Guide

What's a Good ROAS for B2B Marketers?

A channel-by-channel breakdown of typical return-on-ad-spend ranges — and why the honest answer is "it depends" more than most benchmark posts admit.

Ask "what's a good ROAS?" and you'll find confident single numbers all over the internet — 3x, 4x, "anything above break-even." Most of them are quietly borrowed from ecommerce data and don't hold up well for B2B, where sales cycles are longer, deal sizes are bigger, and a single campaign rarely closes revenue on its own. The ranges below are a more honest starting point — treat them as context for a conversation, not a target to hit.

Typical ranges by channel

Why B2B breaks the usual rules

Most published ROAS benchmarks are built on ecommerce data, where a click can lead to a purchase in the same session. B2B rarely works that way — a LinkedIn ad might influence a deal that closes four months later, through a sales conversation the ad platform never sees. That's why channel context (search vs. social vs. video) and campaign objective (awareness vs. pipeline) change what "good" even means far more in B2B than in direct-response ecommerce.

A better question than "is my ROAS good?"

Three questions get you further than comparing to a benchmark table: Is this channel's ROAS trending up or down against your own last campaign? Is spend concentrated in your best-performing channel, or spread thin across underperformers? And is the objective actually one ROAS should be judged on — or is this an awareness play being measured by the wrong metric?