Higher Logic sells community software into trade associations and member-driven orgs. When events pipeline shut down overnight, iExcel rebuilt the paid acquisition engine — six channels, one spine.
Higher Logic's category — community platforms for associations and professional societies — had spent a decade sourcing pipeline from conferences, member meetups, and in-person association shows. Then it all went dark.
When the pandemic emptied the ballrooms, the growth team needed a paid acquisition engine that could carry the number without a single lanyard on the floor. Not one channel. The whole stack — search, social, display, review-site PPC, ABM — running in lockstep, tied back to a reporting layer the CMO could actually defend.
iExcel was brought in to build it. Strategy, launch, optimization, and the attribution work underneath.
The Google Ads account had grown by accretion — years of campaigns, ad groups, and legacy keywords stacked on top of each other. Match-type sprawl, cannibalizing bids, negative keyword gaps, and a Quality Score picture that told us where the money was leaking.
We rebuilt it from the account up: campaign structure aligned to buyer intent, tight ad groups by vertical (associations vs. professional societies vs. member-driven nonprofits), a competitive search layer against category incumbents, and negatives dense enough to keep the wrong queries out.
Then the same forensic pass on Microsoft Ads — because a B2B buyer who still runs Windows in the office is a buyer nobody else is bidding on.
One channel rebuilt is a project. Six channels in lockstep — reading the same audience, the same offer, the same measurement layer — is a system. That's what got built.
Each surface earned its role. Search caught active demand. LinkedIn worked the association operator by title and industry. Meta broadened the awareness surface. Display retargeted. Capterra and GetApp — the review-site PPC layer — caught the buyer already comparing vendors.
Rebuilt account structure. Competitive search layer against category incumbents. Vertical ad groups by association type.
Launched from zero. Job-title and industry audiences aligned to the association operator persona. ABM overlay for named-account motion.
Broader awareness surface — offer-led testing, retargeting the traffic that everything else was sending. Priced to complement, not compete with, LinkedIn.
Behavior-based audiences plus a persistent retargeting layer. The channel that kept the brand present between direct-response touches.
Paid placement on the category page every association buyer visits when they start shortlisting community software. Bought the intent that had already declared itself.
Companion coverage across the second-largest B2B software directory. Same buyer, second decision surface, one integrated bid strategy.
Six paid channels, one measurement layer, one weekly read — the reason the CMO could walk into the exec meeting and defend the number without a pile of screenshots.
"The category had lived on events for a decade. The rebuild took every dollar that used to fund a booth and put it into a channel matrix that could read a buyer six ways at once."
Most paid programs skip review-site PPC. It looks small next to Google and LinkedIn on a spend chart. But the buyer on Capterra or GetApp isn't discovering the category — they've already declared they're in-market. They're comparing.
We treated Capterra and GetApp as first-class channels: bid strategy tuned to the association buyer, category and comparison placements, landing pages that met the buyer where their evaluation actually was — feature comparisons, category positioning, integration coverage.
The result was the cleanest channel-to-opportunity line in the stack. Small volumes, high intent, disproportionate influence on the revenue read.
A paid channel is only as good as the audience it targets and the page it lands on. So we worked both.
The ABM audience strategy — layered against the named-account list the sales team already worked — turned LinkedIn and Display from broad reach into a coordinated, account-targeted motion. Marketing dollars stopped chasing anonymous form-fills and started supporting named accounts already in the pipeline.
The landing page audits — page-by-page, offer-by-offer — flagged the conversion leaks: mismatched offers, weak above-the-fold hierarchy, forms that asked for the wrong things at the wrong time. Where the page couldn't be rebuilt, we told paid to route around it.
Nearly a thousand Q3 conversions across the six-channel matrix — at the tightest blended acquisition cost the paid program had ever posted, quarter over quarter.
Six paid channels running in lockstep only counts if the reporting layer underneath them holds up. The one we inherited didn't.
iExcel documented the attribution gaps — where UTMs were dropping, where a lead source was overwriting on second touch, where the CRM stopped tracking the campaign that opened the account. Then we rebuilt the reporting infrastructure the paid team actually read from every week: channel-level performance, cost-per-conversion, cohort views, and a marketing-sourced pipeline view a CFO could sign off on.
The forensic read mattered more than the pretty dashboard. When something moved, we could tell you which channel moved it — and which channel was getting credit for it that it shouldn't have been.
For B2B SaaS categories built on in-person motion — associations, professional societies, member-driven organizations — the Higher Logic engagement is the template for what happens when the ballroom goes dark.
The lesson isn't "run more paid." It's the architecture underneath the paid: six channels tuned to the same buyer, review-site PPC treated as first-class, ABM audiences overlaid on the named-account list, landing pages that don't leak conversions, and an attribution spine the CMO can actually defend.
That's the difference between paid media and a demand engine. Nearly a thousand Q3 conversions at the most efficient blended CPA the program had run to date, held up by a reporting layer that told the truth. Real numbers, defended by real data, ready for the next quarterly review.
iExcel runs paid media, review-site PPC, ABM, landing page audits, and the attribution layer that ties every channel back to pipeline.
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