LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, with over 875 million members across 200 countries. Thanks to its professional focus, the platform has secured a unique position in our social media landscape. In addition to standard features like personal profiles, company pages, or groups, LinkedIn offers several additional paid functionalities. These functions primarily focus on finding and training talent or securing new clients. You might already be familiar with LinkedIn Recruiter, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or LinkedIn Advertising. In our articles, we dive into LinkedIn Advertising—the platform used to advertise on LinkedIn and the LinkedIn Audience Network.

In our view, advertising on LinkedIn is an indispensable part of any solid B2B online marketing plan. Its professional focus and various advertising tools make it an excellent platform for getting noticed by (potential) clients. However, what truly makes the platform unique are the professional attributes used to build an audience. By using criteria such as job title, company name, education, or industry, you can build a highly specific target audience. Curious about what it takes to leverage LinkedIn’s full potential? Read on as we share our experiences, insights, and examples.

We share our insights and experiences with LinkedIn advertising and provide answers to frequently asked questions. We regularly post new information, examples, and insights. Is your question not answered yet? Ask us via email and we will gladly add it!

What are the benefits of LinkedIn as a B2B advertising platform?

LinkedIn is the premier professional social media platform worldwide, and certainly in the Netherlands, where your potential B2B relations and customers go looking for information and inspiration. While most companies—both B2B and B2C—already have a company page and use the platform to find new employees, LinkedIn advertising is used far less frequently. Yet it offers so many possibilities! With organic LinkedIn activity, you primarily remain visible within your own first-, second-, and perhaps third-degree network. With LinkedIn advertising, we achieve visibility among a much larger audience. These are our five main reasons to clear budget and start with LinkedIn advertising this year:

• LinkedIn is the largest professional social media platform
• Your competition isn’t using LinkedIn Advertising yet
• LinkedIn advertising offers a unique opportunity: measurable outbound marketing
• Advertising on LinkedIn is highly cost-efficient
• Reach exactly the right target audience and get to know them better

We elaborate on these reasons in B2B advertising: the benefits of LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn is an indispensable business platform—but why?

Why should you use LinkedIn? We often see LinkedIn being used merely as a rolodex or an online CV, which is a waste. LinkedIn is the largest professional social media platform and offers unique opportunities to connect with other professionals and companies in your field. We’d like to tell you why we see LinkedIn as a valuable social network; the most common reasons for using LinkedIn are:

• The premier platform for professional networking
• Searching for jobs and new colleagues
• Visibility and personal branding
• Exchanging knowledge and advice
• Company promotion
• Researching potential partners or customers
• Career development and advice

To get more out of your LinkedIn profile, we share a few tips:

1. Optimize your profile. Think of a professional profile picture, a background image, a clear and professional headline, and a compelling summary of your expertise, professional background, skills, and goals. Don’t forget to add all relevant work experience, education, and certificates.
2. Expand your network: Start with people you already know, such as colleagues, family, friends, and existing business relations. Dare to connect with interesting people you don’t know yet, but be sure to add a personal message to your invitation introducing yourself. LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help with this. This is a paid tool that allows for much better searching and lets you contact people you aren’t (yet) connected with.
3. Regularly share valuable content. Think of articles or updates that fit your field, such as posts from the organization where you work. Are you sharing a post from your employer directly? Don’t forget to add a short piece of text, for example, why it’s a relevant piece or what you contributed to it. This makes it much more interesting for your followers.
4. Be active: Try to log in regularly, for example, once a week. Don’t just post content yourself; respond to the content of others and be active within your network. It can help to set a goal for yourself, such as posting one (personal) update weekly.

In our full article, we also offer tips for managers, team leaders, owners, and marketers who want to increase the use of LinkedIn within their organization. Curious about these tips and how to get your team working effectively with LinkedIn? Then read our article Why LinkedIn is an indispensable B2B platform and how to use it.

B2B LinkedIn ad examples

Thanks to the various campaign objectives, advertising options, and audience attributes, you can use LinkedIn in many different ways to support your marketing and sales activities. Although relatively few brands currently utilize LinkedIn ads, we see opportunities and positive results for our clients who have already started. We make it concrete with 3 B2B LinkedIn ad examples. We share everything from the objective to anonymous results and compare them against our own LinkedIn Benchmark.

Supporting account-based sales with a LinkedIn campaign

LinkedIn is the platform where you are guaranteed to achieve visibility among the decision-makers of companies you’d like to do (more) business with. For a Dutch company active worldwide in the high-tech and semicon industry, we regularly build and optimize campaigns to support their account-based marketing teams. The advantage of this approach is the highly specific target audience; usually, it consists of one or a few companies combined with the right job titles. This allows us to address our audience very specifically.

Launching a B2B product with a LinkedIn campaign

Last year, one of our clients—a Dutch machine builder—introduced a new product offering both its existing and potential new customers a completely new packaging solution. How do you ensure that as many people as possible get to know this new, innovative product? Through the right mix of various tools such as newsletters, articles, the established dealer network, and advertising on LinkedIn, we achieved high visibility and website traffic in a short time. In this campaign, we targeted retailers in both the Netherlands and Germany.

In the full article, we share 3 more examples of LinkedIn ads:

• Apex Dynamics: Building brand awareness via LinkedIn
• Why LinkedIn is indispensable for supporting your trade show visit
• Why LinkedIn is the ultimate social media platform for lead generation

Curious about the other examples, the results of all examples, and our comparison with our LinkedIn benchmark? Then read LinkedIn ad example: 5 examples of B2B advertising.

Building a LinkedIn target audience: the secret to strong campaigns

Want to get more results from your LinkedIn campaigns? The secret lies in building the right target audience. When you know exactly who you want to reach, you create campaigns that perform better, yield high-quality leads, increase your conversions, and optimize your marketing budget. But how do you ensure you are speaking to exactly the right people?

We explain this in our article about building a LinkedIn audience. In this article, we explain:

• What makes a good LinkedIn audience?
• Which types of audiences exist within LinkedIn? (such as ‘matched’ and ‘custom’ audiences)
• What is the optimal step-by-step plan for setting up an audience?
• What are common mistakes when building an audience?

One special type of audience we’d like to mention separately: the remarketing audience. LinkedIn Remarketing is a way to reach your website visitors again through ads on LinkedIn. It might sound complicated, but by getting the visitor to your website, you’ve often already done the hardest part. Now they just need a final nudge to take the next step. Remarketing helps with that.

Engagement on LinkedIn

What do you look at to judge whether the content you post on LinkedIn resonates with your target audience? Engagement rate is a proven figure for measuring your online performance. We like looking at this figure because it says something about your performance at a glance, making comparisons across different periods easy. That’s why we use the LinkedIn engagement rate in our monthly online marketing reports. There is one downside, however: LinkedIn only provides an engagement rate per post and not for your entire company page. We solved this by researching which engagements LinkedIn includes in its engagement rate, allowing us to apply this calculation to the company page as well. LinkedIn counts the following engagements:

• Clicks
• Likes
• Comments
• Shares
• New followers

But, what is a good LinkedIn engagement rate? We provide the answer to that question in the full article, LinkedIn engagement rate unraveled + benchmark.

LinkedIn advertising strategy

Which LinkedIn advertising strategy achieves maximum results? If you want to advertise effectively on LinkedIn, there’s more to it than making a nice post and boosting it with a budget. A relatively simple strategy can be set up in three steps, but what we find most important is that you take your customer journey into account. Is your main goal new leads? First ask yourself if your target audience is already willing to share personal details in exchange for an interesting download. Or perhaps they don’t know you well enough yet? Are you known to your audience at all, or do you want to introduce your brand to a new group? Before you start, think about the customer journey. What does it look like, and in which phase is the group you want to address?

We are convinced that a good LinkedIn campaign fits into the customer journey. That’s why we work with multiple campaign phases and different campaign objectives, especially when lead generation is the main goal. How many phases and which campaign objectives these are naturally depends on your audience and objective. In our full article, we share more about our vision on LinkedIn advertising strategy and guide you through the three steps for setting up a strategy yourself:

• LinkedIn advertising campaign: phases and goals
• LinkedIn advertising budget
• Campaign tools

Understanding and using LinkedIn CPM

The term CPM, Cost Per Mille, is likely familiar to you. After all, you encounter it on other advertising platforms as well. For those not yet familiar with CPM: this is what you pay on average for every 1,000 views. CPM can be viewed at both the campaign and ad level, and it is a handy KPI for assessing and steering your campaigns. That’s why we dive deeper into LinkedIn CPM, so you know how to apply it optimally.

In LinkedIn Advertising, CPM holds a very unique position. This is because CPM determines 100% of your campaign costs. While on Google you might pay per click (CPC) in an auction, the costs of your LinkedIn ad campaign are determined by the CPM associated with your target audience. Is your target group popular? Expect a high CPM (> €100 to sometimes even €300). The flip side is also true: if you have a target group that is not frequently targeted by advertisers, you can sometimes appear for < €30.

The LinkedIn CPM is a relatively simple KPI that you can use in several ways to analyze and optimize your campaigns. We list a few ways:

• Cost control: One clear figure that quickly shows how much it costs to display your campaign or ad makes it easy to limit costs if the CPM rises too much.
• Budget planning: If you know roughly what CPM to expect beforehand, you can use this to align your budget and audience size.
• Audience optimization: The average CPM is not the same for every audience. Based on the CPM, you can make choices to approach different target groups as cost-effectively as possible.
• Comparison with other platforms: CPM makes comparing different advertising platforms very easy: on which platform do you reach your audience as (cost-)effectively as possible?
• Measurability and ROI: Are the campaigns delivering the desired result? CPM is one of the factors that helps you easily determine how a campaign is performing.
• Optimization: Just like other campaign KPIs, CPM is a valuable factor to optimize for, improving both your ad spend and campaign effectiveness.

Factors influencing CPM

If you want to optimize LinkedIn campaigns based on your CPM, you need to understand how it works and which factors influence LinkedIn CPM. The most important factors are:

• Target audience
• Competition
• Seasonality
• Bidding strategy
• Ad type
• Campaign goal
• Ad relevance
• Landing page quality
• Network and devices

In our full article on LinkedIn CPM, we explain each of these factors in detail and offer a few tips for using these factors to achieve a lower CPM.

LinkedIn video advertising

One of the best ways to stand out on LinkedIn is by advertising with video. For years, LinkedIn video advertising was the most efficient way to introduce people to your brand. While the days of it being dirt cheap are over, we still see that video is the best way to work on brand awareness.

Video has by far the most stopping power, but this isn’t equally important in all types of campaigns. In our article LinkedIn video advertising: the power of imagery in B2B marketing, we list all aspects of video advertising. This allows you to calmly determine when it’s meaningful for you.

Want to know what it costs and what it yields? Then read further below, where we dive deeper with our LinkedIn Advertising Benchmark.

LinkedIn Advertising benchmark 2026

Almost every client asks the seemingly simple question first: what does it cost? What does LinkedIn Advertising cost these days?

To give a good answer, we have been compiling a LinkedIn Advertising benchmark for years. we use the anonymized data of all campaigns we execute for our clients—B2B companies in Western Europe and primarily the Netherlands. This always results in a very clear picture:

This is what LinkedIn advertising costs, and this is what it yields.

In previous years, we wrote a comprehensive article based on this data sharing all our findings at once:

• LinkedIn Advertising benchmark 2024
• LinkedIn Advertising benchmark 2025

But for 2026, we chose a different approach, because not everyone has the same question. If you are a B2B marketer considering LinkedIn advertising, you primarily want to know what it yields. Right?

For you, we wrote: LinkedIn advertising benchmark: results per € 1,000. In it, we discuss, naturally, what you get for a thousand euros of LinkedIn ads. Too much reading? Then the graphic below is for you:

Another ‘hot topic’ is video. Everyone has noticed how much video is shared on LinkedIn these days. But does it work? We discuss this in our benchmark article: Video – is the cost advantage gone?  This naturally includes the question: was there ever a cost advantage?

Yes, a few years ago, video advertising on LinkedIn was dirt cheap and super effective by comparison. The market has now noticed this, and LinkedIn currently charges a much higher CPM. The good news? Video still works excellently in certain campaigns, even if it is more expensive.

LinkedIn benchmark: CTR, CPC, and CPM

We assess and steer LinkedIn campaigns primarily based on 3 KPIs: CPM, CTR, and CPC, where CPC is the result of the first two. That’s why we wrote a separate article for each KPI:

• CPM has doubled – what does it mean for you?
• CTR – LinkedIn hates external links
• CPC – Why did LinkedIn’s CPC price triple?

Want to get a quick overview of the various averages? We have listed them for you below. For more information, you can naturally visit the specific articles.

Average CTR per campaign phase

What percentage of your views lead to a click? The Click Through Rate (CTR) is an important KPI because it says something about your audience’s interest in your ads. It’s important to know that LinkedIn doesn’t always measure CTR the same way. In a brand awareness campaign, many more clicks count toward this figure—such as a click to the company page or a like. In campaigns focused on website traffic, only a click to the landing page counts.

Based on our 2026 benchmark, the average CTRs are as follows:

• Average CTR brand awareness campaign: 0.46%
• Average CTR website traffic campaign: 0.27%
• Average CTR lead generation campaign: 0.43%

Notable is the sharp decline for website traffic and lead generation campaigns compared to our previous benchmark (0.74% and 0.93%, respectively). The CTR for brand awareness remained relatively stable. The decline for website traffic is partly attributable to a shift in audience composition—smaller, more specific audiences such as those in Account Based Marketing perform differently than broader campaigns. Combined with the increased CPM, the lower CTR has a significant effect on the cost per click—see below.

Average CPC per campaign phase

How much do you need to spend on average to achieve a click on LinkedIn? We assess this based on the Cost per Click (CPC). CPC is not an independent factor: it is determined entirely by the combination of CPM and CTR. If the CPM rises while the CTR falls, the CPC rises accordingly—and that is exactly what we see in 2025. From our 2026 benchmark, we derive the average CPC per campaign phase:

• Average CPC brand awareness campaign: €14.29
• Average CPC website traffic campaign: €29.00
• Average CPC lead generation campaign: €20.79

The increase is significant compared to our previous benchmark, where CPCs ranged between €3.47 and €4.94. This applies most strongly to website traffic: the median CPC rose from €4.50 to €29.00. This is the combined effect of a doubled CPM and a significantly lower CTR—a double blow for advertisers who primarily steer on clicks. The question this raises: does a website visit of €29 justify the investment? For companies with a strongly converting funnel, the answer may still be yes—but that requires an honest analysis of your conversion figures, not an assumption based on previous years.

Average CPM per campaign phase

On LinkedIn, your Cost Per Mille (CPM) is perhaps the most important cost factor to monitor: the amount it costs to show your ad a thousand times. Unlike the number of clicks, this amount is always determined the same way, regardless of the campaign objective. That’s why we find it a good KPI for comparing campaigns and a reliable factor for basing budgets on.

Important to understand: CPM on LinkedIn is not something you set directly. It is determined by an auction based on your audience selection. Two campaigns running on the same audience will always have a comparable CPM—regardless of budget or creative. That also means audience composition and size are the biggest drivers of your CPM, not the bidding strategy itself.

From our 2026 benchmark, we derive the average CPM per campaign phase:

• Average CPM brand awareness campaign: €65.37
• Average CPM website traffic campaign: €72.44
• Average CPM lead generation campaign: €89.57

CPM has risen sharply across the board compared to our previous benchmark (€15.01 / €26.21 / €36.66). The median CPM across all campaigns rose from €25.92 to €73.83—an increase of 185%. A significant part of this increase is attributable to the growing use of smaller, highly specific audiences—such as in Account Based Marketing—where reaching senior decision-makers inherently involves higher CPMs. Campaigns with an audience of fewer than 1,000 accounts show a CPM premium of 76% compared to campaigns with an audience larger than 10,000 accounts.

What can you do with these averages? We hope to give you insight into what you can expect from a LinkedIn campaign. Naturally, this is only an average and can vary significantly per market, audience, and even during holiday periods. But it is a very good indication if you are a Dutch (or Western European) B2B company looking to advertise on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn advertising, what does it cost?

Let’s be direct: yes, advertising on LinkedIn is more expensive than advertising on Facebook and Instagram and in many cases more expensive than Google Ads. And in 2026, it has become significantly more expensive than in our previous benchmark—the average CPM rose by 185%. Yet LinkedIn remains a promising advertising platform, thanks to its unique capabilities for reaching a B2B audience. But what can you expect from the costs of advertising on LinkedIn? We break it down per campaign goal, based on our 2026 benchmark.

• On average, we achieve about 1,530 views for a €100 campaign budget in a brand awareness campaign.
• When the campaign goal is video views, we achieve an average of about 360 views for a €100 campaign budget, with an average cost per view of €0.28.
• Is your goal website traffic? For a €100 campaign budget, we achieve an average of 1,380 views and 3 to 4 clicks to the landing page.
• We see lead generation on LinkedIn as a highly valuable campaign goal. On average, we achieve approximately 0.5 leads for a €100 campaign budget, with an average cost per lead of €207.

Don’t know your campaign goal yet but want an estimate to calculate with? On average, we account for €74 for 1,000 views, but realize that this varies significantly per goal and audience.

Want to know more about LinkedIn advertising costs? In the full article, we break down the various campaign goals and associated LinkedIn costs in detail.

Getting started with advertising on LinkedIn

Want to start advertising on LinkedIn but don’t know where to begin? We help you on your way with the following steps:

• Create a LinkedIn ad account
• Determine ad format: campaign goal and message
• Build your audience
• Set your budget
• LinkedIn Campaign Manager
• LinkedIn Insight Tag
• Launch campaign
• Optimize LinkedIn campaign

We briefly explain the most important steps. In the full article “advertising on LinkedIn”, we detail every step extensively.

Determine ad format

What message do you want to convey to your target audience? Think about imagery and text, but also about your campaign goal. The campaign goal heavily influences your ads, as ad options vary per goal. The table below provides a handy overview of possible ads per campaign goal.

Building a target audience on LinkedIn

On LinkedIn, you can set your audience in a few different ways. You begin with language and geographical area. Only one language is possible per campaign, but you can mix geographical areas. Then, you build your audience based on various professional attributes such as the industry they work in, how many employees a company has, the job titles of the people in your audience, or, for example, their education.

Additionally, LinkedIn offers several ways to build audiences outside the network, for example, based on your website traffic, an offline event, or your mailing list.

Setting a budget

Four factors influence your budget:

• Audience size
• Number of ad phases
• Ad format
• Duration

When setting a budget for your LinkedIn campaign, don’t just look at available resources but try to make the best possible estimate of what the campaign needs. Your campaign improves significantly when you align the budget with your audience size. Sufficient visibility within a smaller audience is preferable to scattering over a larger audience; just like any other form of advertising, brand and campaign recognition on LinkedIn requires repetition.

Also, ask yourself how many ad phases you need to convey your message properly, which campaign goals fit these, and how long you want to run the campaign. Additionally, it’s important to note that LinkedIn maintains a minimum ad budget of €10 per day.

Optimizing your campaign

Once your campaign is running, you’re not done yet! Time to use the data from your campaign to optimize it. LinkedIn provides insights into the number of impressions, your reach, CPM, CTR, and CPC, among others. Furthermore, the demographic report is highly valuable: who are you currently reaching, and how well does this align with the audience you had in mind?

Are you getting started with optimizing your campaign? At least answer these questions for yourself:

• How many people are you reaching, and does this match your audience expectations?
• How high is the CPM, and does this match your expectations and budget?
• How high is the engagement and CTR?
• On average, how often does one person see an ad?
• How is the campaign distributed among your audience?

Curious about the full step-by-step plan for launching your LinkedIn campaign, or want to read more about the steps mentioned above? Then read our full article advertising on LinkedIn.

Outsourcing LinkedIn Marketing

Why should you outsource your LinkedIn marketing? An agency costs money, and you surely know your own target audience, right? Yet many successful B2B companies choose to outsource LinkedIn advertising. Why that is, we explain in our article on Outsourcing LinkedIn Marketing. There, we explain how it helps you get more out of your budget and exactly how we do it. And as a bonus, we share 16 reasons why outsourcing LinkedIn Advertising is a good idea.

LinkedIn Paid Ad specs and format

The ideal format for LinkedIn ads is 1200 x 627 pixels, with an aspect ratio of 1.91:1. This format is widely used for both the popular ‘Single Image’ ads and the ‘Promoted Post’. For a guaranteed sharp display, we advise uploading your image at 2400 x 1254 pixels.

But you’re probably not done there. What other formats should you know before starting your new LinkedIn Advertising campaign? In our FAQ article on the LinkedIn paid Ad specs, we list the most important ads for you.