Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
Let me tell you about the most frustrating client meeting I've ever had. The marketing manager was pulling up three different spreadsheets, switching between Google Analytics, Google Ads, and SEMrush, trying to explain why their Q3 performance was "complicated." The CEO kept asking simple questions: "Are we getting more customers from search? Which keywords are actually profitable? Should we increase the budget?"
Twenty minutes in, nobody had clear answers. The SEO data said one thing, PPC showed another, and the attribution was a complete mess. Sound familiar?
This is the reality for most businesses running both SEO and PPC campaigns. Marketing teams are drowning in data but starving for insights. They're spending more time creating reports than actually optimizing campaigns.
After working with dozens of SaaS startups and e-commerce stores, I've learned that the real problem isn't the data—it's how we present it. When you separate SEO and PPC metrics, you're missing the bigger picture of your search marketing performance.
Here's what you'll learn from my approach to unified growth tracking:
Why traditional reporting creates more confusion than clarity
The exact dashboard structure I use for all my clients
How to identify which channel gets credit (and why it matters)
The simple framework that ended my clients' data arguments
Why most SaaS acquisition strategies fail without unified reporting
Industry Reality
What every marketing team struggles with
Walk into any marketing department and you'll find the same scene: separate teams managing separate channels with separate tools, creating separate reports that tell separate stories.
The traditional approach looks like this:
SEO team: Tracks organic traffic, keyword rankings, and content performance in tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs
PPC team: Monitors ad spend, cost-per-click, and conversion rates in Google Ads and Facebook
Analytics team: Tries to make sense of it all in Google Analytics or similar platforms
Management: Gets frustrated trying to understand which investments are actually working
This siloed approach exists because that's how the tools are built. Google Ads shows you PPC performance. SEO tools show you organic performance. But your customers don't think in channels—they think in problems and solutions.
The result? Marketing teams spend 60% of their time creating reports and only 40% actually improving performance. Every monthly review becomes a blame game: "SEO says brand searches are up because of content, but PPC claims it's their brand campaigns driving awareness."
Most businesses try to solve this with more tools—buying expensive attribution platforms or custom dashboards. But complexity isn't the answer. What you need is a simple framework that shows the truth: how your entire search marketing strategy is performing as one unified system.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The breaking point came with a B2B SaaS client who was spending $50K monthly between SEO content and Google Ads. Their head of marketing was pulling her hair out because the board kept asking which channel was more profitable, but she couldn't give a straight answer.
The SEO agency reported that organic traffic was up 150% year-over-year and organic conversions had doubled. The PPC agency showed that Google Ads was generating leads at a lower cost-per-acquisition than the previous quarter. Both teams claimed success, but the CEO wasn't seeing proportional revenue growth.
Here's what was actually happening: The PPC campaigns were bidding on branded keywords that the SEO was already ranking for organically. Users would see the paid ad, click it, then bounce and return through organic search to convert. The attribution models were giving PPC credit for conversions that might have happened organically anyway.
Meanwhile, the SEO content was targeting bottom-funnel keywords that generated high-intent traffic, but those same keywords had expensive PPC competition. The company was literally competing against itself and inflating their customer acquisition costs.
I tried the standard approach first: implementing better attribution modeling in Google Analytics. We set up custom conversions, adjusted the attribution windows, and created cross-channel segments. The data got more accurate, but the insights didn't get clearer. If anything, the reports became more complex.
That's when I realized the problem wasn't technical—it was philosophical. We were treating SEO and PPC as separate entities when they're really two parts of the same search marketing engine.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Instead of trying to attribute every conversion to a specific channel, I created what I call the "Search Marketing Unified Dashboard." This approach treats SEO and PPC as complementary parts of a single system rather than competing channels.
Here's the exact framework I implemented:
Step 1: Combined Keyword Performance View
I pulled all keyword data—both organic rankings and paid positions—into one spreadsheet. For each keyword, we tracked:
Total search volume
Organic position and traffic
Paid position and traffic (if running ads)
Combined conversion rate
Total cost (ad spend + content creation)
Step 2: Search Visibility Index
Instead of separate metrics, I created a single "Search Visibility" score for each keyword that combined organic rankings and paid presence. This showed us exactly where we dominated search results and where competitors were beating us.
Step 3: True Cost Per Acquisition
The game-changer was calculating the real cost per customer by combining both channels. For keywords where we ranked organically AND ran ads, I calculated what would happen if we turned off PPC. If organic traffic compensated for 70% of the paid traffic, then only 30% of the PPC cost was truly incremental.
Step 4: Quarterly Channel Allocation
Based on this unified data, I created a simple decision matrix:
High organic ranking + high-intent keywords: Turn off PPC and invest in content
Low organic ranking + profitable PPC: Increase ad spend while building SEO
Competitive keywords: Run both to dominate the entire search results page
Low-performing keywords: Eliminate from both channels
The dashboard became a single source of truth that showed search marketing performance as one integrated system. Instead of channel wars, the team started collaborating on which keywords deserved more investment across both SEO and PPC.
True ROI
Calculate the real cost per customer by combining SEO content costs with PPC spend for accurate profitability analysis.
Search Domination
Identify opportunities where running both SEO and PPC for the same keywords creates total search result page ownership.
Channel Allocation
Use data-driven rules to decide when to invest in organic content versus paid ads for maximum efficiency.
Unified Metrics
Track search visibility as one score combining organic rankings and paid positions rather than separate channel metrics.
The results were immediate and dramatic. Within the first month, we identified $15K in monthly PPC waste on keywords where organic rankings were strong enough to maintain traffic without ads.
But the bigger win was strategic clarity. The marketing team went from spending 3 days creating monthly reports to having real-time insights in a single dashboard. Board meetings became focused on growth opportunities instead of channel attribution debates.
Six months later, the company's search marketing efficiency improved by 40%. They were getting 40% more customers from the same total budget by optimizing the entire search funnel rather than individual channels.
The most surprising result? Both SEO and PPC performance improved when managed as one system. The SEO team started targeting keywords that supported PPC campaigns, and the PPC team began protecting organic content investments by avoiding cannibalizing keywords.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons from implementing unified search marketing reporting across multiple client projects:
Attribution is less important than optimization: Stop arguing about which channel gets credit and start optimizing the entire search experience.
Keyword-level analysis beats channel-level reporting: The real insights come from understanding performance at the search term level, not the traffic source level.
Unified budgets drive better decisions: When SEO and PPC teams share budget responsibility, they naturally collaborate instead of compete.
Simplicity scales better than complexity: One clear dashboard beats ten detailed reports when it comes to driving action.
Cross-channel optimization unlocks hidden ROI: The biggest wins come from optimizing the interaction between SEO and PPC, not perfecting individual channels.
Quarterly reviews prevent daily distractions: Set channel allocation rules quarterly and focus on execution daily rather than constantly second-guessing strategy.
Search domination beats channel perfection: Owning 80% of search results for key terms generates more business than achieving 100% efficiency in one channel.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups specifically:
Track trial signups and paid conversions separately across both channels
Focus unified reporting on customer lifetime value, not just acquisition cost
Use search visibility to dominate category-defining keywords early
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores specifically:
Include product-level profitability in unified keyword analysis
Track seasonal performance patterns across both channels
Optimize for total revenue per search term, not traffic volume