Optimising an SEA budget: from siloed fragmentation to unified performance.
1. Context and Stakes
Our client is a major player in the European SaaS sector, specialising in ERP and finance management solutions. With an annual Search Ads investment of €3.5 million, the company had considerable firepower, but its effectiveness was held back by a complex internal organisation.
When we arrived, the account was fragmented across several Business Units (BUs). Each entity managed its own campaigns, budgets and objectives independently.
2. The Strategic Challenge
This decentralised management created three major problems that eroded overall ROI:
- Semantic cannibalisation: The different BUs were buying the same keywords, artificially inflating internal bids and needlessly wasting budget.
- Broad Match drift: Excessive reliance on broad queries (Broad Match) generated a large share of off-target traffic, polluting the sales funnel.
- Data opacity: Without a consolidated view, it was impossible to reallocate budgets in real time towards the most profitable SaaS products.
3. The Million Marketing Solution
Our intervention centred on a deep structural overhaul, drawing on the operational rigour we developed at the Tech giants.
A. Establishing unified budget governance
We broke down the silos by setting up a consolidated account structure. By building a real-time steering dashboard, we gave marketing leadership full visibility over cross-performance. This made it possible to allocate budget dynamically towards the market segments with the lowest cost per acquisition (CPA).
B. Semantic clean-up and intent audit
We carried out an exhaustive audit of keyword match types.
- Decisive action: Suspension of underperforming Broad Match segments that were capturing informational rather than transactional traffic.
- Refocus: Migration to a Phrase Match and Exact Match strategy driven by real conversion data, ensuring every euro invested targets a precise purchase intent.
C. Deploying innovation (Performance Max & audience signals)
To prepare the future of the SaaS business, we architected Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. Rather than letting the algorithm navigate blind, we fed it qualified first-party audience signals (anonymised CRM data) to steer Google’s AI towards high-value financial decision-maker profiles.
4. Results Achieved
Million Marketing’s approach turned this mature account into an agile acquisition machine:
- Traffic quality: An immediate improvement in lead relevance thanks to the elimination of polluting queries.
- Budget efficiency: An end to internal cannibalisation, making it possible to reinvest 15% of the budget in untapped growth segments.
- Scalability: A solid, automated foundation ready to accelerate growth in 2026 without increasing the management workload.
Methodological note: This case illustrates our ability to manage complex, multi-product budgets while bringing the steering clarity that mid-caps and large accounts need.
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