Paid media is under more scrutiny than ever
Marketing teams are under more pressure than ever to demonstrate business impact. At the same time, proving what paid media actually contributes at a channel level is getting harder, not easier.
For a long time, paid media was relatively easier to justify. If campaigns were generating clicks, leads and conversions at an acceptable cost, teams had a clear story to take back to the business.
Today, that story needs to go further, because leadership wants to understand which activity is creating sales opportunities, influencing the pipeline and contributing to revenue.
This is happening at a time when proving which channels deserve credit across a long and complex buying journey is becoming increasingly difficult.
While almost 50% of respondents said their paid media performance is meeting expectations, confidence drops when teams are asked to connect that performance to pipeline or revenue.
| Response | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Very confident | 19% |
| Somewhat confident | 48% |
| Not very confident | 28% |
| Not confident at all | 5% |
If paid media looks healthy in the platform but cannot be clearly linked to sales opportunities or revenue movement, it becomes harder to defend budget, make investment decisions, or identify which channels and activities deserve more investment.
Closing the loop between leads, closed-won customers and revenue changes the quality of the conversation. It helps marketing prove effectiveness against commercial benchmarks like CAC and payback period, makes budget conversations easier, and creates a much stronger foundation when decisions are being challenged by instinct or gut feel.
Yune Wen Chia, Marketing Lead, Renew Map8 in 10 operators see discrepancies between ad platform and CRM data
If confidence drops when teams are asked to connect paid media to revenue, one of the clearest reasons is attribution.
8 in 10 operators have experienced a meaningful discrepancy between what ad platforms report and what appears in their CRM.
| Response | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Yes, occasionally | 44% |
| Yes, regularly | 36% |
| Rarely | 8% |
| No, tracking is accurate | 12% |
It also raises a harder question about where credit should sit. When one channel builds awareness, another captures intent, and a third influences the final decision, often across a buying journey that runs for quarters, attribution becomes far less straightforward than platform reporting suggests.
In many cases, the issue is not that the data is missing
The platform and the CRM are counting different things, source data breaks the moment a lead is captured, or outcomes recorded in the CRM never make their way back into the platforms doing the optimisation.
The data exists on both sides, but it never comes together as one complete view of the customer journey.
It affects how teams operate every day (apart from the very many obvious ones):
- Sales and marketing can end up working from different versions of performance.
- Teams risk optimising for what is easiest to measure rather than what drives business outcomes.
- Strong campaigns can be undervalued, while other campaigns can appear more successful than they actually are.
The goal is not perfect attribution because that doesn't exist. It's enough shared visibility and alignment to make confident decisions.
What to do instead?
Make the CRM the source of truth, and platforms the source of activity.
Platforms can only see their own slice of the journey, so they'll never accurately report their own worth.
Let them tell you how campaigns performed, and let the CRM tell you what the business got. And agree with sales on what "got" means, a source of truth only works if both teams read it the same way.
Protect source data at the point of capture.
Consistent UTMs and click IDs passed into the CRM on every form. It's rare we see this done consistently well.
Close the loop back to the platforms. Sync qualified and closed-won stages via offline conversions.
With enough volume, the algorithms can optimise towards pipeline rather than the cheapest form fill.
Without it, the data should still be imported as it will let you judge campaigns against what actually progressed rather than what converted the cheapest.
Accept that platform tracking within the attribution window will never catch everything.
Much of paid media's influence, especially on LinkedIn, never shows up as a click.
Two ways to see it are impression-level tools like Fibbler that match ad exposure to CRM pipeline, and a "how did you hear about us" field on every form. Neither is precise on its own. Together with your click data, they let you triangulate what each channel is really contributing.
Rather than trying to account for every touchpoint, the bigger win is building a measurement framework that marketing, sales, and leadership all agree on and can use with confidence.
Lead quality is still where paid media gets messy
When we asked operators what their primary success metric for paid media is today, the most common answers were leads or form fills and marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), each selected by 21% of respondents.
| Response | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Marketing qualified leads | 21% |
| Leads or form fills | 21% |
| Pipeline value | 16% |
| Revenue | 11% |
| Clicks or website visits | 9% |
| Sales qualified leads | 7% |
| Other metrics | 15% |
These metrics are useful, but they only tell part of the story. A form fill can show that someone responded to an ad, and an MQL can show that a lead met the team's qualification criteria, but neither confirms whether that lead was a good fit, accepted by sales or likely to become pipeline.
Paid media gets judged on numbers nobody actually agrees on
When quality is not clearly defined, 'the leads are bad' becomes an argument no one can win. Sales can't prove it, marketing can't disprove it, and every metric downstream of that missing definition inherits the problem.
| Response | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Yes, clearly defined | 35% |
| Inconsistently applied | 24% |
| Informal only | 20% |
| No defined terms | 14% |
| Not applicable | 7% |
MQLs and SQLs were meant to create alignment, but in practice, they often create friction. In the survey, 58% of respondents said their organisation either has definitions that are not consistently used, relies on informal definitions or does not have formal MQL/SQL definitions at all.
Teams with tight sales and marketing alignment were much more likely to report stronger paid media performance
75% of tightly aligned teams said paid media was meeting or beating expectations, compared with 45% of siloed teams.
The pattern also showed up in downstream visibility. 68% of teams with systematic visibility into sales outcomes said paid media was meeting or beating expectations, compared with 20% of teams that had not set this up.
We've definitely encountered this issue in the past, and one of the changes we're making is moving away from defining where marketing ends and where sales begins, because the terminology itself can create friction.
The moment you label something marketing qualified or sales qualified, teams start drawing lines instead of looking at what is actually creating pipeline.
Kaylee Liu, Senior Growth Marketing Manager, ShippitMany B2B organisations, especially ones with long sales cycles, do not want 50 small leads every month. They want a handful of high-value opportunities that can materially move pipeline.
The challenge is that paid media will always generate some level of noise, and that does not mean the channel is broken.
Marketing, sales and agencies need to work together to improve lead quality instead of abandoning the channel too early.
Adhiraj Singh Yadav, Director of Growth - Oceania, ThumbtackGet sales and marketing in the same room, agree on what a qualified lead looks like using closed-won deals as the reference point, and then hold the definition steady long enough to judge channels against it.
A definition that changes all the time makes reporting a nightmare and is barely better than no definition at all.
B2B teams are spreading across channels, but budget still follows buyer intent
Most operators are not relying on a single channel to carry paid media performance. They are combining search-led intent with audience-led platforms, with Google and LinkedIn sitting at the centre of the mix. At the smallest budgets, spend still leans towards capturing existing demand, but that starts to shift once teams have more room to invest.
Google Search and LinkedIn dominate that mix, with 82% of respondents running Google Search Ads and 73% running LinkedIn Ads.
| Response | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Google Search Ads | 82% |
| LinkedIn Ads | 73% |
| Meta Ads (Facebook / Instagram) | 54% |
| Google Performance Max | 34% |
| YouTube Ads | 34% |
| Microsoft / Bing Ads | 23% |
| Programmatic display | 21% |
| Software review platforms | 9% |
| Other | 8% |
| None currently | 4% |
The more interesting finding is how often those channels appear together. In the survey, 63% of respondents said they are running both Google Search and LinkedIn, which suggests many teams are not treating paid media as a choice between intent capture and awareness building, but are trying to do both.
Google continues to play an important role when buyers are already searching for a solution, while LinkedIn remains one of the clearest ways to reach specific roles, companies and buying groups before that intent becomes visible in search.
58% of operators in our sample spend less than $15,000 per month on paid media
Our survey found that 29% of respondents spend under $5,000 per month on paid media, while another 29% spend between $5,000 and $15,000 per month.
| Response | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Under $5,000 per month | 29% |
| $5,000 to under $15,000 per month | 29% |
| $15,000 to under $50,000 per month | 27% |
| $50,000 to under $100,000 per month | 8% |
| $100,000 or more per month | 7% |
This is the reality for most B2B teams in Australia, and it's a reality most industry benchmarks ignore. The playbooks and surveys this market reads are usually written by and for teams spending ten times as much.
It also explains a lot of what you'll see in the rest of this report. When spend is limited, there is less room to properly test every channel, audience, and creative idea. Choices get sharper, and some things simply don't get funded.
The result is that many Australian B2B teams are being asked to run sophisticated, multi-channel programs, prove commercial impact and test new ideas, all with budgets where learning takes far longer.
Where does the budget go when spend is tight?
Google still wins when budgets are smallest, but LinkedIn becomes the dominant budget holder once teams have more room to reach specific audiences.
Among respondents spending under $5,000 per month, Google Ads was the most common largest-budget channel, selected by 50%. But in the $5,000 to $15,000 monthly budget range, LinkedIn became the most common largest-budget channel, selected by 45%.
| Response | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Under $5,000 — Google Ads | 50% |
| Under $5,000 — LinkedIn Ads | 20% |
| $5,000–$15,000 — Google Ads | 30% |
| $5,000–$15,000 — LinkedIn Ads | 45% |
Percentages shown represent the two most common channels receiving the largest share of budget within each spend band. Other channels are not shown.
Meta and Google can be very effective testing environments because they let teams validate messaging, hooks and creative angles at a much lower cost. Once you have stronger signals around what is actually resonating, you can take those learnings into LinkedIn with far more confidence, where every test is typically more expensive.
Katharine Suy, Head of Growth, QwilrThat being said, operators also are increasingly testing around the edges. AI, Reddit, YouTube and new audience strategies were among the most common areas of experimentation, suggesting teams are looking for incremental advantages rather than wholesale channel shifts.
How to think about budget allocation
Most B2B teams are already on the same two platforms. The question isn't Google or LinkedIn, it's where the next dollar has the best chance of creating pipeline.
The platforms can't answer that, but your CRM can.
Is there still search demand you're not capturing?
Check impression share, if <50-70% on non-brand high intent, check why. Lost to budget means demand exists that you're simply not funding, which is usually the cheapest pipeline available.
Lost to ad rank means stronger ads and better CTR come before more spend, because pushing bids into a rank problem just buys the same demand less efficiently.
If quality scores are strong and you can afford a higher CPL/CAC, then loosening the bids is the right move.
Does your LinkedIn audience have room left?
Check penetration and frequency. As a rough rule, we start paying attention when prospecting frequency exceeds 6-10 per month and audience penetration exceeds 70-80% over a 60-90 day window depending on your sales cycle. When you hit that wall, the answer usually isn't more budget, and often it isn't a new channel either.
Most teams are only targeting one or two roles in the deal, so widening to the rest of the buying group (something 69% of operators in this survey aren't doing) is usually the best new audience available. After that, new segments, stronger creative, broader channel mix.
What actually creates an edge when everyone is advertising in the same places?
As Google and LinkedIn continue to dominate B2B paid media, the competitive advantage is increasingly less about channel selection and more about what teams put in front of buyers once they get there.
Most B2B teams compete in the same environments, often targeting similar audiences and buying groups. Increasingly, creative is where the difference shows up.
I think too many B2B marketers are focused on capturing demand that already exists instead of creating demand for the future. There's so much pressure to keep CPLs low that teams avoid taking risks with creative testing or investing in brand awareness.
Creative testing is still underpowered
of operators produce 10 or fewer creative assets per month, leaving limited room to test what actually drives performance.
Creative performance can shift quickly when a stronger angle lands, but you only find that angle when there's enough variation to compare. That's the real constraint behind low volume. Ten near-identical versions of one idea teach you nothing, so the goal isn't simply more assets. It's more useful variation.
Creative volume is the pain point we see most, but the real solution is iteration. Most clients test one angle, it doesn't perform well, and they call it a day. There's so much more they can do. We take that same angle and build multiple versions of it, changing the hook, the framing and the execution style, so the volume goes up without losing the hypothesis.
Hayley Robinson, Creative Lead, farsiight| Response | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| 1–5 assets | 33% |
| 6–10 assets | 29% |
| 11–20 assets | 19% |
| 21–40 assets | 12% |
| 40+ assets | 7% |
The creative test worth running is rarely just a new format
When creative output is constrained, every test has to earn its place. Running variations without a clear hypothesis burns limited volume, accelerates creative fatigue, and leaves you no closer to understanding your audience.
A strong test should produce a clear learning: how the audience interprets the message, which angle resonates, and what style of execution carries it best. That means each test usually changes one of four things.
The pain
What problem are we leading with, and is it specific enough for the buyer to recognise themselves in it?
The proof
What evidence makes the claim believable, and does it reduce the doubt a buyer might already have?
The perspective
What point of view makes someone stop, think or reconsider the way they currently see the problem?
The moment
Where is the buyer in their journey when they see this, and are we asking for the right level of action?
Creative testing needs to be tied to a clear hypothesis. Changing colours or making small design tweaks might create activity, but it rarely creates useful learning. The more valuable tests are usually around message, angle and positioning, because that is where you start understanding what actually resonates with buyers.
Chelsey Moir, Marketing Manager, MOVUSOur biggest blocker isn't ideas. It's audience density. When you're targeting a very specific enterprise audience, it's hard to get enough volume for creative tests to reach statistical significance, especially on channels like LinkedIn.
Kaylee Liu, Senior Growth Marketing Manager, ShippitFor me it's having a clearly defined hypothesis, clear parameters for what you're actually testing, and a clear line in the sand for what counts as a winner, all agreed before anything goes live. The bit that gets skipped most often is the decision. Every test we run has an action attached to it, so we know upfront what we'll do whether it wins, loses, or lands somewhere in the middle.
Lauren O'Connor, Head of Marketing, WORK180Paid media campaigns still centre on the person who fills out the form
| Response | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Multiple stakeholders involved | 89% |
| Single decision-maker | 11% |
| Response | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Do not actively target full buying group | 69% |
| Actively target multiple stakeholders | 31% |
In most B2B deals, the person who clicks, downloads or fills out the form is only one part of the buying conversation.
The real decision often moves through champions, end users, budget owners, technical reviewers and senior decision makers, each bringing a different concern into the room.
B2B teams know buying decisions rarely sit with one person, yet our survey found that 69% of operators do not actively target the full buying group.
That gap becomes even clearer deeper in the funnel.
A practical way to plan buying group campaigns
Most buying group strategies break down in one of two ways. Teams either target every possible role in the account, which spreads limited budget too thin, or they reach the right people with a message written for no one in particular.
Prioritise
Start with the smallest group who can materially influence the deal, not every role in the account.
Penetrate
Most of the buying group won't be in-market the day your ad runs, so the job is being remembered when their moment arrives. Reach the group often enough for the message to stick, between 6-10 times per month per person.
Personalise
This is where most teams fall down. The champion, the budget owner and the technical reviewer are not persuaded by the same thing, and one ad written for everyone persuades no one.
Even two or three message variants by stakeholder beats a single generic campaign.
Progress
Where pipeline volume allows, keep paid active after the first hand raise so the campaign supports internal consensus rather than stopping when sales takes over.
Most SMB pipelines are too small to target directly, and that's fine, keeping your buying group audience always-on does most of the same job.
The mistake I see most often is treating the first conversion as the finish line. In B2B that person rarely has the authority to buy on their own, so the moment they put their hand up, they walk into an internal sales process you are not in the room for.
If your media switches off there, you have handed your champion an argument to make alone, without the proof, the risk answers or the commercial case the other stakeholders need to hear. The teams that get it right keep serving the account after the lead is captured, and they build content that helps the buyer sell the decision internally, not just content that helped them find you.
Benjamin Jacquet, Demand Generation Manager, farsiightAI is already part of the paid media workflow
Our survey found that 76% of operators are either using AI in paid media at present or actively experimenting with it, with 29% already using it extensively across multiple workflows and 33% using it in a few limited areas.
Most early AI use in paid media appears to be happening around execution.
AI can help teams move faster on copy, ideation, reporting, landing page copy, and workflow tasks, but speed is only useful if the underlying direction is strong.
| Response | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| AI is already improving our results | 34% |
| We believe AI will transform paid media | 29% |
| We're experimenting with AI tools | 13% |
| We feel pressure to adopt AI | 11% |
| We haven't seriously explored AI yet | 6% |
| Not currently using AI | 5% |
| AI currently feels like hype | 2% |
AI works best as a jumping-off point. The final output still needs human judgment, context and refinement.
Chelsey Moir, Marketing Manager, MOVUSAnyone who can prompt can build a workflow — the real skill is seeing your work as processes and knowing which ones are worth automating. If a task keeps changing, keep prompting. If you're doing it the same way over and over at scale, that's the signal to build, because that's where the time and money come back.
Linya Fernandez, AI Automations Engineer, farsiightWhere AI is being used most
These are the workflows where AI adoption appears strongest today, largely because they are repetitive, execution-heavy and easier to test quickly.
- Ad and landing page copy
- Creative ideation
- Creative asset generation drafts
- Reporting and analysis
- Research synthesis/summarising
- Keyword & search term work
Where AI still feels underused
These are the areas where adoption appears less mature, often because they require more strategic judgement, commercial context or stronger first-party data.
- Audience research
- Workflow automation
- Strategic planning and budget allocation
- Creative production at scale
We use AI for admin, reporting and forecasting, but we keep the creative work human. It helps us get through the work that slows the team down, so we can spend more time on the thinking, the messaging and the creative decisions that still need judgment.
Katharine Suy, Head of Growth, QwilrThe shifts separating stronger B2B paid media teams
The findings in this report point to a clear shift in how B2B paid media is evolving.
In our opinion, the strongest teams are not necessarily the ones spending the most, running the most channels, or moving the fastest, but rather those making better decisions in the areas that most shape performance.
Across the responses, five patterns consistently stood out.
They keep marketing and sales aligned around the same definition of success
Stronger teams are not treating paid media performance as a marketing-only view. They are building shared visibility across campaign activity, lead quality, pipeline movement and sales outcomes, so decisions are grounded in the same version of what is working.
They test creative faster and more deliberately
Creative came through as one of the clearest opportunities for improvement. Stronger teams are treating it as an active performance lever, testing more deliberately across messaging, proof points, offers and buyer context.
They build influence across buying groups
Many operators acknowledged that buying decisions involve multiple stakeholders, yet campaigns still often focus on the first lead captured. Stronger teams are thinking more carefully about who influences the deal and what each stakeholder needs to see.
They use AI to accelerate execution, not replace strategy
AI adoption is clearly growing, but so is uncertainty around where it creates real value. Stronger teams are using AI to speed up execution while keeping strategy grounded in audience understanding, creative quality and commercial context.
They optimise for commercial outcomes, not vanity metrics
Across the responses, operators shared that paid media is still hard to connect to pipeline, revenue and sales confidence. And yes, while platform metrics still matter, stronger teams are looking beyond clicks, form fills and low-cost leads to understand whether paid media is creating value the business can actually see.
The bar for B2B paid media is getting higher
If there is one thing this report makes clear, it is that B2B paid media is entering a more demanding chapter, where familiar channels, familiar pressures, and familiar debates around leads, pipeline, and revenue now meet a market that expects more from every dollar.
What stands out from both the survey and the conversations behind it is that the fundamentals have not changed as much as the environment around them has, and the difference now is that there is less room for inefficiency, slower feedback loops or disconnected decision-making than there was a few years ago.
We've been staring at this data for a month and the real truth is that nobody has a perfect handle on this yet. Not the brands we surveyed, not the agencies advising them, and honestly, not us either. We still deal with data mismatches between platforms and CRMs, and we're still helping clients bridge the gap between sales and marketing.
However, the numbers highlight a massive dividing line, and it has nothing to do with budget.
The most successful operators aren't winning with bigger budgets, they're winning through connection. Tightly aligned sales and marketing teams are 1.7x more likely to meet or beat paid media expectations than siloed teams. On the flip side, literally zero siloed teams reported above-average performance.
The main takeaway for us is that the bar is going up, but it's rising fastest for the teams still operating in silos.
What comes next will likely favour teams that can connect those pieces faster, from creative and targeting to CRM data, sales feedback and the way performance is explained back to the business.