How to Adapt Ad Spend in 2025: Dreamdata Insights

Editor’s note: Dreamdata is a LinkedIn Marketing partner for Signals and Reporting & ROI. To learn more about Dreamdata’s integration with LinkedIn, please visit their partner directory page. 

At the start of the year - budgets are fresh, marketing calendars are open, and the year is ready to be planned. But where to begin? The best predictor of future success is past performance. So we’re going back to our Go-to-market Benchmarks Report to better understand what we should do more - or less - of in 2025.

Our benchmarks offer insights into the state of B2B marketing in 2024: how marketers allocated ad budgets, ad platform cost differences, and what the B2B customer journey looked like. Helping us reflect on how we might adapt our marketing for the year ahead. Could we allocate budgets differently? Improve targeting precision? Measure better metrics?

Dreamdata’s B2B GTM Benchmarks Report 2024 Findings

Ad Budget Allocation

The report gave us insights into the B2B marketing paid budget showing where B2B marketers placed their bets.

Marketing teams continue to pour the majority of their ad spend into Google, with 52% of the budget spent on the Google Network (Google Search, Display, and Youtube). Of this, Google Search Ads took the largest share, with 39% of total ad spend.

LinkedIn Ads took second place, with 32% of the ad budget, reinforcing LinkedIn’s reputation as the jewel in the B2B paid social crown. Facebook accounted for just 11% of spend. 

Evidently, the social platform hasn’t been able to de-throne Google as the preferred paid channel overall, despite, as we’ll see below, LinkedIn running a considerably lower cost per company influenced, and being the only network that provides complete control over the B2B audience size.

Ad Performance Metrics

The report also took us through ad performance data across the primary networks.

While there are obvious, and expected, differences between the primary ad networks, such as the high CTR on Google Search Ads, there are also notable differences. Above all, the data disproves LinkedIn’s reputation as an expensive growth source for B2Bs.

LinkedIn offers the best cost per company influenced by the major ad networks - Google Search Ads and Facebook are both over 75% more expensive. As B2Bs, the cost of acquiring a company is a better measure of cost than individual contacts, given that the deals are companies. LinkedIn also offers a better return on ad spend (ROAS) than the other networks, with Facebook coming in weakest, generating only 29% ROAS. 

Customer Journey Insights

Finally, the report shines a light on the otherwise complex and opaque B2B customer journey.

The report showed that the average B2B customer journey involves multiple touchpoints and spans several months. Specifically, we learned that the customer journey stretches 192 days, with an average 95 days in the sales pipeline (SQL to Closed Won). Within this period, there are, on average, 62 touches across three channels before the B2B deal is closed, and more than six people involved in the buying journey.

Read the full report →

Now let’s see what practical learnings we can take from these findings for the year ahead.

1. Reassess the metrics you’re tracking

It’s tempting to rely solely on (easily accessible) cost metrics like cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-mille (CPM) because they provide quick insights into campaign performance. However, in B2B marketing, where customer journeys are multi-touch and account-based, these metrics often miss the bigger picture. 

Firstly, it’s essential to include account-level cost metrics. For instance, tracking cost per influenced company ensures your marketing spend is evaluated against its ability to influence entire accounts. 

Secondly, you need to pay close attention to how you define conversions. Is an ebook download or newsletter subscription a strong enough conversion? 

Finally, you need to track pipeline and revenue metrics, like ROAS and ROI, which provide a more comprehensive view of how your marketing efforts contribute to the business. Of course, this will require the capacity to track the end-to-end account-based customer journey. See how pipeline and revenue metrics helped ScreenCloud 2.6x their LinkedIn Ads ROAS. 

2. Activate your data in the ad networks

Despite significant budget spend on ad networks, much of it goes to waste on audiences that aren’t in your market or don’t meet your ICP criteria.

Ad platforms offer advanced AI-driven optimization capabilities to help avoid this waste by focusing on the audiences most likely to convert. For these optimizations to work at their best, the platforms need to understand what a “good” deal looks like.

However, they can only work with the data they see - and that doesn’t include your CRM data. Platforms like Google and LinkedIn don’t automatically know who converted in your Salesforce instance or became an MQL in your pipeline.

To bridge this gap, you need to use offline conversion features, such as LinkedIn’s CAPI or Google Enhanced Conversions for Leads. By syncing pipeline and revenue data back into these platforms through tools like Dreamdata, you enable them to optimize for the outcomes that truly matter to your business.

3. Use signals to build retargeting audiences

Using signals in B2B sales and marketing has gained traction because of its ability to pinpoint intent in complex customer journeys. These signals - such as visiting your pricing page, engaging with LinkedIn Ads, or comparing your product on G2 - offer clear indicators of accounts who are in-market for your product and even where a prospect stands in their buying process. 

Tracking and collecting these signals and using them to build dynamic retargeting campaigns that adjust to a prospect’s behavior can be a game-changer, especially in your ABM motions.

Better yet, this can be scaled once all intent tracking is centralized. Tools like Dreamdata’s Audience Hub enable you to create audiences based on diverse signals and sync these back to ad platforms.

Check out how Eftsure has benefited from these tactics using Dreamdata and LinkedIn, with a 40% reduction in cost per lead with Dreamdata - LinkedIn Conversions API connector.

4. Omnichannel, marathon approach

As the Benchmarks Report showed, B2B deals are rarely closed overnight, and no single channel can do all the heavy lifting to get them over the line.

For instance, a decision-maker might first encounter your brand on LinkedIn, explore your blog via organic search, and later be retargeted with Google Display Ads. 

Staying consistent across these touchpoints builds trust and keeps your brand top-of-mind. It’s critical to adopt a marathon mindset: maintain persistence with your messaging and ensure that all channels work together to provide a cohesive narrative throughout the journey.

A final word

The insights from the Benchmarks Report are a call to action for marketers in 2025. With longer customer journeys and more stakeholders, traditional tactics won’t suffice. Smarter metrics, data-driven optimization, buying signals, and omnichannel consistency will be essential to gaining that competitive advantage.