistent challenges in this area, investments in connecting disparate data sources and implementing more sophisticated attribution models offer significant potential returns. Companies that can effectively trace the path from marketing touchpoints to revenue outcomes gain both efficiency and strategic advantages.

2. Creative production and testing platforms.

Tools that streamline creative development, facilitate efficient testing, and provide actionable insights can address key bottlenecks in the marketing process. The ability to rapidly iterate on messaging and quickly identify winning concepts has become increasingly valuable in a competitive landscape where creative quality drives performance.

3. First-party data activation solutions.

Technologies that help capture, organize, and activate first-party data for advertising purposes will become increasingly valuable as third-party identifiers continue to decline. The platforms that can effectively translate customer insights into targeting parameters while respecting privacy considerations are seeing strong adoption among forward-thinking marketers.

4. Cross-channel optimization tools.

Solutions that provide holistic visibility and optimization capabilities across multiple platforms can drive improved efficiency in increasingly complex channel mixes. As campaign management becomes more sophisticated, the ability to view performance across channels and allocate resources dynamically creates a meaningful competitive advantage.

5. AI-powered campaign management.

Tools that use AI for audience development, budget allocation, and performance prediction offer potential efficiency improvements across the campaign lifecycle. While human oversight remains essential for strategic alignment, AI can dramatically enhance the speed and precision of tactical optimizations.

Conclusion

The 2025 SaaS PPC landscape is a paradox: rising costs and fierce competition are squeezing budgets, while emerging technologies are unlocking new levers for growth. Winning in this climate requires more than just smarter tools. It demands sharper strategy, creative firepower, and a ruthless focus on measurement.

At TripleDart, we’re already helping leading SaaS brands stay ahead of the curve. From tackling spiraling CPCs to navigating signal loss, we’ve seen it all—and solved it. Our playbooks are built on deep industry context, real-time data, and battle-tested execution.

If you're tired of running faster just to stay in place, let’s talk. We’ll help you unlock better PPC outcomes—without the guesswork.