Hi there,
Thanks for getting in touch. Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and guidance on how to properly calculate ROI for a B2B tech business. It's a really common challange, and honestly, most businesses get it wrong because they try to apply simple B2C logic to a much more complicated B2B sales process.
You're right to be asking this question though, because if you can't measure it properly, you can't improve it. Getting this right is the difference between confidently scaling your ad spend and just burning through cash with no idea what's actually working. I'll walk you through how we approach this.
We'll need to look at how you're currently measuring success...
The first and biggest mistake I see nearly everyone make is relying on what we call 'last-click attribution'. This is where the ad platform (like Google or Meta) gives 100% of the credit for a sale or lead to the very last ad someone clicked before converting. On the surface, it seems logical. Someone clicks an ad, signs up for a demo, job done. But for B2B tech, that's almost never how it happens, is it?
The sales cycle is long. A decision-maker might first see your brand in a LinkedIn feed (first touch), forget about it, then a week later get retargeted with a video ad (second touch). They might then search for a solution to their problem on Google a month later, see your search ad, and click through to the site but not convert (third touch). Finally, they might see a case study on Facebook, click that, and then finally book a demo (fourth touch, conversion).
If you're only looking at last-click, you'd say "Great, the Facebook case study ad is the only thing that works, let's put all our money there!". You'd then cut the budget for LinkedIn and Google Search. But what happens next is your funnel dries up. You stopped the ads that introduced people to your brand in the first place. You're cutting off the top of the funnel and wondering why the bottom is empty a few months later. Your ROI will look great on paper for a short while, and then it'll completely fall off a cliff.
You need to think about assisted conversions. You need a model that gives credit to all the touchpoints that helped nurture that lead. It's not about saying one channel is 'the best', it's about understanding how they all work together as part of a wider strategy. Some campaigns are for awareness, some for consideration, and some for conversion. They all have a different job to do and you're ROI model needs to reflect that.
I'd say you need to redefine what 'Return' means...
The second big peice of the puzzle is the 'Return' part of ROI. For a B2B tech or SaaS business, the return isn't the £99 they pay for their first month's subscription. The real return is the total amount of money that customer will pay you over their entire lifetime with your business. This is the Customer Lifetime Value, or LTV.
I remember one instance where we worked with a B2B SaaS client. They were spending about £100 to acquire a new user, but the user was only paying £50 a month. On a last-click, first-transaction basis, they were losing £50 on every new customer. Their finance department was panicking. But we did some digging. We looked at their data and realised that the average customer stayed with them for 18 months. So the actual LTV wasn't £50, it was £50 x 18 = £900. Suddenly, spending £100 to acquire a £900 customer looked like an incredible deal. Their whole perspective shifted from 'we're losing money' to 'how fast can we acquire more of these customers'.
You have to work with your sales and finance teams to figure out a realistic LTV. How long does the average customer stick around? What's the churn rate? Are there opportunities for upsells? Once you have a solid LTV number, you can then determine a target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) that is actually profitable in the long term. This allows you to invest in advertising with confidence, even if the initial return isn't immediate. It's about playing the long game.
You probably should think about the whole customer journey...
So if you can't judge every ad by its immediate ROI, how do you judge them? You have to map your campaigns to the customer journey, typically split into Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).
Top of Funnel (ToFu): This is about awareness. You're targeting a broad audience of people who might not even know they have a problem yet, or that a solution like yours exists. On Meta, this would be using detailed targeting (interests, behaviours) to reach potential decision-makers in your target industries. The goal here isn't to get a demo sign-up. It's to get video views, ad engagement, and traffic to a blog post or a whitepaper. You measure success here with metrics like CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions), video view duration, and click-through-rate. The ROI will be negative, and that's okay. Its job is to fill the MoFu stage.
Middle of Funnel (MoFu): This is where you start to nurture the people who've shown some interest. You're retargeting website visitors, people who watched 50% of your video, or people who engaged with your social media page. You're showing them more detailed content - case studies, webinar invites, feature breakdowns. The goal is to build trust and move them closer to a decision. You're measuring things like cost per lead (for a gated asset) or website engagement. The ROI is still likely to be low or break-even at best.
Bottom of Funnel (BoFu): This is where you go for the kill. You're retargeting people who've visited the pricing page, initiated a checkout, or added something to a cart (if applicable). These people have shown strong buying intent. The ads here should be very direct: "Book a Demo", "Start Your Free Trial". This is where you should be looking for a positive and direct ROI. I often see clients running the same "Book a Demo" ad to a cold ToFu audience and a warm BoFu audience and wondering why it doesn't work on the cold traffic. It's because you haven't earned the right to ask for that commitment yet.
By structuring your campaigns this way, you can set appropriate goals and KPIs for each stage, and understand how your budget is working together to guide a prospect from a complete stranger to a paying customer.
You'll need to fix the foundations first...
Finally, and this might be a bit blunt, but no amount of clever ad targeting or ROI calculation can fix a bad offer or a broken website. I've seen so many tech companies spend a fortune on ads, driving traffic to a landing page that's confusing, has a weak value proposition, and makes it difficult for anyone to actually convert.
I remember working with one B2B accounting software company, their ads had zero ROI. We took one look at their site. They were in a hugely competitive space, and their main selling point was 'privacy'. But most businesses care more about features, reliability, and integrations, all of which were buried. Worse, they didn't offer a free trial, only a 'request a demo'. Their competitors were offering 30-day free trials with no credit card required. Why would anyone choose the higher-friction, lower-value option? Their offer was simply not competitive.
Before you spend another pound on ads, you need to be brutally honest about your funnel. Is your offer compelling? Is your landing page clear, persuasive, and focused on a single call-to-action? Is it easy for someone to take the next step? Fixing these foundational issues will do more for your ROI than any campaign optimisatoin. A 1% increase in your landing page conversion rate can have a massive impact on your final ROI, far more than trying to shave 1% off your CPC.
This is the main advice I have for you:
| Area of Focus | The Common Problem | Recommended Action |
|---|---|---|
| Attribution Modelling | Relying on 'Last-Click' attribution, which ignores the full customer journey and undervalues awareness-building channels. | Move to a multi-touch attribution model. Analyse assisted conversions to understand how different channels contribute to the final sale. |
| Value Metric | Calculating ROI based on the first transaction value only, making profitable customers appear unprofitable. | Calculate and use Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) as your 'Return'. This gives you a true picture of profitability and allows for a higher, more realistic target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). |
| Campaign Strategy | Using a one-size-fits-all approach, expecting direct ROI from every campaign, regardless of its purpose. | Structure campaigns into a ToFu/MoFu/BoFu funnel. Set different KPIs for each stage (e.g., reach for ToFu, leads for MoFu, demos/sales for BoFu). |
| Website & Offer | Sending expensive ad traffic to a confusing website or an uncompetitive offer (e.g., no free trial), resulting in low conversion rates. | Critically evaluate you're landing page and offer against competitors. Optimise for a single, clear call-to-action and ensure the offer is compelling enough to convert traffic. |
As you can see, properly calculating and improving ROI in B2B tech is a complex process with a lot of moving parts. It's not just about tweaking bids and budgets in an ad account; it's a strategic effort that involves understanding attribution, customer value, funnel mechanics, and conversion rate optimisation. We've worked with many B2B SaaS clients, helping them scale from a few signups to thousands by implementing these exact principles. For example, we reduced the Cost Per User Acquisition from £100 to £7 for a Medical Job Matching SaaS by optimising their Meta and Google Ads campaigns.
Getting it right can unlock serious growth. Getting it wrong can be a very expensive mistake. If you'd like to go through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can look at your accounts and strategy together and provide some concrete recommendations.
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
