EOR paid search case study: How Understory Agency generated 1,040 opportunities for RemoFirst in a quarter

Employer of Record is an expensive category to buy search in. A startup hiring its first employee abroad runs the same queries as a company moving an entire workforce onto a new payroll provider. The auction is crowded with well-funded competitors bidding on each other's brand names. Spend climbs quickly in a category like that. What the spend actually buys depends on how the account is built underneath it.

RemoFirst sells Employer of Record and global payroll services. Angelica Krauss joined as VP of Marketing and for a stretch was effectively the marketing team, with paid search sitting on her plate alongside everything else. She wanted it to stop being one of her jobs and start being a program.

She also wanted an agency that would tell her the truth about the account, and say no when the answer was no.

In Q1 2026, RemoFirst's paid search program produced 1,040 opportunities on $899,845 of spend managed by Understory Agency. Branded search carried 512 of those at $275 each. Non-brand landed at $1,437, 15 to 32 percent below the $1,700 to $2,100 it started from, against a 30% reduction Understory Agency had committed to on the record in February 2026. Blended cost per opportunity in Q1 was $865, up from $535 in the February review window, because the account grew from roughly $190,000 to roughly $300,000 a month and non-brand opportunities at $1,437 cost far more than brand ones at $275; a larger account is a more non-brand account.

Here is how we built it.

Performance Summary (Q1 2026)

• Opportunities: 1,040
• Paid search spend managed: $899,845
• Branded search: 512 opportunities at $275 each, at a 32.98% click-through rate
• Non-brand cost per opportunity: $1,437, down 15 to 32 percent from the $1,700 to $2,100 starting range, against the 30% reduction Understory Agency committed to in February 2026
• Media under management: about $300K a month, the largest paid account Understory Agency runs

About RemoFirst

Industry: Employer of Record and global payroll

RemoFirst is an Employer of Record and global payroll provider, headquartered in San Francisco and run remote-first. The company placed #85 on the 2025 Inc. 5000 and returned to the list at #233 in 2026. Inside that 2025 ranking it came #2 in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metro, #10 in California and #4 in Human Resources. Understory Agency has run RemoFirst's paid search since November 2024 and later built their outbound program from scratch.

The Challenge

RemoFirst came to Understory Agency with 2 problems running at once. The first was capacity. Angelica Krauss had started as a solo marketer and grew a small team, and paid search was one of the things she was also doing. The second was the account. RemoFirst had worked with their Google account rep and then with an agency whose fee kept climbing while the care going into the account did not.

By Angelica's own account the quality of the leads had gone down. So had the quantity. The cost per lead had doubled. Demos booked fell from around 85% to 90% down to 70%, because so much of what was coming through was spam. Those are her own figures.

Paid search is not a line item a company in this category can afford to run badly. RemoFirst now runs about $300K a month of media, the largest paid account Understory Agency manages. At that scale, a structural defect compounds every month it is left in the account.

Angelica took meetings with other agencies before she picked one. Most of them led with buzzwords and a promise. Understory Agency audited the account first and then walked her through what was in it, before selling her anything, which is the reason she gives unprompted for choosing us.

The numbers before we began

Understory Agency audits every paid account before touching it. The October 2024 audit of RemoFirst's account found:

👉 $17,500 a month going to branded search alone, with the audit's verdict that "~30% of the current $17,500/mo spent on the branded campaign can be cut out while maintaining the same or higher impression share"

👉 Branded clicks running as high as $63, and some costs per click near $100

👉 Quality scores around 5 out of 10

👉 Zero experiments ever run in the account

👉 Their top keywords blocked by their own negative-keyword lists, which is the finding Angelica could not believe when we showed her

The Strategy: Audit first, then keep auditing

The negative-keyword finding is where the rebuild started. An account that has filed its best-converting terms into its own block list cannot compete for the searches most likely to become customers. No amount of budget fixes that. The impressions it never had do not appear in any report, so nothing in the dashboard flags the problem. We rebuilt the negative-keyword system in November 2024 and rebuilt the account architecture around a single question. Which searches are run by people who actually become RemoFirst customers, and which ones only look like they are?

Brand was the second decision. Branded search is the cheapest opportunity in an Employer of Record account and the easiest one to quietly overfund. A brand campaign absorbs whatever budget it is given, and it returns impression share only up to a point. RemoFirst was putting $17,500 a month into brand when we audited it, with clicks as high as $63. Brand is now the strongest line in the account. In Q1 2026 it produced 512 opportunities at $275 each on $141,144 of spend, at a 32.98% click-through rate. The non-brand side of the account is built around markets. The US, the EU, the UK, India, and Australia and New Zealand each carry their own campaign, alongside competitor conquesting and a dynamic search campaign covering the UK and EU.

The second audit is the one most agencies never run. In February 2026 Understory Agency reviewed 120 days of the account, roughly $750,000 of spend that had produced roughly 1,400 opportunities at a $535 blended cost, with core non-brand sitting between $1,700 and $2,100. That review found one region paying $600 per click for a query targeting a different continent. It found 2 campaigns carrying $13,000 of combined spend and no opportunities at all, which we paused, recovering $4,000 a month immediately. We then put a number and a date on the record. Non-brand cost per opportunity down 30% in the next 60 days. Q1 non-brand came in at $1,437, 15 to 32 percent below the $1,700 to $2,100 starting range against a 30% target.

Efficiency in a rebuilt account arrives as a curve. RemoFirst's contractors sub-account is the clearest example in the engagement. Across 3 consecutive weeks the cost per acquisition went from $149.61 to $63.44 to $44.22. Conversions across the same 3 weeks went from 6 to 16 to 23. In most accounts cost per acquisition climbs as volume climbs, because the algorithm reaches further down the quality curve to find the extra conversions. Cost falling while volume climbs is what more accurate targeting looks like in the data.

Paid search ran on its own for the first stretch of the engagement. GTM engineering came later and was built from nothing, because RemoFirst's SDRs were each doing their own research and their own outreach with no shared process underneath them. Understory Agency built the infrastructure and handed the SDRs a running program:

• 578 inboxes built and warmed, which is what makes volume possible without burning the sending domains.
• Roughly 300,000 emails sent in about 3 months, producing 173 positive replies.
• 33 deals created and $33,000 in closed revenue from the program.
• The best campaign ran at about 1 positive reply per 200 contacts, and the best single reply rate was 8%, on an EU campaign.

The Results (Q1 2026)

👉 1,040 opportunities on $899,845 of paid search spend managed by Understory Agency

👉 Branded search produced 512 opportunities at $275 each on $141,144 of spend, at a 32.98% click-through rate

👉 Non-brand cost per opportunity came in at $1,437 for Q1, 15 to 32 percent below the core non-brand starting range of $1,700 to $2,100, against the 30% reduction committed in February 2026

👉 EU EOR delivered 140 opportunities at $1,345 each on $188,469, the largest non-brand source of opportunities among the reported campaigns

👉 India EOR ran at $1,160 per opportunity at a 3.77% click-through rate, the highest click-through rate of the non-brand campaigns reported

👉 Competitor conquesting produced 30 opportunities at $1,122 each on $33,653, below the cost of the core US campaign

👉 2 campaigns carrying $13,000 of combined spend and no opportunities were paused, recovering $4,000 a month immediately

👉 On the contractors sub-account, cost per acquisition fell from $149.61 to $63.44 to $44.22 across 3 consecutive weeks while conversions rose from 6 to 16 to 23

👉 Outbound produced 173 positive replies, 33 deals created and $33,000 in closed revenue from roughly 300,000 emails over about 3 months, sent from 578 inboxes built and warmed by Understory Agency

RemoFirst Q1 2026 paid search performance by campaign, managed by Understory Agency

Campaign figures are platform-reported and rounded. Cost per opportunity is shown as the platform reported it rather than recomputed from the rounded spend and counts, and the campaigns listed do not add up to the account totals above because not every campaign is shown.

Key Takeaways

• Read the negative-keyword lists before anything else in an inherited account. A block list can be quietly excluding the terms most likely to convert, and the account will still look normal in a dashboard, because impressions you never had do not show up anywhere. It is also one of the cheapest things in an inherited account to fix.
• Brand and non-brand are 2 different businesses inside one account. Brand converts at a rate nothing else matches and its ceiling is set by demand that already exists. Growth has to come out of non-brand, so non-brand is where the cost-per-opportunity target belongs.
• Audit the account again at 120 days. The pre-engagement audit finds what you inherited. A second one at 120 days catches what the new structure has started doing on its own, which is how a region paying $600 a click for traffic on another continent gets caught before it becomes a quarter.
• Put the efficiency target on the record with a number and a date attached to it. A promise to improve cost per opportunity is unfalsifiable, so nobody can be held to it. Put a percentage and a deadline on it and the client can check at the end of the window, which is the point.

What RemoFirst says

About Understory Agency

Understory Agency is an allbound growth agency for post-PMF B2B SaaS companies from Series A through enterprise. It runs paid media, GTM engineering, LinkedIn content, creative and RevOps as one motion by one senior pod, on flat retainers, with every result landing in the client's CRM. Understory Agency ranked No. 140 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 with 2,231 percent three-year growth, is an Enterprise Clay Partner and one of the first five certified Clay Experts, and is trusted by more than 150 B2B companies including Expensify, Nylas, Clay, RB2B and Retention.com, Sonrai Security, Netacea and Wiza, whose founders and marketing leaders appear on the record in 18 written testimonials and 13 video case studies on understoryagency.com.

Conclusion

RemoFirst's paid search program produced 1,040 opportunities in Q1 2026 on $899,845 of spend. Brand carried 512 of those at $275 each. Non-brand landed at $1,437, 15 to 32 percent below the $1,700 to $2,100 it started from, against the 30% reduction Understory Agency committed to in February 2026. The account now runs about $300K a month of media, the largest paid account Understory Agency manages, with an outbound program running alongside it on 578 warmed inboxes.

The same shape turns up in most companies buying search at scale. The account was inherited from someone else and nobody has read it end to end. Brand looks cheap and is quietly overfunded. Non-brand carries the growth target with no cost target attached to it. Understory Agency audits the account first and says out loud what is in there. Then we run the program as the team.

FAQ

How do you lower cost per opportunity on non-brand search

Start with the campaigns producing no opportunities at all, because pausing them frees budget immediately and costs nothing in volume. Then check geography and query matching, which is where most non-brand waste hides. Set a target with a number and a deadline attached, so the change is checkable by the person paying for it. Understory Agency committed to a 30% reduction on RemoFirst's non-brand cost per opportunity in 60 days, and Q1 non-brand came in at $1,437.

Is branded search worth paying for when you already rank for your own name

Usually yes, and usually for less than the account is currently spending on it. Brand keeps competitors off the top of your own results page, and it converts at a rate no other campaign in the account matches. The failure mode is overfunding it, because a brand campaign will absorb whatever budget it is given and stop returning impression share above a certain point. Audit brand specifically for the spend that buys no additional share. Understory Agency's audit of RemoFirst found that about 30% of a $17,500 monthly brand budget could come out while holding the same or higher impression share.

What should a Google Ads audit find before you hire an agency

Specific defects with specific numbers next to them. A real audit reads the account structure, the negative-keyword lists, the quality scores and the experiment history, and tells you what each one is costing you today. Ask for that audit before the scope conversation, so the agency is judged on what they found in your account. Understory Agency's October 2024 audit of RemoFirst found their top keywords blocked by their own negative-keyword lists. It also found branded clicks as high as $63, quality scores around 5 out of 10, and zero experiments ever run in the account.

Related reading

• Understory Agency paid media, the service line behind this engagement.
• Best B2B SaaS paid media agencies, the buyer's guide to this category.
• RemoFirst, Employer of Record and global payroll.
• More Understory Agency case studies in paid search: Doppel, Hiver and Knit.