Case Study: How an Over-Reliance on ROI Cost a SaaS Company Its Market Position
Author: IMB Editorial Team
IMB Journal – International Marketing Board
Volume 1 | Issue 4 April 2026
The ROI Trap: How a Growing SaaS Company Optimized Itself Into a Corner
The following case draws on a composite of client engagements handled by IMB advisors. Identifying details have been changed to protect confidentiality, but the pattern is one we have now seen repeat across a number of mid-market software companies.
The Setup
The company, which we’ll call Vantra, sold a project management platform to mid-sized construction firms. By its fourth year, Vantra had built a healthy customer base and a marketing team that reported into finance rather than into the CEO. That structural detail mattered more than anyone realized at the time.
Every campaign, every content initiative, and every paid channel was judged on a single dashboard metric: return on ad spend, tracked weekly. The finance team liked the discipline it created. For a while, it worked. Vantra’s paid search campaigns were converting at 6x spend, well above industry norms, and leadership pointed to the number in every board meeting as proof the growth engine was healthy.
What the Number Was Hiding
The 6x figure was real, but it was measuring a shrinking pool. Vantra’s paid campaigns were almost entirely bottom-of-funnel: branded search terms, retargeting ads to people who had already visited the pricing page, and remarketing to trial users close to conversion. These channels convert well because they capture demand that already exists. They don’t create new demand.
Meanwhile, the marketing budget for anything that built awareness among construction firms who had never heard of Vantra, industry sponsorships, trade publication features, a documentary-style customer story series that had been pitched a year earlier, kept getting deprioritized. None of it had a clean ROI story in the short term, so none of it survived the quarterly budget review.
By month eighteen of this pattern, Vantra’s branded search volume had started to plateau. New trial signups slowed because the pool of people already close to a purchase decision was running dry, and there wasn’t a healthy layer of newly aware prospects behind them to replace it. The ROI dashboard didn’t catch this early, because branded search and retargeting were still converting at the same efficient rate. They were just converting a smaller and smaller number of people.
The Diagnosis Came Late, and From the Wrong Direction
When new customer growth stalled, the first response was to increase spend on the channels that had always shown the best ROI. It made sense on paper: if retargeting converts at 6x, spending more on retargeting should produce more revenue. Instead, cost per acquisition on those channels climbed sharply, because there simply weren’t enough warm prospects left to retarget. The team was pouring more fuel into an engine that had run out of the fuel it actually needed.
It took an outside review, and a slower look at the top of the funnel, to identify the actual problem. Vantra wasn’t losing efficiency. It had quietly stopped building the awareness that made its efficient channels possible in the first place, and nobody had noticed because the metric they were watching had no way of showing it.
What Changed
Vantra restructured its marketing reporting to track two separate conversations rather than one. Efficiency metrics, including ROI, stayed in place for evaluating how well existing campaigns performed. A second, separate review, held quarterly rather than weekly, tracked category awareness among the target customer base: unaided brand recall, share of voice at industry trade events, and inbound interest from companies with no prior touchpoint with Vantra at all.
Budget for the awareness-building work was ring-fenced so it could no longer be raided every time the finance team wanted to hit a quarterly ROI target. It took nearly a year for the new awareness investments to show up as new demand in the funnel, and during that year, the reported ROI on total marketing spend actually looked worse, not better, because the awareness spend had no direct conversion attached to it.
The Lesson
Vantra’s leadership wasn’t wrong to measure ROI. They were wrong to let it be the only thing they measured, and the only question they asked when deciding where to invest. A metric that only sees the bottom of the funnel will always look healthiest right before the funnel runs dry.
Part of a three-part series on strategic measurement. Next: a short insight on the one question that catches an ROI-only mindset before it does damage.