89 B2B Paid Media teams
Found 32% of Their LinkedIn Budget Was Wasted
Benchmark your performance against $40M in LinkedIn ad spend
Brands that have taken part so far include:
The last 89 B2B brands to run a free Audience Audit uncovered a clear pattern:
32% of their combined $40M annual LinkedIn spend was being absorbed by the same 100 ‘Click-Sponge’ companies.
That’s $106,000 in wasted budget every week — going to big names that never convert.
Click Sponges were just 0.01% of accounts targeted
But sucked up 32% of ad budgets ($m)
A few of the worst ‘click sponges’ from the Audience Audits so far:
Here’s what the results have revealed:
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“So LinkedIn can just spend my budget on these nonsense companies…isn’t that a bit of a loophole for them?”
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“This very much identifies with data the issues that I know that we've got with our top of funnel firmographic targeting.”
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“If we look at even just cutting out those top ten bad-fit companies we’d see the efficiency right away”
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“The thing that really hit me hard instantly was that the top 100 companies represent 1% of all the businesses we're targeting, but 32% of our spend!”
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“I think that's very much on point of ones that we want to stay away from and ones that we want to target”
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“80% of our budget is going against these [bad fit] companies? That’s quite a percentage!”
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“So these massive companies are taking up all our impressions basically. And none ever become leads…we're getting it wrong and it's still our biggest revenue stream. So what if we got it right?”
It’s easy to over-saturate common click-sponges with impressions.
Click Sponges are unlikely to buy, but pollute sales pipelines and waste sales time.
Diagnosing the problem is impossible in ad platform reporting, so most B2B Brands don't know it’s happening.
B2B Marketers simply see ad ROI and lead conversion collapsing.
Redirecting this wasted budget means you grow 50% faster!
Take this 1/3 of your budget, advertise to good-fit accounts and marketing contributed growth will go up 50%.
Audit Preview
Monthly Wasted Paid Media Budget: $0
Annual Wasted Paid Media Budget: $0
Here's an example of Clicksploitation at a sophisticated ‘Unicorn’ B2B HR Tech Company that ran a Free Audience Audit:
Spend on ads over 12 months: $819,864
Poor-fit 'click sponges' as % of total companies targeted: 1.49%
Total budget spent on click sponges: $279,018 (34% of total budget)
Typical clients: SME, High-Tech, High Remote-Work Adoption, generous employee benefits, an 'our culture' webpage, high SaaS adoption
Click Sponges: Department of Work and Pensions, PWC, United States Air Force, IBM, US Postal Service, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan etc.
Take a look at the Audience Audit results below for another company suffering clicksploitation below:
See clicksploitation in action:
Now, this company is blocking wasted clicks, and has discovered their true online TAM with Adzact.