Google brand search: 77% lower cost per trial sign-up. 20% more monthly trials.

The client: a product-led B2B SaaS scale-up

The client is a B2B SaaS scale-up with fewer than 100 employees, serving customers across Europe and North America. The company follows a product-led acquisition model, with free trials giving potential customers a way to experience the product before buying.

Typical customer contracts represent €2,000–€3,000 in annual recurring revenue, with an average sales cycle of around three months.

Kraftvertising managed paid search and paid social for the company. This case study focuses specifically on its Google brand search campaigns.

The challenge: paying for users who already knew the product

Brand search can look efficient at first glance. People search for the company by name, clicks are relatively inexpensive, and intent appears high.

But for a product-led SaaS company, a brand search does not necessarily represent a potential new customer. Existing users often search for the tool in Google to reach the app and log in. When they click a paid result, the company pays for a visit from someone who already uses its product.

At the same time, competitors were actively bidding on the client’s brand name. The campaigns needed to capture potential new customers in a competitive search environment while reducing spending on returning users.

Before Kraftvertising’s takeover, monthly cost per sign-up fluctuated considerably, and brand campaigns accounted for roughly 10% of the advertising budget.

What Kraftvertising changed in Google brand search

Kraftvertising took over Google Search in December and focused on three practical changes: restructuring the brand campaigns, excluding likely existing users and switching from manual CPC to target CPA bidding.

Restructuring the brand campaigns

Kraftvertising adjusted the campaign structure to support acquisition goals and the new bidding approach. The objective was to make the brand budget work harder at generating new sign-ups.

Building an audience of likely existing users

Excluding existing users required a workaround. The app did not have the same tracking tags as the marketing website, so Kraftvertising could not directly build a complete audience of logged-in users.

Instead, Kraftvertising tracked visitors who clicked Log in rather than Sign up. That behaviour was used to build an audience and exclude it from the brand campaigns.

Login clicks served as a practical signal of existing-user intent. This did not identify every current user, but it gave the team a way to reduce spending on people returning to the product.

Switching from manual CPC to target CPA bidding

Kraftvertising replaced manual cost-per-click bidding with a target CPA strategy focused on sign-ups.

The account already generated a substantial volume of free trials, providing conversion signals for automated bidding. Cost per sign-up fell immediately after the changes; the campaigns used those free-trial conversion signals for target CPA bidding.

The results: lower trial acquisition costs and more sign-ups

Across the full comparison period, Google brand search cost per sign-up decreased by 77%, while average monthly sign-ups increased by 20%.

The initial improvement was sharper: cost per sign-up dropped by approximately 85% in the takeover month compared with the previous month. Although CPA increased somewhat later, it remained substantially below its earlier level.

The improvement therefore extended beyond a short-term drop in costs. Across the full comparison period, the campaigns generated more monthly sign-ups at a much lower acquisition cost.

Why this matters for product-led SaaS acquisition

For product-led SaaS companies, brand campaigns deserve the same scrutiny as other acquisition campaigns. A low click price can still hide spending on existing users.

In this account, a practical audience exclusion, campaign restructuring, and conversion-focused bidding were followed by a substantial improvement. The company already had enough conversion volume to support automated bidding; Kraftvertising’s work helped put those signals to use.

These are before-and-after campaign results, not a controlled experiment. The data does not isolate the contribution of each change or establish incremental paid-customer or revenue growth.

Our scope: results specific to Google brand search

Kraftvertising’s broader remit covered paid search and paid social across Google, Microsoft/Bing, LinkedIn, Meta, X/Twitter, Reddit, and Quora.

The results presented here relate exclusively to Google brand search campaigns.