Heard a vendor at a trade show say they track competitor ad spend but not their own ROI

Last month at the Chicago B2B summit, I overheard a marketing director admit they spend $12k monthly monitoring competitors yet couldn't tell me their cost per lead. Has anyone else seen teams prioritizing surveillance over their own numbers?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_wyatt2mo ago

Man that is wild lol. $12k a month watching competitors but can't track their own cost per lead? I gotta ask - how do they even know what to fix or improve if they have zero baseline for themselves? Seems like a lot of time and money just to see what someone else is doing without knowing if it even applies to their own business.

the_alice1mo agoMost Upvoted

So you don't think there's any value in knowing what your competitors are doing? I get the pushback but I've seen it play out differently. My old company spent basically nothing on competitor tracking and missed a major pricing shift that was stealing our customers for six months. That cost us way more than $12k in lost deals. The real issue isn't the tracking itself but that they clearly don't have their own numbers either. If you know your own cost per lead and conversion rates cold, competitor intel fills in the gaps. It's not either/or.

morgan5122mo ago

$12k a month? That's like my entire martech budget (and I've definitely wasted it on dumber things, like a bizarre A/B test where I tried to optimize font sizes for 6 weeks and got zero meaningful results). Honestly, the irony is painful because I've been guilty of the same thing on a smaller scale - once spent an entire afternoon tracking a competitor's LinkedIn ad copy changes instead of just looking at my own conversion funnel. But the real kicker is that without your own numbers, you're basically flying blind while wearing binoculars to watch the other guy's plane. You can't even know if their strategies apply to your market, your customers, or your product. So yeah, it's a pretty expensive way to feel busy without actually doing anything useful.