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Ishaan Shakunt
Founder & Head of Marketing Strategy, SpearGrowthIshaan Shakunt is the founder of SpearGrowth, a B2B SaaS Marketing agency that helps high-growth companies with Ads and SEO
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After a few weeks of setup and projections, John and Alex were finally ready to launch their ad campaign. John, as always, had a million questions.
With their projections in hand, John and Alex are now ready to launch their ads. Sitting in their favorite café, John leans in, excitement bubbling over. “So Alex, what happens once the ads are live? Should we expect fireworks or…?”
Alex laughs, “Not quite! Right now, we’re just getting warmed up. The first few weeks are all about testing the waters. We’ll gather insights and refine our approach.”
John nods, “Got it! So, what should we expect as we kick things off?”
As you move through your ad journey, you’ll notice different results at each stage. We have broken down the entire process by weeks. By following this timeline, you’ll better understand when to expect key milestones and how to adapt along the way.
Note: This is assuming you have a whole team of people you can trust and know how to work together from day 1. Whether this team is an in-house or an agency.
During the first one to two weeks, focus on the following tasks:
Now, if you’re a seasoned pro or have the right SaaS PPC agency alongside, I know you can skip a lot of these things and get started by the end of the week. But don’t rush! Building a strong foundation now will save you from the headaches of endless approval cycles and back-and-forth later on.
By now, your ads are live, and now the fun begins. At this stage, the main question on your mind should be:
If the answer’s “no,” something’s off, and here are the usual suspects:
Now that people are clicking, it’s time to look into the numbers. Here, your real questions should be:
Just because someone clicks doesn’t mean they’re the audience you want.
This is where the difference between keywords and search terms becomes important. For example, you may be bidding on “HR software for enterprises,” but Google might show your ads to small businesses. (Yes, it happens)
To avoid this, first, check your search terms report daily and ensure the right search terms are triggering your ads. This is extremely important.
Apart from this, if you have deanonymization tech, you can also look at the companies coming to your website through different ad groups and optimize there.
For B2B SaaS companies, tools like Clearbit, Factors.ai, and R!B2B can be a game-changer here. It helps you quickly figure out if the people clicking on your ads actually fit your ICP. You’re not necessarily aiming to increase conversions with this—just making sure you’re reaching the right crowd.
| 🗨️ Note |
| If you have the right strategy and get more than 300 clicks, you might even start seeing conversions in weeks 3-4. But if not, don’t sweat it too much. Conversions often take a bit longer to show up. That’s what the next phase is all about. |
By this point, you should have enough data to dig into two big questions:
To find out if your strategy is scalable or not, you need to ask yourself – How much search impression share are we able to capture? Impression share tells you how much of the available search volume you’re capturing. Here’s what to look for:
This is also a great moment to revisit your original projections:
Even if you’re feeling pretty confident, it’s always worth a second look based on what the data’s telling you.
By now, you’ve got a decent pile of data, and it’s time for the ultimate question:
Remember that strategy you mapped out back in week 1? Well, now you get to see if it’s actually working. If conversions are rolling in—congrats! You’re on the right path.
But what if they’re not? Or, if the quality of conversions is really bad?
It could mean:
| 🔁 Recap |
| The worst thing isn’t spending money on ads that didn’t work. The worst case scenario is running ads for 6-12 months and still not knowing if it’s an ideal channel for you. |
If your strategy isn’t working, you’ve just found something that doesn’t work. Now, you can pivot, rethink, and test something new.
Typically, demand generation is a slow process. It’s important to understand this from the outset. It’s not like demand capture, where you see results fast. It’s slow. It’s expensive. And it can feel like you’re burning money with nothing to show for it.
This is a slower lift that requires patience and persistence.
One of the first questions a lot of my clients ask is, “When will we start seeing demos or free trials flow in?” The short answer: Don’t expect to see significant results until at least month 4.
It feels like forever but the this timeline depends on factors like:
Even after the four-month mark, attributing demos directly to your demand generation efforts might be challenging. You may not see them cleanly attributed in your CRM. It will require additional work in reporting to identify the impact of your campaigns.
Here’s what you’re up against when it comes to delays:
Depending on the approach you opt for (low-bid or high-bid), you may get to your weekly ad budget in 1-3 weeks…
Let’s understand what these two approaches actually mean.
Here, you start bidding as close to the minimum bid as possible. Then, if you aren’t able to spend your daily budget, you slowly increase your bid till you are able to. This is a conservative but cost-efficient approach.
Timeline: 2-3 weeks
Here, you start bidding 2-3x higher than the bid LinkedIn proposes. Then, you slowly reduce the bids till you aren’t able to spend the daily budget anymore. This is an aggressive approach that quickly generates data and maximizes initial impressions but requires careful monitoring to prevent overspending.
Timeline: 1 week
Expect to test 4-6 different messages before finding one that clicks. Our upcoming Chapter, “Messaging” breaks down everything you need to know about creating a message that resonates.
After you’ve figured out your messaging, the next hurdle is testing offers. On average, you’ll go through at least 4 different ones before landing on a winner.
You’re looking at around four weeks before you have an audience ready for retargeting.
The factors affecting this timeline include ad engagement rates, website traffic, and LinkedIn page visits.
Your sales and marketing teams need to be in lockstep. Depending on your setup, you may need to coordinate closely with sales. If your existing cadence isn’t enough, setting up and streamlining this process often takes 2-6 weeks.
Demand generation isn’t just slow—it’s a lot of work, too. Here are a few things that might take more effort than you expect:
Creating visually appealing creatives takes considerable work.
Demand generation doesn’t show up in your CRM easily. You’ll probably have to dig into custom reports and extra tracking to tie the results back to your campaigns.
Every piece of creative—whether it’s copy, landing pages, or video—goes through multiple layers of approval. From the marketing team to the tech team, you’ll need to get a lot of people on board, which adds time.
If your strategy involves manual outreach, this can again be labor-intensive.
you may also need to involve numerous stakeholders, which adds up to the additional work:
With all these challenges, you might be wondering—why even bother? If it’s so slow and so much work, why do demand gen ads at all?
Honestly, if you can avoid it, you probably should – at least initially. Your job is to show results, not to do “sexy marketing.”
But you’ll have to. Because demand capture is not infinitely scalable. Once you’ve maxed out capturing the existing demand, your ads will stop being profitable. That’s when you have to do demand gen.
Ishaan Shakunt is the founder of SpearGrowth, a B2B SaaS Marketing agency that helps high-growth companies with Ads and SEO