Goals
Q4 2026 objectives
Give all teams faster access to performance data (Brian)
- Rationale: Build reporting by platform, campaign, and creative into PostHog so we can see what is working throughout the month. Give all teams a shared view of results so we can adjust spending, improve creative, and plan future tests without waiting for the growth review. Build it so we can also add in data from our non-paid marketing efforts too.
Use fewer ad formats and build a stronger pipeline of brand and product ads (Brian)
- Rationale: Focus on reusable formats that create and test more creative assets for the brand and products. Rank ads against their intended objectives, increase investment in strong performers, and use what we learn to guide the next round of creative. Product ads should explain the problems users face and how PostHog solves it. Brand ads should connect those products to PostHog's role as the context layer for your product.
Turn customer and creator content into effective paid ads (Brian)
- Rationale: Help more people hear why PostHog is useful from people who use PostHog. Find and turn specific posts, content, and recommendations into ads, then use targeting and measurement to find the audiences and messages that work best and double down.
Build the referral program (Joe)
- Rationale: Word of mouth is how we grow. Let's make that explicit and measurable.
- Things we could do: Joe's goal issue.
- We'll know we're successful when: We've discovered incentives that work and have a new growth channel.
Decide whether a team sponsorship is worth pursuing (Charles)
- Rationale: It's a large bet we could make in a weird way that helps us stand out. We would not want to just copy someone else's playbook though.
Roll out a new suite of product ads with structured testing (Jonah)
- Rationale: Develop eight variations per product across different customer problems, copy, and art directions. Use content and ads reporting to learn which content and messaging resonate with our target audience. Show what each product helps customers do and how its data gives developers and their agents more context.
Launch the Q4 context-layer brand campaign (Jonah)
- Rationale: Create a video and static campaign showing how bringing analytics, errors, replays, and business data together helps people and their agents understand what is happening, find problems, and decide what to change. Use concrete examples to make PostHog's role as the context layer for your product clear, and test which messages communicate that value best.
What we do
The demand gen team owns paid ads at PostHog. Because we're already such a brand and content driven company, our job is to go reach the people those channels can't, and pull them into the PostHog universe.
This quarter, we're getting the word out about PostHog as the context layer for your product. Every one of our products is great on its own, and building products is better when all your product data lives together. So it's up to Demand Gen to show developers and their agents that PostHog is the best way to see what's going on and figure out what to do next.
Why this team exists
We're in a strong spot today. We've got a healthy flow of high quality inbound leads driven by word of mouth and general brand love, but that won't last forever, and we can't rest on it.
Organic already brings in loads of leads, but ads are how we reach up market and educate our ideal customers on the value of PostHog and self-driving. Our job now is new signups, and especially the signups that rank high for our ICP and are likely to turn into MRR.
Sure, we've got a ton of fans who are going to love all of this, and they're going to tell their friends, but what about everyone else? Everyone four degrees from Kevin Bacon instead of three? We want to get them psyched too, and we want them as customers.
We're SUPER lucky to have so much great word of mouth driving our growth, but we can't just sit back and coast. We have to get self-driving out there through targeted ads, in front of the people who'll use it to its fullest.
How we think about paid
We split our budget roughly 50/50 between awareness and conversion, and we run conversion ads on Google Ads alongside awareness plays on LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, and Connected TV.
Unlike most demand gen teams we don't run ads to book demos, because we make it easy for people to self serve without ever talking to sales, so funneling them toward a demo would just be a waste. We also don't touch third party trackers or pixels; instead our conversion tracking runs through our CDP. The full detail on channels, tracking, creative, landing pages, and the monthly growth review lives in the Paid ads handbook page.
Roles
- Brian owns budget, channel strategy, analytics, and reporting, including ICP signups.
- Jonah writes copy and creative across every platform, including scripts for video ads.
- Joe acts as copy editor and generally keeps the team on track and aligned with PostHog's marketing as a whole.