PandaDoc · San Francisco · pandadoc.com
—Emilla Conlon
Paid Media Team Lead, PandaDoc
The usual assumption in B2B marketing is that paid media lives under one roof: either in-house or with an agency. PandaDoc challenged that assumption and chose both.
PandaDoc is one of the world’s largest agreement management platforms, and its in-house paid media team already had dedicated owners for paid search and paid social. There was no skills gap to fill. What the team lacked was room to do more. Keeping a program of this size healthy took up the hours that could have gone to strategy and bolder experiments. Instead of adding a hire or another underutilized tool, PandaDoc brought in Outshine to co-own the program.
With both teams sharing the day-to-day, PandaDoc’s team could zoom out and look at the bigger picture. Outshine pressure-tested direction, brought ideas proactively, and pushed the program toward bigger swings.
An in-house team understands one organization in-depth. A SaaS-specific agency understands patterns across many. That outside perspective was one of the main reasons Conlon gives for the partnership.
Internal priorities can shift. A structured partnership keeps the core work moving. Outshine mirrored PandaDoc’s team structure, assigning a dedicated channel owner opposite each in-house owner, with a standing weekly meeting per channel.
Every change from either team went into a shared optimization tracker, connected to an AI workflow that tied account activity to performance trends, so both sides always knew what the other had done and what effect it had.
Working with PandaDoc’s data team, Outshine audited web conversions, UTM tagging, and campaign tracking from the ground up, then built a Salesforce-to-BigQuery-to-Looker pipeline with dashboards on top.
PandaDoc now has one view that connects spend and clicks to MQLs, pipeline, and closed-won, answerable at any level from channel and region down to a single keyword. It replaced a manual weekly reporting process that took the in-house team hours, so time once spent documenting performance now goes to acting on it.
The partnership started with paid search and expanded to include paid social (LinkedIn, Meta, and Reddit being the main channels), responsive display, and video.
That gave PandaDoc’s team more time to work with its in-house team on experiments in existing channels (and exploratory bets on new ones).
PandaDoc found a partner that matched its expertise, adapted to its structure, and added what an internal team can’t easily build alone: an outside view, a steady cadence, and measurement infrastructure, alongside the hands to execute.
—Emilla Conlon
Paid Media Team Lead, PandaDoc
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