Episode 23: Why Your B2B Ads Are Wasting Budget on the Wrong Accounts (ABM Masterclass)

Most B2B companies do not have a traffic problem. They have a relevance problem. They generate impressions, they generate clicks, and sometimes they even generate leads. But the accounts they actually want to close never see their message. Meanwhile, marketing celebrates campaign metrics while sales keeps asking why the right deals are not coming in. In this episode of Leaders of Growth, Milan Savov sits down with Daniel Macià, founder of Astrad, to unpack why this disconnect keeps happening and what account-based marketing done properly actually looks like.

1. Why B2C Metrics Are Killing B2B Campaigns

The root problem in most B2B advertising is that marketers are applying a B2C mindset to a completely different buying environment. Optimising for the lowest cost per click and the highest click-through rate made sense when you were selling directly to individuals making fast, low-risk decisions. In B2B, where buying committees, long sales cycles, and high-value contracts are the norm, that approach actively misleads you.

Daniel explains that CTR and CPC are not false metrics. They are incomplete ones. The real signal is what happens after a prospect sees your ad and does not click. On average, the number of people who visit a website after seeing an ad without clicking is 300% higher than the actual click-through rate. That means the majority of engaged prospects are never captured in the metrics most teams are reporting.

If you are measuring success by clicks alone, you are watching the wrong scoreboard. The real game is influence, brand presence with the right accounts, and the intent signals that follow. Getting obsessed with volume metrics while ignoring post-impression behaviour is one of the most expensive habits in B2B marketing.

2. The Logic Behind a Target Account List That Actually Works

Account-based marketing begins with a list of accounts, but that list is only as good as the logic behind it. Daniel is direct: targeting 16,000 companies because they fall within your industry is not ABM. It is broad targeting with an ABM label on it. Real ABM starts with hand-picked accounts that have been chosen for a specific strategic reason, validated by both sales and leadership.

The recommended structure is three tiers. Tier one consists of 10 to 20 accounts maximum, each receiving a one-to-one campaign with individual optimisations. These are the accounts you absolutely must close. Tier two covers priority accounts within your ICP that receive strong attention but not the same bespoke treatment. Tier three keeps non-priority ICP accounts warm with lighter budget allocation, typically around 20% of the total.

The tiering exercise itself is valuable beyond campaign setup. It forces the conversation between marketing, sales, and the CRO about which accounts actually matter and why. That alignment is where most companies fall short before a single ad is ever placed.

3. Where You Appear Is as Important as Who You Target

Premium publishers matter. Appearing on contextually relevant, brand-safe media is not a nice-to-have in ABM. It is foundational. Showing an ad for a complex B2B solution next to breaking news about a factory accident, or inside a hyper-casual mobile game, does not just waste budget. It actively damages the brand perception you are trying to build with the exact accounts you most want to influence.

Creative format is equally critical. Static banners cannot carry complex B2B messaging. Daniel points to animated HTML, video, audio, and connected TV as formats that allow a proposition to land properly. A buyer who encounters your brand through a 30-second audio ad or a full-screen connected TV placement is being influenced in a fundamentally different way than one who scrolls past a banner.

The open web’s strength is its dynamism. Unlike walled gardens such as LinkedIn, programmatic gives you precise control over publishers, devices, timing, and context. That flexibility is exactly why it requires more rigour, not less. The companies that waste budget in programmatic are almost always the ones treating it like a spray-and-pray channel.

4. How to Evaluate an ABM Partner Before You Sign

Not every company offering ABM services is actually delivering it. Daniel outlines three pillars to evaluate any potential partner. First, full transparency: you should be able to see exactly which publishers your ads appeared on, which creatives were delivered to which accounts, at what times, and on which devices. If the answer is that this is proprietary or handled internally, walk away.

Second, brand safety protocols. The B2B space is delicate. Appearing next to the wrong content can undo weeks of brand building with a key account. Ask specifically what systems are in place to prevent your ads from appearing alongside unsuitable media. Third, and most critically, where does the account data come from? Many providers rely on basic DNS lookups against IP ranges, which are imprecise and often target the wrong people entirely.

The right partner should be targeting individual IPs validated through multiple signal chains from the open internet, mapped back to the actual accounts you specified. Anything less than that level of precision means your tier-one strategy is reaching people who were never supposed to see it.

5. AI, Growth, and the Human Logic Behind Every Decision

AI is lowering the barrier to entry for ABM. Creative studios, campaign planners, and improved bidding algorithms are making it possible to run precise account-based campaigns with budgets as low as $3,000, provided the target list is small and highly focused. The marketers who understand how to use these tools without getting distracted by the noise around them are the ones gaining an edge right now.

But Daniel’s deepest lesson from seven years of building Astrad is not about technology. It is about people and logic. The most expensive mistake he made was hiring team members who did not genuinely believe in the product. Skill alone is not enough. The team needs to share the ethos behind what the company is building. When that is missing, it shows up in the results across every level.

His advice for growth, distilled into a single sentence: make it human. Build relationships with accounts, not just campaigns. Nurture clients over years, not quarters. Connect the dots between marketing, sales, and operations so that every action has a logic tied to the same goal. Growth that compounds is always built on that foundation.

B2B companies do not have a visibility problem. They have a focus problem. Daniel Macià has spent years helping companies stop spreading their budget thin across thousands of accounts and start building surgical, relationship-driven strategies around the 10 to 20 accounts that truly matter. If your marketing team and your sales team are telling different stories about pipeline, this episode will show you exactly where the disconnect starts and how to close it.

Watch the full episode of Leaders of Growth with Daniel Macià and learn how to turn your advertising budget into a precision instrument for closing the accounts you actually want.