Growth Unhinged is proudly supported by Primer
B2B ad platforms are good at buying media, but not so good for defining your market. Primer helps marketers build precise audiences from customer data and buying signals, activate them across channels, and measure what’s working.
See how 379 B2B advertisers allocate budget across Google, LinkedIn, and Meta, plus benchmarks for CPM, CPC, CPL, channel mix, and measurement. Read The State of B2B Paid Advertising in 2026.
You can love or hate paid digital ads. They’ll likely be in your future, if you get big enough.
Digital advertising is the most popular GTM channel among at-scale software companies above $50 million ARR, via the new State of B2B GTM report. It jumped from #3 to #1 over the past year. It’s especially having a resurgence among fast-growing AI-native companies (see: Wispr Flow’s UGC-centric paid ad playbook going viral on X with nearly 2 million views).
Yet digital ads an expensive channel that’s rife with waste and fraud. I probably don’t need to tell you that.
Making things worse, the classic B2B paid strategy has gotten harder and harder to run. AI Overviews are squeezing out inventory on Google, leading to more competition for fewer clicks. LinkedIn ads are often prohibitively expensive. Meta requires its own set of data and skills, and is especially hard to unlock for companies selling into larger enterprises.
The way out is by picking one of three paid playbooks – Demand Gen, ABM, or PLG – according to Primer co-founder and CEO Keith Putnam-Delaney. Primer, a B2B advertising platform that helps marketers build precise audiences, reach them across channels, and continuously improve performance, recently launched a new benchmark report that featured ad spend and performance data from 379 B2B companies. (This data skews heavily toward software and AI-native companies.)
Today I’m unpacking what’s working (and what’s not working) for B2B paid ads across all three playbooks. What stood out to me the most: the rapid rise of Meta for B2B, the shift to branded search, and native lead-gen forms for better lead capture.
Demand Gen playbook: The good old days are behind us
Demand gen playbook: focus on demo requests, no self-serve signup option, broadly sold across midmarket companies
The classic, albeit oversimplified, B2B demand gen approach looked something like this: marketing puts ads in front of prospects, qualified demo requests appear on the other side. Life was good.
Demand gen ad budgets go largely to Google where a cost-per-lead is roughly $500, although only 10-20% of these end up being an ICP-fit, according to the Primer data. I suspect that sales ignores many of these MQLs even when marketing has spent so much money to acquire them (#DownWithMQLs).
In a demand gen playbook, a demo is worth a good deal of money and is a high friction ask. There’s still a lot of gifting or incentives to make these more enticing. Webinar offers are common as a mid-funnel educational offer, too.
The two key trends right now are industry verticalization (picking off specific industries and personas with more targeted plays) and signal-based ads (using first-party and third-party signals in ad strategies because they have scale to leverage these).
While the classic demand gen playbook still exists, it is on the decline. “Everybody in demand gen seems to be either choosing PLG or going ABM,” according to Keith. Let’s explore those.
ABM playbook: The resurgence is real (as are the measurement pains)
ABM playbook: focus on demo requests and buyer group engagement, targeting a narrow set of high-value accounts only
As AI makes generic outreach cheap and ubiquitous, differentiation comes from precision, relevance, and deep context around a small set of high-value accounts. It’s perhaps not surprising then that account-based marketing (ABM) is having a resurgence.
Demand gen playbooks focus on the qualified lead (aka the demo request or the trial signup) as the north star for marketing. ABM playbooks focus more on influence within target accounts: making them aware of your brand, interested in your offerings, and then considering a purchase. I challenge you to replicate this chart for your own target accounts!
LinkedIn remains the reigning champ of paid spend for ABM with 75% of advertisers using the platform. It’s still the best platform for reaching buying groups within target accounts.
But even ABM advertisers are shifting toward Meta as LinkedIn CPMs have exploded. The cost per 1,000 LinkedIn impressions is typically 5.3× Meta’s and 8.3× the cost of Google’s impression-based formats (source: Primer benchmarks).
“ABM advertising would be LinkedIn and programmatic display, and that would be it from a paid ad standpoint,” Keith told me. He now sees the pendulum swinging away from old school ABM ad platforms and toward signal-based and contact-based ad plays.
There’s buzz around highly personalized, 1:1 ABM ad campaigns, although Keith says these are still rare because they’re extraordinarily hard to execute operationally. He spotlighted UserGems as a positive example here. A scroll through LinkedIn ad library shows the variety of ad creatives that get tailored to each account.
UserGems runs 1:1 ABM ads on LinkedIn, via the LinkedIn ad library
ABM measurement needs a different scorecard. Start with account-level reach and engagement across the buying group; use website visitor de-anonymization and CRM influence to connect those touches to pipeline; then validate incrementality with matched holdout groups inside your target audience. The operational work is real—and website de-anonymization is still imperfect—but done well, it can show that a January touchpoint on Reddit influenced an opportunity that emerged in September.
The ABM ad playbook focuses on document ads along with promoting webinars and events, offers that require a higher level of investment. Few optimize around website conversion; it’s usually split between views and form-fills directly in LinkedIn or Meta. Primer’s data shows that 59% of confirmed LinkedIn leads from April to August happened through native lead gen form submissions, i.e. without ever reaching your website.
PLG playbook: Budgets shift hard to Meta and Google branded search
PLG playbook: focus on self-serve product signups, lower starting deal sizes and large TAMs
The PLG playbook goes in the opposite direction of ABM. There’s a massive audience, a low friction offer (free signup), and quick buying cycles.
The biggest trend here is shifting budget from Google toward Meta, where you can get B2B demand with B2C prices. Investment in Meta jumped from 20% of PLG ad budgets last November to 32% of budgets as of August 2026.
Keith credits Meta’s Andromeda algorithm update, which means Meta can steer much more qualified leads to B2B companies.
That’s increasingly how Keith thinks about the opportunity at Primer: separate the audience layer from the media-buying layer. Build the audience you actually want from your ICP, first-party data, and buying signals, then decide where you can reach it most efficiently — instead of defaulting to the platform with the best native B2B targeting. The ingredients you need to unlock Meta for B2B are:
Conversion signal: Feed conversion signals back to Meta via the Conversions API to give them something to optimize around. Keith says you’ll want to send Meta at least 50 conversions per week so send the lowest-funnel conversion signal you can where there’s enough volume. Otherwise move up the funnel (ex: activated signups, business signups).
Creative experimentation: Send Meta lots of different creative and the algorithm will find the winner (although this works best for larger audiences).
A taste of Wispr Flow’s Meta ads with UGC creative. They have 4,300 (!) different ad creatives in the Meta Ad Library.
Custom audiences: Bring your own B2B audience data to Meta rather than relying exclusively on its native targeting. You can target those people directly or use them as the foundation for a 1% lookalike audience to expand your reach. The quality and match rate of the underlying audience matters enormously.
AI answers have eaten into the placement of unbranded search campaigns in Google, i.e. the sponsored links at the top of queries like “best CRM tools” (shown below). Inventory is constrained and companies have needed to drastically pivot their Google budget, Keith points out.
Google isn’t providing AI Overviews on branded search terms (yet) and just provides you with the company’s website. PLG companies are paying attention, investing less in unbranded search and more in branded search, which includes investing in competitors’ keywords and the keywords of companies in adjacent categories. (This is even extending into spaces like GTM agencies and consultancies, where tech vendors are active bidders among these branded Google searches. I smell channel conflict.)
Thanks for reading Growth Unhinged! To receive new posts and support my work, please subscribe or share this post.
Where paid advertising is heading next
It’s almost impossible to talk about paid advertising without talking about ChatGPT ads. The product reportedly it hit a $1B annualized run rate in August, 200 days after its launch.
“The anecdotal feedback is that people were really excited to try it, but nobody has been able to tie good conversion value to it yet,” Keith told me. “Nobody has figured it out yet and it’s a work-in-progress product.”
Just 3% of respondents in the 2026 State of B2B GTM report said they’re currently using ChatGPT ads. That’s among the lowest adoption rate of any ad platform we asked about. Yet 39% plan to try ChatGPT ads in 2027.
Other channels with more near-term promise include:
X (formerly Twitter): There’s renewed interest in X, especially for companies targeting engineers.
Reddit: Keith says it’s most interesting as an influence channel rather than a last-click channel.
TikTok: There’s plenty of experimentation although “nobody is really going hard on it yet” according to Keith.
Connected TV: It’s growing in popularity and has much better audience targeting capabilities than traditional TV.
Paid advertising is almost guaranteed to be in your future if you get big enough. But the playbook is changing. The advantage increasingly comes from knowing exactly who you want to reach, understanding where they are in their buying journey, and bringing that audience to the channels that can reach them most efficiently.
Whether you're running ABM, PLG, or Demand Gen, start with your market instead of your media plan. And don't assume the channels that worked yesterday will be the ones that perform best tomorrow.
