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Welcome back to The B2B Stack. A Substack note I posted a couple of weeks ago on the click-optimisation trap struck more of a nerve than I expected, so I want to properly finish the thought here: where the problem actually comes from, what the evidence says, why it gets worse the moment you step outside display, and what a saner measurement stack looks like in practice.
What you’ll learn in this article:
Why optimising toward clicks trains your system to find clickers, not buyers, and why that’s structurally different from a targeting problem
What the evidence actually shows about who clicks on ads, and how much of it has nothing to do with intent
Why B2C-style click optimisation routes budget toward suspect environments, and why in-app games are the clearest example
How brand-safety filtering and click-chasing bidding combine to filter most real B2B impressions out before they ever reach a DSP
Why clicks don’t exist at all in audio and barely register in CTV, and what that means for attribution design
A practical framework for what to measure instead, channel by channel in order to maximise your investments into programmatic paid media
The pattern, restated
Here’s the setup, because it’s worth being precise about it. A GTM team invests in intent data, which is using an array of observable signals across the internet, job boards, pixel tracking to infer tech stacks and other such sources, to indicate which accounts may be in motion - so far, so good. They layer this into an ABM platform or LinkedIn to run some ads. Builds a high intent TAL. Launches the campaign. Then optimises the whole thing toward whoever clicked.
Not who engaged meaningfully. Not which accounts showed multi-signal buying behaviour. Not which members of the buying committee consumed content across three separate touchpoints over three separate visits. Who clicked.
Its a proxy B2B teams have fallen back to since paid media began, largely because unlike our B2C cousins, we do not have the observable (and short) path to trackable purchase as the ultimate source of truth. In b2C, where we may be selling sneakers, ‘all’ we need to do is pick a handful of data segments and bake them off measured on ROAS. This luxury is not in the B2B building.
So when we deploy the worlds best advertising tech to chase clicks, their elite AI optimisation engines go looking for segments of users who look like prior clickers. The algorithm duly learns to find clickers, based on looking for matching behaviours in the new cohorts of users today which matches those behvaiours shown from previous users who went on to click. You may instantly think this doesn’t really matter if they are within your TALs, but it does. It matters because clickers, it turns out, are very often not buyers. They are not the super-high intent cohort within the TAl that they are often assumed (or hoped?) to be.
This isn’t a targeting flaw you can patch with a better audience or a tighter frequency cap. It’s closer to what statisticians call the observer’s paradox: the act of measuring something changes the thing you’re measuring. Optimise toward what’s countable and the system quietly stops looking for what actually matters, because what actually matters was never the thing being counted.
B2B buying is slow, deliberate, and largely invisible to a dashboard. Gartner’s research (see sources at the end of this newsletter) shows buyers spend only around 17% of their total buying time in direct contact with potential vendors, meaning roughly 80% of the journey is self-directed, and Gartner’s 2026 research puts 70-80% of the B2B buying journey inside this dark funnel before any vendor contact form is filled.
So on B2B’s much [over] cited 95/5 rule, only 5% of your accounts are maybe in market for what you sell today. Of those 5%, 80% are likely still in the dark funnel, and maybe 1% of the overall total TAL is both in-market AND showing observable signal.
Forrester’s 2025 survey found the average B2B purchase now involves around 13 stakeholders inside the buyer’s organisation and nine outside it, spanning three or more departments. None of that shows up as a click. Almost all of it happens before anyone lands on your site.
So when a campaign optimises purely on click-through, it isn’t finding the buying committee. It’s finding whoever happened to be holding a phone at the wrong moment.
Below is the measurement setup I’d use instead of clicks, channel by channel.