A B2B SaaS founder came to me ready to put their first real budget into Search. They were doing about €1,000 a month and wanted to scale it with Google Ads.
So before touching the account, I opened Keyword Planner and checked the actual demand for what they sell.
There was almost none.
The part most people miss
Search ads do not create demand. They capture it (the distinction between demand generation and demand capture). If barely anyone is searching for your category, your keywords sit flagged "low search volume" and your ads never even run.
Paid search is a tax you pay on demand that already exists. At their stage, that demand had not been built yet. Pouring budget into Search before the searches exist is just setting money on fire, with a clean dashboard to watch it burn.
What we did instead
So we killed the ads plan and did the opposite. I pulled a list of the exact buyers on LinkedIn and we went direct. DMs and calls. Manual, unscalable, and exactly right for stage one.
The sequencing that actually works at this stage:
- Check the demand first. Keyword Planner tells you in five minutes whether the searches exist. If the category is thin, no bidding strategy saves you.
- Create your first customers by hand. Targeted outreach to named accounts builds the demand, and teaches you the language those buyers actually use.
- Bring in Search once there's search. Ads scale demand that already exists, they don't manufacture it from zero.
"But won't PMax or Demand Gen build the demand?"
A fair question, and one a fellow Google Ads specialist raised when I posted this. The honest answer splits in two.
Demand Gen, fair. Its YouTube, Discover and Gmail placements are genuinely built for the top of the funnel, so it can create interest that isn't there yet. The catch is time: demand generation is a long game. You do not manufacture demand and intent for a product in a month or two, so it won't pay back inside a quarter on a shoestring.
Performance Max, I'd push back on. It is conversion harvesting, not demand creation. And here's the part that bites at zero-data stage: with no conversion history, the only way to make PMax "reach" is to loosen it with broad search themes, which is exactly when it starts pulling in junk. A beginner-stage account cannot afford to feed itself spam traffic. It poisons your conversion signal and your remarketing pools, so it quietly taxes every retargeting campaign you try to run later, too.
Then there's the budget. Dropping a whole sub-€1k into ads isn't a budget, it's a candle. Paid earns its place once you have revenue you can afford to reinvest, not when the ad spend is the revenue.
The takeaways
- Run a Keyword Planner demand check before committing a Search budget.
- "Low search volume" keywords stay inactive until traffic rises, so your ads simply don't serve.
- Early-stage go-to-market is built with outbound, not captured with ads.
- Paid search scales existing demand. It cannot create a category from silence.
- PMax harvests demand, it doesn't create it. Forcing it to "reach" at zero-data stage pulls in junk that poisons your conversion signal and remarketing pools.