This report draws on campaign data from Harmonic London programmes running across UK B2B companies between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, supplemented by published benchmarks from LinkedIn, Google, and independent research. All figures represent UK B2B performance. Where figures differ materially by company size or sector, we have broken them out by segment.
Overview and methodology
The data in this report covers 47 active B2B paid media programmes, ranging from early-stage companies with monthly budgets of £3,000 to enterprise programmes spending £80,000+ per month. Sectors represented include SaaS, professional services, financial technology, cybersecurity, and manufacturing technology. All conversion rate data is based on MQL-to-SQL definitions agreed with each client's sales team — not self-reported marketing MQL counts.
Active B2B paid media programmes across UK-headquartered and UK-targeting companies, Q1 2025 – Q1 2026.
Monthly paid media budget per programme. Median programme spend: £14,500/month across all channels.
LinkedIn Ads, Google Search, Google Display, programmatic display (via DSP), and Meta (where applicable for B2B).
Average contract value across programmes. Benchmarks are reported by ACV tier where figures diverge significantly.
Key findings
The headline finding from this year's data is the growing divergence between programmes optimising for MQL volume and those optimising for pipeline quality. Volume-oriented programmes generate 3-4× more MQLs per £1,000 of spend, but MQL-to-SQL conversion rates are 60-70% lower — producing similar or worse pipeline outcomes at higher cost.
LinkedIn campaigns targeting by company list upload or job function + seniority combinations outperform broad LinkedIn audience targeting by 3.2× on MQL-to-SQL conversion. The channel's high CPM is justified only when the targeting is precise. Broad targeting makes LinkedIn one of the most expensive and least efficient B2B channels available.
Average CPCs for high-commercial-intent B2B search queries increased 31% year-on-year across our programme portfolio. At the same time, zero-click rates on informational queries reduced organic traffic and pushed more buyers to paid results — briefly improving conversion rates, then inflating costs as more competitors bid into the same window.
Programmes that integrated Bombora or G2 intent data signals into audience targeting — either suppressing non-surging accounts or increasing bids/budgets for surging accounts — achieved median ROAS of 4.8× versus 2.3× for programmes without intent data overlay across the same channels and budget levels.
Across all programmes, retargeting campaigns targeting engaged website visitors (2+ pages, 60+ seconds) delivered median CPL of £34 and MQL-to-SQL conversion rates of 28% — versus £127 CPL and 14% MQL-to-SQL for cold audience campaigns. The budget allocation implication: most programmes underinvest in retargeting relative to cold prospecting.
Benchmark data by channel
All figures are medians across programmes in the relevant category. Top quartile figures represent the top 25% of performers on each metric.
Common mistakes and how to fix them
The most expensive paid media mistakes in B2B are not bidding errors — they are structural programme design errors that compound across every campaign.
Cost per lead is easy to minimise — and consistently the wrong metric to optimise. Lowering CPL by reducing targeting precision produces high-volume, low-quality leads that inflate marketing metrics and destroy sales productivity. Optimise for cost per sales-qualified lead (CSQL) and let CPL find its natural level.
Most B2B programmes allocate 5-10% of budget to retargeting. Given that retargeting delivers 3-5× lower CPL and 2× higher MQL-to-SQL conversion than cold prospecting, the optimal allocation is typically 20-30%. The constraint is audience size — effective B2B retargeting requires 500+ monthly website visitors in the target segment.
Awareness campaigns require brand-building creative — thought leadership content, original research, category education. Conversion campaigns require direct response creative — demo offers, case study proof points, urgency drivers. Using direct response creative for cold audiences produces low engagement and high CPL. Using awareness creative for warm retargeting wastes conversion intent.
A paid media campaign that generates leads in January for a company with a 6-month sales cycle will not show revenue impact until July. Measuring ROAS on a 30-day window for long-cycle B2B programmes produces consistently misleading conclusions and systematically under-credits channels that contribute to deals closing months later.
Implications for B2B paid media managers
- If your LinkedIn CPL is above £150: Your targeting is too broad. Audit your audience definition — if you're targeting by job function alone without company size or industry filters, you're reaching a much broader audience than your ICP. Add company list targeting or tighten firmographic filters before increasing budget.
- If your MQL-to-SQL rate is below 12%: Your lead scoring threshold is too low, your ICP definition is too broad, or your landing page content is attracting non-buyers. Run a cohort analysis of rejected MQLs — the rejection reasons will tell you which fix to make first.
- If your Google Search CPCs have risen more than 25% year-on-year: You are likely competing in an increasingly saturated category. Explore long-tail query variations, competitor-displacement terms, and account-based search campaigns targeting only companies on your ABM list to improve efficiency.
- If retargeting represents less than 15% of your paid media budget: Reallocate. The ROI differential between retargeting and cold prospecting is consistently 3-5× in favour of retargeting. The only valid reason to underinvest in retargeting is insufficient audience size — in which case the priority is building website traffic before scaling paid media.