Industry: Legal SAAS
Platforms: Google Ads
Timeframe: 9 Months
What changed after restructuring the legal SaaS paid-media program?
Paton Digital consolidated more than 50 fragmented Google Ads campaigns into a focused structure optimized around qualified pipeline outcomes. Across the reporting period, Google Ads managed more than $4.28 million in spend and generated 1,532 sales-qualified leads, while Meta added more than 8,600 leads from approximately $1.38 million in spend.
The Challenge
A multi-billion dollar SaaS company in the legal industry spent years with inefficient Google Ads management that resulted in bloated campaign structures, wasted spend, and declining lead quality. Despite the company’s size and resources, the Google Ads account had become unnecessarily complex, with more than 50 campaigns competing against each other, fragmented keyword targeting, overlapping intent, and little strategic consolidation.
The result was an account spending millions annually while generating inconsistent lead quality and inflated acquisition costs.
The Strategy
Google Ads Optimization:
When we took over the account in November, the first priority was identifying where budget inefficiencies were occurring and rebuilding the account structure around business outcomes rather than vanity metrics.
The existing structure lacked focus. Campaigns had become fragmented over time, creating internal competition, diluted data signals, and inefficient optimization. Instead of allowing Google’s machine learning to accumulate meaningful conversion data, the account was spread too thin across dozens of campaigns with overlapping themes and inconsistent targeting strategies.
We restructured the account from the ground up.
More than 50 campaigns were consolidated into a far smaller, more strategic framework designed around high-intent search behavior and conversion quality. Redundant campaigns were eliminated, keyword targeting was tightened, budget allocation was centralized around proven performers, and bidding strategies were rebuilt to focus on downstream lead quality rather than raw conversion volume.
At the same time, significant effort went into improving the quality of traffic entering the funnel. Search intent was refined, negative keyword strategies were expanded aggressively, and campaign segmentation was rebuilt to align with actual buyer behavior inside the legal SaaS space.
The impact was substantial.
Expanding the Acquisition Engine With Meta
While Google captured existing demand, Paton Digital also used Meta to reach legal professionals earlier in the buying process and generate additional qualified pipeline.
From November 2025 through August 2026, Meta campaigns managed approximately $1.38 million in advertising spend and generated more than 8,600 leads at a blended cost of approximately $160 per lead.
Rather than relying on a single generic lead generation campaign, we developed campaigns around individual products, use cases, AI solutions, free trials, demos, and specific segments of the legal market.
This allowed us to match the message and offer to the prospect’s actual needs while continually identifying which combinations of audience, creative, product, and conversion path produced the strongest downstream lead quality.
The result was a second major acquisition channel capable of generating thousands of opportunities while supporting the demand being captured through Google Search.
Optimizing for Sales Qualified Leads, Not Cheap Leads
One of the biggest changes brought to the account was a different definition of success.
A cheap lead isn’t valuable to a multi-billion-dollar SaaS company if that person never enters the sales pipeline.
Campaign decisions were increasingly informed by deeper funnel signals rather than front-end conversion volume alone. Media performance was evaluated against demo requests, Marketing Qualified Leads, Sales Accepted Leads, Sales Qualified Leads, and other meaningful actions.
This allowed us to identify campaigns that appeared expensive based on traditional CPL metrics but produced valuable opportunities, while reducing investment in campaigns that generated inexpensive but low-quality leads.
That distinction became especially important at this scale. Even relatively small improvements in acquisition efficiency can represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in media savings when millions of dollars are being invested annually.
The Results
Google Ads:
Across the reporting period through the end of March, the account managed over $4.28 million in Google Ads spend while generating more than:
- 2,186 demo requests
- 1,532 Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
- 1,146 Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
- 1,004 Sales Accepted Leads (SALs)
More importantly, the account became significantly more efficient after the restructuring.
By consolidating campaigns and eliminating wasted spend, Paton Digital improved conversion efficiency while increasing the volume of high-quality leads entering the pipeline. Instead of spreading budget across dozens of competing campaigns, spend was concentrated into a focused structure that allowed Google’s algorithm to optimize more effectively around high-intent users.
The improvements were especially noticeable in Sales Qualified Leads, which became a primary optimization target rather than simply maximizing front-end conversions. This shift helped improve downstream lead quality and aligned paid media performance more closely with actual revenue generation.
Meta Ads, November 2025 through August 2026
- Approximately $1.38M in ad spend
- More than 8,600 leads generated
- Approximately $160 blended cost per lead
- More than 14.3 million impressions
- Nearly 194,000 link clicks
- Built scalable acquisition campaigns across demos, free trials, AI products, retargeting, and other legal SaaS solutions
Conclusion
The key drivers behind the turnaround included:
- Consolidating 50+ bloated campaigns into a streamlined, scalable structure
- Eliminating overlapping targeting and wasted spend
- Rebuilding keyword strategy around high-intent legal SaaS searches
- Improving lead quality through tighter targeting and qualification
- Aligning bidding strategies with SQL generation instead of vanity metrics
- Creating a cleaner account structure that allowed Google’s automation to perform more effectively
The biggest accomplishment wasn’t simply increasing conversion volume.
Paton Digital helped a multi-billion-dollar company rethink how paid media should operate at enterprise scale.
Google Ads went from more than 50 fragmented campaigns to a focused structure capable of allocating significant budgets around the company’s strongest opportunities. Meta developed into a major complementary acquisition channel capable of reaching legal professionals outside of active search.
Most importantly, the paid media strategy became increasingly aligned with the sales pipeline.
Instead of asking, “How many leads did advertising generate?”, the focus became, “How many qualified sales opportunities did advertising create, and what did it cost us to create them?”
That shift allowed Paton Digital to reduce inefficiency, increase qualified lead generation, and build a paid acquisition system capable of supporting a multi-billion-dollar legal SaaS company at scale.
This case demonstrates that even enterprise-level companies can suffer from poor paid media infrastructure when accounts become overcomplicated over time. By simplifying the structure, tightening targeting, and optimizing toward qualified pipeline metrics, Paton Digital transformed a bloated Google Ads account into a far more efficient and scalable acquisition engine.
In a relatively short period of time, the account evolved from an inefficient enterprise setup into a disciplined performance marketing system focused on generating high-quality legal SaaS leads at scale.
If you’re ready to transform your paid media from a cost center into a revenue generator, let’s talk.
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