A Done-With-You Google Ads model gives B2B SaaS companies the ability to keep strategic control of their paid acquisition while offloading execution to a proprietary engine and a senior strategist. This case study follows a representative mid-market B2B SaaS company that replaced an underperforming agency with groas's DWY model, cut cost per lead meaningfully within 90 days, and improved qualified lead rates over six months, all without hiring a single new team member or giving up ownership of their go-to-market strategy. The lesson is specific: the gap between what most agencies deliver and what an in-house team needs is not about effort or talent. It is structural. And the DWY model exists precisely to close it.
Background: The In-House Team That Was Doing Too Much
The company fits a pattern that most B2B SaaS marketers will recognize. Mid-market product, strong positioning in its category, around $40K per month in Google Ads spend across Search and a handful of Demand Gen campaigns. The marketing team was three people: a VP of Marketing, a growth marketer who owned paid channels, and a content lead. Google Ads was the primary paid acquisition channel, driving the majority of inbound demo requests.
For the past 18 months, an external agency managed their Google Ads account. The agency was professional. Reports came on time. Calls happened monthly. But the reports read like recaps, not strategy documents. When CPL rose quarter over quarter, the agency attributed it to "market conditions" and "increased competition" without offering a concrete response plan.
What The Team Was Being Told Versus What The Data Showed
The agency's narrative was that impression share was holding, click-through rates were stable, and conversion volume was "within expected range." What the growth marketer saw in the CRM told a different story. Demo requests were up slightly in raw count, but the percentage that converted to qualified pipeline had dropped. More leads were coming in from broad, loosely relevant queries. Sales was spending more time disqualifying than closing.
The trigger moment came during a quarterly planning meeting. The VP of Marketing asked for a breakdown of CPL by campaign intent tier and the agency could not produce it. That single gap exposed a deeper problem: the agency was managing the account, but nobody was owning the strategy.
The Problem: Agency Execution Without Strategic Ownership
When the in-house team ran a proper audit of the account (something they had been putting off because the agency was supposed to handle it), the findings were not shocking. They were typical. And that is what made them frustrating.
What The Account Audit Revealed
Broad match keywords had been added over time with no corresponding negative keyword governance. Informational queries like "what is [product category]" and "how does [feature] work" were generating clicks that never had a realistic chance of converting into a demo request. Bidding targets had been set during onboarding and left largely untouched. The tROAS target was inherited from a previous campaign structure and bore no relationship to the company's actual unit economics or sales cycle.
Ad groups overlapped significantly. Multiple campaigns were competing against each other for the same search terms, inflating costs without expanding reach. Landing pages were generic and had not been updated since launch.
The Real Issue Was Structural, Not Personal
The agency was not incompetent. They were operating within the constraints that most agencies face: too many accounts per media buyer, no proprietary execution layer, and a business model that rewards retention over performance. The account got enough attention to avoid catastrophe but never enough to unlock real improvement.
This is a pattern that extends well beyond one company. The growth marketer knew what needed to change but did not have the bandwidth to execute daily optimization across dozens of campaigns while also owning strategy, reporting, and stakeholder communication. Hiring a dedicated PPC specialist was discussed and shelved. The budget was there for one role, not two, and even one experienced hire would still be limited by the hours in a week and the tools available.
The team needed a model where they retained strategic control but stopped being the bottleneck on execution.
The Decision: Done-With-You Instead Of Full Handoff Or Full DIY
The team evaluated three paths: hire a new agency, bring execution fully in-house, or find a model that split the difference without compromising on either side.
A new agency carried the same structural risk as the old one. The team had already learned that good communication does not guarantee good execution. Going fully in-house meant the growth marketer would spend 80 percent of their time inside the Google Ads interface, which was not where the VP of Marketing wanted their only paid channel specialist spending their days.
groas's Done-With-You model fit because it was explicitly designed for this exact gap. The proprietary engine, trained on over $500 billion in profitable ad spend, took over the execution layer: campaign structure, bidding adjustments, negative keyword governance, and real-time optimization. A senior strategist worked alongside the in-house team, providing recommendations, flagging issues, and running a strategy call every other week. The growth marketer stayed in the driver's seat on offer positioning, ICP alignment, and budget allocation.
What Made The Transition Low-Risk
Onboarding cost $0. There was no long-term contract. The arrangement was month-to-month, which meant groas had to earn the next month every month. The team could evaluate performance on a rolling basis without being locked in.
This stood in sharp contrast to their previous agency relationship, which had included the kind of long-term commitment and onboarding costs that make switching feel expensive even when staying is clearly worse.
The Execution Changes That Moved CPL
Within the first two weeks, the groas strategist and engine made a set of structural changes that the in-house team had identified as necessary but never had time to implement.
Campaign Restructure Around Buyer Intent
The existing campaign structure had grown organically over 18 months, with ad groups added reactively as new features launched or new verticals were targeted. The engine collapsed overlapping ad groups, rebuilt campaign architecture around buyer intent signals (high-intent demo queries separated cleanly from mid-funnel research queries), and eliminated internal competition for the same search terms.
This alone changed the cost distribution significantly. Budget stopped leaking into low-intent impressions and reallocated toward queries with demonstrated conversion potential.
Bidding Goal Correction
The strategist identified that the account's tROAS target was misaligned with the actual sales cycle. For a B2B SaaS product with a 30-plus day sales cycle and an average contract value that justified a higher CPL, optimizing for tROAS at the click level was pushing the algorithm toward low-value conversions. The team agreed to switch to tCPA with targets set based on actual pipeline data from the CRM, not Google's default attribution.
This is a common mistake in B2B SaaS Google Ads accounts. The right bidding strategy depends on how your business actually measures success, and most agencies default to what Google recommends rather than what maps to revenue.
Negative Keyword Governance
The groas engine built a negative keyword library within the first week, systematically excluding informational queries, competitor-name searches that were not strategically targeted, and long-tail variations that historically generated clicks but never pipeline. This was not a one-time cleanup. The engine updated the negative list continuously as new search term data came in.
Landing Page Recommendations
During the first bi-weekly strategy call, the groas strategist flagged that the primary landing pages had no message match with the highest-performing ad copy. The in-house team updated the landing pages based on specific recommendations, including headline alignment, form field reduction, and adding social proof relevant to the ICP segments driving the most qualified leads.
The Results: 90 Days In And 6 Months In
By day 90, the trajectory was clear. CPL had dropped meaningfully compared to the previous quarter, and more importantly, the composition of leads had shifted. The qualified lead rate, measured by the percentage of demo requests that sales accepted into pipeline, improved alongside volume. The team was generating more leads that actually mattered.
What Changed Beyond The Numbers
The growth marketer got 15 to 20 hours per week back. That time went into conversion rate optimization on the website, building out a content strategy to support paid campaigns, and deeper CRM analysis that informed targeting decisions. The VP of Marketing stopped fielding questions about why CPL was rising and started having conversations about scaling budget.
By month six, the team had increased spend by roughly 30 percent without degrading CPL or lead quality. The engine scaled execution as budget grew, and the strategist adjusted targets and structure to match. No new hires were needed. No additional tools were purchased.
Pipeline Attribution
Marketing and sales aligned on a shared attribution model during the transition. The groas strategist helped define which conversion actions in Google Ads mapped to which pipeline stages in the CRM, eliminating the ambiguity that had plagued the previous agency relationship. For the first time, the VP of Marketing could show the CEO a clean line from ad spend to pipeline to closed revenue.
The Lesson: Control And Execution Do Not Have To Come From The Same Place
The insight that makes this story transferable is not that the old agency was bad. It is that the agency model itself creates a structural limitation. One media buyer, a fixed number of hours per week, no proprietary execution layer, and a business incentive to retain the account rather than transform it.
The DWY model is not a compromise between agency and in-house. It is a distinct category. Your team keeps strategic ownership: the decisions about offers, positioning, audience, and budget stay with the people who know the business. The groas engine handles the execution that would otherwise consume your best person's week. A senior strategist provides the strategic depth that most agencies promise and few deliver, including insights drawn from direct proximity to Google's internal teams.
How To Know If Your Current Setup Is An Execution Problem Or A Strategy Problem
If your team knows what needs to happen in the account but does not have the bandwidth to do it, that is an execution problem. DWY solves it directly. If your team does not know what should happen and does not want to be involved in figuring it out, that is a strategy-and-execution problem, and DFY is the right answer. Many teams start on DWY and move to DFY as the founder's attention shifts elsewhere. The groas strategist flags the right time for that conversation.
Who This Applies To
If you are running Google Ads in-house or through an agency, your account is already live, and you have someone who understands the channel well enough to make strategic calls, DWY was built for you. You keep control. The engine and strategist handle the rest. There is no onboarding fee, no long-term contract, and the first conversation is about your account, not a sales pitch.
The gap between what you are paying your current agency and what you are getting for it tends to show up in the numbers within a few weeks. groas puts a senior strategist on top of an engine trained on hundreds of billions in ad spend, so execution does not stop when a human runs out of hours.
If this sounds like your situation, get started with groas DWY today. For larger accounts, apply and the team will walk through your account on the call.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is A Done-With-You Google Ads Model For B2B SaaS?
A Done-With-You (DWY) Google Ads model is a hybrid approach where your in-house team retains strategic control over positioning, offers, and budget decisions while a proprietary engine and a dedicated senior strategist handle day-to-day execution. This includes campaign structure, bidding optimization, negative keyword governance, and performance analysis. It is designed for teams that know their Google Ads account well enough to make strategic calls but do not have the bandwidth to run execution at the level required to cut CPL and improve lead quality consistently. groas's DWY model pairs an engine trained on over $500 billion in profitable ad spend with a senior strategist who works alongside your team on a structured cadence.
How Is DWY Different From Hiring A Traditional Google Ads Agency?
A traditional agency assigns a media buyer who splits time across many accounts, operates within fixed business hours, and typically lacks a proprietary execution layer. DWY with groas replaces that model entirely. The engine runs optimization around the clock, while a senior strategist provides strategic depth on a bi-weekly call cadence. Your team keeps ownership of strategy. There is no onboarding fee, no long-term contract, and groas earns the next month by performing. The structural difference is that execution scales with the engine rather than being capped at what one person can get through in a week.
Can I Keep Strategic Control Of My Google Ads While Using A Managed Engine?
Yes, and that is exactly what the DWY model is designed for. Your in-house team makes decisions about ICP targeting, offer positioning, budget allocation, and go-to-market alignment. The groas engine and strategist handle campaign structure, bidding, negative keyword management, and real-time optimization. You stay in the driver's seat on everything that requires business context while removing the execution bottleneck that prevents most in-house teams from optimizing at the speed and scale their accounts need.
How Long Does It Take To See CPL Improvements With A DWY Google Ads Setup?
Most teams running B2B SaaS accounts see meaningful trajectory changes within the first 30 to 60 days. Structural fixes like collapsing overlapping ad groups, correcting bidding targets, and building a negative keyword library tend to show impact quickly. Deeper improvements in lead quality and pipeline conversion rates often take 60 to 90 days as the engine accumulates enough data to optimize against your specific funnel metrics. groas onboarding is instant and costs $0, so there is no ramp-up delay before the engine starts working on your account.
What Happens If I Want To Switch From DWY To Fully Managed (DFY)?
Many teams start on DWY and upgrade to DFY as they scale or as the founder's attention shifts to other priorities. With groas, the strategist monitors whether your team is getting stretched and flags the right time for that conversation. DFY means groas owns your Google Ads end-to-end, including landing pages, offers, and strategy. The transition is seamless because the engine and strategist already know your account. If you are unsure which model fits, the guidance is to apply for DFY and groas will figure out the right plan on the call.
Is The DWY Model Only For B2B SaaS Companies?
No. While this case study follows a B2B SaaS company, the DWY model works across industries. Any business that has someone in-house who understands Google Ads, is already running campaigns, and wants to keep strategic control while improving execution is a fit. The engine is trained on over $500 billion in profitable ad spend across a wide range of verticals. What matters is that your team is willing to act on the strategist's recommendations and stay engaged on the strategy side.
What Does The groas Strategist Actually Do In A DWY Engagement?
The groas strategist provides a weekly report on exactly what was done in the account, runs a strategy call every other week, and delivers exclusive insights including policy support and competitor analysis drawn from groas's internal team. They review landing pages, flag structural issues, recommend bidding changes based on your actual business data, and help align your Google Ads execution with your pipeline goals. They are not a project manager reading dashboards. They are a senior practitioner who works alongside your team to make strategic decisions that the engine then executes.
How Do I Know If My Problem Is Execution Or Strategy?
If your team knows what should happen in the account but does not have the hours or tools to implement it at scale, that is an execution problem, and DWY solves it directly. If your team does not know what changes to make and does not want to be involved in the decision-making, that is a combined strategy-and-execution problem, and DFY is the better fit. A good diagnostic question: can your growth marketer articulate what the account needs but consistently deprioritizes it because of bandwidth? If yes, DWY with groas gives them the leverage to focus on strategy while the engine and strategist handle the rest.
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