These countries are the most valuable to these advertisers due to their high purchasing power, and similar characteristics.

By advertising to high-tier countries, you are paying more per click but expect to also earn more back.

The map covers 174 countries. Pick a tier, then copy the list straight into your campaign location targeting.

Eight markets are flagged because the ad platforms either will not serve them or will only serve them partly, and the copy button leaves those out by default.

The mini-tool was vibe-coded with Claude over the Lovable MVP. Read more on how you can Vibe Code for Marketing or join our community of Marketing Vibe Coders at GrowthVibers.com.

What are Country Tiers in Advertising?

Country tiers group markets by how much a click from them is worth. GDP per
capita is the starting point, because people in richer countries have more to
spend and advertisers bid more to reach them.

It is not the only input, and any tier list that claims otherwise is selling
you something. Singapore has a higher GDP per capita than Spain and still sits
in Tier 2. Kuwait is richer per head than Poland and sits in Tier 3. Market
size, language, and how hard advertisers are actually competing all move a
country up or down. The tiers below use GDP per capita as the spine and those
three factors as the correction.

Higher tier countries’ citizens have higher salaries and more disposable income. Lower-tier countries are still developing economies and have less disposable income.

By advertising to higher-tier countries, you can get higher conversion rates and better ROI for your ads.

Advertising Country Tier List

Every ad network keeps its own list, and tiers move as economies do. Treat this
one as a working default, not a standard.

If you run Google Ads, pick a tier in the tool above and hit Copy list. It
gives you bare country names, one per line, which is the format location
targeting expects. Restricted markets are left out unless you untick the box,
so a copied Tier 2 list will not quietly include Russia.

P.S.: You can calculate your CPC Cost using the calculator.

The below table lists Tier 1,2, and 3 countries in alphabetical order:

Tier 1 Countries

Wealthiest countries, where the citizens have higher salaries and more disposable income. CPC in these countries is the most expensive, but expected returns are also the highest. 

Tier 1 countries include all english speaking countries and advanced economies.

Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Ireland
Italy
Luxembourg
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom
United States of America

Tier 2 Countries

Good economies with average salaries and disposable incomes. Tier 2 countries are less desirable than Tier 1 but come with lower CPC & CPA costs.

Andorra
Argentina
Bahamas
Bolivia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Brazil
Brunei
Bulgaria
Chile
China
Colombia
Costa Rica
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
Egypt
Estonia
Fiji
Greece
Guyana
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
Indonesia
Israel
Japan
Kazakhstan
Latvia
Lithuania
Macao
Malaysia
Malta
Mexico
Montenegro
Morocco
Nepal
Oman
Panama
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico
Qatar
Republic of Korea
Romania
Saudi Arabia
Serbia
Singapore
Slovakia
Slovenia
South Africa
Thailand
Turkey
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
Uruguay
Vanuatu

Tier 3 Countries

Developing economies where people have limited or no disposable income. Clicks
are cheap and conversion rates are low, so most international advertisers
exclude them by default.

Tier 3 is the biggest group at 92 countries. It grew because 28 markets that
were missing from earlier versions of this list are now in it, including the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Zimbabwe.

Albania
Algeria
Angola
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belize
Benin
Botswana
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cambodia
Cameroon
Cape Verde
Central African Republic
Chad
Comoros
Congo
Côte d’Ivoire
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Djibouti
El Salvador
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Gabon
Georgia
Ghana
Guatemala
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Haiti
Honduras
India
Iraq
Jamaica
Jordan
Kenya
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Laos
Lebanon
Lesotho
Liberia
Libya
Macedonia
Madagascar
Malawi
Mali
Mauritania
Mauritius
Moldova
Mongolia
Mozambique
Namibia
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
Pakistan
Palestine
Papua New Guinea
Rwanda
Senegal
Sierra Leone
Somalia
South Sudan
Sri Lanka
Sudan
Suriname
Swaziland
Tajikistan
Tanzania
The Gambia
Timor-Leste
Togo
Trinidad and Tobago
Tunisia
Turkmenistan
Uganda
Uzbekistan
Vietnam
Yemen
Zambia
Zimbabwe

Which Country Tier Should You Choose?

For Advertisers

Advertisers prefer to start their campaigns with Tier 1 countries as they all speak English as a first or second language. 

This tactic allows for less campaign management and fewer variations.

As your spending budget grows, you will want to expand to Tier 2 countries where you may need to work on localization per different geo-location.

For Publishers

For publishers such as bloggers, website owners, etc. who operate ad-supported websites, targeting Tier 1 countries in their niche is the ideal scenario.

However, Tier 1 countries are much more competitive, and you might want to consider Tier 2 countries if you speak the language.

Countries You Cannot Advertise To At All

A tier tells you what a market is worth. It does not tell you whether you can
buy it.

Three countries are off the table completely. Cuba, Iran and Syria are under
comprehensive US sanctions, so the major platforms will not serve ads there no
matter what your targeting says.

Five more are restricted or partly suspended. Google Ads stopped serving in
Russia in 2022. Belarus is under EU and US sanctions. Venezuela, Myanmar and
Afghanistan are limited to varying degrees depending on the platform.

Two of those eight sit in Tier 2, which is the trap. If you copy a Tier 2 list
from an older version of this page and paste it into location targeting, Russia
and Belarus go in with everything else. The tool above leaves restricted markets
out by default for exactly that reason.

Platform policy changes faster than economics does. Check Google and Meta before
you plan a budget around any of these.

The post Country Tier List for Advertising in 2027 appeared first on Marketing Experts Hub.

The truth is, a referral campaign that works well for a SaaS startup probably won’t deliver the same results for a Shopify store. 

And you don’t want to spend money on a tool only to discover that the features you need come with a more expensive plan.

For this review, I explored the Viral Loops platform using its 14-day free trial for the Growing plan. I also looked into its pricing and customer reviews to see what it offers and where it falls short.

What Is Viral Loops?

Viral Loops is a viral and referral marketing platform founded in 2016. It helps businesses turn word-of-mouth into new customers by rewarding people for referring their friends.

Source: viral-loops.com

Viral Loops’ typical clients are SaaS startups, e-commerce businesses (such as Shopify stores), and newsletter publishers looking to grow their audience through referrals.

The platform’s core capabilities include:

• Ready-made campaign templates and customizable widgets
• Referral tracking and performance analytics
• Reward management and fraud detection
• Integrations with other marketing tools

These capabilities power a variety of referral campaigns, such as:

• Customer referral programs with rewards for successful referrals
• Prelaunch waitlists where inviting more friends moves participants up the list
• Giveaways and leaderboard contests
• Newsletter referral programs that reward subscribers for sharing newsletter content

Its biggest advantage (in my personal opinion)? The ready-made templates. Pick a campaign that fits your goals, tweak it to match your brand, and voila! You’re ready to launch.

What Are the Key Features of Viral Loops?

Viral Loops’ features do a lot behind the scenes once a campaign is live.

You can manage participants, track which referrals turn into signups, and keep track of rewards. You can also connect campaign data to other tools you already use, although the available features and integrations depend on your pricing plan.

I think it’s worth looking at these features individually, especially since some could be more important than others, depending on the type of campaign you are running.

Campaign builder and templates

The first thing you will do when setting up a campaign is choose a template. 

From there, the platform lets you customize campaign rules based on what you want participants to see when they sign up.

Viral Loops also updated its drag-and-drop page builder in May 2026, so you can now move sections around, add or remove referral widgets, or see how everything looks on mobile.

Honestly, the customization options are quite interesting. You can make basic design changes in the editor, but there is also the option to use CSS and HTML if you want something more specific.

One thing to keep in mind is that for each campaign you can only use one template. You can’t mix features from different templates in the same campaign.

Referral tracking and fraud detection

Can you follow what happens after someone shares their referral link? Yes, you can see who signed up through it and whether they completed the action needed to count as a successful referral.

I was also interested in how the platform deals with people trying to game the system. Viral Loops checks things like repeated IP addresses and similar email addresses, then gives participants a fraud risk score.

That’s the best part, actually. Instead of the platform just erasing what it considers fraudulent, you can review suspicious accounts yourself and decide whether to remove them. You can also add email verification and reCAPTCHA if you are worried about people creating fake accounts to collect rewards.

Fraud checks are especially useful for campaigns offering prizes. 

Just remember that you still need to review flagged participants before taking action.

Integrations and tech stack compatibility

Viral Loops works with quite a few tools you probably already have in your marketing stack.

You can connect Mailchimp or Brevo to use referral data in your email campaigns. HubSpot also integrates to send new participants and their referral details to your CRM, so you can segment contacts based on their activity.

For tracking, you have Google Analytics 4 and Mixpanel (typically handled via Segment). Facebook Pixel is supported too. And if you need to connect something else that isn’t in their menu, Zapier gives you more options. 

P.S. One detail worth checking before signing up is how each integration works. Some might need extra setup, and the available options can depend on your campaign template and pricing plan.

Analytics and reporting dashboard

You created your campaign, launched it, and it started getting some traction. Now you want to know where those new signups are coming from. Nothing simpler.

The Viral Loops dashboard lets you see how many people joined your campaign and how many referrals they brought with them. You can also see which sharing channels perform well and how participation changes over time.

You can use a chart to track these numbers week by week, download them as a CSV, and dig into the data further.

For me, the main limitation is that these numbers only tell part of the story. You see how your campaign is doing, but figuring out how much those new customers are worth… That will take some extra work using your other analytics tools.

Reward fulfillment and management

Rewards are also very customizable with Viral Loops. For example, you can reward participants for every friend they bring in or give them bigger prizes when they hit specific campaign goals. 

Also, if you plan to give away something costly, you can cap how many rewards one person can collect.

The interesting part is the options for delivering rewards.

If you choose manual rewarding, you will see eligible participants in the Pending Rewards table, but you have to send their rewards yourself.

For automated rewards (my favorite bit), the platform connects with services like Tremendous for gift cards and Stripe for account credits. Sendoso is also an option if you want to offer physical gifts. Once someone becomes eligible for a reward, fulfillment is automatic; you don’t need to do anything.

One thing you must pay attention to, though, is pricing. Automated rewarding is available only in the higher-tier plans, while the Plus plan supports automation through Zapier or webhooks, which requires more setup.

How Easy Is It to Set Up and Launch a Campaign?

I’d say Viral Loops has a fairly easy setup process (big plus for the setup wizard), especially if you plan a simple giveaway or prelaunch campaign. You can get one running without much technical knowledge, although installing it on your website may require some coding.

Here is how the process looks in four simple steps:

1. Choose a template: Think of the campaign type you plan to do and pick an appropriate template. 

2. Set the rules: Decide what triggers the reward or set referral milestones if your campaign uses them.
3. Make it your own: Add your branding and adjust the signup form. Now is also the time to customize widgets, hashtags, URLs, and compose the sharing message participants will use.
4. Get it live: Host it on a Viral Loops page or install it directly on your website. For a first campaign, I recommend going with the Viral Loops-hosted page. It saves you the trouble of installing scripts, and you can always look into a custom setup later.

Viral Loops Pricing: How It Works Across Plans

The setup is one thing. The next question is how much you have to pay to keep your campaign running. 

Viral Loops has four standard paid plans, with monthly pricing starting at $49. There is a 30% discount if you pay annually.

Source: viral-loops.com/pricing

The difference between the plans is in how many participants you can have and which of the features you can use:

• Start-up ($49/month): Includes 1,000 participants and lead generation campaigns, including giveaways and prelaunch waitlists. You also get basic integrations and fraud detection.
• Plus ($139/month): Includes up to 5,000 participants, customer referral programs, and the milestone campaign template, plus themes for Viral Loops pages, reCAPTCHA integration, and full application programming interface (API) access.
• Growing ($229/month): Allows up to 10,000 participants and unlocks automated rewards through Stripe or Tremendous. HubSpot integration and referral revenue tracking are also included.
• Power ($399/month): Covers up to 25,000 participants, with a dedicated account manager and priority support. It also allows you to invite team members to the platform to manage your campaigns.

*For anything bigger, there is an Enterprise plan with custom pricing.

Before you choose a plan, look closely at how Viral Loops counts participants. Why? Because anyone who signs up gets counted toward your limit, even if they never bring in a referral.

To test how the platform works, you can do what I did and try the Growing plan for free for 14 days. Even if the trial only allows 10 participants, that’s enough to check if the features work for your goals. 

What Real Users Say About Viral Loops

Across reviews on G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot, most users seem happy with Viral Loops, especially its ease of use and customer support.

The overall ratings are pretty good, too:

• G2: 4.0/5 from 42 reviews.
• Capterra: 4.6/5 from 137 reviews.
• Trustpilot: 4.7/5 from 129 reviews.

On Capterra, one reviewer praised the support team after running into a configuration problem, saying they “jumped on it within hours.”

The complaints are also worth a look.

One user liked the integration process but felt there were “not enough design options for the referral program.”

Pricing comes up in the complaints as well. In a Capterra review, a user described the platform as “expensive for what it is” and reported problems getting timely support.

As with anything, people’s experiences with the platform vary. Some are very pleased with it. Some, not so much.  

I recommend reading the reviews, of course, but don’t draw conclusions until you test Viral Loops yourself. That way, you can see how it works for your needs and can make an informed decision.

How Does Viral Loops Compare to Its Top Alternatives?

The main difference between Viral Loops and its alternatives like ReferralCandy, Referral Factory, and SparkLoop is the variety of campaigns you can run. Viral Loops supports everything from giveaways to prelaunch waitlists, while the other platforms focus on more specific types of referral marketing.

Here is how the four platforms compare:

When Is Viral Loops the Right Choice?

After looking more closely, I can say Viral Loops is worth considering for businesses that want to use referrals to grow their audience. Of course, it depends on the kind of campaign you are planning to run.

Here is where I would recommend using it:

• Shopify stores: For rewarding customers for referring people who make a purchase in your store.
• SaaS startups: If you are launching a new digital product, you can build a prelaunch waitlist where people move up the queue when they refer friends.
• Newsletter publishers: You can give subscribers rewards for referring new readers. 
• Small marketing teams: If you are working with a small team, the ready-made campaign formats can save you quite a bit of setup.
• Businesses interested in viral campaigns: You can use campaign formats inspired by viral giants like Dropbox or Harry’s and adapt their referral mechanics to your own offer.

Final Verdict

Viral Loops is a great option for businesses looking to grow through referral marketing. It has a lot to offer, and the positive customer reviews give you another reason to consider it.

Of course, there’s always room for improvement, especially around design flexibility and participant limits on lower-priced plans. 

Still, these are the things I would weigh against what the platform offers.

I would definitely recommend giving Viral Loops a try. Start by booking a free demo, explore the features yourself, and see what it can do for your business.

The post Viral Loops Review: Is It the Right Referral Marketing Platform for You? appeared first on Marketing Experts Hub.

I have used, tried, or evaluated most tools in this list, took decisions to buy, cut, or change marketing analytics tools.

And, while Google Analytics (GA4) has evolved and changed since it’s release, there are still many reasons to stop using it. If you are exploring a better alternative for Google Analytics, then you are at the right place.

Keep in mind, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Depending on your use-case, budget, and resources, you will probably choose a different tool.

For SaaS, you care about website analytics that fits with product journeys.

For e-commerce, you care about sales and revenue per conversion.

For B2B / Enterprise, you might be looking for complex cases with compliance built-in.

While, if you operate in Europe, you want a GDPR-compliant marketing analytics software.

The Marketing Analytics Tools Covered in this Guide

This is by no means an exhaustive guide, and no ranking guide, even though I have my personal favourites. It is a categorized menu of options.

*Pricing and information was collected on October 2026.

Why not GA4?

Honestly, GA4 is good enough for most businesses. But, there are good reasons to stop using it as well.

1. Bad modelled data – when cookies are not firing, Google Analytics creates reports with modelled data versus real data, messing with actual analytics and missing a lot of insights you could have. This is a compliance challenge when using 3rd-party tools to comply with legal requirements like GDPR.

2. Difficult to use – Google analytics may be free and useful, but it’s tough to create proper reports and dashboards, or explore specific angles you might want. It’s not the most user friendly software any more.

3. No connection to product data – you can set Google analytics inside your software product, but it is not as good in exploring user behaviour and experience as more specialized software.

4. Data ownership and retention – your data is not your own if you don’t export to BigQuery, ownership and data retention for your business may be central to a healthy and long-term resilient business.

5. Data residency – If legal and security compliance are important for your business you might want to keep a strong data residency in-house or in specific areas e.g. EU, UK, Germany.

A word around Consent, Modeling, and Direct traffic

Most visitors block or decline cookies, so Google fills the gap with predictive modeling. Essentially, your data is made up.

GA4 behavioral modeling switches on above a high traffic floor. Google’s own documentation requires at least 1,000 daily events with analytics_storage set to denied for at least seven days, plus at least 1,000 daily users sending events with consent granted for at least seven of the previous 28 days.

A site with 30,000 monthly sessions does not qualify for predictive modelling. Below that threshold, you might be under-reporting.

Below the threshold, GA4 is dropping the sessions. Those sessions disappear and event conversions go to Direct.

First-party GA4: Tag Gateway vs Server-Side GTM

What you can do to move Google Analytics to become first-party data is serve the tags from your own domain so that requests look like first-party traffic instead of calls to a known tracker, and there are now two paths with very different costs.

Google Tag Gateway

The first is Google Tag Gateway for advertisers, previously called First-Party Mode. It reached general availability in May 2025 with Cloudflare as launch partner, with Akamai added in January 2026 and Fastly in April 2026.

If your domain already sits behind Cloudflare, setup is a few clicks from the GTM admin panel and it costs nothing. Cloudflare reported an average 11% uplift in data signals among early testers, and Fastly cited 14%.

For anyone spending good money on Google Ads it should be the first move before considering a migration.

Server-Side GTM

The second is server-side GTM, which routes events through a tagging server on a subdomain you control.

It covers more vendors than Google’s own tags, extends first-party cookie lifetimes past Safari’s ITP limits, and lets you strip or hash data before it leaves your infrastructure.

It also comes with high costs and engineers to maintain it. The data still goes to Google, so you gain no ownership. Consent obligations do not change, because moving processing to your server does not change the legal basis for collection.

Google Analytics Alternatives by Use-Case

There is no one-size-fits-all, but there are many options. Let’s go through the main use cases:

• Cheap options
• Open-source and self-hosted
• Advanced and premium options
• European and data-residency options

Cheap options for SMEs

These are for teams with low budget that need simple reporting, and no complexity.

Fathom

Fathom is cookieless, hosted, and priced by traffic rather than by feature tier.

Fathom Pricing

• Free trial, no credit card.
• $15 per month up to 100,000 monthly page views,
• $25 at 200,000,
• $45 at 500,000,
• $60 at 1 million,
• $100 at 2 million,
• custom above 25 million.

Every plan includes at least 50 sites, with extra packs of 50 at $10 per month. Events count toward the page view allowance.

What differentiates it:

EU visitor traffic is routed and processed in-region.

Data retention is unlimited on every plan, which removes the GA4 retention cap entirely.

Uptime monitoring is bundled into the subscription.

There is a built-in custom domain proxy so you can serve stats from your own subdomain without touching server config, plus a free GA4 importer.

Pros

• No cookie banner required, so no consent-driven data loss
• Unlimited data retention and unlimited CSV exports on every tier
• 50 sites included, which makes it cheap per site for agencies and multi-brand setups
• Uptime monitoring bundled at no extra cost

Cons

• No self-hosted option and no open source version, so no path to full data sovereignty
• No funnels, cohorts, or product analytics of any kind
• The entry tier is $15 even for a very small site

Publytics

Publytics is an Italian, cookieless analytics tool built specifically for publishers and content networks rather than for ecommerce.

Publytics Pricing

• Lite: from €5 per month at 10,000 page views and events
• Business: from €10 per month, unlocks the multi-site network environment
• Enterprise: custom

Free trial available.

What differentiates it: the multi-site network view lets you see every panel across all your sites at once, which is the core feature if you run a portfolio of properties. Editorial reporting is pre-built, including views per author and views per category, which no generic analytics tool ships out of the box. It imports historical Universal Analytics and GA4 data, and reporting is unsampled at every tier.

Pros

• Cheapest entry pricing
• EU-hosted and cookieless, so GDPR, CCPA and PECR compliant without a banner
• Multi-site comparison built in
• Publisher-specific reports

Cons

• Not the right pick for ecommerce: no native Shopify or WooCommerce integration, no multi-step purchase funnels, no deep cohort analysis
• Very small company, but has existed for years
• Limited integration ecosystem compared to anything else here
• Community and documentation depth is thin

Open source and self-hosted

Open source software allow for more ownership of the software and data, and seem cheaper out-of-the-box, but come with higher maintenance fees like server costs, time needed, and often lose a bit on features or ease-of-use.

But, it’s a great use if you want a community-based solution with no corporate control and unexpected price hikes or data gating.

Matomo

Matomo is the closest thing to a full GA4 replacement. It is a complete analytics suite with segments, goals, custom reports, site search, ecommerce tracking, a built-in tag manager, and optional heatmaps*, session recording, A/B testing and form analytics.

*Some features like heatmaps are charged extra, they are not included in the open source package, but can run on your own server without limitations.

Matomo Pricing

• On-Premise: GPL-licensed and free with no usage cap, pay only for the server
• Premium plugins: sold individually or as a bundle
• Matomo Cloud: from roughly €29 per month for 50,000 hits – You pay the company to host Matomo on their servers

What differentiates it: billing is on hits, not page views, and a hit is any tracked action including events, downloads and outbound clicks. On an event-heavy site that is commonly 1.5 to 3 hits per page view, so a 50,000-hit plan may cover half the traffic you assume. It also ships a tag manager, roll-up reporting across multiple sites, a GA4 importer, and full access to the raw data in your own database.

Pros

• Closest feature parity with GA4
• Genuine data ownership on self-host
• Unlimited retention and unlimited users on the self-hosted edition
• A WordPress plugin option

Cons

• Hits-based pricing is easy to underestimate and gets expensive fast on Cloud
• For bigger sites you need web devs to correctly setup and run Matomo
• The WordPress plugin version has a tighter performance ceiling

Plausible

Plausible offers an incredibly simple dashboard for minimal analytics needs. Not many features, light-weight, and simple to read. I would recommend it only for solopreneurs and very small teams where you want to know your traffic and where it comes from every month, no more headaches.

Plausible Pricing

• Starter: $9 per month
• Growth: $14 per month
• Business: $19 per month
• Enterprise: custom

All paid tiers start at 10,000 monthly page views and scale with traffic. Annual billing gives two months free, and the trial is 30 days with no credit card. The Community Edition is AGPL-licensed and free to self-host.

What differentiates it: the script is roughly 54 times smaller than Google’s, which is visible in real Core Web Vitals (faster websites). Scroll depth is tracked automatically with no tag manager setup. It reports traffic from AI tools natively, and it connects Search Console so query data sits next to conversions in the same dashboard. Bot and data-center filtering is built in. All data is processed on European-owned infrastructure.

Pros

• No training needed for non-analysts
• No cookies and no consent banner in most EU jurisdictions
• Open source with a self-host option

Cons

• Funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue attribution, custom properties and the Stats API are all gated to the Business tier
• No free cloud tier at all, only a trial
• Data retention is capped by tier, at 3 years on Starter and 5 on Business
• Self-hosting is demanding on both the server side and maintenance

PostHog

PostHog is not a Google Analytics alternative in the traditional sense. It is a product analytics platform that also does web analytics. This allows you to combine product analytics with your website traffic into one system.

PostHog Pricing

• Free: unlimited team members, no per-seat fees; 1 million analytics events and 5,000 session recordings per month included; 1-year data retention
• Pay-as-you-go: per-unit rates step down as volume rises, with hard billing caps settable per product; 7-year data retention

What differentiates it: analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys, error tracking and data pipelines sit in one platform on one event stream, which is why teams use it to replace three or four subscriptions. EU cloud hosting in Frankfurt is available, and the platform is open source and self-hostable if you need full residency control.

Pros

• Unlimited seats
• Generous free tier
• Consolidates several tools into one
• EU region and self-hosting both available for residency requirements

Cons

• High technical ceiling
• Each product meters separately, making it hard to forecast expenses
• Events tied to identified users carry an extra person-profiles rate on top of the base rate
• Weak as a pure marketing reporting tool

Umami

Umami is the minimal end of the category: MIT-licensed, cookieless, and light enough to run on a small VPS next to your existing database.

Umami Pricing

• Self-hosted: free under the MIT license with no usage cap, pay only for the server
• Cloud hobby tier: free at low event volumes
• Cloud paid tiers: for more than 100,000 events per month

What differentiates it: the deployment footprint. It runs on Postgres or MySQL with no separate analytics database, which makes it the fastest self-host in this guide to stand up and the cheapest to keep running. Recent versions added shared website teams and segments, but the philosophy is still deliberate minimalism.

Pros

• Free and open source
• Deploys in minutes
• Cookieless, so no banner and no consent loss
• No vendor lock-in of any kind

Cons

• Shallow feature set: no funnels, no revenue attribution, no cohort analysis
• No formal support on the self-hosted edition
• You own uptime, upgrades and backups

Advanced and premium options

These tools are intended for heavy users with strong technical foundations, and possibly a team to support data and analytics for marketing. Not for the feint of heart 🙂

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is built for behavioral analysis. It is made for teams with a strong data-led approach in their work.

Mixpanel Pricing

• Free: 1 million monthly events, unlimited seats, 5 saved reports, session replay allowance
• Growth: roughly $0.28 per 1,000 events (around $1,120/month at 5 million events, $2,520/month at 10 million)
• Enterprise: custom

What differentiates it: funnels, retention curves, user flows and behavioral cohorts are the deepest of any tool at this price point. Autocapture collects events without manual instrumentation, which cuts GA4 migration time considerably. Spark AI adds natural-language querying on every plan.

Pros

• Best-in-class funnel, retention and cohort analysis
• Unlimited seats on every tier, including Free
• Transparent per-event pricing with no mandatory sales call to get started
• Autocapture makes the first 30 days fast

Cons

• Cost grows a lot once event volume grows
• SSO, custom retention, advanced data governance and data residency control are Enterprise-only
• Poor substitute for marketing traffic and channel reporting
• Requires disciplined event naming or the workspace becomes unusable within a year

Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is a person-based behavioral analytics platform, founded in 2008 and still positioned around tying individual actions to revenue across a customer lifetime rather than aggregating sessions.

Kissmetrics is an enterprise analytics platform, it is recommended for bigger marketing teams with complex requirements and custom attribution models.

Kissmetrics Pricing

• Free for up to 100k events per month
• Growth plan for $99 per month up to 20M events
• Then, pricing changes to quote-based

What differentiates it: the person-level data model. Path analysis shows the routes users actually take, custom attribution models let you define how conversion credit is assigned, and event-based email automation triggers campaigns off behavior inside the same tool. Historical data import is supported, so you are not starting from zero.

Pros

• Ties individual behavior to revenue and lifetime value
• Strong segmentation on complex criteria
• Automation and analytics in one product, useful for subscription and ecommerce models
• Data anonymization options for privacy-sensitive implementations

Cons

• Smaller integration ecosystem than Mixpanel or Amplitude
• Not a traffic reporting replacement, it’s an advanced solution
• Steeper learning curve than the price tier suggests

Adobe Customer Journey Analytics

Adobe is more an everything analytics for enterprise, connecting every data point from offline to online. Not just a GA4 replacement, a big boys’ toy.

Adobe Customer Journey Analytics Pricing

• Quote only, on enterprise contracts, plus implementation partner cost
• Budget in six figures annually once services are included

What differentiates it: it stitches online and offline data across channels into a single customer view, sitting on Adobe Experience Platform rather than on a web tracking model. Custom dimensions are effectively unlimited, and the governance and permissions layer is built for organizations with compliance teams.

Pros

• Depth and cross-channel stitching that nothing else in this guide approaches
• Genuinely omnichannel, including call center, retail and offline data
• Enterprise-grade governance, permissions and audit posture

Cons

• Enterprise cost and months of implementation before first value
• Requires a dedicated data, analytics, dev, and marketing team to operate – probably legal, and many others as well
• Only if your company is on the 10 figures and above

HubSpot Analytics

I use HubSpot analytics alongside GA4, and the distinction between them is the most useful thing I can say about it. GA4 tells you how much traffic arrived and where it came from. HubSpot tells you which of those sessions became a contact, then a deal, then revenue, because it sits on the CRM record rather than on an anonymous client ID.

HubSpot Analytics Pricing

• Free CRM: includes basic reporting
• Starter: around $15-$20 per seat per month, 1,000 marketing contacts
• Professional: from $890 per month for 3 seats and 2,000 contacts, plus a mandatory onboarding fee of around $3,000 in year one
• Enterprise: from $3,600 per month

Analytics is bundled into Marketing Hub rather than sold separately, and contacts are a separate meter that steps the bill up independently of seats.

What differentiates it: original source and every subsequent touch persist on the contact record, so channel data survives into the deal and the closed-won number without a stitching project. Campaign ROI reporting compares spend to pipeline in one view. The important caveat is that multi-touch revenue attribution sits on the Enterprise tier, not Professional.

Pros

• Answers the pipeline question GA4 cannot
• No data warehouse or identity-resolution project required
• Source data persists on the contact level
• Free plan includes basic CRM and reporting options

Cons

• Cookie-based, it’s not a compliance-friendly solution for analytics
• Multi-touch revenue attribution is gated to Enterprise
• Channel attribution and reports are quite inflexible

European and data-residency options

If legal considerations drive the decision, then you need a compliance-first solution. And, if you operate in EU with strict data-residency requirements, this is the list you may want to go with.

Piwik PRO

Piwik PRO is a commercial platform built for regulated environments, bundling analytics, tag management, consent management and a customer data platform into one suite.

Piwik PRO Pricing

• Business: from €36 per month
• Enterprise: custom

The free Core plan was discontinued in February 2026, and existing users were moved to the Business plan above. If you are reading an older guide that recommends the free Piwik PRO tier, that recommendation has expired.

What differentiates it: it is the only tool here with a full consent management platform in the same package as the analytics, less vendors to manage. Data retention on Business runs to 25 months rather than the 14 the free plan offered, infrastructure is European-owned and operated, and the reporting interface will feel familiar to anyone who ran Universal Analytics.

Pros

• Analytics, tag manager, consent manager and CDP in one vendor
• Built for procurement and DPIA processes
• Universal Analytics-like reporting, so the team relearning curve is small
• 25-month retention of data
• European-owned infrastructure

Cons

• No free tier any more
• Smaller native integration ecosystem
• Reviewers report firm renewal practices, so read the contract terms carefully

Simple Analytics

Simple Analytics is a Dutch company: cookieless, and deliberately minimal, positioned as much as a companion to GA4 as a replacement for it.

Simple Analytics Pricing

• Free: hobby sites, 1 user, 5 websites
• Simple: $15/month, 10 websites, 3 years of retention
• Team: $40/month, 2 users, 20 websites, 5 years of retention ($20 per additional user)
• Enterprise: custom

What differentiates it: the company positions the product explicitly as a data layer you run alongside GA4 or Adobe to quantify the traffic those tools miss to consent banners and ad blockers, rather than as a rip-and-replace. Ad-blocker bypass, role-based access, IP range blocking and export API sit on the Team tier.

Pros

• Free plan
• No cookies, no banner, no personal data collected
• EU-hosted
• Simple & easy to use

Cons

• Per-user pricing can get expensive
• Less features, it’s simple
• Self-hosting and on-premise are Enterprise-only
• Retention is tiered, so the cheap plan limits historical analysis

Pirsch

Pirsch is German-hosted, cookieless, and built with a developer audience in mind, which shows up in both the integration options and the price.

Pirsch Pricing

• Standard: $6/month for 10,000 monthly page views, including 50 websites, unlimited members and unlimited data retention
• Plus: $12/month, adds unlimited websites, funnels, A/B testing and segmentation, custom domains and extensive white labeling
• Enterprise: adds managed cloud setup or on-premise installation

30-day trial, no credit card.

What differentiates it: you can integrate through the backend using the API or an SDK rather than a JavaScript snippet, which sidesteps ad blockers entirely instead of trying to outrun them. White labeling on the Plus tier makes it viable as an agency reporting tool, and unlimited data retention on every plan is unusual at this price.

Pros

• Cheapest credible EU-hosted option, at roughly a third of comparable tools
• Unlimited retention and 100% data ownership on all plans
• Server-side integration avoids the blocker problem rather than mitigating it
• White labeling and unlimited websites on a $12 plan is strong agency economics

Cons

• Small vendor with a limited integration list
• Feature depth well below Matomo, and product analytics is not the goal
• Backend integration needs developer time, so the cheapest path is not the fastest
• Smaller community, so fewer third-party guides when something breaks

Residency comparison at a glance

Pricing and plan details change regularly across this category. Verify current figures on each vendor’s own pricing page before you build a business case on them.

Choosing a GA4 Replacement

When choosing your tech stack, there is no “best” solution for all cases.

You really need to create a wishlist of items and budget.

Do you care more about depth or ease-of-use?

Do you care about reporting or simplicity?

Do you care more about compliance or accuracy?

Then, consider your budget, are you going for a free choice or are willing to pay, and how much.

Choosing a marketing analytics is a long term decision, and some times you may be able to test 2-3 solutions in parallel and decide which works (of course this comes with downsides in speed, compliance, and technical complexity).

This is not a light decision, but if it doesn’t work, you can always change later…

…if you can afford losing some historical data in the process.

The post Google Analytics Alternatives for any Use-Case: Features, Data, Ownership, and Compliance appeared first on Marketing Experts Hub.

And, being in Europe, you got great location, and smart SEOs spread around easy-to-travel countries near-by.

This is your last-minute fix if you are looking for one more event to use your company’s training budget, last-minute free time, or combine with some vacations to get over summer’s end blues 😊

Quick view on the SEO conferences

◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ SPONSORED ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

This newsletter is proudly sponsored by SEO on Stage. An SEO conference like no other coming in Athens Greece.

The best part of it?

This is the one in the list I will be participating both as an attendee, speaker, and MC.

Book your place with 70% discount: SEO-On-Stage-NickMalekos70

P.S.: If upskilling is your goal this year, you will find no better place to learn by joining live experts and colleagues in the SEO industry, and the rising art of AEO/GEO – optimizing for AI search.

◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

1. brightonSEO UK, October Edition

Date: 8 to 9 October 2026

Location: The Brighton Centre, Brighton, UK

Main speakers: Ross Simmonds (closing keynote), plus 190+ speakers across multiple stages

Ticket: Friend pass, £580 + VAT (two days) (24th of September is the last day for £430 tickets)

brightonSEO is one of the biggest search conference in the world. More than 4,500 marketers come from 70+ countries. This edition is also its 10th anniversary at the Brighton Centre.

Being at Brighton two years back, it’s an experience worth living.

My advice, register for the masterclasses, and be sure to network with fellow SEOs, that’s where most of the value lies.

Register at: brightonSEO October 2026

2. Masters of Search

Date: 22 October 2026

Location: von Greifswald, Berlin, Germany

Main speakers: Aleyda Solis (Orainti, SEOFOMO), Malte Landwehr (Peec AI), Fabrizio Ballarini (Revolut), Margus Veeber (Pipedrive), Jennifer Lapp (Brevo), Amir Bohnenkamp (Heyflow), Anita Kirkovska (Vellum)

Tickets starting at €499 Regular

Masters of Search sits at the other end from brightonSEO. It’s one day with 175 seats, all talks in English, and the focus is GEO and AI search.

For SaaS marketers, this is the most relevant agenda on the list.

Go if: you lead organic growth at a SaaS or tech company and want peer-level operators instead of vendors.

Masters of Search

3. SEO On Stage, Athens Edition

Date: Saturday, 24 October 2026

Location: Benaki Museum, Pireos 138, Athens, Greece

Main speakers: Arnout Hellemans, Malte Landwehr, Nick Malekos, Marco Giordano, Natalia Witczyk, Tom Winter, Helene Jelenc, Ivana Flynn, Darko Ivanoski, Darko Brzica, Sarah Pokorna

Tickets: €80 Standard,

70% off with code SEO-On-Stage-NickMalekos70

Full disclosure: I’m the MC for this one, and I also join a round table on the day. So yes, I’m biased.

SEO On Stage will be closer to a theatre production, with talks, music and conversation into the night, all inside a real theatre space at the Benaki Museum.

The speakers are practitioners you rarely see together in Southern Europe. Arnout Hellemans and Tom Winter bring technical and strategic depth. Malte Landwehr covers AI search visibility, since his company, Peec AI, tracks brand presence in LLMs. There are also panels and a fireside chat on where search goes next.

Expect more AI Search, and iGaming in the heart of Athens with SEOs from all over Europe.

SEO On Stage Athens Edition

P.S.: Athens is a city to experience, be careful where you book your stay and book some extra days for incredible food, museums, and cultural activities – also one of the European capitals for escape rooms 😉

4. SERP Conf. Vienna

Date: 3 to 4 November 2026

Location: Tech Gate Vienna, Austria

Main speakers: Barry Schwartz (RustyBrick), Martin Splitt (Google), Dan Petrovic (DEJAN Marketing), Jes Scholz, Chima Mmeje (Moz), Jairo Guerrero (Organic Hackers)

Tickets: €499 Conference Ticket (Day 1 conference, networking cocktail and Day 2 masterclasses) – early bird tickets end on September 30th

SERP Conf. sits where SEO, e-commerce and AI meet.

Dan Petrovic alone makes it worth considering. Few people have done more practical research on how LLMs select and cite content. Barry Schwartz brings the news desk view of what’s actually changing in Google.

There is also a Team Pass with two tickets for the price of one. If you’re sending two people from the same team, that’s the best value on the list after Athens.

Go if: you want structured learning and hands-on masterclasses, not just talks.

SERP Conf. Vienna

P.S.: Vienna is a beautiful visit, always book extra days.

5. MozCon London

Date: 13 November 2026

Location: Convene 22 Bishopsgate, London, UK

Main speakers: Dr. Pete Meyers and Tom Capper (Moz), Helen Pollitt (Getty Images), Miracle Inameti-Archibong (John Lewis), Mark Williams-Cook (Candour), Beatrice Gamba (WordLift), Chima Mmeje (Moz)

Tickets: £520 General Admission

MozCon was a Seattle institution for years. The London edition brings it to European audiences as a single, focused day.

The lineup leans toward enterprise in-house SEO.

Getty Images and John Lewis run search at a scale where small percentage gains are worth millions.

Beatrice Gamba from WordLift covers the entity and knowledge graph side, which matters more every month as AI systems decide which brands to trust.

Go if: you run in-house SEO at an enterprise brand, or you want data-led talks from the Moz research team.

MozCon London

6. SEOkomm

Date: 27 November 2026

Location: Salzburg Congress, Salzburg, Austria

Main speakers: Bastian Grimm (Peak Ace), Tobias Fox (VERDURE), Kai Spriestersbach, Michael Schilling, Thiago Pojda, Nina Roser (fischerAppelt)

Tickets start at €630 net (depends on the sales phase, standard €790 net plus 20% Austrian VAT)

SEOkomm is the most respected SEO conference in the DACH region. It’s also the last major in-person SEO event in Europe this year.

Talks are in German.

SEOkomm

How to choose the right SEO conference for you

For tight budgets

SEO On Stage Athens (€80 before the discount). The Search Central Deep Dive is free if you already have a place.

AI search, GEO and AEO

Masters of Search in Berlin. SEO On Stage and SERP Conf. also give it heavy coverage.

Enterprise in-house SEO

MozCon London.

Biggest networking crowd

brightonSEO.

DACH market

SEOkomm.

FAQ

What is the cheapest SEO conference in Europe in fall 2026?

SEO On Stage Athens is the cheapest paid option at €80 Standard, with 70% off using code SEO-On-Stage-NickMalekos70.

Are there SEO conferences in Europe in October 2026?

Yes. October is the busiest month of the fall season, with four events:

• brightonSEO UK is on 8 and 9 October in Brighton.
• Masters of Search is on 22 October in Berlin.
• SEO On Stage Athens Edition is on 24 October at the Benaki Museum in Athens.

Are there SEO conferences in Europe in November 2026?

Yes. November has three:

• SERP Conf. is on 3 and 4 November in Vienna, with a conference day followed by a masterclass day.
• MozCon London is on 13 November and focuses on enterprise and in-house SEO.
• SEOkomm is on 27 November in Salzburg. Its talks are in German.

SERP Conf. is the best value if you’re sending a team, because its Team Pass gives two tickets for the price of one.

Are there SEO conferences in Europe in December 2026?

No major in-person SEO conferences in Europe are scheduled for December 2026. SEOkomm in Salzburg on 27 November is the last big one of the year.

Which fall 2026 SEO conferences focus on AI search?

Masters of Search (Berlin), SEO On Stage (Athens) and SERP Conf. (Vienna) put AI search, GEO and AEO at the center of their agendas. At brightonSEO, the closing keynote covers brand visibility in LLMs.

Which conferences are in English?

All of them except SEOkomm, which runs in German.

Can I still book a Q4 SEO conference in 2026?

Yes. Six of the seven events on this list still sell tickets. Search Central Live Deep Dive needs registration through Google, and places are limited.

Final thought

You don’t need to go to every conference. This is a last-minute budget for a quick travel.

Choose something that is near, convenient, good priced, and will give the most value in a couple of days.

I always like to add a couple of days to explore the location and live the city 🙂

For me, it will be Athens for SEO on Stage, then Lisbon for a GTM event.

Where are you going?

The post Top SEO Conferences in Europe for Fall 2026 – Last-minute Picks appeared first on Marketing Experts Hub.

Now it is going away.

Shield is winding down.

Both Google and LinkedIn made it clear that we could not continue operating Shield as it was built. We decided not to fight it.

Since 2018, Shield has helped people understand the work they were doing on LinkedIn. Tens of thousands of creators, writers, founders, and operators used Shield to make sense of their words, their content. That mattered to us. We hope it mattered to you.

To all of you who trusted us, thank you.

Andreas & Alex
Co-founders, Shield

This article covers what happened, what current users need to do this week, and the best Shield alternatives in 2026, with honest pros, cons, and best use cases for each.

Why Is Shield Shutting Down?

The ShieldApp had it’s troubles with LinkedIn and their business page got blocked by the platform.

Their app was pulled from the Chrome Store, and they asked the users to manual download & update it.

The workarounds didn’t seem to work, as a few months layer they are announcing their “winding down”.

This is the same wall that hit Apollo and Seamless.AI. LinkedIn does not want third parties operating on top of its platform.

What Shield Users Should Do First: Export Your Data

Before you evaluate a single replacement: export your data while you still can.

Shield’s whole value was historical depth. Years of post history, engagement trends, audience breakdowns. That context does not exist anywhere else once the tool is gone, and you will not get it back from LinkedIn’s native analytics, which only look backward a limited window.

Pull everything. CSV exports, screenshots of the dashboards that matter, whatever the platform still allows. Do it today, not the week of the deadline.

How to Choose a Shield App Alternative

There is no clean one-to-one replacement, because Shield did one thing extremely well and nothing else. The honest answer depends on the job you actually need done.

Most people conflate three different jobs. Get this right before you pick a tool:

• Measuring your own performance … the actual Shield-shaped hole.
• Acting on buyer signals … finding who is in market, not how your post did.
• Capturing and organizing inputs … the swipe file and the people you track.

Here is every tool we are covering, by job, with pros, cons, and the use case each one actually fits.

The three all-in-one Shield alternatives compared side by side. Pricing verified May 2026.

All three advertise a low entry price that locks the feature most people actually want behind a higher tier, so the table shows both the headline price and the real one.

Pricing changes often. Confirm current plans on each tool’s site before subscribing.

Best Shield Alternatives for LinkedIn Analytics

1. DemandBird

DemandBird goes beyond LinkedIn only and adds multiple layers of social scheduling across multiple social media.

Tracking analytics for everything in one platform, using the official LinkedIn APIs to avoid getting the fate of ShiledApp.

Try DemandBird

Get 20% for 24 months currently on DemandBird with the coupon code: MALEKOS

DemandBird can be used by individual creators, but it’s multi-social and team management features are perfect for big companies and agencies handling many social accounts across multiple companies.

Pros

• 9 platforms including Substack
• Built for teams: approvals, workspaces, Company Pages
• Repurposing engine and content pillars
• MCP server and REST API for automation
• Official APIs, no cookie-based scraping and no ban risk

Cons

• Analytics only use the official API which might be limited
• Approvals & API are under the second tier
• Trial requires a card

Best for: B2B teams and agencies who publish on more than LinkedIn who need processes and approvals.

2. Taplio

The all-in-one play: analytics plus AI writing plus scheduling plus a lead database on the higher tier.

Try Taplio

Pros

• Consolidates Shield plus a separate scheduler into one tool.
• AI content generation speeds up drafting.
• Lead database prospecting on the Pro tier.

Cons

• Analytics are adequate, not a step up. If deep data is why you paid for Shield, this is a downgrade on that axis.
• Some automation features push against LinkedIn’s policies, which carries account risk.
• Pricier than single-purpose tools (starts around $39/month).

Best for: Solo creators and founders who want content, scheduling, and analytics in one place and are not running deep data analysis.

3. AuthoredUp

AuthoredUp is the most common landing spot for ex-Shield users. It does analytics, but the center of gravity is content creation: post editor, formatting, device preview, drafts, hooks, and a template library.

Pros

• Backfills your full historical post data instead of starting from install date.
• Does not collect your LinkedIn cookies, which it positions as a safety advantage.
• Combines measurement and writing in one tool, so you stop tab-switching.
• Works for company pages, not just personal profiles.

Cons

• Analytics are solid but not as deep as Shield’s data slicing.
• You pay partly for writing features even if you only want analytics.

Best for: Creators who post consistently and want one tool to write, format, preview, and measure. Pricing sits around $20/month.

4. Supergrow

Supergrow is the budget all-in-one.

Pros

• Cheapest all-in-one option (around $19/month).
• Voice-learning AI, scheduling, and analytics bundled.

Cons

• Analytics are less granular than Shield.
• AI content quality varies.

Best for: Budget-first creators who cannot justify a standalone analytics subscription and want a full package that is good enough across the board.

Extra Tool: Capturing and Organizing Inputs

The third job nobody mentions until they lose access. Not “how is my content doing,” but “how do I capture and organize the posts and people worth learning from.”

LibrarIn

Full disclosure: I built this one. It is a free Chrome extension that adds a tagging and categorization layer on top of the LinkedIn feed.

Pros

• Completely free. No tiers, no post limits, no category limits.
• Save posts into custom color-coded categories, search by keyword, filter by author.
• People You Follow lets you track specific profiles (competitors, ICPs, key prospects) regardless of what the algorithm surfaces that day.
• Privacy-first: no credentials collected, no browsing history tracked. Full CSV export, no lock-in.
• No scraping and no terms-of-service violation, so it does not share Shield’s structural fragility.

Cons

• No analytics. It does not track impressions, engagement, or follower growth.
• Chrome only.
• It does not replace Shield. It solves the capture problem that sits next to the measurement problem.

Best for: Creators building a swipe file, and marketers running competitive intelligence or ABM-style prospect tracking who cannot rely on the feed to surface the right content.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Shield (ShieldApp) really shutting down?

Yes. The founders confirmed Shield is winding down, citing that Google and LinkedIn made it clear they could not continue operating it as built.

Will I lose my Shield analytics data?

Eventually, yes. Export everything now: CSV files and screenshots of the dashboards that matter. The historical depth does not exist anywhere else once access is gone.

What is the closest replacement for Shield?

For a pure dashboard, Inlytics or LinkedIn’s native analytics. For analytics plus a writing workflow, AuthoredUp is the most common switch.

Is there a free Shield alternative?

Yes. LinkedIn’s native analytics and Inlytics’ free tier cover the basics. LibrarIn is free for the separate job of capturing and organizing posts and people.

The post Shieldapp is Closing Down: What to do now? appeared first on Marketing Experts Hub.

But those placements are competitive. For any given query, multiple businesses are bidding for the same handful of spots.

SaaS PPC agencies know how ad platforms decide which businesses win those spots and they use that knowledge to help you get in. They do this through strategies like audience targeting, budget optimization, and landing page optimization.

Some of the top SaaS PPC agencies are:

Now that you have a brief overview, here’s a more detailed explanation of each agency.

Disclaimer: The information about these agencies is accurate as of 29th April, 2026.

1. AdConversion 

AdConversion is a B2B SaaS PPC agency that specializes in creating ad campaigns optimized for revenue (not clicks and low-quality leads).

Source: Adconversion.com

To achieve this, it digs into your CRM data to identify the lead types actually closing deals. It uses the data it finds to build multi-channel campaigns across Google, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Capterra, and Bing to attract more of those, not form-fills. Meanwhile, the in-house team designs ad creatives and landing pages using what they learn about your brand guidelines and product positioning.

Once campaigns are live, AdConversion’s internal automation platform continuously monitors performance and uses specific rules to optimize your ad campaign for revenue. For example, it can:

• Pause ads when the cost per SQL exceeds $1,000
• Flag creative fatigue when frequency exceeds 5 and CTR drops below 1%
• Limit LinkedIn spend to business hours only

The reporting reflects that same logic. The Revenue Dashboard pulls ad channel data (Google, LinkedIn, Meta) directly into your CRM. So, closed/won data flows back into the platforms, and they optimize toward actual revenue. 

Offline conversion tracking is also part of the setup, so Google and LinkedIn see which leads became customers, not just clickers. For teams on HubSpot or Salesforce, this closes the attribution loop most agencies leave open.

As for the management structure for each campaign, each client has a senior B2B performance marketer, backed by a dedicated creative, web development, and data team. 

That means, over time, they become knowledgeable about your company, enough to create ads that communicate its positioning clearly.

On the commercial side, AdConversion is transparent about pricing. Packages range from $4,000 per month (for teams that prefer to handle execution) to $18,200 per month. Regardless of the tier, there are no fixed contracts, no ad spend fees, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. 

In B2B PPC, where agencies typically hide pricing details and 6- to 12-month retainers are standard, that’s an unusual position to take. 

But it’s an offer an agency will only make when it’s absolutely sure its methodology will produce results that will prompt clients to extend their contracts. Which is why over 8,000 B2B marketers worldwide enroll in AdConversion’s paid media Academy to learn its winning methodology.

Now, let’s look at the services they use to implement their methodology.

Services:

AdConversion’s services include:

• Pay per click (PPC)
• LinkedIn ads
• Video ads
• Demand generation
• ABM (account-based marketing)
• Landing page design and optimization
• Data analytics and revenue dashboards

Take a deeper look at what each service entails:

Who is AdConversion for?

AdConversion is best for a B2B SaaS company that’s Series A or beyond, and is spending (or ready to do so) a minimum of $15,000 per month on paid ads. Within that group, the agency is usually a strong fit for:

• Lean marketing teams running campaigns on their own or with freelancers. They are getting some results with paid media, but lack an overarching strategy. 
• Growing companies already spending massively on paid ads ($5,000+) but not getting the required results.
• In-house marketing teams that need a specialist to own paid media execution, while collaborating with AdConversion’s team on the broader strategy.

Minimum project size (Based on Clutch): 

$5,000+

2. Camel Digital

Camel Digital is a SaaS PPC agency that works with PLG and self-serve SaaS companies.

In a self-serve model, people sign up and buy inside the product without speaking to sales. The agency focuses on getting more paid customers and growing MRR without letting acquisition costs get out of control.

Source: https://www.cameldigital.co/

The founder spent two years running growth inside a PLG SaaS company, Infogram at Prezi, before starting Camel Digital in 2020. That is where he learned how people find, try and buy software from the inside. After 10+ years in SaaS PPC and $8M+ in ad spend, the team has built tested playbooks for PLG based on performance data. 

Before scaling, they look at the numbers. LTV, conversion rates and payback show what CAC the product can support and whether paid acquisition can work in the first place. Product and revenue data is then connected back to the campaigns, so the team can see which traffic actually becomes paying customers.

From there, the team looks at where the demand is and which searches and audiences bring in users who actually pay. Campaigns and landing pages are built around those opportunities. The goal is to grow paid customers and MRR while keeping CAC at a level the customer LTV can support.

Services:

• PPC (Google Ads and Microsoft Ads)
• Paid social (LinkedIn and Meta)
• ChatGPT Ads
• PPC landing pages and CRO
• Product-level conversion tracking
• PLG paid acquisition strategy and PPC audits

Minimum project size:

Recommended minimum of $5,000/month in ad spend.

Who is Camel Digital for? 

Camel Digital is built for PLG and self-serve SaaS companies past product-market fit that want to grow paid users and MRR without CAC running ahead of them. Inside that group, the agency is usually a strong fit for:

• You have a PLG SaaS product
• You have a confirmed product market fit and want to scale
• You spend, or are ready to spend, at least $5,000/month on paid ads

Pricing: Starts at $3,889/month for paid media management. 

3. Bounty Hunter

Bounty Hunter is a SaaS marketing agency that also offers PPC services. It focuses on the various channels popular with B2B SaaS buyers: Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, and even software review platforms like G2 and Capterra.

Source: Bountyhunter.agency

The agency is the result of a merger with Impactable, a LinkedIn ads agency founded by Justin Rowe. The outcome is stronger cross-channel execution than most agencies of Bounty Hunter’s size, particularly on LinkedIn, where many B2B PPC agencies are weakest.

The agency’s coverage of review platforms also sets it apart, especially since most PPC agencies either don’t know how to run G2 and Capterra campaigns or treat them as an afterthought.

On the data side, it is a certified partner of Segment, Clearbit, Mixpanel, and Adalysis, so it can set up the full data pipeline from ad click to CRM record. 

Before setting up the CRM integration, every client is assigned a dedicated PPC strategist, account manager, and copywriter, all of whom are reachable directly via Slack. In practice, it means faster feedback loops and fewer of the miscommunication issues that cause campaigns to fail.

Pricing is published up front, which is worth noting in a category where most agencies make you sit through a discovery call before revealing a number:

Now, here’s a spectrum of services you can pay for:

Services:

• Paid ads management (Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, Capterra, G2, Quora)
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
• Landing page design and development
• Analytics and tracking setup
• Remarketing strategy
• A/B testing
• User onboarding optimization (Unicorn plan)

Who is Bounty Hunter for?

Bounty Hunter is a strong fit for high-growth B2B SaaS companies that have moved past the early stage and are ready to scale acquisition. That means you’ll find the agency a great fit if you:

• Already have a functioning sales process
• Spend (or are ready to spend) a minimum of $5,000 on ads
• Wouldn’t mind giving the agency access to your CRM

Check out a more detailed checklist of the type of clients the agency serves:

Minimum project size (Based on Clutch): 

$5,000+

4. TripleDart

TripleDart runs paid acquisition programs across Google Ads, LinkedIn, Meta, and Bing with full ownership of pipeline and revenue outcomes.

They have managed over $150 million in ad spend across 250+ SaaS companies, which means most SaaS verticals (fintech, security, HR tech, dev tools, enterprise) are familiar territory for us.

What makes their PPC practice different is our proprietary AI workflows.

They run 24/7 and handle things like real-time budget reallocation, anomaly detection on conversion rates and CPC spikes before they drain spend, and lead quality scoring that feeds directly back into platform bidding algorithms.

Their agents also predict creative performance before launch, so we’re not just A/B testing blindly.

TripleDart’s paid programs don’t operate in a silo. Every campaign syncs with clients SEO, content, and RevOps teams, so that attribution modeling, CRM data, and organic insights all inform paid strategy.


They also run ABM programs natively alongside PPC for accounts with high ACVs and long sales cycles to warm up buying committees before they ever hit a demo form.

Best For

B2B SaaS companies with $50K+ monthly ad budgets and 6-18 month sales cycles.

Strengths

AI workflows that automate budget reallocation, anomaly detection, and creative performance prediction in real time
Paid media execution integrated with RevOps infrastructure, so attribution runs from ad click to closed deal
Native ABM layering alongside PPC for enterprise and mid-market sales cycles

Notable Clientwork and Results
We work with companies like Payoneer,
VWO, CleverTap, and Airbase.

Pricing

Starts at $3500/month for Paid Media Operations.

Rating and Reviews

TripleDart is rated 4.8/5 on Trustpilot

5. Spear Growth

Spear Growth is a B2B SaaS PPC agency based in Bengaluru, India, working with SaaS companies, from Series A startups to unicorns. This means the agency has PPC playbooks for companies at different stages of growth.

Source: Speargrowth.com

Its channel coverage is one of the broadest on this list, cutting across the usual suspects (Google Search, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Meta) and extending to niche platforms such as:

• Reddit
• G2
• GitHub
• Salesforce AppExchange

Dev tools and RevOps SaaS businesses find the coverage of GitHub and AppExchange particularly valuable.

Spear Growth implements a five-week onboarding process to set up campaigns for success. 

Week one is dedicated to auditing your existing account, firstly to identify and cut 10–20% of wasted spend. By week three, new campaigns are running under the agency’s DCDG framework: Demand Capture for buyers already in-market, and Demand Generation for buyers who aren’t. Two weeks later, ad spend is reallocated to the best-performing ads by revenue.

The other thing that separates Spear Growth is how it treats unconverted traffic.

Most PPC engagements stop at the form-fill. So, if someone clicks but doesn’t convert, they’re gone forever. 

Spear Growth tracks intent signals from that traffic (ad engagement, pages visited, time on site) and passes that data to your sales team as a list of accounts that have already shown interest. Reps can then warm-call those leads.

On reporting, this agency goes further than most. 

Ad platform metrics connect to your CRM for SQL-level attribution, while an ETL layer on top enables slicing of pipeline data by segment, channel, and funnel stage.

That way, you get insight into which campaigns generated leads and which leads actually moved through the funnel.

Let’s see the services Spear Growth offers:

Services:

• Paid channel execution (LinkedIn, Google, Meta, Reddit, G2, GitHub, AppExchange, YouTube)
• Demo and free-trial funnel optimization
• Signal-based prospecting (signal-based sales)
• Landing page CRO
• Wider conversion journey optimization
• Reporting and attribution (CRM- and ETL-integrated)
• Copy and design production
• Demand generation and strategic ownership

Who is Spear Growth for?

Spear Growth serves unicorns and Series A to C funded B2B SaaS companies. This widens its target audience to early-stage startups and mature companies. The same broad audience coverage is also reflected in the industries the agency serves:

• HR tech
• Fintech
• Dev tech
• Martech
• Security tech
• RevOps tech

Minimum project size (Based on Clutch): 

$1,000+

6. SevenAtoms

SevenAtoms is a digital marketing agency, headquartered in San Francisco. While its client base spans various industries, it has more than a decade of experience running paid media for SaaS companies.

Source: Sevenatoms.com

SevenAtom’s paid media channel coverage is one of the broadest on this list. Google Search, Bing, LinkedIn, Meta, display, video, Performance Max, and shopping ads all feature in its paid media offering. On top of that, the agency manages ad placements on G2 and Capterra, where buyers are actively comparing vendors and shortlisting solutions.

To set up campaigns on those platforms, SevenAtoms follows a methodological approach:

• Strategy: This includes account audits, CRM audits, competitor analysis, keyword and audience research, and budget planning. 
• Setup: This includes landing page design, CRM integration, conversion tracking, ad copy, creatives, and negative keyword lists.
• Ongoing optimization: This includes A/B testing across ads and landing pages, bid management, audience refinement, and real-time ROI dashboards.

While ads run, the agency reports on revenue through the integration it has set up between the ad platform and your CRM.

Services:

• Google Ads management (search, display, video, Performance Max, shopping, remarketing)
• Facebook and Instagram Ads management
• LinkedIn Ads management
• Bing Ads management
• Landing page design and CRO
• Content marketing and SEO
• Review site placements (G2, Capterra)

Who is SevenAtoms for?

SevenAtoms is a great fit for B2B SaaS companies at various stages, from startups without a dedicated marketing team to established companies looking to scale their acquisition efforts. 

Below is the agency’s eligibility checklist.

Minimum project size (Based on Clutch): 

It’s not publicly disclosed. However, based on Clutch reviews, it ranges from $5,000 to $10,000.

7. GrowthSpree

GrowthSpree is an AI-native B2B SaaS marketing agency with offices in India and the US. The agency’s offerings primarily revolve around PPC, ABM, and RevOps.

Source: Growthspreeofficial.com

It describes itself as AI-native. But unlike those agencies that use the label after merely adding a few automation tools, AI is embedded in how GrowthSpree hires, builds campaigns, and measures performance. Three proprietary tools drive most of that automation:

• Zipeline: Consistently monitors your entire marketing engine 24/7 and ties ad spend to revenue. It also automatically reallocates your ad spend to revenue-generating campaigns.
• QLA (lead quality filter): Filters out low-quality leads from Google and Meta at the source, so your sales team isn’t wasting time on people who were never going to buy.
• GrowthSpree MCP: Tracks LinkedIn ad performance and surfaces specific performance metrics using natural language prompts.

That said, AI handles only the repetitive work, such as monitoring campaigns, reporting, and reallocating spend. The strategy and the final call on every major decision stay with the senior PPC specialists on your account.

This combination of human input and AI helps the agency iterate faster and detect what’s not working before it wastes your ad spend.

When it comes to CRM integrations, HubSpot is the primary platform. 

It offers a full HubSpot implementation and migration as a standalone service, including setup and ongoing management. The goal here is to connect your Google, LinkedIn, and Meta ad data directly to the HubSpot pipeline so revenue reporting reflects closed deals.

Services:

• Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Meta/Facebook Ads
• Demand generation
• Account-based marketing (ABM)
• Landing page design and optimization
• Content and messaging
• RevOps (HubSpot implementation and migration)

Take a look at what’s in each service offering:

Who is GrowthSpree for?

GrowthSpree works with B2B SaaS companies at two stages, and the engagement looks different for each. 

For early-stage companies, the focus is on building the demand gen foundation from scratch. For scale-ups, the agency prioritizes scaling what’s already working and fixing what isn’t.

Here’s a checklist you can use to determine if GrowthSpree is best positioned to meet your needs:

Minimum project size (Based on Clutch): 

$1,000+

8. Powered by Search

Powered by Search is a B2B SaaS marketing agency that has been working with SaaS companies for over a decade. It’s a certified Google Partner, Meta Business Partner, and Bing Ads Accredited agency.

Source: Poweredbysearch.com

Where other agencies focus purely on paid media, Powered by Search runs the entire marketing operation (paid ads, SEO, content, digital PR, ABM, and web design) under a single strategy. 

Its argument for offering such a broad scope of services is that paid, organic, and content channels compound over time when they work in tandem rather than in isolation. 

This concept forms the basis of the agency’s Predictable Growth Model, where each marketing initiative connects with others and builds on past results. 

So, a blog post is written with distribution in mind, paid campaigns reinforce the same positioning as organic content, and each channel builds on the results of the previous ones.

Here’s how this approach extends to the services the agency offers:

Services:

• Paid advertising across Google, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Account-based marketing (ABM)
• Content marketing and publishing
• Digital PR and link building
• Demand generation strategy
• HubSpot operations and revenue operations (RevOps)
• SaaS web design and development
• Marketing for startups
• Marketing to developers

Who is Powered by Search for?

Powered by Search works best with B2B SaaS companies that are ready to hand over demand generation entirely, including the overarching strategy. They’re not a good fit for teams that want an agency to execute a plan they’ve already built internally, or for companies that only need paid media managed without the broader marketing infrastructure.

Here’s a more detailed checklist with all the eligibility criteria:

Minimum project size (Based on Clutch): 

$5,000+

9. Right Left Agency

Right Left Agency is a growth-focused digital marketing agency that works with SaaS, B2B, fintech, and construction tech companies. Its paid advertising process covers the full campaign lifecycle across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Bing, YouTube, and programmatic display.

Source: Rightleftagency.com

The name ‘Right Left’ reflects how the agency thinks about marketing; the left brain and right brain working together. 

The left side is the science: audience research, campaign structure, attribution, optimization. The right side is the creative: ad design, copy, branding, storytelling. 

The argument is that most agencies are good at one but not both. Either they’re data-driven, and the creative is forgettable, or the creative looks great, but the targeting is all over the place.

So, to bridge the gap, Right Left handles the creative (copy, design, and video editing) and web, as well as the data, in-house. That way, creative decisions are informed by performance data, and targeting decisions are informed by what the creative can actually support.

So, what services does the agency offer?

Services:

• Paid advertising
• SEO
• Email marketing
• Branding
• Creative design
• Web design and development

Who is the Right Left Agency for?

Right Left’s minimum recommended ad spend ($1,500–$3,000 per month) is significantly lower than most specialist agencies on this list. So, it’s a great option for early-stage companies that need real paid media expertise but can’t afford the $5,000–$ 15,000 minimums that larger agencies require.

You’ll have to look elsewhere, however, if you need CRM-connected revenue dashboards, deep RevOps integration, or ABM at scale. Those capabilities aren’t part of this agency’s core offering.

Here are its best- and worst-fit companies based on its service offerings and approach:

Minimum project size (Based on Clutch): 

$5,000

10. Directive Consulting

Directive Consulting is a B2B marketing agency founded in 2013, with offices in Orange County, Austin, New York, London, Toronto, and Mexico City. It works exclusively with companies in three verticals: technology, professional services, and industrial.

Source: Directiveconsulting.com

Its paid media stack covers Google Search, Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Display Network, and programmatic display and video. It also runs international campaigns across EMEA and APAC, which you’ll need if you’re expanding across markets.

The Directive Consulting framework, DiscoverabilityOS, is built around a single premise: MQLs and traffic are the wrong things to optimize for. 

Instead, every campaign decision is anchored to LTV:CAC, which relies on a single metric: is the cost of acquiring this customer justified by what that customer is actually worth over time?

To better track this metric, the agency built a proprietary AI-powered tool called Stratos. Strategists use the AI tool to:

• Pull together data from across the stack—Google Ads, LinkedIn, HubSpot, Salesforce, ZoomInfo, Gong, SEMrush, and more—into one place. Instead of waiting for end-of-month reports, strategists can immediately see trends and act on them.
• Automate repetitive work (keyword research, reporting, early-stage copy drafts) so the strategists spend more time on strategy than admin.
• Use natural language prompts to identify the shared characteristics of high-value customers and find others like them.
• Enrich known accounts with additional firmographic and behavioral data.

Over time, the platform has become sharper, fueled by the $2.2M Directive invests annually in marketing R&D.

Here are the service offerings this methodology powers:

Services:

• Paid search (Google and Bing) and social (LinkedIn and Facebook)
• Programmatic advertising
• Account-based marketing (ABM)
• Content marketing and SEO
• Revenue operations (RevOps)
• Lifecycle and influencer marketing
• Organic social media
• Public relations (PR)
• Performance reporting and analytics

Here’s a closer look at what each service entails:

Who is Directive Consulting for?

Directive Consulting operates on a scale far beyond that of most PPC agencies. Its client roster—which includes companies like Adobe, Cisco, Calendly, ZoomInfo, and Gong—gives you a clear picture of whom it’s built to serve. 

Its model is designed for companies with large budgets and market scope.

For that reason, it’s a great fit for teams running complex campaigns that cut across multiple markets. But a mismatch for lean teams that need tight, direct access to the people running the account.

Take a closer look at who the agency does and doesn’t serve:

Minimum project size (Based on Clutch): 

$5,000

11. PipeRocket Digital

PipeRocket Digital is a B2B SaaS marketing agency specializing in GTM strategy, SEO, performance marketing, marketing ops, and content marketing. Its paid media runs across Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Meta, and programmatic channels.

Source: Piperocket.digital

Praveen Ravi and Kamaraj Mathiarasan, PipeRocket’s co-founders, spent years on the client side of SaaS before starting the agency in 2023. That experience shapes how they work. 

Rather than running generic campaigns and reporting on traffic, PipeRocket builds its engagements around a three-stage process: 

• Understand the product, ICP, competitive landscape, and which channels your buyers actually use.
• Execute campaigns across the right channels, built around that research, not templated from a previous client.
• Continuously test and refine until the results are sustainable, not just present in month one.

Each step is treated as a prerequisite to the next, rather than as a box to be checked during onboarding. PipeRocket has applied this process across 50+ SaaS brands, managing over $5M in ad spend along the way.

For teams using HubSpot, Salesforce, or Marketo, the agency integrates your PPC ad platform directly with your CRM, to simplify revenue attribution.

PipeRocket deliberately limits new client intake to one or two per month. That sounds like a constraint but it actually signals that the agency would rather do fewer things well than overcommit and produce subpar results.

Services

PipeRocket’s services include:

• SaaS PPC (Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Meta Ads, programmatic)
• SaaS SEO
• Marketing operations (MarkOps)
• Content marketing
• Go-to-market (GTM) strategy

Here’s how each service matters for SaaS.

Who is PipeRocket for?

PipeRocket works with B2B SaaS companies at any stage, from early-growth to scaling. However, it is only a strong fit for teams that want PPC managed alongside SEO and marketing ops under one roof.

Minimum project size (based on Clutch): 

$5,000+

12. Team 4

Team 4 is a B2B SaaS marketing agency based in London, specializing in inbound. It works exclusively with startups and scale-ups in niche verticals such as AI, fintech, HR tech, edtech, climate tech, and legal tech. 

Source: Team4.agency

Although Team 4 runs PPC campaigns (Google Search, LinkedIn, and Meta), it always runs them alongside SEO, targeting the same keywords across both channels. 

The thinking behind this position is that making paid a major lead acquisition channel is unsustainable over time. Once the ad budget runs out, it stops working. 

So, before scaling spend, Team 4 uses SEO to identify which keywords and messaging actually convert and what an allowable cost per lead looks like. PPC then amplifies what’s already working, rather than funding guesswork at scale. 

That way, every dollar of ad spend goes toward what’s more likely to work, rather than failed experiments.

To keep iteration fast, the agency also offers fully managed landing pages as part of the service, built and hosted by its in-house team. When a page needs to change mid-campaign, the team handles it directly instead of waiting on a third party.

Let’s take a look at Team 4’s other services next.

Services:

• PPC and paid media (Google Search, LinkedIn Ads, Meta for retargeting)
• SEO and organic search
• Webflow design and development
• Inbound marketing
• LLM and AI search optimization
• Content marketing
• Digital marketing strategy

Who is Team 4 for?

Team 4 works primarily with B2B SaaS brands spending at least £3,000 (approximately $4,400 at current rates) per month on marketing. They typically fall into either of two groups:

• A startup or scale-up that doesn’t yet have a dedicated inbound team and needs to build one. 
• A marketing team with a large headcount, but without the specialist expertise to handle PPC.

Early-stage startups that haven’t yet validated product-market fit and larger enterprises that need a full-service agency are unlikely to be a good fit.

Below is a more detailed breakdown of Team 4’s eligibility criteria:

Minimum project size (Based on Clutch): 

Team 4 doesn’t publish pricing on Clutch, but its website states that it typically works with companies spending at least £3,000/month on marketing. Add a typical agency retainer on top of that, and the total monthly commitment is likely closer to £7,000–£8,000. 

However, it’s worth confirming this directly with the agency before coming to a conclusion.

How to Choose a PPC Agency

To choose a PPC marketing agency for your business, follow these steps:

• Match the agency to your stage: Early-stage companies and scaling companies have fundamentally different needs. Most agencies are better at one than the other. Before evaluating anyone, be honest about where you’re actually at, and confirm how they adjust their process to fit your current stage.
• Ask how they measure success: Almost every agency claims to track revenue, but few explain how. Find out by asking the right questions. Does the agency report on cost per SQL or cost per opportunity, not just cost per lead? Can it connect closed/won data from your CRM back into the ad platforms? How does it calculate the CAC payback period?
• Review SaaS-specific case studies: Ask for results from B2B SaaS clients, preferably in your category, at your price point, and with your sales motion (PLG vs. sales-led). Case studies that cite SQL volume, pipeline generated, and CAC improvement would be better, since those numbers are harder to fake.
• Check channel depth, not just channel breadth: It’s best to find an agency that handles the channels that matter most to your buyers specifically, instead of focusing on broad channel coverage. For example, to confirm an agency’s depth in Google Ads, you could ask it to walk you through how it structures a Google Search campaign for a B2B SaaS product specifically. How does it separate branded, non-branded, and competitor terms and handle match types?
• Understand the pricing model before the first call: Learn about the agency’s price structure and what that entails. You should also check for ad spend fees and what happens if there are no results. 
• Confirm the reporting and CRM attribution stack: Regardless of the channel it uses, the agency should be able to connect ad spend data to your CRM. Without this, your ad platforms will be optimizing toward form-fills and attribution will only cover vanity metrics such as clicks and impressions.

Wrapping Up

Every agency on this list runs paid media. What separates them is what they optimize for, how they measure it, and who they’re actually built to serve.

For example, if you’re Series A or beyond with a minimum of $15K/month in ad spend and want campaigns tied directly to revenue, AdConversion is worth the conversation. Whereas if you’re scaling across multiple markets, Directive Consulting might be worth a look.

The right agency for you shouldn’t only have a list of impressive clients and service offerings. Its operating methodology should match your growth stage, budget, and how buyers in your industry make decisions.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Check out these answers to questions we get from most B2B SaaS brands looking for a PPC agency:

Are SaaS PPC agencies worth it?

Yes, if you have a clear ICP, a functioning sales process, and enough ad spend to justify the management fee. Without those in place, you’ll likely burn through budget without seeing meaningful returns, even if the agency is really good. Conversely, when they are in place, a great SaaS PPC agency simply comes in to scale what’s working and cut down what’s not.

How long until PPC works for SaaS?

In our experience, we use the first 30–60 days to gather sufficient data to learn what the algorithm rewards and continuously improve the campaign. Once that’s done, we typically start seeing results 30 days later (90 days or three months after we launched the campaign).

Which channels matter most for SaaS?

At the top of the list is Google Search; even with the advent of AI, buyers still search for SaaS companies on Google. LinkedIn is the next on the list for SaaS companies that already have an ICP with a clearly defined job title and company size, and a marketing budget to cover the higher CPCs. Lastly, G2, Reddit, and Capterra are great ways to reach buyers actively comparing vendors.

The post Best SaaS PPC Agencies: Top 12 Partners for Pipeline Growth in 2026 appeared first on Marketing Experts Hub.

However, some truths exist.

In this article, Antonis Dimitriou, Organic Growth Strategist at Omniscient Digital shares his tiered list, based on his experience working with SaaS and Enterprise clients. These beliefs are supported by various studies across the web.

The article was edited by Nick Malekos, the founder & editor of Marketing Experts Hub.

The Tiered List

S Tier

Tactics with strong evidence and effectiveness towards ranking of AI Search, and are the most important factors LLMs will use to surface citations and mentions.

• Building brand mentions with co-occurring terms
• Targeting queries plus modifiers
• Consistent brand positioning

A Tier

Tactics which strongly impact AI Search results.

• Link building
• Targeting fan-out queries
• Homepage messaging

B Tier

Often used for citations and influencing the AI Chatbot’s answer to a query, but not always effective.

• Reddit mentions
• YouTube videos

C Tier

Impactful up to a point, for specific cases.

• Schema

D Tier

Possibly impactful, there is evidence crawlers related to LLMs visit the pages, and sometimes mention them, but not as impactful.

• Creating an AI info page

F Tier

Often recommended by agencies, but with little evidence of impacting AI Search.

• llms.txt

S Tier

These tactics teach models what your brand is, in relation to what, for whom. This is what the systems reach for when they decide who to cite and who to show up in responses.

Building brand mentions with co-occurring terms

This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do, and most teams do a diluted version of it.

Models learn associations from the text around your brand name, not from the name in isolation. If your brand keeps appearing beside “SOC analyst training” or “sales engagement platform” across enough independent sources, that association becomes stronger, and LLMs learn to associate it with it.

Pick the three to five terms you need your brand welded to. Then create mentions which carry those terms in the same sentence or paragraph: podcast show notes, roundup contributions, expert quotes, partner pages, community answers, comparison posts on third-party sites.

Targeting queries plus modifiers

Buyers do not ask LLMs one-word questions. They ask long-tail ones. For example “Sales engagement tool with HubSpot integration and SSO for enterprise.”

Build your target list from modifiers, not keywords. Pull them from your own sales calls, your G2 category filters, your competitor comparison pages, and your Search Console long tail. Then create pages that answer the head term plus the modifier explicitly and completely, in the page’s own words, high on the page.

Consistent brand positioning

This a company-wide problem and usually sits under PMMs or Brand. Consistency of how the brand is represented creates stronger associations and assists retrieval for niche cases.

Vague and varied responses create confusion and your brand will get replaced with a competitor who was clearer.

Write one positioning line. Use the same text everywhere: site, review profiles, LinkedIn company page, partner directories, press boilerplate, podcast intros, guest bios.

Enforce consistency on a company-level.

A Tier

These strongly impact AI search results, and the evidence behind them is solid. They sit one step down because they work by improving the conditions for visibility rather than by directly teaching a model what you are.

Link building (Digital PR)

Links got rebranded to Digital PR and citations. Backlinks still matter, even if they are unglamorous by building the authority and connections required for discovery.

The essentially improve the conditions and chances, but do not directly impact HOW you are being mentioned.

Targeting fan-out queries

AI Mode and similar systems decompose a query into sub-queries, run searches based on them, and synthesise the results. Those sub-queries are called fan-out queries.

Fan-out tactics target the use-cases, niches, and different ways people may search, and are informed by the memory of the chat for you. You can’t easily “know” what fan-out queries are, but much research shows the structure they take and can be replicated when doing SEO research.

Homepage messaging

Your homepage is the highest-authority page telling models what you are. Treat it as a primary source document, not a conversion asset with a hero image and three adjectives.

If your H1 is a slogan and your subhead is a benefit statement, there is nothing concrete to extract. If it names the category, the buyer, the core capability and the differentiator in plain text, then LLMs understand what you actually do.

LLMs prefer usability over brand statements.

B Tier

Both of these show up in citations regularly and both may decide what content is being used in the decision-making process.

Reddit mentions

Reddit is heavily cited by several AI search systems.

Active participation is the best way to get Reddit mentions, while many SEOs tend to try manipulative and automated tactics.

Use it with caution.

YouTube videos

Very good for Google’s AI search surfaces.

Video assets get surfaced in AI Overviews and adjacent Google experiences, so if Google is your primary target, then it’s own video platform is the right source to train.

C Tier

Impactful up to a point, but may not work for all kinds of businesses and niches. Use when needed.

Schema

Structured data helps Google understand entities and can support your presence in Google’s AI surfaces. Product, Organization and FAQ markup are the best ones to use overall, and they help to get various rich results on Google, they may as well help with AI Overviews.

What it does not do is affect visibility in non-Google LLMs like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity etc.

D Tier

Possibly impactful, there is evidence crawlers related to LLMs visit the pages, and sometimes mention them, but not as impactful.

Creating an AI info page

There is something here, but pretty uncertain. The problem is that it’s probably not needed, but crawlers still visit the page with little evidence it works.

Editor’s note: I strongly believe that a well written Home, About, and Contact pages are more than enough for the purpose, an AI info page may not be a complete waste of time but it probably does little more than a blog post or a product page.

F Tier

Often recommended by agencies, but with little evidence of impacting AI Search.

llms.txt

Many SEOs, consultants, and agencies implement llms.txt, but as proven by cats.txt, a fun experiment by Mark Williams-Cook, even an irrelevant page will be crawled and cited.

No major AI search system has committed to consuming it as a ranking or retrieval input. It has not been adopted the way robots.txt or sitemaps were, and publishing one has no demonstrated effect on whether you appear in AI answers. It is a proposal with strong marketing behind it, and it survives mostly because it is easy to sell and easy to tick off.

How to sequence this

Tiers S to A are actions which must be in everyone’s to-do list, while actions B and C depend per case and resources.

The rest are pretty much optional.

But, each tactic can support a wholistic SEO / GEO / AEO strategy to rank for search and various AIs.

The post The Top AI Search Optimization Tactics Ranked in a Tier List appeared first on Marketing Experts Hub.

Back then, I was the founding marketer at LearnWorlds, and one of my main resposibilities was SEO who became my main focus and growth channel over the next few years.

For the next year, we built what was going to be our biggest inbound channel that quadrable results over the Covid time (2020-2021).

I actually included it in a speech earlier this year as well, you can view the whole growth-marketing story at LearnWorlds here.

Now, as the Head of Demand at Cyberbit, SEO is again my responsibility, and I have hired Minuttia again to run the new playbook of SEO.

What Is Minuttia?

Minuttia, led by George Chasiotis, is a content marketing and SEO agency for B2B SaaS companies.  

Image Source: minuttia.com 

When LearnWorlds signed on in 2019, our engagement focused on services designed to close our organic visibility gap and fix the underlying issues affecting our content performance.

The core services offered included:

• SEO strategy: Keyword research and audience mapping tied to our buyer’s journey 
• Content strategy: A full audit of our existing content to decide what to update, merge, or remove 
• Content optimization: Refining underperforming pages instead of only producing new ones 
• Link building: Earning backlinks from domains with real authority and topical relevance 
• Technical SEO guidance: Walking our team through fixes for indexation issues 
• Content operations: Establishing briefing processes and training our writers on new methodologies

Minuttia has since expanded its services to include AEO, GEO, and AI SEO. This is the work I am hiring them now to help with, along with traditional SEO.

Why Did LearnWorlds Hire Minuttia?

When we hired Minuttia, LearnWorlds focused on four growth levers – Organic SEO, Paid Social & Google, Email marketing, and affiliates.

Organic from Google was our best channel, followed by paid, but our budget was limited there. So, Google organic traffic seemed like a good bet and better ROI to focus, especially because I built a strong content team.

SEO was doing well, but we were hitting some walls on growth and passed through a period of flat growth. We needed a fresh approach and a new bet to grow to the next level.

Challenges LearnWorlds was facing

Before we hired Minuttia, our content team was split in multiple projects, and we were losing focus. We needed someone who would own and lead our strategy, kept us honest, and add additional analysis which I didn’t have enough time to do:

• Content calendar was there but lacking SEO depth: We were publishing and following SEO best practices, but not really documented or fully procesized.
• A competitive gap: Our strategy was focused too much on top and middle of the funnel, and little bottom of the funnel. Honestly, I needed an extra argument to convince a resistant management that competitive listicles were important.
• No content operations: There was no established process for briefing writers. This meant that our content quality and consistency depended on impulse decisions over a process.
• Technical issues: My technical SEO was not my strong point, so a few technical SEO errors crept in the way.
• Reporting was lacking: Reports were not convincing on results, I needed help in developing the right reports and explain the wins to the management.

These issues needed a result-driven SEO and content marketing agency that could diagnose the whole system, not just produce more articles. 

How LearnWorlds evaluated agencies

We didn’t sign with the first agency that pitched us. We reviewed a few local and a few international agencies, and came upon the one that seemed more trustworthy.

Minuttia, and specifically George was chosen because the pricing made sense and we saw a strong culture fit”

• Attention to detail
• Good people we could trust
• Hard-working mindset, going above & beyond to deliver (since the selection process, yes)

Since working with them in multiple projects side-projects, and hired them in two companies, their communication, processes, and work has improved. Delivering high-quality work, going above & beyond, and being professional along the way.

Second impressions of the Minuttia team

Here, I want to intercept the LearnWorlds story, to talk about the second hiring here at Cyberbit. As our AI Search budget was approved recently and I had to review 3 agencies before going with our top choice (again).

How the second time felt in 2026 was very different than 2019.

• More professional process
• Better pitch-deck with in-depth details on the plan
• Better understanding of tech, and cybersecurity
• Incredible onboarding*

*The process of asking the right access, brand collateral, and company tone of voice – they know how to work for bigger corporations & enterprise who are demanding.

To avoid any conflicts of interest, I reviewed and compared three agencies with great reviews. I will not be naming those, as they are great SEO Agencies and they came very close to winning the bid, it would not be fair to underplay the competition.

The decision was approved both by the CMO & our Content Lead after multiple rounds of talks and project discussion.

What Did Minuttia Do for LearnWorlds?

Once we signed on, Minuttia offered six connected strategies: 

• Audience research
• Content audit and optimization
• Content strategy and planning
• Link building strategy
• Technical SEO guidance
• Content workflows and team training

Here’s how they actually played out:

Audience research

Minuttia didn’t start with content, but with the people who’d eventually read it.

The team researched LearnWorlds’ target audience and identified the specific sources and topics that influenced potential customers before they ever reached our site. 

From there, they conducted keyword research and mapped every search opportunity to a stage in the buyer funnel, so we knew whether a keyword mattered to someone just discovering online course platforms or someone ready to compare software.

Each keyword also got an Opportunity Score, which allowed the team to prioritize based on real potential. That research turned directly into a practical content calendar we could execute against.

This is a collaborative effort, as my side of the equation (as an in-house marketer) is to pass industry knowledge and company-specific details to support the agency.

Minuttia built up on it to develop a more in-depth version only a dedicated specialist with access to more data can do.

Content audit and optimization

With the research in place, Minuttia turned its attention to the content we’d already published.

They reviewed our entire content inventory and came back with a specific recommendation for every page: update it, consolidate it with overlapping content, or remove it because it no longer served a purpose. 

The audit also flagged user experience issues affecting how visitors engaged with our existing pages, and it prioritized the pages with the greatest growth potential first.

Minuttia gave me the clarity and plan needed to focus. They “owned” organic, so I could work with the ten other open projects we were running at the same time. A trusted partner I could spend a few hours a week and delivered results, almost on auto-pilot (of course you need to be deeply involved to succeed, don’t get me wrong, it’s a two-part collaboration, always).

Content strategy and planning

The audience research and content audit fed directly into how Minuttia chose new topics to prioritize.

Topic selection balanced search demand against actual business relevance, so we weren’t chasing volume for its own sake. 

The resulting strategy covered multiple stages of the buyer journey, from early awareness content to pages built for people actively comparing platforms. All of it rolled into the content calendar, which gave our team a systematic plan.

The most important part though is working with most of our capacity on the bottom-funnel capturing demand from the market.

Link building

Once content strategy was underway, Minuttia moved into link building.

The focus stayed on relevant, authoritative domains rather than volume for its own sake. Interestingly, those links directly supported the broader organic strategy by helping close the domain rating gap we had against competitors. 

Over the engagement, that work produced 77 new backlinks from sites with real authority in our space.

Of course, we had a mix of tactics on link-building.

• ABC link-building handled-inhouse
• Targeted outreach (high valued links from relevant sites)
• Linkable assets – attracting links passively

Honestly, the best tactic for long-term businesses is linkable assets, but that produces results in 2-3 years, with the highest ROI. If you are building a resilient business, build assets, studies, and own-data pages people will link to.

Technical SEO guidance

Minuttia also identified the indexation issues that were limiting how much of our site Google could crawl and rank.

Recommendations came with clear, step-by-step guidance rather than a black-box fix. In addition, Minuttia worked directly with our internal team so we understood what was wrong and how to resolve it ourselves.

Errors we had for a while and could not figure out how to solve started to resolve with the help of Minuttia’s briefs.

The most difficult part was pitching it and adding it on our developers’ queue… but that’s another story!

Content workflows and team training

Minuttia helped us build a real content-briefing process where none had existed before, which created more consistent workflows across the whole team. 

They trained our internal content team directly and shared the methodologies behind their own work.

We saw a significant quality difference, and many lessons and SOPs stayed for years with us, only partially updated.

What Was It Like to Work with Minuttia?

Here’s what the actual working relationship looked like from our side:

Communication and responsiveness

Not sure if it’s the standard nowadays, but the best agencies I have worked with come with great communication practices.

A slack channel for updates / communications.

Email for the most important things.

Responsive team, and fast coordination.

There are always hiccups of course, the idea is to have an adaptive team who can take over and quickly return.

Professional, communicative, and strong project management is essential.

Expertise

Strategy only holds up if the people behind it actually understand the business they’re working on.

I take this as my responsibility. Minuttia knew SaaS, but EdTech was new to them, as is Cybersecurity now.

It took a short time ~3 months for them to get a strong hang of the industry and nuances.

Compared to my next “premium” agency, where their analysts after 1.5 years never got the nuances or my feedback…

Now, having worked and discussed multiple projects, I have to admit their expertise especially in tech companies, SaaS, and enterprise is much improved.

Back then, Minuttia was perfect for a SaaS startup.

Now, Minuttia is perfect for an enterprise company.

Transparency

Minuttia does not mince its words.

They are honest around expectations and what can be realistically achieved. I prefer an honest outlook, over over-promisers.

That realistic expectations paired with regular, honest reporting helped prove the results to management.

What Did LearnWorlds Get from the Cooperation with Minuttia?

Nine months into the engagement, the results showed up in numbers we could report directly to leadership.

Organic traffic grew by 123.7% month over month, driven by a combination of new content built off the audience research and updates to pages that had been losing ground before the audit.

Image Source: Ahrefs

I have said it many times. One of the reasons LearnWorlds grew fast around 2020, was because we had delivered 80% of the organic content plan we planned with Minuttia before it hit.

We covered most important commercial queries.

When e-learning surged in Covid, we were there, well-positioned to capture the traffic.

We were ready, at the right time.

Of course, many more things happened – the team was growing, the budget was growing, engineering delivered some important items. It was a team effort, but SEO captured the traffic.

The number of keywords we ranked for increased by 51.7%, spread across new and updated content in high positions in our target market. Updates were always a big part of LearnWorlds’ content strategy, as keeping up high with our top content has always been important.

Image Source: Ahrefs

The link building work added 77 new backlinks from authoritative, relevant domains, which helped close the domain rating gap that had been holding our content back from ranking as well as it should have. 

Image Source: Ahrefs

The traffic and keyword numbers show the big numbers, the reality was however the operational changes which impacted the long-term.

Our content briefs became more detailed and consistent, and production followed an actual process instead of ad hoc decisions made week to week. 

Writers produced first drafts faster, our internal team’s SEO knowledge grew, and we had a clearer system for prioritizing which content to tackle next.

Those changes outlasted the engagement itself. The traffic numbers reflect nine months of work. The processes and internal capability are still paying off today.

What Does Minuttia Offer Now? 

The agency I worked with in 2019 and 2020 focused almost entirely on traditional SEO, i.e., keyword research, content strategy, link building, and technical fixes aimed at ranking well in Google.

Minuttia’s services today cover more ground. Alongside Google search strategy, the agency now works on dominating AI search platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity, human and AI-assisted content creation, digital PR, and even Reddit marketing as a way to influence how brands get mentioned in AI-generated answers. 

There’s also a reporting tool built specifically to track how AI systems discover and cite a company’s content, something that didn’t exist as a category when LearnWorlds signed on.

The core positioning hasn’t changed. What Minuttia does with it has expanded to match how people actually search now.

Why We Ended the Partnership

2020 was an incredibly busy year, and we were behind in our content plan.

For what we did, we had a queue for a whole year to cover in deliverables to be done from our internal team.

We paused Minuttia until we covered some ground.

Then, our Series A took place, and the VC dictated their own agency – which I was not happy with… but the money talks.

Starting the New Project

For 1.5 years I went freelancing, where we collaborated with Minuttia on a few side-projects.

And, now in my new company one of the most important agency “hires” is Minuttia, which we were budgeting since last year. Internal changes delayed the project, as we focused on migrations & fixing other channels.

Now, we are betting on SEO & AI Search to be the next ROI-positive channel.

Final Verdict

Last time, ROI from SEO was 10x-20x (depending on month & spend, it was quite variable). SEO was an easier channel, and we were well-positioned for it.

A few lucky moments helped with capturing traffic.

Minuttia delivered on what LearnWorlds needed most, and that’s a real strategy behind our content.

Over nine months, that translated into 123.7% growth in organic traffic, a 51.7% increase in ranking keywords, and 77 new backlinks from authoritative sites.

Just as important, our internal team came out of the engagement more capable, with processes and skills that outlasted the contract itself.

This isn’t a hands-off arrangement, and it isn’t the cheapest option available. But if you want an SEO and AEO agency that treats your business like theirs, Minuttia is worth a conversation.

I am paying a trusted partner.

I know my investment will have ROI.

And, I know their values align with my team’s values.

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