GrowthSpree's audit of 56 B2B SaaS LinkedIn account

A new audit of LinkedIn advertising spend in the B2B SaaS sector has put a precise dollar figure on a problem marketers have long suspected but rarely measured. GrowthSpree, a paid media and ABM agency, reviewed 56 accounts representing $9.4 million in ad spend and found $3.0 million of it went to audiences that could never buy. The firm says the finding establishes the first named benchmark for LinkedIn Ads waste.

Where the Money Goes Missing

The report puts the average waste rate at 32.0%, or roughly $53,600 per account audited. Unlike Google Ads, where inefficiency tends to hide inside measurement gaps, the study concludes that LinkedIn's problem sits squarely in targeting settings — the platform's default audience configuration is too broad, and every mistargeted click still gets billed.

Three causes account for two-thirds of the total waste: spend reaching non-ICP job functions ($903,000), seniority mislabeling ($662,000), and budget leaking into companies with fewer than 50 employees ($452,000). Sales and business development representatives emerged as the single largest category of misdirected spend, a detail that stands out given how active that group is on the platform despite rarely holding purchasing authority.

The disparity between well-run and poorly-run accounts was stark. Waste ranged from 13.5% in the best-managed quartile to 52.4% in the worst — nearly a fourfold spread that the report attributes to management discipline rather than any inherent platform limitation.

"A third of your LinkedIn budget isn't a market problem. It's a settings problem. LinkedIn returns 121% ROAS against Google's 67%, but that only shows up once the budget reaches decision-makers. Right now, two out of every three dollars are reaching people who couldn't sign the contract if they wanted to. This isn't a sophisticated optimization gap. These are accounts that never excluded Sales reps."

— Ishan Manchanda, Co-Founder, GrowthSpree

Uneven Waste Across Sectors and Stages

The audit found meaningful variation by industry vertical and company stage. HR Tech accounts wasted the most budget at 37%, while DevTools companies performed best among the sectors studied, wasting 28%. Funding stage also correlated with waste: Series A companies averaged 40% waste, compared with 28% among growth-equity-backed accounts, suggesting that targeting discipline builds as demand-generation functions mature.

Decision-makers, the study found, received under 33% of ad budget against a recommended target of 60% or more, and only 22% of job-function spend reached genuine ideal-customer-profile roles. GrowthSpree, which has managed more than $60 million in ad spend across over 300 companies, proposes a 90-day recovery sequence built around a single rule: exclusions first, bids second, funding last.

Applied retroactively across the audited dataset, that sequence lowered average waste from 32.0% to 11.8%, recovering $1.9 million of the $3.0 million originally identified as lost. Decision-maker budget share rose from 33% to 61% under the same framework, according to the report.

For B2B SaaS marketing teams managing tightening budgets, the findings offer a concrete, if uncomfortable, benchmark: a third of a typical LinkedIn spend may be reaching people who cannot buy. The full report, published July 15, is available free at GrowthSpree's website, and the company frames the fix as an audience-exclusion exercise rather than a bidding or budget problem — one that, on this evidence, most accounts have yet to attempt.