Gated v Ungated Content and the Impact on B2B Lead Gen
If you’re looking to get more B2B leads from your content, here’s an interesting read. It covers ungated v gated content and how/what to measure through the pipeline towards sales qualified leads – and revenue.
Advanced Level.
Here’s the full article over at Content Marketing Institute
No Time TO READ THE DETAIL? here’S A SUMMARY:
Here’s a quick-skim AI summary if you don’t have the time to read the full pdf.
Why a CMO Ungated Everything and What Changed?
Blue Triangle’s CMO, looked at a gated e-book campaign, didn’t like the economics or the lead quality, and ran a simple test: publish the same asset ungated and measure engagement instead of form fills. The results pushed the team toward ungating content more broadly and reframing how marketing performance was reported.
The gated e-book campaign that kicked this off
The gated version delivered traffic, but the cost per usable lead wasn’t pretty.
- $15,000 spend
- 3,400 landing page visits
- 106 form fills
- $142 cost per lead
- Around half the emails were bad, so net cost per lead became $284
Visitor behaviour also looked thin, with roughly 1.2 pages per visit.
The ungated test and what improved
They removed the form, spent $2,000 promoting the ungated version over 2.5 weeks, and switched the success measure from ‘leads’ to ‘engagement’.
Compared with the gated version, they reported:
- 175 people engaged in about half the time
- 61% more engagement
- $11.44 cost per engagement (a 95% drop)
- Pages consumed increased fivefold
How they got internal buy-in to ungate more content
The article is clear that this wasn’t a quick ‘remove the form’ change. It took months of reporting and stakeholder conversations, with the case framed around the outcomes leadership cared about: pipeline and revenue. Once the CEO was aligned, they moved toward ungating all content.
The five-stage model they used instead of MQLs
Rather than treating form fills as the main signal, they came up with a five-stage progression model:
Stage 1: first engagement
Stage 2: repeat engagement from the same company
Stage 3: actively assessing (high-intent pages like features and demos)
Stage 4: demo request (positioned as the modern replacement for MQLs)
Stage 5: proof of concept to close to revenue
Account-based tracking and what it showed
They targeted 478 companies and tracked movement through the stages. The article reports:
- 72% completed stage one
- 81% of those had repeat engagement
- 27% were tracking toward actively assessing partway through the year
They also saw an average of 50 to 60 touches before a demo request, using HockeyStack to track interactions.
How do you measure marketing success without MQLs?
Track intent and progression instead of form fills: first engagement, repeat engagement, visits to high-intent pages, and demo requests, then tie those signals back to pipeline and revenue.
What happened after a year?
After a year of the ungated approach and the new reporting model, Blue Triangle reported these outcomes:
- 265% increase in demo requests
- 242% pipeline growth
- 41x increase in marketing-sourced revenue
- Pages consumed rose from 1.2 to 8
- Cost for engagement dropped 90%
- Marketing activity generated 81% of the prior year’s pipeline in the first six months of the year
The compromise: still capturing emails, just differently
They didn’t stop collecting emails entirely. Instead, they added an optional CTA at the bottom of ungated pages along the lines of ‘Want this emailed to you?’. The article says that approach produced 122 leads in a couple of months for one new e-book, with better contact quality, followed by a short nurture sequence built around related content.
When gating can still make sense
The main exception is proprietary content people cannot get elsewhere, such as original benchmark research or licensed third-party reports (for example, Gartner and Forrester).
