Forwrd
Kittl • Case Study • YouTube Ads & Google Search Ads

One of the most consistent SaaS scaling stories we've seen across both channels.

Kittl had strong product-market fit and an aggressive growth target. What they needed was a paid acquisition engine that could scale without the economics falling apart.

Kittl

The numbers

0x YouTube subscription growth in 6 months
0% reduction in Search CPA over the partnership
0% improvement in Search ROAS year over year

About Kittl

Kittl is a fast-growing design platform built for creators, entrepreneurs, and designers who want to produce professional-quality visuals — without the learning curve of traditional design tools.

The brief

Scale without the economics falling apart.

Unlock YouTube as a primary acquisition channel and turn Search into a compounding growth engine — all while maintaining the unit economics a SaaS business needs to scale sustainably.

YouTube and Search as complementary engines.

We treated YouTube and Search as complementary engines with distinct roles.

The story

Kittl had strong product-market fit and an aggressive growth target. What they needed was a paid acquisition engine that could scale without the economics falling apart.

In May 2023, they came to us to build YouTube from the ground up and compound the efficiency of their Google Search performance. What followed was one of the most consistent SaaS scaling stories we've seen across both channels.

YouTube SaaS scaling challenge animation

The challenge

YouTube was completely untested territory for Kittl when we started. Google Search was performing, but with room to grow significantly in both volume and efficiency.

The core difficulty with YouTube for SaaS isn't launching — it's building something that holds up at scale. That requires the right campaign architecture and, critically, the right creative. Getting both wrong is expensive. Getting both right is transformative.

YouTube: Volume through creative & structure

Starting from zero, YouTube grew 17x in paid subscriptions within the first two quarters. We built a two-layer campaign architecture: a stability layer to protect performance and give the algorithm consistent signals, and a growth layer to push spend aggressively when conditions were right.

This structure is what allowed us to scale without the account destabilising — a common failure when YouTube spend increases too fast without the right foundations.

But structure alone doesn't drive subscriptions. Creative does.

YouTube campaign structure animation

Search: Compounding efficiency at scale

On Search, the story is sustained efficiency improvement at growing volume. CPA dropped by more than 70% over the course of the partnership while subscription volumes grew 5x — a combination that's rare to achieve simultaneously.

ROAS improved by over 140% year on year, the result of consistent structural refinement and identifying gaps to fill.

The creative: Why talking heads outperformed everything else

The breakthrough came from a creative format that most SaaS brands underestimate: direct-to-camera, presenter-led ads built around a single strong hook.

We shared our know-how and directed hero creatives that became the backbone of the YouTube account at launch. No complex production. No motion graphics. Just a confident presenter, a clear problem statement in the first five seconds, and a product that solved it visibly and compellingly.

The logic was simple: Kittl solves a real frustration that creators feel every day — the gap between having an idea and being able to execute it at a professional level. The fastest way to land that message on YouTube is a real person speaking directly to that frustration before the viewer can skip. If the hook earns the next 30 seconds, the product sells itself.

These three creatives

All talking head format, all built around a sharp opening hook — drove the initial scale that proved YouTube could work for Kittl. They remain among the best-performing assets in the account.

Creative 1 Watch here
Creative 2 Watch here
Creative 3 Watch here

What Kittl Said

Before working together, we were running YouTube ads, but the results weren't where we needed them to be. Within just two months, we went from our baseline all the way up to our growth target.

YouTube ads are critical for any SaaS company, it's probably the best way to show people your tool at scale, just look at Monday.com or Canva.

What made the difference was that Forwrd turned our YouTube ad account into a reliable, scalable machine from week one. They scripted the ads, provided visual direction and tested everything.

When we wanted to take creative in-house, they shifted seamlessly into coaching us and optimizing our own productions.

YouTube isn't just a channel for us, it's one of the most important drivers of new customer growth at Kittl and Forwrd made that possible.

Tyler, Performance Marketing & Growth, Kittl
The result

YouTube became the dominant acquisition channel — responsible for 60–80% of all new paid subscriptions in any given month.

By the end of the second full year, YouTube had become the dominant acquisition channel — responsible for 60–80% of all new paid subscriptions in any given month — outperforming Meta, and every other paid format in Kittl's mix.

Yann Durand
Ask me about a free audit

Meet Yann Durand

Co-founder of Forwrd. Google Ads, YouTube Ads and performance marketing specialist.

Hi, I'm Yann. I've spent the last 10+ years living and breathing Google Ads, YouTube and performance marketing — and honestly, I still love it.

I started out at a leading global agency in the UK after a first-class master's in digital marketing. Then I moved to the Netherlands to run Google Ads for Bestseller on brands like Jack & Jones, Vero Moda and Only, spending millions across 16 brands and 15 markets simultaneously.

The chapter that really changed things was Vienna. At waterdrop, I took non-brand Google Ads from €200k to €6M in revenue. That experience became the backbone of a system for D2C brands trying to scale with Search, Shopping and YouTube Ads.

After seeing the bad shape of most Google Ads accounts out there, I built Forwrd to go after the untapped potential most agencies leave behind. Where agencies stay on the surface, we go after the moves that actually shift revenue.

Get in touch & get started today.

If your growth problem is not just volume but quality, the answer is usually not more spend. It is a better structure, better signals, and better creative strategy.

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