How software buyers search
Software searches come in four kinds. Category: “inventory management software”, “school management system Nepal”, “HR software for small business”. Competitor: “[rival] alternative”, “[rival] pricing”, “[rival] vs”. Problem: “how to track employee attendance”, “invoice template”. And brand: your product’s name, often with “login”, “pricing” or “review”. Category and competitor searches convert; problem searches convert later; brand searches are mostly existing users. The same keywords attract people looking for free tools, cracked downloads, tutorials and jobs. Buyers evaluate on a desktop during working hours and convert on a trial or a demo request, and the sale closes days or months later. My Google Ads services for software companies separate those four search types and measure the paid conversion, not the sign-up.
What changes in Google Ads for SaaS
Keywords and match types
Exact and phrase match on category terms with buying modifiers (“software”, “tool”, “system”, “pricing”, “for small business”); competitor campaigns on alternative and comparison terms, with copy that is accurate and does not use the rival’s trademark in the ad text; problem keywords in a separate campaign landing on guide content with a trial offer. Negatives for “free”, “open source” where you are not, “crack”, “download”, “tutorial”, “course”, “jobs”, “salary”, “template”, “excel” and “github”.
Market and language
Nepal-based SaaS selling abroad targets the buyer’s countries, prices in their currency, and schedules to their office hours; selling in Nepal, presence targeting and NPR pricing. The two are different campaigns with different landing pages.
Landing pages and offers
A page per use case or segment with the problem, the product in three screenshots, pricing or a pricing link, proof that is true, and one action: start a trial or book a demo. Trials suit self-serve products at lower price points; demos suit products where a sales conversation is part of the purchase. The page and the ad make the same offer.
Assets
Sitelinks to pricing, features, integrations and security; callouts for trial length and no-card sign-up where true; lead form assets for demo requests with a qualifying question on company size.
Measurement from sign-up to revenue
Trial starts and demo requests are tracked online as secondary conversions; activation, paid conversion and subscription value are recorded in your product database or CRM and imported into Google Ads against the click ID or hashed email, with a conversion window matching the trial length. Bidding then targets paying customers, and the competitor campaign that produced expensive trials but no revenue becomes visible. The setup is under conversion tracking.
Typical account structure
| Campaign | Keywords | Primary conversion |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | Product name, with login and support terms excluded or sent to a support page | Trial or demo |
| Category by market | Category plus modifiers, one campaign per country group | Paid conversion (imported) |
| Competitor | Alternative, vs, pricing terms | Paid conversion (imported) |
| Problem and use case | How-to and task searches, landing on guides | Trial start |
| Remarketing on Search and Display | Pricing-page visitors, trial abandoners | Paid conversion |
| Demand Gen | Lookalikes of paying customers, product video | Trial or demo |
Performance Max is added only after the imported paid conversion is stable, with brand excluded, and lead generation campaigns cover the demo-request layer for sales-led products.
Mistakes I see in SaaS accounts
- Bidding on trial starts, then celebrating a low cost per trial while revenue stays flat.
- Brand and login searches reported as new-customer conversions.
- Competitor campaigns without a comparison page, sending rival-brand searchers to a generic home page.
- No negatives for free and crack searches, which dominate software queries in Nepal and India.
- Conversion windows shorter than the trial.
Full stack for IT, SaaS and software
Paid search captures the category demand that exists; organic and social create the rest. The same industry is covered under SEO for IT companies and SaaS SEO for the organic side, and Meta Ads for B2B and SaaS for prospecting and retargeting on Meta. Equipment and distribution businesses are on Google Ads for B2B and medical equipment.
Next step
Send read-only access for a free Google Ads audit; the summary will show which campaigns produce trials that pay, which produce only sign-ups, and whether the account can currently see the difference.