LinkedIn stands alone among major advertising platforms in delivering positive returns for B2B marketers, according to a recent report from Dreamdata.
The LinkedIn Benchmarks Report 2026 found that LinkedIn is the only platform to deliver positive return on ad spend (ROAS) at 121%, outperforming Google Search (67%) and Meta (51%) on revenue impact. This performance is credited with the social media compnay be able to capture 41% of B2B paid social budgets, making it the single largest ad investment among platforms.
The Dreamdata LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks Report analyzed aggregated campaign data from thousands of B2B companies, covering over 66 million sessions across 3.5 million customer journeys. This second annual report tracked year-over-year shifts in budget allocation, ROAS performance, and customer journey evolution across major advertising platforms, providing B2B marketers with reliable benchmarks to assess their strategies and demonstrate marketing’s revenue impact.
Dreamdata’s Steffen Hedebrandt
Steffen Hedebrandt, co-founder and CMO at Dreamdata, stated B2B deals are essentially won before sales get involved in the process.
“However, proving marketing’s impact is difficult, since CRMs aren’t built to track multiple anonymous touchpoints or connect early engagement to a deal that closes months later,” said Hedebrandt in a statement. “This often leads to marketing’s impact being undervalued, causing marketers to underinvest in the activities that actually drive revenue.”
Report Details
The report reveals a fundamental shift in B2B buying behavior: the nurturing phase has become the longest and most influential part of the customer journey. B2B marketers now own 81% of the full buyer journey, which has extended to 272 days from 211 days from a year ago. Buyers spend the first roughly seven months forming their purchasing decisions through content consumption and self-education before ever entering the sales pipeline.
The year-over-year data reveals mounting complexity in B2B buying behavior. The typical buyer journey now includes 88 touchpoints (up from 76), spans four channels and involves 10 stakeholders (up from 6.8), indicating that B2B purchasing has become increasingly distributed, multi-channel, and consensus-driven.
Hedebrandt noted the report helps B2B marketers determine “which channels best influence buyer perception and where to invest for sustainable growth requires making marketing’s influence on the customer journey visible, beyond clicks and leads.”
The report from Dreamdata, a B2B Activation & Attribution Platform that is a a LinkedIn Marketing Partner, can be download by clicking here.
