70% more paid subscribers for the same ad spend
A US SaaS QR code generator. Same Google Ads spend, spring against summer 2026, with 70% more paid subscribers at 41% lower cost each.
Whose work this is
A Zero Filter Growth client. We don’t name them here. Every figure comes from the Google Ads account and the product’s own payment data.
The client
A US software company that sells a QR code generator on subscription. People search, sign up, and some of them pay. Only the last step is revenue, so that is what the account was pointed at.
What we did
- Bids. Each campaign got a target cost per acquisition set against real payment data from the product’s backend.
- Budgets. Money moved to what paid. Mobile exact match went from $1.0k to $14.7k a month.
- Structure. Separate campaigns by device and by match type, so each could be bid and judged on its own.
- Expansion. Broad match, a keyword-expansion campaign, a UK test and ad copy experiments.
- Kills. Canada desktop, Performance Max, the UK test and US desktop-only all went. They didn’t pay back.
What moved
March to May 2026 against June to August 2026, with spend flat:
- Paid subscribers up 70%
- Cost per paid subscriber down 41%, from $191 to $113
- First-payment revenue up 71%
- First-payment return on ad spend from 0.75 to 1.28
That last line is the one that matters. In spring, the first payment didn’t cover the ad cost. By summer it did, before a single renewal.
The context
This compares two back-to-back quarters, not the same months a year apart, so part of the lift may be seasonal. The spend was the same in both. What changed was where it went.
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