How PriceLabs Generated 2.5x Return On Ad Spend
“Within a few months of engagement, they were able to establish ads as an ancillary channel for our revenue growth. SaaS Growth Advisory is no less than an extension of our in-house marketing team that we can 100% trust.”
– Richie Khandelwal, Co-Founder
PriceLabs
Cost per Product Signup
$88
# of listings syncing per product user
1.3
Return on Ad Spend
2.5
The Story Of PriceLabs
PriceLabs is a dynamic pricing tool for the vacation and short-term rental industry that helps STR property owners save time and increase income.
PriceLabs approached us through “SaaSBoomi”, the largest community of SaaS startups in India. The product caters to a small niche and thus, from the beginning, we knew it was going to be a challenging task for us to profitably acquire SMB customers over a period of time.
Before PriceLabs approached us, they were solely relying on organic traffic, partnerships, and referrals, and had not explored paid channels at all.
Challenges
Entering the market and running ads profitably for a SaaS with a price point of $10 per month per user is almost always difficult. Moreover, there were competitors in the space who were already running paid acquisition experiments, including AirBnB which is one of the biggest indirect competitors.
The absence of a robust attribution mechanism also made things tricky as there was no clarity on which channel was contributing to the MRR.
Our Solution
We started with campaigns targeting US geography, as that’s where the penetration of AirBnB is deepest. and decided to go with “core value proposition” and “brand awareness” ads. We soon realized that the organic brand awareness is already at par with our competitors and thus, reallocated our portfolio to dedicate 75% of the ads budget to “value proposition” campaigns. From continuously changing the bids to optimizing and experimenting with landing pages & offers, we fine-tuned everything in order to maximize the return.
We ran several quick experiments to leverage middle-of-the-funnel content like promoting ebooks, and guides to generate & re-engage leads from platforms like display, LinkedIn, etc. With limited test budgets for an SMB audience, we found it extremely difficult to generate leads, convert them into product users, and eventually paying users. Hence, we called off these campaigns to ensure that we validate the channels by demonstrating ROAS through BoF campaigns.
While running these experiments concurrently, we figured out a set of keywords that worked for the US market and expanded those to other geographies with high penetration of AirBnB such as Australia, and Spain. This prompted us to start several geo-specific campaigns. Through rapid iterations of budget and biddings in different geos with multiple campaigns, we were able to figure out the sweet spot that consistently generates paying customers at a ROAS of at least 1 every month.
Results
Finding the right set of campaigns and geographies, quickly without wasting too much time and money was the key to the success PriceLabs got. Overall, ROAS stood at 2.5x and oscillates between 1-5x periodically due to seasonality.
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