B2B · Open Source SaaS · Google Ads
Open source MCP gateway turns Google Ads into an enterprise trial pipeline
Enterprise Trial Signups In Under Four Months
Decrease In Cost-Per-Trial-Signup
Increase In Trial Conversion Rate
Background
Governing the agents
Every enterprise that lets AI agents touch internal systems runs into the same wall: which agent called which tool, with whose credentials, and who approved it. Obot exists to answer that question. Its open source MCP gateway and AI control plane sit between AI agents and the tools they reach through the Model Context Protocol, adding centralized OAuth, access policies, and a full audit trail. Security and IT teams can self-host it or run it in Obot Cloud, and its GitHub repository is the front door for most first-time users.
That front door shaped the marketing goal. When Obot began advertising on Google in 2025, the target was traffic: getting the platform in front of engineers searching for an MCP gateway and sending them to GitHub, with whitepaper downloads, newsletter signups, and repository stars as secondary goals. Above all, Obot wanted to own the search results for "MCP gateway."
A freelancer ran the first campaigns. On paper the numbers looked busy, but most clicks came from display retargeting and low-cost international search traffic, and conversion tracking recorded more conversions than clicks. The Obot team couldn't tell what the spend was buying.
"Managing Google Ads before TAS felt like a bit of a tornado. It seems pretty straightforward, but once you actually get into it, you realize how complicated it can be, and how much time it takes to really understand what you're doing, especially with Google constantly changing and updating things. As a small team, we just didn't have the time or resources to train someone from scratch or spend months trying to become Google Ads experts ourselves. We wanted a partner who already knew the platform inside and out and could come in ready to help."
Obot partnered with TAS Marketing in October 2025. Within a year, the account had gone from buying cheap traffic to producing a steady flow of enterprise trial signups from North America and Europe.
Paid search
Owning the MCP gateway search results
The TAS team rebuilt the account from the keyword up. The new structure centered on a dedicated MCP Gateway campaign, a General campaign for the broader problem space, and separate defensive and offensive trademark campaigns, so brand and competitor searches could be bid and measured on their own terms.
Targeting was tightened to the countries where Obot's buyers actually sit. That meant fewer clicks at a higher cost per click than the freelancer's campaigns had shown, which was the point: every click now came from the market Obot sells to.
Results on the core term came quickly. Monthly impressions on the MCP Gateway campaign grew 3.8x between its November launch and January, and held steady through the summer. From there, TAS expanded into the searches that surround an MCP gateway purchase, including MCP OAuth, security, management, and governance, then consolidated budget behind the themes that showed the strongest intent.
"The Friday recaps give us a clear view of what's working, what's shifting, and where we may need to pay closer attention. Overall, our visibility into performance has improved significantly. Todd and the TAS team do a great job of pulling out the most important insights and summarizing what matters, which makes it much easier for us to use that information internally and make smarter business decisions."
The campaigns kept delivering against the original goals too, from Get Started clicks and Contact Us submissions to newsletter signups and whitepaper downloads.
Cloud trial
From traffic to pipeline
In late May 2026, Obot launched the Obot Cloud Trial: a free 14-day trial of Obot Cloud that enterprise teams request through a form on obot.ai. For the first time, paid search had a conversion event tied directly to pipeline.
On June 1, TAS made the trial submission the account's only primary conversion and moved every campaign to bid toward it. Contact forms, whitepaper downloads, and newsletter signups stayed tracked as secondary signals. The team also audited the landing pages against the new goal, using heatmaps and session recordings to find friction between the ad click and the form.
The account needed a month to relearn what a valuable click looked like, and June was the most expensive month for trial signups the program would see. Then the results began to compound.
"The transition felt like a big step forward for us because it shifted the focus from generating interest to driving actual product adoption. Once we started seeing a steady increase in trial requests, it became clear that there was real demand for the product, not just from the audience we were already reaching, but from a much broader market. That was really the point where we knew the new approach was working."
Monthly trial signups more than doubled between June and August, and September was on pace to finish well ahead of August.
By September, cost per trial signup was down 68% from June, and the share of clicks that turned into trial requests had quadrupled. Obot received more than 100 trial signups in under four months, on a budget similar to what the account had previously spent on traffic, including several highly qualified enterprise teams in North America and Europe.
"When we shifted our focus from driving traffic to driving product deployments, we quickly saw an improvement in the effectiveness of our sales funnel. Our marketing spend was more closely aligned with our sales process, and users were seeing our product in minutes, instead of wading through pages of content. It was a key transition that led to rapid pipeline growth."
Outlook
Scaling what works
With cost per trial falling month over month, the conversation at Obot has shifted from whether paid search can produce pipeline to how far it can scale. A year into the partnership, both teams are focused on the same question: how many more enterprise teams are out there searching for an MCP gateway, and how quickly Obot can reach them.
"Working with TAS is like having a world class SEM expert on staff. TAS easily merged into our team, quickly gained a solid understanding of our market, and within weeks had markedly improved the impact and efficiency of our advertising budget."
Services used