How Maxma Helped A SaaS Client Achieve Full-funnel Attribution For The First Time

The Brand

A San Francisco Bay Area-based SaaS company with over $100M ARR, serving a global customer base ranging from SMBs to enterprises with workflow solutions.

The Challenge

The client has traditionally relied on Google Analytics attribution and ad platforms’ pixel tracking to assess the performance of their $10M–$20M annual paid advertising spend.

Their budget was concentrated on search because it appeared to be the most effective channel based on their existing attribution. They tested other channels such as YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but their value has been hard to justify.

The Head of Marketing suspected that their attribution model was flawed, inflating search’s effectiveness while failing to capture the impact of top-of-funnel channels. They needed to uncover the true value of search and other channels.

The Maxma Marketing Mix Model Solution

The client used Maxma’s proprietary next-generation Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) solution to measure the incremental impact of their entire paid advertising portfolio on driving MQLs for the past one year, addressing the tracking limitations that rendered traditional attribution ineffective.

Key Findings

Branded Search Inefficiency

Maxma’s solution revealed that branded search was not delivering enough incremental MQLs for its cost. It proved that many conversions attributed to branded search by traditional methods could have been captured organically without ads or should be reassigned to top-of-funnel channels that actually drive traffic to search.

What’s worse, branded search efficiency consistently declined over the past year. A likely reason is that as the client’s customer base grew, more customers began using branded search as an entry point to the product. Meanwhile, Google’s ads-serving failed to exclude these existing customers, diluting the overall efficiency of branded search.

Profitable Investment in Top-of-Funnel Channels

In contrast, top-of-funnel channels like YouTube and LinkedIn demonstrated significantly lower costs per incremental MQL and higher ROAS. This included tactics driving awareness and consideration. Despite not being “performance-focused”, these channels proved to be more efficient in driving incremental MQLs than previously assumed.

From Findings to Action

Maxma’s solution identified a multi-million-dollar opportunity to reallocate budgets from search to top-of-funnel channels, driving more MQL and increasing ROI without increasing overall spend.

However, executing such a significant budget shift required a deliberate and methodical approach, and Maxma is supporting the client at every step.

Validating Risky Budget Adjustments with Geo-Based Experiments

Reducing branded search spend was perceived as risky, given its historical importance. To address this, Maxma provides complementary geo-based experimentation (a.k.a Incrementality Testing) to help the client further verify the insight before rolling out.

Precise Insights for Actionable Optimization

To scale the client’s top-of-funnel channels effectively, Maxma’s granular MMM insights and response curves helped determine at tactic-level where to allocate additional budget and how much to spend before reaching saturation.

Seeding and Scaling Winning Tactics

Maxma’s response curve insights also revealed that some currently efficient channels and tactics had limited room to scale. This highlighted the need for a diversified test portfolio to identify new, unsaturated tactics and audiences.

Maxma’s unique ongoing MMM equips the client with the tools to adopt a fast, iterative test-and-learn approach—enabling them to measure new tactics every week, identify successful ones to scale, and monitor for saturation over time.

Broader Implications

This case highlights how Maxma solves a common challenge faced by SaaS marketers - traditional attribution favors more trackable bottom-funnel channels, often leading to over-investment in channels like branded search while undervaluing top-of-funnel channels that generate new demand.

SaaS businesses are particularly prone to this issue because their buyers often engage across multiple devices, making conventional tracking-based attribution even less reliable. Maxma’s approach eliminates tracking biases, putting all channels on an equal playing field and assigning credit based on true incremental impact rather than ease-of-tracking.