Can I reach exactly who buys?
That is the question LinkedIn Ads exists to answer, and it is the only large platform that can answer it with a straight face. Google waits for somebody to search for what you do. Meta guesses from what people watch and tap. LinkedIn members keep their own work profile current, so you can choose your audience by professional targeting, naming the people you want and buying their attention.
LinkedIn Ads is not a cheap channel, and that decides whether this guide is for you. A click commonly costs $8 to $20 where Google Search costs $2 to $5, so the price is only defensible when one new customer is worth a lot and the audience is narrow enough to name. A firm selling a $40,000 engagement to operations managers at manufacturers with 50 to 200 staff has a case. A firm selling a $90 product to anyone has none.
LinkedIn sells access to a job title. That is worth several times a Google click when one client is worth five figures, and nothing when the sale is small.
How LinkedIn decides who sees you
Three stages, and the third has a fork that catches almost every beginner.
Stays inside LinkedIn
A lead gen form opens inside LinkedIn. The lead never touches your website, so it never appears in Google Analytics.
Goes to your website
A click lands the person on your page like any visitor, shows in Analytics and your own conversion tracking.
That fork is where most beginners go wrong. Both options are worth testing, but they are counted in different places. The form gets more leads for the money, because nobody has to type anything or like your website. The click gets a visitor you can retarget, measure alongside every other channel, and follow to an enquiry in your own numbers. Most B2B firms end up running both and reading them separately.
Your bid is not the auction's only input: LinkedIn also weighs how likely members are to engage, so a dull ad aimed at an expensive audience is punished twice, on click price and on how often it is shown.
The four numbers worth reading
Campaign Manager shows dozens of columns. Four decide whether the channel works, and the fourth is not a performance number at all: it is the sanity check before you spend a cent.
What is it costing me to be seen?
CPM: the price of a thousand views. Where LinkedIn's premium shows most bluntly.
A $40 CPM means 10,000 views cost $400. Meta often runs a third of that.Campaign Manager · performanceIs anyone clicking?
CTR: clicks divided by impressions. Judge it against LinkedIn, never against search.
50 clicks from 10,000 impressions is a 0.5% CTR, ordinary here. 0.4% to 0.6% is normal.Campaign Manager · performanceWhat does one lead cost?
Cost per lead: spend divided by leads. The rest is diagnosis; this is the verdict.
$1,200 for 10 leads is $120 a lead. Whether that is good depends on what a client is worth.Campaign Manager · conversionsIs the audience big enough to learn from?
Audience size: LinkedIn's estimate while you build the targeting.
Aim for 30,000 members or more. At 4,000, a month of data proves nothing.Campaign Manager · audience builderRead them in that order and each narrows the question. A high CPM with a healthy CTR means the audience is expensive but the ad works, so fix the targeting. A reasonable CPM with a CTR down at 0.15% means the right desks and the wrong message, which no bidding change will rescue. A fine CTR with a terrible cost per lead means the landing page or form is failing, not the ad.
Cost per click is a price. Cost per customer is a decision. Only one of them belongs in the conversation about whether LinkedIn works.
Setting it up
An hour of setup, mostly once. Step two is the one people skip, and it makes every later number readable.
- 1Create the Campaign Manager account and add billing
Sign in to Campaign Manager with your own LinkedIn login, create an ad account, associate it with your company page and add a card. The account is free; nothing spends until a campaign goes live.
10 min - 2Install the Insight Tag on your website
The Insight Tag is one snippet in your site's head, or a tick box in Google Tag Manager. Without it, LinkedIn reports clicks and nothing about what they did next.
15 min - 3Define the one conversion that matters
In Campaign Manager, create a single conversion: a form submitted or a call booked. One, not seven. Everything else can wait; this is what the platform optimises towards.
10 min - 4Build one campaign, one audience, two or three ads
Pick your audience by job title or function plus company size, write two or three properly different ads, and turn off the LinkedIn Audience Network for the first test. It is on by default, and it moves budget off LinkedIn before you know what the feed alone can do.
20 min - 5Set a daily budget you can hold for four weeks
Take the money you are prepared to lose learning, divide it by 28, and set that as the daily budget. A two week test at a small budget tells you nothing, because you will not buy enough clicks to separate signal from noise.
5 min
Three things beginners misread
The wrong read
"Clicks are $14 on LinkedIn and $3 on Google. LinkedIn is four times too expensive."
The right read
"$120 a lead, one in four closes, a client is worth $8,000. That is $480 to win $8,000."
Misread one
Expensive is a judgement about clicks, not customers
Cost per click is the first number anybody quotes about LinkedIn and the least useful. It compares two different things: a click from someone who typed a question into Google, and a click from a named job title at a named size of company who was not looking for you.
The only fair comparison is cost per customer: spend, divided by leads, divided by your close rate, against what a client is worth over the relationship. A $120 lead that closes one time in four on an $8,000 engagement is cheap, and a $12 lead that never closes is not a bargain.
The wrong read
"LinkedIn says 18 leads. Analytics shows almost no LinkedIn traffic. Our tracking is broken."
The right read
"Those 18 filled in a form inside LinkedIn and never visited the site."
Misread two
Lead gen form leads never reach Analytics
This costs people whole afternoons. A marketer sees a lead count in Campaign Manager, opens Google Analytics to reconcile it, finds nothing, and concludes the tag is misfiring. It is not. The form opened and closed inside LinkedIn, the member never loaded a page on your domain, and analytics cannot report a visit that did not happen.
Two habits fix it. Download or sync the leads from Campaign Manager into your CRM or inbox the same week, because a lead nobody collects is not a lead. And compare like with like: form leads against form leads, website enquiries against website enquiries.
The wrong read
"3,000 perfect people on $20 a day. Ad B got 2 leads, ad A none, so B wins."
The right read
"40 clicks across two ads in a month is a coin toss with a spreadsheet around it."
Misread three
A narrow audience plus a small budget equals no learning
Precision targeting is the reason to be on LinkedIn, and also the trap. At 3,000 people the same members see the ad again and again, delivery slows, and a month buys a few dozen clicks. Nothing you conclude from forty clicks is safe to act on.
Widen the audience rather than lengthening the test: add adjacent job titles, a second industry, or a wider company size band. Narrow later, once you have enough clicks to see which slice carried the result.
In Clearly
LinkedIn Ads is connectable today. Sign in once with the LinkedIn account that has access to the ad account, pick the account, and the report reads campaign performance: spend, impressions, clicks, CTR, CPM and your conversions, over any date range, with the previous period beside it.
The block worth knowing about is Top LinkedIn creatives. Instead of a table of campaign names, it shows the rendered ads your audience saw, with spend and cost per result beside each. That turns the monthly creative conversation from an argument about opinions into a wall of ads sorted by what they cost.
LinkedIn spend also sits beside Google Ads spend and the enquiries your website recorded, in one report on one date axis, not three tabs and a spreadsheet. If you are running LinkedIn for a B2B service business, start a lead generation report and connect it alongside Analytics and Google Ads.
Keep this one
LinkedIn metrics cheat sheet
| Metric | What it is | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | Times your ad was shown | One count per appearance, not per person. The same member scrolling past twice makes two |
| Clicks | Times somebody clicked the ad | Clicks to your website and, depending on the column, clicks that open a lead gen form |
| CTR | Click-through rate | Clicks divided by impressions, as a percentage. Never an average of daily rates |
| CPM | Cost per thousand views | Spend divided by impressions, times 1,000 |
| CPC | Cost per click | Spend divided by clicks. Useful for pacing, not for judging the channel |
| Leads | Completed lead gen forms | Counted when a member submits the in-app form. Not visible to Google Analytics |
| Cost per lead | What one lead cost you | Spend divided by leads. The only one here that answers the business question |
Common questions
What does LinkedIn advertising cost to start?
There is no account fee, and LinkedIn's own minimum is around $10 a day per campaign, which is not a realistic budget. With clicks at $8 to $20, a four week test at $10 a day buys perhaps 30 clicks, too few to judge anything. Plan on $1,500 or more across four weeks so the test can produce an answer.
Should I use a lead gen form or send people to my website?
Test both, and read them separately. The form is pre-filled from the member's profile, so it converts far better and usually costs less per lead, but those leads never saw your website and never appear in Google Analytics. The website click gives you a visitor you can measure end to end and market to again. Many B2B firms run the form for volume and the click for offers the reader must understand first.
Why are my click-through rates so low?
Because you are comparing them to search. On Google, people clicked because they typed a question. On LinkedIn, your ad interrupted their feed, so a CTR between 0.4% and 0.6% is ordinary and healthy. Worry below about 0.3%, which usually means audience and message do not match, and celebrate above 1%.
Do I need a company page to advertise?
Yes for anything in the feed. Sponsored content runs from a company page, which people click through to check you are real, so spend twenty minutes on the logo, banner and description first. Text ads beside the page do not require one, but they are a small part of the platform and a poor place to start.
Can I target specific companies by name?
Yes, and it makes account-based advertising possible for a small firm. Upload a spreadsheet of company names, LinkedIn matches them to company pages, and you can layer job function or seniority on top to reach the right people inside those organisations. If you have 200 accounts you would love to work with, this turns them into an audience you can advertise to by name.
Where to go next
Before you build anything, write down what one new client is worth and what share of enquiries become clients. Those two numbers decide whether a $120 lead is a bargain or a disaster; without them every report is just prices.
The series
All nine Platform 101s, in setup order
What each platform does, what it costs, how to set it up, and what its numbers mean.