Nord LuceCase Study: Jama Software
From Form Fills to Pipeline: Four Years of Paid Search at Jama Software
If your ads bring in leads your sales team ignores, this is how I fixed that at Jama Software. The ad account learned to bid on what sales did next instead of on form fills, and over four years paid search opportunities rose 190%. You'll see how ad clicks were tied to sales stages, the tracking leaks I had to fix, and a test that won on cost but lost on sales.
What this shows
- Paid search
- Conversion tracking
- CRM data
- Testing
Related servicesDigital Advertising Tracking and Analytics
- Company
- Jama Software, B2B requirements management software
- My role
- Senior Digital Marketing Manager, April 2021 to April 2026. I owned paid search and SEO strategy, working with an agency partner and Jama's marketing operations and sales teams.
- Budget
- About $2M a year in paid media
Fiscal 2022 to fiscal 2025, from paid search
The problem
Cheap Leads That Sales Didn't Want
When I joined, the account was set up to win form fills. Google was told that a white paper download and a demo request were worth roughly the same thing, so it found plenty of the cheaper one. Cost per lead looked fine. Sales saw a pile of leads that never booked a meeting.
That's a common trap in any business with a long sales cycle. The ad platform can only optimize toward what you tell it counts. If you tell it a form fill counts, it will get you form fills.
What I changed
Bidding Learned from What Sales Did Next
- Ad click
- New lead
- Qualified lead
- Booked meeting
- Sales opportunity
- Closed deal
I connected the ad clicks to what sales did next. A script wrote each lead's Google click ID into Salesforce. As a lead moved through the stages, from new lead to qualified lead to booked meeting to sales opportunity to closed deal, Salesforce sent that stage back to Google Ads with a value attached. Form fills were demoted to a secondary signal, so bidding learned from the meetings and opportunities instead.
I fixed the leaks that kept the data from being trusted. Some of what I found:
- A time zone mismatch was recording conversions before the click happened. A Salesforce field that adjusted the timestamp fixed it.
- A redirect was stripping tracking tags, which sent about two weeks of paid traffic into Direct, Organic and Referral.
- Opportunities were being created with no lead source, so paid search lost credit for them. I took it to the revenue operations team.
- Bot submissions were inflating the qualified-lead count.
I restructured the account and tested, including tests that lost. With the agency, I ran bidding and landing page tests and judged each one against later sales stages, not just cost per conversion. One brand test cut cost per conversion by 27% and still produced fewer sales opportunities, so it didn't count as a win.
The results
Pipeline Grew Faster Than Spend
Paid search, measured in Salesforce by lead source, by Jama fiscal year (May to April). Each figure is growth compared with my first year.
- New recurring revenue won
- Opportunities
- Pipeline
| Fiscal year | Opportunities | Pipeline | New recurring revenue won |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY2022 (my first year) | Baseline | Baseline | Baseline |
| FY2023 | +98% | +92% | +108% |
| FY2024 | +134% | +133% | +82% |
| FY2025 | +190% | +177% | +263% |
The last column is subscription revenue from new customers, counted for their first year only. Software customers who renew keep paying after that, so each one was worth well beyond the figure counted here.
Opportunities rose every year. Measured by quarter, paid search opportunities were up about 550% in the last quarter of FY2025 compared with my first quarter.
The shift in what the account optimized for shows up most clearly in one year of Google Ads data. From 2023 to 2024, form-fill leads that marketing qualified stayed flat (down 4%). Booked sales meetings from paid search rose 55% and sales opportunities rose 71%.
Spend went up too. Paid search spend rose about 70% from my first year to 2024, and clicks got more expensive across most of the market. WordStream's 2024 benchmark, covering April 2023 to March 2024, found cost per click rising in 86% of industries and cost per lead up about 25% on average. In roughly that same year, Jama's paid search cost per sales opportunity fell 21%. Over my four years, pipeline rose 177% and new recurring revenue 263%.
Context
What the Numbers Don't Tell You
A few things sit behind these numbers:
- Spend, the sales team and the market all changed over four years too. The data can't separate my changes from those.
- Google only received about one in five of the later sales stages back, because of how long those deals took to close. The account learned from a partial signal, and so did I.
- A lot of people did this work with me: the agency ran much of the day-to-day build, and marketing operations and sales owned their sides of the data.
Today
How I'd Run It Today
The principle hasn't changed: tell the ad platform what a good lead is worth to your business, and check the data before you trust it. What's changed is the day-to-day. I now run my own ad accounts with an AI system that checks them every day, flags what moved and drafts the next changes. I review and approve the ones that matter. The judgment about what counts as a good lead still has to come from someone who understands the business.
More on how I work with AI: how this site was built and AI consulting.
Paid search
Ads Bringing In Leads Sales Doesn't Want?
That's usually fixable. Book an exploratory strategy call and we'll look at what your account is actually optimizing toward.
CamCamrick Schoen-Clark, Nord Luce