B2B SaaS · Series A
Paid was subsidizing a channel sales already owned.
This marketing & margin audit identified $41k a year of budget redeployment in a B2B SaaS business. Findings were delivered in 5 days.
The business
A Series A SaaS company, under real pressure to demonstrate pipeline to its board, had poured paid budget into brand term search and retargeting. Both lines reported strong conversion rates and were treated internally as the safe, efficient core of the media spend, the campaigns you never cut because the dashboard always showed them working hard for the money.
What triggered the audit
Fresh board scrutiny on burn rate prompted a hard question about whether paid marketing was genuinely creating demand or merely taking credit for it. Brand term search and retargeting are precisely where that distinction tends to blur, so the audit focused on separating incremental, paid created demand from demand the company already owned.
What the audit found
The two "safe" lines turned out to be largely buying customers the company had already earned. The brand term and retargeting conversions were overwhelmingly people who already knew the product, inbound demand generated by sales conversations, word of mouth and organic discovery, and who would have converted through those owned channels anyway. Paid simply intercepted them at the last click and invoiced for the result. Because the reported conversion rates were high, the spend looked like the most efficient in the account, when in reality it was the least incremental. The company was paying roughly $41k a year to rebuy demand it already had, while genuine top of funnel growth went comparatively underfunded.
What we changed
Cut brand term defense spend to the minimum genuinely needed to hold position against real competitor bids on the company’s own name.
Paused the redundant retargeting that was intercepting already committed buyers, and redirected that budget into genuine net new demand generation.
Applied incrementality tracking to the remaining paid spend, so efficiency is measured against demand actually created rather than clicks conveniently harvested.
Reframed the marketing narrative for the board around incremental pipeline, giving a cleaner, more defensible efficiency story ahead of the next raise.
The result
The before and after percentages cover all paid activity. The annual budget was redeployed within the same total spend. $41k a year freed from spend buying demand the company already owned, redeployed into real growth, an annual figure equal to 7× the $5,950 Audit + Sprint fee. For any founder defending burn to a board, the sting is that brand term and retargeting were the “safe” lines nobody questioned. If your most efficient looking campaigns simply intercept demand you’d win anyway, you are paying to rebuy your own customers, and that spend looks great right up until you test it. A fixed fee audit gives you a defensible, incrementality based story in days, ahead of your next raise.
From kickoff to signed off findings: 5 days, inside our fixed 5–7 day window.
What the client said
$41k annual budget redeployment identified in 5 days
Share of all paid spend that was incremental: 28% → 82%
“Our safest lines were the least incremental. Alex showed brand term search and retargeting were intercepting demand from sales calls and word of mouth, then invoicing for it. We cut both to a defensive minimum.”
Alex PopSenior Auditor · signed this audit off