Go Fish Digital during the past years has worked with many software as a service (SaaS) companies on paid and organic-search campaigns and wanted to try to estimate in aggregate the amount companies spend and which spend the most. Here are some educated guesses based on public numbers gathered with online tools.

“Knowing that these companies have aggressive advertising budgets, we thought it would be interesting to take a data-based look at how much SaaS brands tend to spend on these efforts,” Chris Long, vice president of marketing at Go Fish Digital, wrote in a post. “After all, platforms like Google Ads provide marketing Directors and VPs with a channel that’s immediately built for demand generation and user acquisition.”

While Go Fish Digital marketers cannot know for certain how much these companies spend on paid advertising, there are tools that allow the agency to estimate or approximate advertising spend. For example, SEMRush provides a SaaS platform that estimates advertising keywords, traffic and costs.

The data in aggregate shows how much traffic sites were estimated to get and what the estimated annual traffic costs were:

• The average company in the dataset is estimated to spend $1,311,768 a year on Google Ads
  
• The average company gets 177,267 sessions a year from Google Ads
  
• The industries that spend the most on Google Ads are E-Signature, VoIP, Communications and Consulting

Top spending companies include:

• Adobe               $130.3 million
  
• IBM                  $  85.7 million
  
• WordStream      $  80.4 million
  
• Intuit                $  59.8 million
  
• NetSuite            $  50.1 million
  
• Onpay               $  27.8 million
  
• Biz2credit          $  23.3 million
  
• Freshworks        $  22.0 million
  
• Amplitude          $  20.8 million
  
• Docusign           $  17.0 million

Long also broke down the data into private companies — top industries including E-signatures, VoIP, Unified Communications, Consulting, and Lending.

One of the more interesting numbers pointed to average annual Google Ads costs. Cloud computing came in at No. 1 for the most popular category, spending about $2.5 million in aggregate.

When looking at the data in aggregate, Long said there were some limitations to the dataset. “These cost metrics are estimations of costs that are likely based on the company’s position in the Google Ads results and the estimated CPC (cost per click) of an individual query. As well, the data has a selection bias of those that were able to be exported from Crunchbase’s database and does not reflect every SaaS company,” he wrote.

Go Fish Digital during the past years has worked with many software as a service (SaaS) companies on paid and organic search campaigns and wanted to try to estimate in aggregate the amount companies spend and which spend the most. Here are some educated guesses based on public numbers gathered with online tools.