Better measurement for B2B advertisers starts with an account-based approach

For many marketers, measuring the impact of media spend can be the most challenging part of advertising. Ad measurement is a key area where B2B advertisers have been under-served as a result of the ad-tech industry’s heavy lean toward consumer budgets. The metrics that indicate success in a consumer campaign mean next to nothing to a B2B marketer, who must drive awareness, credibility and consideration among a highly targeted audience, and capture the impact on a more complex set of outcomes that don’t always leave a clear digital footprint.

Form-fill lead conversions are often thought to translate nicely. But B2B advertisers continue to drift away from cost-per-lead (CPL) as a core metric, and for good reasons: advertising is not particularly efficient for driving leads, and only 1% of leads ever turn into revenue (Forrester).

Today’s savviest B2B advertisers are adopting an Account-Based Marketing approach that places emphasis on engaging a full buying committee throughout the buyer journey, using metrics like the following to evaluate the impact of their budgets and the relative performance of various technology and publisher partners:

• Account-based reach: How successful was the campaign at reaching buyers specifically within a set of prioritized target accounts that were selected based on firmographic fit and intent signals?
• Accounts visited: How many target accounts came to our website during the course of the campaign?
• On-site engagement lift: Did the campaign drive incremental engagement from prioritized accounts, compared to a baseline period?
• Opportunities: Did the accounts targeted in the campaign generate opportunities in our CRM? Use a control group to understand the incremental impact.
• Closed-won rate: Did opportunities from campaign accounts close at a higher rate than opportunities from a comparison group?

Metrics like these help tie advertising to business outcomes, and they can forestall the question surrounding advertising that inevitably comes up during budget planning: “Can’t we reduce or eliminate it?” Instead, you’ll find yourself relaying to sales that your ad programs increased pipeline from target accounts by 45%, as we did at Demandbase.

Learn more about account-based advertising and how the Demandbase Targeting Solution is helping B2B marketers better target their audiences and measure business outcomes.