How we counted
153 advertisers, $57.6M of 2025 ad spend and the CRM pipeline behind 90 of them. Two pages on what is in the data and how every published number is built.
What is in the data
153 B2B advertisers ran $57.6M of paid media through Metadata in calendar 2025 and generated 211,000 leads. LinkedIn carried 69.6% of the spend, Google Ads 15.2%, Facebook 10.6% and Instagram 4.3%. Reddit and Microsoft Ads are in the totals and too small to publish on their own.
Cost per lead, cost per click and click-through come from every advertiser. Pipeline and cost per customer come from the 90 advertisers whose CRM is connected to Metadata: $43.3M of lead-generation spend, joined to every Salesforce opportunity created in 2025.
| Channel | Advertisers | Share of 2025 spend |
|---|---|---|
| 152 | 69.6% | |
| Google Ads | 65 | 15.2% |
| 81 | 10.6% | |
| 50 | 4.3% |
What each number means
- Cost per lead
- Spend on lead-generation campaigns divided by the leads they produced. A channel figure is spend-weighted: the biggest spenders count most. Where a page says "the middle of the market" it means the advertiser in the middle when every advertiser is lined up by its own cost per lead.
- Sourced pipeline
- The value of every opportunity the CRM credits to an ad-generated lead, whether the deal is open, won or lost. Pipeline per $1 divides it by lead-generation spend.
- Influenced revenue
- Closed-won deals at accounts an ad touched anywhere on the way to the sale.
- Cost per customer
- Lead-generation spend divided by the closed-won deals the CRM credits to it.
- Close rate
- Deals won divided by deals won plus deals lost.
- Credit
- A deal that several campaigns touched is split evenly between them, so the numbers still add up when rolled together.
When a number is published
Every media number has at least 5 advertisers and $50,000 of spend behind it. Every pipeline number has at least 8. No advertiser is more than half of a published media number or 40% of a published pipeline number. A segment that misses the bar is left out of the report and the explorer.
One advertiser with a transactional CRM (thousands of small deals) is counted in pipeline totals and left out of cost-per-customer figures.
What we left out
- Pipeline totals by audience type, where one advertiser held more than 40% of the result.
- Cost per customer by company size outside LinkedIn.
- Reddit and Microsoft Ads as segments of their own.
How to cite this data
Metadata 2026 B2B Paid Media Benchmark (153 advertisers, $57.6M, 2025). https://metadata.io/benchmark-report-2026
The aggregate data is published at /benchmark/data/benchmarks-2026.json under CC BY 4.0.