LinkedIn Ads is LinkedIn's self-serve advertising platform: from Campaign Manager you show ads to people chosen by job title, company, industry and seniority, and you pay per click, per thousand impressions or per message sent. The minimum daily budget is $10, and in Metadata's 2025 benchmarks across 138 B2B advertisers a click cost $9.39 on average.
Anyone selling to other businesses ends up there for the same reason.
LinkedIn is where the decision-makers are, with their job title written on their profile.
The risk is opening Campaign Manager, targeting procurement directors, spending a few hundred pounds and coming back with three leads and one question: wasn't Google cheaper?
There are three mistakes to avoid:
- using it where demand on Google already exists, paying $9 for a click that would cost a fraction in search;
- judging it on cost per click, when the number that matters is cost per lead (and there the comparison flips);
- measuring it badly: LinkedIn forms downloaded as CSV files, no link to the CRM, no idea which leads become customers.
Most of our work is on demand that comes through Google, and that is exactly where you can see when LinkedIn is worth it.
Macropix makes LED walls in Italy: Google Ads has brought it 2,906 quote requests since 2018, with the cost per request down to €39.44 in 2025. Its category, "ledwall", gets 8,100 searches a month in Italy.
Bosatta makes parts for Vespa and Piaggio scooters: with separate Google Ads campaigns for consumers and dealers it collected 127 enquiries from dealers and workshops in one year.
So what does that have to do with LinkedIn Ads?
In both cases the buyer was searching on Google. Many B2B companies are not that lucky: in our test on 20 B2B niches, 7 categories out of 20 get fewer than 100 searches a month across the whole UK, and 9 out of 20 in Italy. That is where LinkedIn stops being an expensive channel and becomes the only one that reaches the buyer.
In this guide:
- how Campaign Manager works, with the official objectives and pricing models;
- how many people you can really reach and the minimum audience LinkedIn accepts;
- the formats, with the limits read in the official guide on 28 October 2026;
- what it costs, comparing LinkedIn, Google Ads and Meta across 153 B2B advertisers;
- our test on 20 B2B niches in the UK and Italy to choose between LinkedIn Ads and Google Ads;
- how to measure leads and when to walk away.
Let's start.
How LinkedIn Ads works (Campaign Manager in five steps)
Campaign Manager is the tool where you create, run and measure LinkedIn Ads campaigns. LinkedIn's official guide sums it up in five steps: choose the objective, the targeting, the format, the budget and schedule, then measure and optimise.
There are 7 objectives in 3 groups:
- awareness: brand awareness;
- consideration: website visits, engagement, video views;
- conversion: lead generation, website conversions, job applicants.
The objective is not a label. It decides what you pay for: LinkedIn uses objective-based pricing, so with "website visits" you are charged for the click to your site, not for a like.
There are three cost models: CPC (you pay per click), CPM (you pay per thousand impressions, usually for awareness) and CPS (you pay per sponsored message delivered). Prices are set by an auction, and according to LinkedIn the auction rewards engagement: an ad people click on can win without bidding more.
One figure says a lot about who uses it: in the UK "linkedin ads" gets 3,600 searches a month and "linkedin campaign manager" 2,400 (Google Ads data via DataForSEO, October 2025 to September 2026 average). For every three searches about the platform there are two from people looking for the way into the tool.
Who you can reach (and why 48 million is not 48 million)
According to DataReportal's Digital 2026: United Kingdom, LinkedIn had 48.0 million members in the UK in late 2025, and its ads reached 86.8% of adults. In Italy the Italian edition counts 25.0 million members. These are registered profiles, not people who open the app every month.
So the real audience is smaller?
Yes. Those totals include students, retirees and abandoned profiles, which is why we treat them with care in our practical guide to using LinkedIn.
For campaigns, two other numbers matter, from the official targeting page:
- the minimum audience is 300 members: below that the campaign won't run;
- LinkedIn recommends at least 50,000 people for single image and text ads, and more than 15,000 for message ads.
A lot of B2B sits between 300 and 50,000: one role, in one sector, in one region. The recommended threshold helps LinkedIn deliver ads well; it does not mean a smaller audience is wrong.
There are more than 20 attribute categories (job title, function, seniority, skills, company industry and size), which you can combine with AND/OR and exclusions. On top of that you can upload your own data with Matched Audiences: contact lists, company lists and website visitors. It is how a well-written ideal customer profile turns into targeting.
One setting to always check: Audience Expansion, which widens the audience to "similar" profiles. On a niche audience it is worth leaving it off, at least until you know which roles respond.
LinkedIn Ads formats (with the limits from the official guide)
LinkedIn Ads formats fall into four families: sponsored content in the feed, sponsored messaging in the inbox, dynamic ads and text ads in the right-hand column. Below are the limits read in the LinkedIn Ads Guide on 28 October 2026; the last column is our suggested use.
| Format | Where it shows | Main limits | Suggested use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single image | Feed | 1200x627 px, PNG or JPG, under 5 MB | Website visits, leads |
| Video | Feed | MP4 up to 500 MB, up to 30 minutes | Awareness, retargeting |
| Carousel | Feed | 2 to 10 cards, 1080x1080 px recommended | Several products or cases |
| Document | Feed | PDF, DOCX or PPTX up to 100 MB and 300 pages | Guides and spec sheets behind a form |
| Thought Leader Ads | Feed | Posts by verified employees or 1st to 3rd-degree connections | Giving a voice to someone in the company |
| Message Ads | Inbox | Text up to 1,500 characters, CTA up to 20 | Event invitations (check EU availability) |
| Conversation Ads | Inbox | Up to 5 CTAs, text up to 8,000 characters | Choose-your-path journeys (same check) |
| Spotlight and Follower Ads | Right column, desktop | 100x100 px logo, headline up to 50 characters | Page followers, visits |
| Lead Gen Forms | Inside the ad | Up to 12 fields, 3 custom questions | Collecting leads without a landing page |
Why "check EU availability"?
Because in January 2022 LinkedIn suspended delivery of sponsored messages to members in the European Union, as Blog du Modérateur reported, quoting the notice in Campaign Manager. The UK is outside the EU, but if your audience includes EU countries, check in Campaign Manager whether the format is available before you plan it.
The format that weighs most on the numbers is Lead Gen Forms: the form opens inside LinkedIn, pre-filled with profile data. In Metadata's sample a Lead Gen Form lead cost $193 against $346 for a click sent to a landing page. If you do use a landing page, make it a B2B landing page built for that audience, not your homepage.
How much LinkedIn Ads costs (and why cost per click misleads)
LinkedIn Ads costs whatever you decide, from $10 a day: the price of each click or impression is set by an auction between advertisers who want the same audience. The official pricing page publishes no averages: it says cost depends on your bid and on how contested the audience is.
For real numbers you have to look outside LinkedIn. The most transparent dataset we found is Metadata's: 153 B2B advertisers, $57.6 million in spend and 211,000 leads in 2025, with spend-weighted figures. The region is not stated, so these are not UK prices.
| Channel | Advertisers | CTR | CPC | Click to lead | Cost per lead |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 138 | 0.67% | $9.39 | 5.9% | $202 | |
| Google Ads | 56 | 6.33% | $9.76 | 1.9% | $524 |
| 71 | 0.79% | $1.95 | 2.6% | $145 | |
| 49 | 0.65% | $2.82 | 4.0% | $138 |
Hang on: Google Ads costs more than LinkedIn?
In that sample, yes: a click costs about the same, but on LinkedIn it becomes a lead 5.9% of the time against 1.9%. Two caveats: the 56 Google advertisers are a different subset from the 138 on LinkedIn, and Metadata does not define what counts as a lead (a form filled in on LinkedIn is not worth the same as a written quote request).
Real accounts change the picture again. At Macropix a Google Ads quote request cost €39.44 in 2025, in a category with 8,100 searches a month in Italy. When demand exists, search wins by a wide margin. If you want to know where the price of a click comes from, see our guide to cost per click.
And the minimum budget? Let's do the maths with Metadata's numbers. $10 a day is about $300 a month: at $9.39 a click that is 32 clicks, and at 5.9% fewer than 2 leads. A budget like that teaches you nothing: two leads in a month don't tell you whether the audience is right.
A $202 lead is neither cheap nor expensive: it depends on where else you could have found it.
At Macropix the same request comes from Google at €39.44. In other niches Google doesn't have enough searches to spend a few hundred pounds a month. Before opening a campaign we measure the demand in your category and the value of a lead, then decide with you how much goes to search and how much to LinkedIn.
Book a strategy callLinkedIn Ads or Google Ads? Our test on 20 B2B niches
LinkedIn Ads is worth it when your buyer searches for you on Google too rarely to fill a campaign. To see how often that happens we measured 20 categories of products and services sold to businesses, in Italian on Google.it and in English on Google.co.uk: average monthly volume and estimated CPC (Google Ads data via DataForSEO, October 2025 to September 2026 average, pulled on 28 October 2026; CPC in US dollars, as the API returns it).
| Category searched | Searches a month, Italy | Searches a month, UK |
|---|---|---|
| Plastic injection moulding (services) | 20 | 320 |
| ERP for SMEs | 30 | 40 |
| B2B CRM | 40 | 70 |
| Cyber security for businesses | 50 | 260 |
| Technical translation (services) | 50 | 90 |
| Export consultancy | 50 | 20 |
| Third-party logistics | 70 | 1,600 |
| ISO 9001 consultancy | 90 | 40 |
| Industrial water treatment | 90 | 70 |
| Production planning software | 110 | 70 |
| Payroll software | 140 | 1,600 |
| CNC machine tools | 210 | 110 |
| Industrial packaging | 210 | 170 |
| Office cleaning | 480 | 1,600 |
| Industrial painting | 880 | 480 |
| Forklift hire | 1,300 | 2,400 |
| Industrial automation | 1,900 | 480 |
| Steel fabrication | 5,400 | 4,400 |
| Health and safety training | 9,900 | 1,600 |
| Employee benefits | 27,100 | 2,900 |
What the table shows:
- in the UK 7 categories out of 20 get fewer than 100 searches a month, and 9 fewer than 200; in Italy the figures are 9 and 11;
- the median is 290 searches a month in the UK and 125 in Italy;
- CPCs are higher in the UK: a median of $12.21 against $4.87 in Italy, with payroll software at $117.66;
- the biggest categories (employee benefits, health and safety training) also attract employees and individuals, not just people buying for a company.
Take "ERP for SMEs": 40 searches a month in the UK. With the 6.33% CTR Metadata measures on Google Ads, even showing on every search you would get 2 or 3 clicks a month. At $15.17 each, the campaign can't spend $40 a month.
So where do you find the people buying an ERP?
On LinkedIn, before they search. John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute set out the 95-5 rule (2021): if a company changes supplier roughly every five years, about 5% of potential clients are "in market" in any quarter and up to 95% are not buying. Google Ads speaks to the 5% who search. LinkedIn Ads can also reach the 95%, so that when the time comes your name is already familiar.
The rule of thumb we take from it, to check against your own numbers:
- above 1,000 searches a month, start with Google Ads, as with Macropix, and use LinkedIn for remarketing to visitors;
- between 200 and 1,000, use both: Google for people searching, LinkedIn for the accounts you really want;
- below 200, LinkedIn becomes the main channel, and search is left for your brand name and the odd explicit request.
We explain how to set up the search side in our guide to Google Ads for B2B companies, and how to hold the channels together in our B2B marketing strategies and the acquisition funnel.
How to measure LinkedIn Ads leads (Insight Tag, forms and CRM)
Measuring LinkedIn Ads takes two things: the Insight Tag on your website, for web conversions, and a connection between Lead Gen Forms and your CRM, for leads collected inside LinkedIn. Without the second you are counting forms, not customers.
The Insight Tag is a JavaScript snippet that records visits, matches visitors to LinkedIn profiles and enables retargeting. According to the official page:
- activation can take up to 24 hours: don't judge the tag on the day you install it;
- enhanced conversion tracking uses first-party cookies and recovers signals where third-party cookies are blocked;
- the Conversions API is the recommended alternative to the old image pixel.
The Insight Tag sets cookies, so it goes through your consent banner: if the banner is set up badly you lose data or collect it without consent. We cover this in our guide to Consent Mode v2.
Bad tracking is expensive on Google too. At Valore Solare, when we took over the account, Google Ads was counting 15,267 "conversions" in one month from 5,467 clicks, and none of them was a quote request. On LinkedIn the same mistake happens when every form opening is counted as a conversion.
When LinkedIn Ads isn't worth it (three cases to spot early)
LinkedIn Ads isn't worth it when the buyer can't be identified by their professional profile, or when you can already find them for less on Google. There are three cases.
- You sell to consumers. In Metadata's sample a LinkedIn click costs $9.39 against $1.95 on Facebook: that premium buys targeting by role and company. If the role doesn't matter, it buys nothing.
- Your category has demand on Google. With 8,100 searches a month for "ledwall" in Italy, Macropix gets requests at €39.44: moving budget to LinkedIn would only make sense to reach specific accounts that don't search.
- The budget can't buy a readable test. At $10 a day you collect fewer than 2 leads a month at Metadata's averages. Better a one-month campaign with a budget that brings a few dozen clicks a week, or to wait.
LinkedIn Ads and AI answers (what you buy and what you don't)
Ads themselves are not sources that ChatGPT or AI Overviews cite: AI answers cite public pages and posts, not paid placements. What can count is the content your ads put into circulation.
In Semrush's study of around 230,000 prompts between July and October 2025, Google AI Mode cited LinkedIn in nearly 15% of its answers. A Thought Leader Ad boosts a post that remains a public post by the person who wrote it: if it is useful and specific, it is the kind of content those engines read. There is no guarantee of a citation, but it is one more reason to sponsor content with real data rather than slogans.
We measured what LinkedIn content really shows up in search in our LinkedIn SEO test, which domains AI tools cite in our study on sources cited by ChatGPT and AI Overviews, and how to get your brand named in our guide to AI brand mentions.
Frequently asked questions about LinkedIn Ads
It depends: the minimum budget is $10 a day and prices are set by an auction. In Metadata's 2025 benchmarks across 138 B2B advertisers (region not stated) a click cost $9.39 on average and a lead $202, or $193 with Lead Gen Forms.
It depends: it pays off when buyers rarely search for your category on Google. In our test on 20 B2B niches, 7 UK categories out of 20 get fewer than 100 searches a month: there LinkedIn is often the only way to reach the people who decide. You still need a budget that brings in more than a couple of leads a month.
It depends: Google Ads catches people who are already searching, LinkedIn Ads reaches decision-makers before they search. Above 1,000 monthly searches for your category it makes sense to start with Google; below 200, LinkedIn becomes the main channel.
It depends: in January 2022 LinkedIn suspended delivery of sponsored messages to members in the European Union, according to Blog du Modérateur. Before planning Message Ads or Conversation Ads for an audience that includes EU countries, check in Campaign Manager whether the format is available.
No. With Lead Gen Forms the lead is collected inside LinkedIn and can be downloaded as a CSV or connected to your CRM. You need a website if you want to measure web conversions with the Insight Tag and retarget visitors.
It depends on the format: the absolute minimum is 300 members. LinkedIn recommends at least 50,000 people for single image and text ads and more than 15,000 for message ads.
The number to check before opening Campaign Manager
LinkedIn Ads: from $10 a day.
An average B2B click: $9.39. A lead: $202.
Minimum audience 300 people, recommended 50,000.
Lead Gen Forms before landing pages.
Insight Tag and CRM, or you're counting forms.
Our position: the first number to look at isn't on LinkedIn. It is the monthly searches for your category on Google. If there are thousands, LinkedIn comes second. If there are 40, as for an ERP for SMEs in the UK, LinkedIn is how you get known by the 95% who aren't buying today and who, a year from now, will look for a supplier, quite possibly among the ones they've already seen.
If you want to do it with us, we start from search demand and the value of a lead: see how we work on our LinkedIn, Google Ads and lead generation pages.
Speak soon!
