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Article's Content
“You have to spend money to make money.”
The saying applies equally well to the lemonade stand around the corner as it does to companies with multibillion-dollar valuations.
The question is, “How should you spend it?”
In B2B SaaS marketing, the money spent often goes toward hiring people who develop and implement marketing strategies that lead to growth. But, sometimes, companies opt to spend that money in a more direct way: Paid advertising.
Despite controversy over the utility of pay-per-click advertising in the B2B space, there are plenty of ways brands can use this strategy to drive results.
Today, we’ll look at two cybersecurity companies — Mimecast and Barracuda — and how they incorporate paid search into their overall marketing strategy.
G2 currently has both of these companies ranked just inside the top 10 for the secure email gateway category.
This provides a great opportunity to examine how these two successful, well-funded companies with similar industry positions take different approaches to driving brand awareness and lead generation with paid search advertising.
First, let’s take a quick look at the state of PPC in B2B SaaS.
The Evolving Landscape of PPC in B2B SaaS
Pay-per-click advertising is a controversial topic in the B2B SaaS space.
Unlike B2C eCommerce, the sales cycles for enterprise-grade software are longer and involve multiple decision-makers.
It’s easy to get an accurate read on key metrics like customer acquisition cost and return on ad spend when you’re selling athletic wear through a Shopify site. It’s much more difficult when you’re selling a suite of cybersecurity products to a large multinational.
The longer conversion process in B2B SaaS is a big reason why industry leaders prioritize specialties like SEO, content, and brand marketing. (If you don’t believe me, take a look at the replies to Ross’s post.)
You’re the head of marketing at a startup (think typical B2B SaaS) and your super power is paid media.
You can only hire one role. Which is it:
– Content Marketer
– Video Editor
– SEO Expert
– PPC Expert
– Writer
– ABM Strategist
– Brand Strategist— Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) March 1, 2023
That’s not to say that paid advertising isn’t effective in B2B SaaS. Industry-leading SaaS unicorns like Snowflake — a $70 billion company — use PPC to drive potential customers to key assets.
Concepts like pay-per-lead (PPL) are growing in popularity because it’s more effective than paying for clicks. PPL uses paid ads to gather qualified leads with higher purchase intent than your typical web searcher.
Unfortunately, the paid ad landscape isn’t getting easier to navigate. According to Search Engine Lands’s PPC in 2024 report, there are a number of developments disrupting this practice, including:
- Cost-per-click inflation: The steady increase in the cost per click of keywords through Google Ads, including lower volume ones.
- Impact of AI on PPC: Artificial intelligence gives brands the ability to personalize and automate paid ads at scale.
- Transition to privacy-first advertising: As Google finally sunsets third-party cookies, companies need to adopt other targeting methods.
So, with these challenges in mind, let’s compare and contrast the paid ad strategy of two email security brands to see the different ways you can deploy PPC to drive traffic.
How PPC Fits into Mimecast’s Marketing Strategy
Mimecast specializes in cloud-based email management, mainly for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office 365. Founded in 2003, they focus on email security, archiving, and ensuring continuity in business mail services.
Mimecast went public in 2015 after raising over $90 million in funding and was taken private in a multibillion-dollar acquisition at the end of 2021 by private equity firm Permira. The company also has over 42,000 customers.
Considering they’ve had two decades to build up brand awareness and strength, it’s not surprising to see that direct search is the leading traffic driver to Mimecast’s website. Direct traffic made up over 75% of their traffic in December 2023, according to Similarweb.
Organic search is the next closest traffic driver at about 16%. But that still drives 160k organic visits every month.
Paid search represents a fraction of Mimecast’s web traffic at 0.38%. So, why even bother focusing on this tactic at all? It’s a fair question.
This is a channel distribution snapshot from the end of 2023. If we take a more macro view of their traffic — say, the last five years — things look quite different. Here’s a quick overview:
- From early 2020 to mid-2021, Mimecast spent around $150k each month to earn just under 40k clicks.
- In the summer of 2021, they increased their monthly spend to over $200k, producing a massive spike to 150k clicks.
- Over the next year, the monthly PPC budget decreased from $180k to $140k, while the number of clicks stayed at around 50k.
Then, from July to September 2022, the PPC clicks fall off a cliff — from 45k to 4.5k. The budget only decreased by about $9k over that time. The decrease in clicks and spending has continued until today.
What caused this decrease in monthly clicks? Well, there are a number of reasons.
It could be CPC inflation of certain keywords in the email security space. It could also be that Mimecast is losing out to competitors during the ad auction process. Or maybe it’s that the audience is becoming less responsive to paid searches in general.
Whatever the reason, it’s interesting to note that Mimecast’s organic traffic doubled over the same period of time and now sits at over 240k monthly visits.
It certainly appears that the overall strategy for lead generation has shifted from a paid approach to an organic one.
Still, paid search can be an important lead generator, even when used sparingly.
For example, Mimecast still uses PPC to promote key assets like their Employee Cyber Awareness Training Kit. The landing page is short and sweet:
- An immediate call-to-action for readers to reduce cyber risk through training by downloading free Mimecast resources.
- A module explaining how human error is often the weakest link in a company’s cybersecurity posture, including a tongue-in-cheek video explanation to keep viewers engaged and entertained.
- A trust-building section that includes key stats about the importance of awareness training and a list of recent awards Mimecast has in the space.
So even though Mimecast has pivoted away from PPC over the past five years to prioritize brand and organic search, they still use paid ads to strategically drive traffic toward specific marketing assets.
That’s the beauty of paid ads — you can turn them on and off to match the exact needs of your business.
The Takeaway:
Building an SEO moat around key organic search terms helps decrease your reliance on paid ads, which can be especially helpful when the CPC starts climbing in your niche. If you start seeing too much volatility in organic search, you can always fire up Google Ads to test the paid search landscape.
Now, let’s look at Barracuda’s paid search approach.
How PPC Fits into Barracuda’s Marketing Strategy
Like their competitor, Mimecast, Barracuda was also founded in 2003. They’re known for products that protect against email, web, and instant messaging threats, including spam, spyware, trojans, and viruses.
Barracuda has also experienced success in the email security space. They have over 200k customers across the globe and have been acquired multiple times — most recently in 2022 by the investment management firm KKR. The acquisition was reportedly valued at $4 billion.
Barracuda currently has a nice three-headed monster, bringing in over 360,000 in total traffic to their website. Direct search still leads the way at with about 130,000 (36%), but it’s followed closely by paid search (34%) and organic search (22%).
At 70k organic visits per month, Barracuda still brings in less than half the amount of their competitor. But they more than make up for it on the paid side.
With an estimated monthly PPC budget of $834k, Barracuda has the ability to climb up the SERPs at a much faster rate than the organic route. According to data from SpyFu, this expansive budget helps them bring in 8,500 clicks to key landing pages each month.
With this large PPC budget, Barracuda can quickly attack some highly competitive keywords to get more visibility in the SERPs. Their top-performing paid search pages target terms that would be difficult to rank for organically, like email security, spam filtering service, and ddos attack.
That’s nearly 3k people every month who skip the top and middle stages of the funnel to land on BOFU conversion assets. So, how does Barracuda set up these key assets to increase the likelihood of conversion?
Let’s examine what a potential customer looking for a spam filtering service sees when they click on a sponsored Barracuda link.
The ad directs them to a landing page promoting their Phishing and Impersonation Protection service, with the tagline “Effortless threat prevention with AI-powered precision.”
It’s a compelling start. People want to avoid these attacks, but they don’t want to spend additional time doing so. Barracuda uses AI to recognize potential cyber attacks effortlessly.
Directly under the tagline are some immediate CTAs to try the product for free, build and price a custom solution, and schedule a demo.
The Barracuda marketing team then uses several different tactics to win over these potential users and move them to the sales team:
- A module providing key information on the prevalence of phishing and impersonation attacks and outlining why Barracuda’s features and pricing make them the ideal solution.
- Highlight key stats with imagery and back each one up with simple, compelling copy (Pro tip: It’s always wise to highlight wins over Microsoft). ]
- Testimonials from current enterprise customers about the positive impact of Barracuda’s AI-powered tool with links to full case studies.
- Various product screenshots with an introduction to product features and their interface.
- A module promoting Barracuda’s Email Threat Scanner — a free tool used by more than 16k different organizations.
- Displaying their trophy case of recent wins across different G2 categories.
- A module encouraging readers to check out the pricing options for the entire Barracuda Email Protection suite.
It’s a well-built, well-designed landing page. No wonder Barracuda currently has over 90 different ads funneling visitors from related keywords.
The Takeaway:
Paying to earn a top SERP position for product or service landing pages can help you quickly get these key assets in front of a high-intent audience and reduce the time it takes them to move through your funnel.
It’s interesting to note that for the same keyword, spam filtering service, Mimecast holds down a SERP spot just outside of the top three organic results with an introductory blog post bringing in nearly 1,000 organic visitors monthly.
Barracuda uses paid search to jump the SERP line and gain a top spot for their conversion-oriented page.
Despite bringing in more volume than Mimecast and other competitors via paid search, it’s hard to know if this is a sustainable game for Barracuda in the long term. Looking at their PPC performance over the past five years, it’s clear that CPC inflation is also hitting them hard.
Just two years ago, Barracuda earned 100k clicks on their ads each month with a budget of around $700k. According to SpyFu, that budget has grown by an estimated $100k, yet the number of clicks now sits around 8,500.
It’s difficult to know precisely what’s causing this decrease in paid search traffic — increased competition, CPC inflation, or some penalty from Google. While it looks like a big problem to an outsider like me, maybe this is just the cost of promoting brand trust and strength for a large company like Barracuda.
With over 200k customers and counting, it’s difficult to argue with the results.
Key Takeaways and Strategic Insights for SaaS Organizations
So, what does this all mean for B2B SaaS brands? Should you invest in PPC? Should you not invest in PPC? Like most talk surrounding marketing strategy, the answer is frustrating: It depends.
The Mimecast-Barracuda case is interesting because it features two companies with a number of similarities:
- Both were founded in 2003 and have had decades to build up their brand and product.
- Both have been taken private by private equity firms that have massive stores of capital.
- Both sit just outside the top tier of email security products, according to reviewers.
- Both invested a significant amount of money in paid advertising during the early 2020s.
However, these companies have taken a different approach to PPC in recent years as the industry faces major disruptions, such as CPC inflation, the rise of AI in advertising, and the end of third-party cookies.
- Mimecast appears to have shifted their investment into organic content to help boost their brand and solidify their organic position in the SERPs.
- Barracuda is still investing just under seven figures each month in paid advertising traffic to increase visibility in the SERPs.
From the outside, it seems like Mimecast is taking a more sustainable approach to long-term growth. They’re bringing in nearly 500k visitors to their site each month through organic search and saving hundreds of thousands in paid ads. But Barracuda still gets over 8,500 clicks, bringing web searchers to key landing pages that are better optimized for conversion than your typical blog post or ebook.
It ultimately comes down to who has the better conversion rate.
The lesson for SaaS marketers is to pay attention to the metrics and stay adaptable. Paid clicks and organic visits are great, but you need tools in place to track how these leads flow through your website before converting. Above all, you must pay attention to your niche and the larger digital marketing space to identify and get ahead of major changes.
