Why B2B Programmatic Looks Broken — and How to Fix It
The transformation happens when you stop optimising for media metrics and start feeding the DSP business metrics.
“For B2B … how do you optimise your ad content when programmatic ads generate a 99% bounce rate with no real user engagement or click-through conversions?”
— r/programmatic
You’ve seen the comment before.
Every B2B marketer who’s touched programmatic has felt that pain.
But the problem isn’t the channel.
It’s the measurement.
We’ve spent a decade teaching machines to chase the wrong outcome. And I built an 8 figure business fixing the problem - and here is exactly how I do it
The Wrong Goal
Most B2B campaigns still optimise for click-through rate.
CTR was born in the B2C space - a world of impulse decisions, add-to-cart actions, and instant gratification.
As a consumer, if I see some cheap but cool product, which costs £20, I’m not going to spend 9 months thinking about it. These conversions are easily won, in a way that B2B ones are most definitely not.
In B2B, there’s no “Buy Now.” There’s research, consensus, budget sign-off, and long memory. There’s teams of people, with their jobs on the line, making big decisions over 9+ months with dozens of touch points.
Across hundreds of vendor sites we’ve analysed and tracked, the pattern is consistent:
High CTR correlates with high bounce and low engagement.
When you train your DSP to chase clicks, it learns to find cheap clicks.
It believes it’s winning at 0.25% CTR while your pipeline goes nowhere. If you told your DSP that you wanted a 0.2>% CTR, didn’t properly deploy tracking (and I don’t just mean plonking a pixel down), and gave it no further context on what you’re actually measuring - then we have a clear misalignment. The DSP IS winning based on what it was asked to do, but you’re measuring much more - as you should - and naturally concluding it doesn’t work.
It’s the wrong goal, optimised perfectly.
The Wrong Tech for the Job
Most ad-tech was designed for consumer performance.
It rewards immediacy — not consideration. Its built to act on those impulses, and to stack impressions up high and cheap, scalping the market for outcomes (like sales).
High bounce rates often reveal a misalignment between message, audience, and experience:
Ads targeting the wrong segment or geography - random B2B third party data in the DSP, with no audit trail on what goes into it - and it isn’t working.
Creative that doesn’t deliver on the landing-page promise - is the landing page the natural next step based on the creative or is it misaligned? did the creative over-sell the page or does the landing page not look like the creative? In B2B landing pages get forgotten and yet we complain about high bounces - in D2C and e-commerce, where they have programmatic working well, they OBCESS over the landing page, running hundreds of A/B tests monthly to fine tune every pixel. We can learn some tricks from this sort of hardcore performance marketing if we really want post click behaviour
Consumer-style calls-to-action that feel out of place in a B2B journey
Programmatic isn’t broken; it’s being used like B2C in a B2B world.
Machine Learning Isn’t Magic
Every DSP claims machine learning superiority — but AI is only as smart as the signal you feed it.
If you reward clicks, it will hunt for click-prone placements. This chases down cheap, low quality placements which are often in-app or on junk websites - and the performance that follows these placements reflects that
If you reward engaged sessions, repeat visits, and form interactions, it will start to learn what true intent looks like, and then you will get some of the best ML in the market pulling for your real goals not against them
The transformation happens when you stop optimising for media metrics and start feeding the DSP business metrics.
That means aligning your optimisation goals with the events that actually matter to your funnel.
Rebuilding the Discovery Funnel
Programmatic was built for discovery — finding audiences before they raise their hand.
Over time, we reduced it to a CTR race.
The path forward is attention.
Attention metrics normalise across clickable and non-clickable formats.
They value visibility, dwell time, and engagement — not just actions.
That means channels like CTV and Digital OOH can finally be part of the same performance conversation as banners and native ads.
When you connect attention with intent, programmatic can rediscover its purpose: building demand, not just measuring response.
How to Fix Programatic for B2B advertising
The modern programmatic stack for B2B should look like this:
1. Define High-Value Actions (HVAs).
Map out micro-conversions that reflect real buying behaviour: pricing-page views, form starts, documentation reads, repeat visits. We run HUNDREDS of these at FunnelFuel - not for all clients at all times, but as customisable, scoreable placeholders ready to customised to each client - this is the foundation of making programmatic work
2. Capture those signals.
Use your analytics and tag management layer (FunnelFuel, Adobe, GA4) to track them at an account level.
3. Feed them back to your DSP.
Set those HVAs as optimisation events so your machine learning works toward quality engagement, not vanity metrics. They need hardwiring into the DSP’s conversion API’s to achieve this
4. Use advertising attention Metrics to measure media not clicks.
These look at a wide array of advertising quality metrics like viewability, and time-in-view to quantify the ads impact. They don’t worry about clicks, which equalises formats like banner display which DOES generate clicks with formats like CTV which does not - giving a level playing field view into performance. We then link high attention placements which drive HVA action, letting us really optimise for what placements, formats and channels are working
The result: your media budget starts working toward engaged, high-quality traffic — the audience that actually rebuilds your discovery funnel.
Programmatic as a Context Engine
We’re entering an era where Large Language Models and AI assistants reshape how discovery works.
If programmatic remains a blunt delivery tool, it becomes irrelevant.
But if we reposition it as a context engine — surfacing the right message in the right environment — it becomes the foundation of intelligent B2B demand generation.
The fuel is attention.
The signal is behaviour.
The outcome is pipeline.
For B2B Stack Members
Inside my Premium Members Portal (available to paid subscribers, $7.99/month) you’ll find:
The HVA Generator Tool — define and export your own micro-conversions with ready-to-use GTM tags.
The Signals-to-DSP Playbook — learn how to pass attention and intent data back into The Trade Desk, Adform, or DV360.
1:1 Founder Session Access — reply to this email to discuss aligning ABM strategy and programmatic activation with FunnelFuel’s model.
Upgrade today to unlock the toolkit that turns programmatic from a vanity metric machine into a true pipeline driver.