The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

The “Boomerang Method” Remarketing Strategy for SaaS

by 

Jessica Boisvenue

Last updated: October 21st, 2025

Remarketing used to be easy, but it’s now much more challenging to get predictable results as cookies are being depreciated, privacy laws are becoming stricter, and ad platforms, web browsers, and devices are limiting tracking.

While this is good news for the consumer, marketers are finding it increasingly challenging to generate a predictable ROI from remarketing efforts.

We’re still using remarketing to produce a positive ROI for our clients, though there’s less margin for error. 

In this post, we’ll outline the exact remarketing strategy we’re implementing for clients and common mistakes to avoid.   

New Remarketing Restrictions And Challenges 

A few years ago, you could easily collect data on users with third party cookies and then show them ads based on their behavior and demographic characteristics. 

For example, you could easily set up a remarketing campaign for users that frequently visited multiple competitors’ sites. You could also track specific products they viewed and then show them a product tailored specifically to their interests.

These remarketing ads were very effective because you could rely on the ad platforms to use that data to show users highly relevant ads.  

Today, privacy laws are becoming stricter and you can’t use cookies to track users across the internet.

Without data on a user’s demographics or online behaviors, advertisers are forced to show ads that are more vague and therefore less relevant to users.  

As a result, the ads tend to have a lower conversion rate, making the entire remarketing strategy less effective. 

Is Remarketing Still Worth It For B2B SaaS Companies? 

Many SaaS marketers are experiencing either a very low or negative ROI from their remarketing campaigns due to recent changes, so questioning the viability of remarketing is certainly valid. 

Here at Powered By Search, we’re still using remarketing campaigns in our clients’ strategies and seeing a positive ROI. For example, this is a campaign we recently ran that generated…

While it’s true that the ROI has decreased, we’ve found that it is still an easy option to increase touchpoints with your buyers across the buyer journey. 

However, there’s certainly less margin for error.

If you’re experiencing a negative or very minimal positive ROI from your remarketing efforts, it’s more likely that there are some gaps in your remarketing strategy. 

These gaps may not have been apparent before, but the new privacy changes have brought them to light.

Common B2B SaaS Remarketing Mistakes

Promoting A Generic Lead Magnet/Offer

Most information a prospect needs is available online for free, so a common reason SaaS companies struggle to attract and convert leads is because the offer itself is too generic.

For example, an ultimate guide isn’t a compelling offer because users can likely find the same information elsewhere online. 

We have a separate guide to creating a compelling lead magnet, but there are two questions you can ask to evaluate the value of your lead magnet:

• Can this resource be found elsewhere online?
• To what degree will this resource impact the user?

Another problem is that prospects may not understand the value of the lead magnet. 

For example, a free trial isn’t a very compelling remarketing offer if the prospect doesn’t understand how the software could solve their problem.

Additionally, a free trial indicates that the prospect will eventually have to purchase the product to receive lasting value, so few will take up the offer.

Below we’ll discuss how we create more compelling offers for B2B SaaS companies.

A Weak Nurture Funnel

Rather than relying exclusively on paid remarketing, optimize your nurture funnel so that you don’t have to show as many remarketing ads to win a conversion.

Email nurture sequences are a critical aspect of building a nurture funnel, and after multiple tests, we’ve found that the 14 day email nurture sequence is most effective.

Here’s an overview of the outline of that template that includes:

• Asset Delivery: This is sent when the prospect downloads the lead magnet and it delivers the asset and introduces them to your solution.
• 3 Hot Button Emails: These emails are sent in quick succession following the asset delivery and each one addresses how the solution solves one of the top three pain points your customers face.
• Probing Question: This email is a single sentence sent several days following the last hot button email and asks if the prospect is still interested in solving their pain point.
• The Breakup: This email acknowledges that now isn’t the right moment to continue the conversation, but they’re always welcome to reach out at any time.

Another way to improve the efficiency of your nurture funnel is creating multiple CTAs for each touchpoint to ensure prospects always have a next step that fits their stage in the buyer journey. 

For example, here at Powered By Search, the CTA for each blog post includes a handful of different options. If you’re a first-time reader, you might not be ready to schedule a call. Instead, you probably want to read more about our philosophies first. So providing a handful of different CTAs ensures each prospect has a logical next step.

Lack of Segmentation

As remarketing now relies entirely on first party data you collect, you might not have as much information on a prospect and many marketers ultimately group large buckets of prospects together and retarget them with generic messaging.

Generic messaging likely won’t resonate with prospects, and you’ll lose right fit prospects.

The solution to this problem is to first ensure you’re using very specific lead magnets. Then, create more detailed segmentation based on the pain point addressed by that lead magnet they engaged with and any other data you’ve collected. 

Long Lead Forms

In an effort to compensate for the lack of data collected by third party tracking, some SaaS marketers create extensive lead forms that ask for too much information at once.

As a result, many right-fit prospects will abandon the form altogether, resulting in low conversion rates.

Instead, we take a progressive profiling approach. The first download might only require name, email address, and company size. After routing the prospect into the nurture sequence, we can gather more information on their company and pain point.

Our Step By Step Remarketing Process 

This is the step by step process we use with our clients to set up and run effective remarketing campaigns.

1. Evaluating Site Traffic And List Size 

We typically recommend remarketing to all of our clients with sufficient list sizes as it’s an easy win if you use the proven process outlined below.

Google recommends that users have a minimum of 100 monthly site visitors to run display remarketing ads and one thousand monthly site visitors to run search and discovery remarketing ads. However, we’ve found that you really need a minimum of a few thousand site visitors for remarketing to be an effective channel.

A good rule of thumb is to always double any recommendations set by Google.

For remarketing lists, Google requires at least 1,000 emails, though we recommend having a minimum of 2,000. Many of the people on these lists are cold, so most of them won’t see your ads. 

If a company meets these requirements, then we determine whether or not we can split the list into different stages. There are a few different ways we can split a list. 

First, you can segment your list by website visit date (e.g., the past 30, 60, or 90 days). 

Retarget recent website visitors (e.g., those who visited within the last 30 days) with more aggressive demo pitches and colder leads (e.g., those who visited the website 60 or 90 days ago) with social proof, checklists, and other resources to bring them back into your ecosystem.

You can also segment your list by the types of pages the prospects visited. For example, leads that visited pricing pages, comparison pages, and product feature pages often have higher intent than those who visited a “Best 10 (Category) Tools” page. 

Both have purchase intent, but the former has higher purchase intent than the latter.

If you have substantial traffic, you can segment your list with a combination of website visitor timeframe and the type of page visited. Detailed segmentation will allow you to improve targeting accuracy, but if you don’t have enough traffic volume, you won’t have a sufficient list size to run an effective campaign.

2. Create An Offer

Earlier we discussed the importance of creating a compelling offer, but what is a compelling offer for B2B SaaS?

First, here are some examples of common B2B SaaS offers that aren’t very compelling:

• Scheduling a demo for a product
• A guide when the same information is freely available elsewhere 
• A calculator that is freely available elsewhere

Instead, make sure your offer meets the following criteria:

• The value is easy to understand: A free trial might be valuable, but if the audience doesn’t understand how your product works or how it will help them, it probably won’t perform very well. (And, there’s the added friction that the value will disappear if they don’t eventually hand over money). 
• The value is instant: The faster users receive value, the more likely they are to take action and click.
• The value is exclusive and substantial: Guides and calculators often don’t work because users can find the same information elsewhere for free. Additionally, the level of value is also important. For example, is the offer going to help them save some time or save the organization thousands of dollars? 

Now that you know the basic criteria for what a compelling offer looks like, here are a few examples of compelling offers in B2B SaaS:

• Freemium products: For example, if you have a keyword research tool, you could make the remarketing offer 10 free keyword research reports. 
• Exclusive (valuable) reports: Offering a Gartner report is compelling because they are genuinely difficult to get a hold of, and they offer high value. However, keep in mind that the report must actually contain high value information. 
• Tools based on proprietary data: Create a calculator based on proprietary data that answers a hard question for your audience. For example, Favikon’s Fair Pricing Calculator allows prospects to estimate influencer pricing. The team leveraged proprietary influencer pricing data to create the calculator and now it provides useful benchmarks for influencer marketers (their ICP).
• Micro tools: Even if you don’t have proprietary data, you can still create a micro tool for your ICP. For example, here at Powered by Search, we created a free tool that allows brands to discover their brand presence in ChatGPT.

These offers don’t immediately ask people to book a demo. Instead, they’re designed to provide value while also surfacing a pain point. This touchpoint builds trust and organically moves prospects down the buyer journey. 

3. Iterate

A mistake B2B SaaS companies often make is setting and forgetting campaigns. If you aren’t running tests you won’t discover opportunities to improve campaign performance and your audience will eventually become fatigued from seeing the same ads repeatedly, making them less effective.  

Therefore, we test different offers, imagery, and supplemental text for each remarketing campaign.

We also segment audiences and test different ads and offers to different segments.

How To Take The Next Steps

Paid search remarketing can still work, but the strategy must be executed methodically. The step by step process outlined above is the approach we’ve found most effective, though there are a lot of variables within the strategy that impact performance.

For example, the type of offer, the ad copy, and even the audience segmentation all impact performance. 

If you want to reduce the time and resources spent testing different variations, reach out to the Powered By Search team today. We can review your current campaigns, identify opportunities, and help you implement an effective remarketing strategy. 

Our team of experts has years of experience implementing paid search remarketing campaigns for dozens of SaaS companies, and we can help you achieve better results in less time.