PPC for B2B and SaaS: 290,000 people a month are looking up what your words mean.
“What is SaaS” is 32,000 searches. “SaaS meaning” is another 41,000. Almost none of them will ever buy software. Connect your account with one Google sign-in and AdPilot’s AI takes it from there. It audits the account unattended, establishes where the spend is really going, and returns each fix as a card in plain English. Tap approve, or skip it. No PPC knowledge needed.
Start free - no credit cardOne Google sign-in to start · No PPC experience needed · Flat price, never a cut of your ad spend · Free 7 days · You approve every change
B2B PPC does not leak to entertainment. It leaks to education.
Consumer categories lose money to television shows and job hunters. B2B loses it to homework. The vocabulary of this industry is mostly searched by people who want a definition, a diagram for a presentation, or a passing grade. They click, they read, they leave.
Then there is the second problem, which is worse because it is invisible. B2B deals close in weeks or months, and a default conversion window closes in thirty days. Google therefore scores your best campaigns on results it never sees, and confidently shifts the budget toward whatever produces fast, cheap, low-quality leads.
AdPilot connects to the account and audits it the way a consultant would before writing a strategy deck. Searches that were never in market. Tracking that is quietly lying to the bidding algorithm. Ads that generate clicks and no pipeline. Each finding returns as a card, without the jargon. You approve it or you skip it. Nothing reaches your account until you do.
And you stay in control the whole way:
- You approve every change. The AI proposes; you decide. Every budget, bid, keyword, or ad edit arrives as a plain-language card you approve or skip with one tap. Nothing is ever applied on its own.
- A snapshot before every change. AdPilot saves exactly how things looked before anything is touched, so you always have a clean “before.”
- One-click revert. Don’t like a change once it’s live? Undo it in a single click, straight back to that snapshot.
- A full audit log. Who, what, when, the old value and the new value, every change recorded. Nothing hidden.
- You keep the keys. You connect with one secure Google sign-in, and it only ever makes changes you approve. The account stays yours start to finish - you never transfer ownership, and you can disconnect anytime.
Where B2B and SaaS ad budgets actually leak
Real US search volumes from July 2026. Every line contains a word software companies bid on, and almost none of them is a buyer.
The last two are worth a moment. One is an insurance company’s partner portal. The other is an Indian television soap opera, because “saas” is Hindi for mother-in-law.
| What people search | Searches/mo | Why it is not a client |
|---|---|---|
| saas | 144,000 | Mostly people learning the word |
| saas meaning | 41,000 | A definition |
| what is saas | 32,000 | A definition |
| b2b meaning | 22,000 | A definition |
| state farm b2b | 22,000 | An insurance company’s partner portal |
| what is b2b sales | 11,000 | Career or coursework research |
| kyunki saas bhi kabhi bahu thi | 6,600 | An Indian TV soap; “saas” is Hindi for mother-in-law |
| saas stands for | 5,700 | A definition |
| b2b sales meaning | 4,600 | A definition |
US monthly search volume, Ahrefs, July 2026. Around 290,000 searches a month, and hardly a buyer among them.
Negative keywords for B2B and SaaS. Free, no email, no form.
Use it whether or not you ever become a customer. Ten minutes, no cost, and definitional traffic is the one leak we find in nearly every B2B account we look at.
- Definitions and coursework
- what is, what are, meaning, means, definition, stands for, examples, example of, explained, tutorial, course, certification, exam, pdf, ppt, slideshare, assignment, thesis
- Job hunting
- jobs, job, salary, careers, hiring, recruiter, resume, cv, interview questions, internship, glassdoor
- Free and pirated
- free download, freeware, open source, crack, cracked, nulled, torrent, licence key, serial, lifetime deal
- Analyst and market research
- market size, market share, statistics, industry report, gartner, forrester, trends 2026, forecast
- Wrong industry entirely
- state farm, kyunki, saas bahu, bahu, serial, episode
- Students and templates
- template, templates, sample, worksheet, cheat sheet, for students, homework
Two things you must not block here. “Alternative to” and “vs” are among the strongest buying signals in B2B, because somebody comparing you to a named competitor is already shopping. And do not block “free trial”, since that is very often your own offer. Block “free download” and “open source” instead.
B2B PPC: five things that matter more than your bids
- Send closed deals back to Google. Offline conversion import is the single highest-leverage thing in B2B paid search and the thing most accounts skip. Without it Google optimises toward form fills, and form fills include students, competitors and job applicants.
- Match the conversion window to your sales cycle. A default window of thirty days against a seventy-day cycle means the campaigns producing real revenue look like your worst performers. Fixing the window sometimes reverses the entire ranking of your campaigns overnight.
- Bid on alternatives, and expect to be bid on. “[Competitor] alternative” is cheap, high intent and full of people already unhappy. Your competitors are doing it to you right now, which is also why your own brand terms deserve a budget.
- Exclude the people you already have. Upload a customer list as an exclusion. Otherwise a meaningful slice of your budget goes to existing customers looking for the login page, and they convert beautifully, which makes the waste invisible.
- Judge lead quality, not lead count. Cost per lead is the metric that most often flatters a failing B2B account. Cheap leads are cheap for a reason. Cost per qualified opportunity is harder to get at and the only one worth acting on.
What a B2B PPC agency charges, and why the bill grows as you do.
Agencies that specialise in B2B and SaaS price above generalists, and most bill a monthly retainer plus a percentage of your ad spend. Ten to twenty percent is the usual range. The more pipeline you chase, the larger their share.
Illustrative example. Agencies vary, so check your own contract. The full calculation is here so you can run it against your own contract.
You spend $5,000/month on ads
B2B PPC agency
$2,750/mo
$2,000 retainer + 15% of $5,000 ($750) - on top of the $5,000 Google already takes
AdPilot
$99/mo
Flat, whatever you spend
You spend $20,000/month on ads
B2B PPC agency
$5,000/mo
$2,000 retainer + 15% of $20,000 ($3,000) - you grew, so their invoice grew
AdPilot
$99/mo
Flat, whatever you spend
You spend $60,000/month on ads
B2B PPC agency
$11,000/mo
15% alone is $9,000/mo, with the retainer still on top - and it climbs every time you scale
AdPilot
$99/mo
Flat, whatever you spend
At those rates the agency clears well past $30,000 in the first year and grows from there. AdPilot Growth is $1,188 a year and it does not move.
PPC management for B2B and SaaS, shown as cards you approve one at a time.
What you actually pay a B2B agency for is the hands-on part. Structuring campaigns by buying stage, digging through search terms for definitional traffic, getting the conversion window and the offline import right, writing ads for people mid-comparison. AdPilot’s AI does that work, with the reasoning attached to every recommendation.
Examples of what the cards look like - not results from your account
Builds your campaigns
Build a complete Search campaign for competitor alternatives: 3 ad groups, 40 keywords aimed at people actively switching, and 8 ads. Built and queued behind your approval.
Proposed change
What it’s doing: Producing the campaign end to end, ad copy included, so nobody starts from an empty brief. It ships only when you approve.
Finds wasted spend
You paid 214 times this month for searches containing “what is” and “meaning.” Those are students and researchers. Add them as negative keywords and the spending stops.
Proposed change
What it’s doing: Reading your search terms for money that never turns into a demo or a trial, then closing the leaks. (A “negative keyword” simply tells Google not to show your ad for that search.)
Tightens your targeting
Your conversion window is 30 days, but your average deal takes 74 days to close. Google is judging every campaign on the wrong deadline. Widen the window so the good leads count.
Proposed change
What it’s doing: Making sure the numbers Google optimises toward match how your sales cycle actually works.
Drafts better ads
Your ads describe features. The people searching are comparing you to a named competitor. Here are 4 headlines built around the switch, not the feature list.
Proposed change
What it’s doing: Writing ads for the stage of the decision the searcher is actually at.
Set up in minutes. No PPC background needed.
You don’t need to know what a “match type” or a “quality score” is. AdPilot does the analysis and explains everything in plain English.
- 1
Connect your Google Ads account
One secure Google sign-in - nothing to install, no API keys, no technical setup. AdPilot analyzes your account and never changes anything until you approve it, one tap at a time. Disconnect anytime.
- 2
Answer a few plain questions
Tell AdPilot your goal - more calls? more sales? a lower cost per customer? - and a couple of simple numbers about your business, like what one customer is worth to you. Plain words, no jargon.
- 3
Approve improvements with one tap
AdPilot reads your account - or builds you a brand-new campaign from scratch - and hands you concrete moves as plain-language cards, each explaining what it does and why. Tap Approve on the ones you like. Skip the rest.
Free 7 days · No credit card · You approve every change · Cancel anytime
A broken conversion window does not wait for the monthly report.
Agencies review on a schedule. Bidding algorithms do not.
In B2B the damage compounds. If tracking is misreporting, every day Google spends is a day it learns the wrong lesson and shifts more budget toward the wrong leads. By the time a monthly report shows it, the campaign has been trained.
Catching that on Tuesday rather than next month is the whole difference. One is steering. The other is reading the map after you have arrived.
AdPilot vs a B2B PPC agency
A straight comparison. No straw men.
What you pay
B2B agency: A retainer, usually with a percentage of ad spend on top. B2B specialists charge the highest retainers in the market, and their cut grows with your budget.
AdPilot: One flat monthly price. It does not move when your ad spend does.
How fast a problem gets fixed
B2B agency: You raise it, it joins a queue, you hear back next week.
AdPilot: The account is read continuously. A leak arrives as a card before the algorithm has learned from it.
Who holds the account
B2B agency: You hand over access. Changes happen and you read about them in the report.
AdPilot: You keep the keys. Every change waits for your one-tap approval, with a snapshot and one-click revert behind it.
Conflicts of interest
B2B agency: B2B agencies often hold several accounts in the same category. Your budget may be funding a competitor’s learning curve.
AdPilot: It is software. It works on your account only, and it has no other client in your category.
Contract
B2B agency: Six or twelve month minimum terms are the norm at this end of the market.
AdPilot: Month to month, cancel anytime. Free 7 days first, no card.
Free 7 days · No credit card · You approve every change · Cancel anytime
You keep control, and you stop being dependent.
Plenty of founders hand paid search to an agency because it is opaque, and it stays opaque because nobody has a reason to explain it. AdPilot is built the other way round. Every card tells you:
- What it changes - for example, pause a keyword that spent $611 and produced no demo requests.
- Why it helps - the reasoning, not just the instruction.
- What it is based on - the numbers in your own account.
Approve one and a snapshot is saved first. Then a before and after dashboard shows what happened to cost per lead, spend and conversions, in plain words. After a month or two you can hold an agency conversation on equal terms, whether or not you still have one.
Flat, predictable pricing. It never grows with your ad spend.
Start with a free 7-day trial. No card. Pick a plan at the end, or walk away. Every plan is flat, so whether you spend $3,000 or $80,000 a month on ads, your AdPilot price is the same. We never take a percentage of your spend.
Full plan details on the pricing page.
AdPilot is new - and we’d rather earn your trust than fake it.
We could plaster this page with five-star quotes and a “trusted by 10,000 businesses” banner. We won’t - because AdPilot is new, and inventing proof would be lying to you. Instead, here’s what actually protects you:
- You risk nothing to try it. 7 days free, no credit card. If it isn’t useful, you walk away having spent nothing.
- Your account is never at risk. Nothing is ever applied without your one-tap approval, a snapshot is saved before every edit, every change has one-click revert, and a full audit log records it. The worst case is a suggestion you don’t like - so you just don’t approve it.
- Guardrails you can’t trip by accident. AdPilot never deletes campaigns and never touches shared budgets. Some doors simply don’t exist.
- Built by an operator, not a VC-funded black box. Software made to give small businesses the Google Ads work an agency charges a retainer for - without agency prices or the loss of control.
Judge us on the work, the math, and the safeguards - on your own numbers, not our adjectives.
Questions, answered straight
Our sales cycle is months long. Can Google Ads even work?
Yes, but only if the tracking reflects that. Two things matter: extend the conversion window so deals that close late still count, and import closed deals back into Google so bidding learns from revenue rather than from form fills. Skip both and Google will optimise toward the fastest, cheapest, worst leads, which is exactly what most B2B accounts complain about.
What should count as a conversion in B2B?
A qualified opportunity if you can send it back, a demo request if you cannot. A raw form fill is the worst option and the most common, because it treats a student downloading a template the same as a buying committee.
Is bidding on competitor names allowed?
Using a competitor’s name as a keyword is permitted by Google. Using their trademarked name in your ad text is not. “[Competitor] alternative” is one of the highest intent, lowest cost segments in B2B, and it is also why defending your own brand terms is worth the budget.
How do I stop paying for students and researchers?
The negative keyword list above removes most of it in one pass. After that it is a weekly look at the search terms report, because definitional phrasings multiply endlessly and each one looks harmless on its own.
Should we exclude our own customers?
Almost always. Upload a customer list as an exclusion. Existing customers searching for your login page convert at a wonderful rate, which is precisely why that waste hides so well in the reporting.
We are pre-product-market-fit. Is paid search too early?
Often yes, and we would rather say so than take the money. Paid search amplifies a message that already works. If you are still finding out which message works, a smaller budget spent learning will teach you more than a bigger one spent scaling.
Will AdPilot change anything on its own?
No. Never. AdPilot proposes and you decide. Nothing is written to your account until you approve that specific change with one tap. If you approve nothing, nothing changes.
What if I don’t like a change I approved?
One-click revert. A snapshot is saved before every change, so it rolls straight back to how it was. The audit log shows exactly what happened, old value and new value.
Does the price go up as I spend more on ads?
No. Your plan price is flat no matter what you spend. Unlike an agency, AdPilot never takes a percentage of your budget.
See what your pipeline is actually costing you.
Connect your account with a secure Google sign-in. Answer a few plain questions about your deal size and sales cycle. Then work through specific improvements one approval at a time, each with a snapshot and a single-click rollback. One flat price. No retainer, no cut of your ad spend, no contract.
Start free - no credit cardFree 7 days · No credit card · You approve every change · Cancel anytime