Performance marketing for SaaS: nine questions before you sign
Nine questions, asked on the first call, will tell you more about a performance marketing agency than any case study deck. I write these from the agency side, which means I know exactly which ones make people shift in their seats. Ask all nine. The pattern in the answers matters more than any single response.
The money questions
- What CAC ceiling will you work to, and how did you calculate it?
The answer that should worry you is a ROAS number. Return on ad spend is a platform metric that knows nothing about your gross margin or your payback period. A good answer works backward from contribution margin and asks for your churn data before committing.
- What counts as a conversion, and where is it measured?
Worrying answer: platform-reported conversions only. If the agency’s success metric lives inside the ad account, you will get cheap conversions that never become pipeline. Ask whether their reporting reads from your CRM.
- What happens to spend in a bad week?
Worrying answer: “we let the algorithm learn.” Learning periods are real, and they are also the most convenient excuse in the industry. You want a stated rule about when spend pauses and what evidence triggers it.
The people questions
- Who touches the account daily, and what else are they running?
Worrying answer: vague. The senior person on the pitch is rarely the person in the account. Ask for the name, the seniority, and the number of other accounts that person carries.
- Who built the audit you just presented?
Worrying answer: a tool exported it. Audits assembled by software are easy to spot: generic issues, and no mention of your sales cycle or what your product actually costs. Ask them to walk through one finding and explain why it matters for your business specifically.
The process questions
- What are the first 30 days, in order?
Worrying answer: a strategy phase with no deliverable attached. You want tracking verification, an account and landing page teardown, a measurement baseline written down, and a first test live. The best agencies name what ships in week one. That level of specificity is visible in how Growthym scopes paid engagements, and it is a fair benchmark to hold other pitches against.
- If we cut paid by 30 percent in month six, what carries the pipeline?
Worrying answer: nothing yet, or a promise that organic is impossible in your category because the competition is too strong. In live US checks in September 2026, page one for “performance marketing agency for saas” included sites at domain authority 4, 12, 17, 20 and 24. Authority is a weaker barrier than the pitch usually claims, and an agency that says otherwise is protecting the retainer rather than your pipeline. You can see what a paid and organic pairing looks like over time in one of their SaaS engagements.
The failure questions
- What happens in month two?
Worrying answer: more of month one. Month one is setup and early signal. Month two is where most engagements quietly stall, because the easy wins are gone and the real work starts. You want to hear about creative volume and what they plan to kill.
- We miss the CAC target for a full month. What do you do?
Worrying answer: a request for more budget or more time. A strong answer names the diagnostic sequence: check whether volume, conversion rate, deal value or lead quality moved, then say which lever they pull first and who approves it. Ask what they have killed in the past, and listen for whether they can describe a failure without blaming the client’s product.
Two answers deserve attention beyond the rest. The CAC calculation tells you whether the agency thinks in business terms or platform terms. The month-two answer tells you whether they have run long engagements or only good first months.
Before your next agency call, write your own CAC ceiling on a single line, using your gross margin and the payback period your board expects. Open the call with it. Any agency that cannot respond in your numbers rather than theirs has told you what you needed to know in the first five minutes.
