LinkedIn Ads is one of my favorite platforms. I suggest it to nearly every B2B client we work with and the non-B2B folks as well!

That said, I find that LinkedIn is the platform I hear the most failures from. Many, many people come to me and say they tested on LinkedIn, but they just couldn’t make it work. More often than not, it’s only because they tried to apply best practices and assumptions from other platforms onto LinkedIn, rather than adjusting for the unique channel that it is.

In this comprehensive LinkedIn advertising guide, I’ll review everything you need to know to get started.

Contents

• What is LinkedIn advertising?
• LinkedIn advertising benefits
• How to advertise on LinkedIn
• LinkedIn advertising costs
• LinkedIn advertising tips

What is LinkedIn advertising?

LinkedIn advertising is the practice of placing paid promotions for your business across the LinkedIn platform, which is a social media site and app that’s geared towards professionals, students, and businesses of all stages and industries. Advertising on LinkedIn is an effective way for both B2B and B2C businesses to reach prospective customers. LinkedIn has nearly 900 million active users, so this is a major paid channel you’ll want to consider when planning your marketing strategy.

🚨 LinkedIn Ads can fill gaps in your marketing strategy! Learn more in this free guide to marketing gaps that cost you customers (and how to fix them).

LinkedIn advertising benefits

LinkedIn is one of the biggest social media platforms, so odds are, your ideal customers are on there and ready to see your business’s LinkedIn ads. After all, LinkedIn is the most trusted social network in the US.

Businesses trust and like this platform just as much as consumers, too. It’s been found that LinkedIn is the third most popular platform for small business marketing, with 48% of businesses currently using it.

Plus, LinkedIn Ads offers tons of different ad format options for you to reach your target audience. In fact, there are many to consider—even some that aren’t available anywhere else. With all that diversity, there’s a lot you can do to stand out.

As for lead generation, LinkedIn Ads can be beneficial in that regard as well. I’ve been in the advertising space for well over 10 years now, and for lead-generating ads, nothing holds a candle to LinkedIn. The targeting options are by far the best, and the results are the most accurate when trying to reach a certain persona.

Here are some other LinkedIn advertising statistics to consider:

• LinkedIn ads can increase purchase intent by over 30%.
• 80% of B2B advertisers use LinkedIn Ads (and B2C advertisers love it, too!)
• Businesses that post on LinkedIn each week get a 2x higher engagement rate than those that don’t
• LinkedIn generates up to three times more conversions than X and Facebook.
• 79% of businesses see LinkedIn as a very good source of leads, and 43% say they sourced at least one customer from LinkedIn.

Source

Here are the four steps to run LinkedIn advertising for your business:

1. Set up your LinkedIn advertising account
2. Choose your campaign objectives
3. Test your LinkedIn ad types and formats
4. Set your target audience

Once you have these components all set, you can set your campaigns live and run LinkedIn ads! Let’s take a deeper dive into each step.

⚡ Ready to get started on LinkedIn? Get help with our free, definitive guide to social media marketing (simplified!) >>

1. Set up your LinkedIn advertising account

You’ll run LinkedIn Ads directly within the LinkedIn Ads manager. You’ll need to have a LinkedIn company page created that will be attached to your ads. Once your initial simple sign-up steps are all set, the first thing you’ll want to do is familiarize yourself with the LinkedIn Ads account structure.

LinkedIn Ads has gone through a bit of a reorganization as of the beginning of 2026, and if you’ve been running LinkedIn ads (or have tried them in the past), you might still have the old naming convention in your accounts. Here’s how your LinkedIn ads will be grouped:

• Campaigns: This is the highest level of organization. There are some settings you can use at a campaign level, like campaign objective, budget, and schedule, but for the most part, this level is a container that houses your ad sets.
• Ad sets: Ad sets were previously known as campaigns. This is where the majority of settings live. Here, you’ll choose an objective (if you haven’t done so at the campaign level), find your target audience, select an ad format, choose your bidding strategy, and more.
• Ads: This tab is pretty self-explanatory. This houses all of the creatives you have in a given ad set or campaign.

Now that you know the basic structure of an account, let’s start getting into the details of setting up your campaigns.

2. Choose your campaign objectives

Each campaign objective in LinkedIn is unique and has been created to achieve specific goals. Here’s a quick rundown of each:

• Brand awareness: Reach an audience of users with a post. Designed to gain impressions.
• Website visits: Drive clicks from your target audience to a page on your website.
• Engagement: Increase social engagement on your LinkedIn posts, such as comments, likes, shares, etc.
• Video views: Get your video in front of more users.
• Lead generation: Generate leads for your business with a form housed on LinkedIn.
• Talent leads: Identify potential candidates interested in open positions.
• Website conversions: Drive users to your website and optimize for leads, purchases, or more on-site events that you’ve identified as valuable.
• Job applicants: Generate more job applicants for your company’s open positions.

It’s important you select the right objective because each comes with its own set of options. For example, not all ad formats or bidding strategies are available in every campaign type.

Additionally, if your KPIs for your efforts are tied to traffic and engagement, selecting a conversion campaign, for example, could cause you to severely underperform those goals.

Here’s an example of how engagement and website conversion campaign performance can differ. All of the audiences, bidding, targeting, and creatives are the same. The only difference is the campaign objective.

In this example, the LinkedIn platform is being much more selective with who it’s serving ads to with the website conversions campaign because it’s optimizing for those actions. That’s causing the click-through rate (CTR) to be much lower and the cost per click (CPC) to be much higher than the Engagement campaign, where it doesn’t have to be as selective.

If you need help selecting a campaign objective, check out this post for a more in-depth rundown.

3. Test your LinkedIn ad types and formats

LinkedIn has many different ad formats you can select from, and each has a different look and feel, and some have different placements they can show in.

Single image ads

These are likely the ads you see the most (or second most) in your personal newsfeed because they’re the most common on the platform. They leverage a single image along with some introductory text, a headline, and a call to action.

• Placements: LinkedIn Feed (desktop and mobile)
• Benchmark CTR: ~0.35% – 0.65% CTR
• Best practices:
  • Use clean, high-contrast visuals that stand out in the feed
  • Write strong copy that gets the user’s attention
  • Align your image and headline well so the ad unit flows well
• Single image ads specifications

LinkedIn video ads

Video ads are very similar to single image ads except the creatives you can use are, you guessed it, videos instead of images.

• Placements: LinkedIn Feed (desktop and mobile)
• Benchmark CTR: ~0.30% – 0.55% CTR
• Best practices:
  • Use video ads when you want to tell a more complex story than what a single image ad can support.
  • Have a compelling hook in the first few seconds to keep the user engaged and watching.
  • Assume the viewer will have their sound off for at least the beginning of the video.
  • Videos of any length can work, but most sources suggest a 30-second or shorter video.
• Video ads specifications

Carousel ads

Carousel ads allow advertisers to add multiple images (cards) to the same ad creative that the end user can swipe through. Each card can have its own headline and destination URL, so they’re highly customizable.

• Placements: LinkedIn Feed (desktop and mobile)
• Benchmark CTR: ~0.40% – 0.70% CTR
• Best practices:
  • Make the first card the most attention-grabbing so as to stop the user from scrolling, then use the rest of the cards to give the details.
  • Be creative with your story progression between cards. Highlight different products, create a single scene, showcase customer reviews. Don’t just put together 2-10 ways to ask for a demo request.
• Carousel ads specifications

Text ads

Text ads are a very small, throwback-style ad format that leverages only a very short headline, description, and a small thumbnail image.

• Placements: Right rail (desktop only), Top banner (desktop only)
• Benchmark CTR: ~0.02% – 0.08%
• Best Practices:
  • These ads tend to have high impression counts and very, very low CTRs. They’re great for remarketing to known audiences.
  • Test lots of variants to see what sticks and can stand out.
  • Be very direct in the short text space you’re given.
  • Use simple, single focal images like a logo or a single item. Large scenes will get lost and muddied.
• Text ads specifications

Message ads

Message ads operate similarly to a user-to-user message on LinkedIn. They show up in their inbox, so they can feel a bit more invasive than the other ad formats, so you need to earn that privilege.

• Placements: LinkedIn Messaging Inbox (desktop and mobile)
• Benchmark CTR:
  • Open Rate: ~40% – 55%
  • CTR: ~3% – 5%
• Best practices:
  • Focus on a single, clear CTA that is meaningful enough to warrant the perceived privacy invasion. A demo request is a bad idea for this ad format, but a special event invite or an offer for a significant discount could work.
  • Personalize the message with dynamic fields when possible
  • Keep your messaging conversational and not overly salesy.
• Message ads specifications

Conversation ads

Conversation ads are effectively Message Ads but souped up. They allow for more of a chat-like experience and give you the option for multiple call-to-action buttons that can help the user effectively “choose their own adventure”.

• Placements: LinkedIn Messaging Inbox (desktop and mobile)
• Benchmark CTR: ~4% – 6% (expect your metrics to vary based on your branching paths)
• Best practices:
  • Avoid decision fatigue/confusing options by limiting to 2-4 options
  • Use clear, action-oriented CTAs
  • Build your conversation branches based on how a user makes their way through your buyer funnel.
• Conversation ads specifications

Documents

Document Ads are one of the newer formats in recent years and, quite frankly, I’m a huge fan of them. This format lets you upload a document, a PDF, for example, and tease a portion of the document, maybe the first 2-3 pages, as the ad creative, then require the user to fill out a form to get access to the rest.

• Placements: LinkedIn Feed (desktop and mobile)
• Benchmark CTR: ~0.40% – 0.80%
• Best practices:
  • Design your first page to be compelling and easy to understand what the document is about.
  • Use strong lead gen messaging in the lead generation form you use to capture the user data.
  • I’ve found that using 10%-25% of an asset is usually enough to get someone to bite.
• Document ads specifications

Dynamic LinkedIn ads

Within Dynamic ads, there are three separate options: Follower, Spotlight, and Jobs Ads. Each is designed to do pretty much what the name says and uses the user’s information in the ad itself.

• Placements: Right rail (desktop only)
• Benchmark CTR: ~0.08% – 0.30% (varies widely by type)
• Best Practices:
  • Lean into personalization
  • Ensure landing pages match the personalized intent
• Dynamic ads specifications

With the exception of a new beta test, all ad sets only let you use one ad format. So if you want to test Image ads and Carousel ads, you would need to create two different ad sets. While this might not seem like a big deal, that means your budget will be separated by ad set.

If you have too many different ad formats being tested (and you’re not using campaign-level budget controls), you may run into an issue with having too little budget for each ad set.

4. Set your target audience

In my opinion, the targeting options on LinkedIn are really the bread and butter of the platform. The specificity we can leverage just makes this platform a no-brainer for many businesses we work with, but the targeting is only good if you know how to use it!

The first thing you need to know is the highest-level breakdown of how targeting works. In the image below, the biggest categorization is audiences versus audience attributes. As a shorthand, Audiences means a group of users you’ve put together by one method or another, and audience attributes are targetable characteristics of that user based on what LinkedIn knows about them from their profile, behaviors, etc.

Now that we have that out of the way, here’s a rundown of the majority of targeting options on LinkedIn Ads:

List upload targeting

This feature allows you to upload a CSV file of companies or individual users to target on the LinkedIn platform. You start by downloading the templates provided, add your information, and make sure your formatting is correct; then LinkedIn will try to find those users or companies based on the info you provided.

For users, you’ll add first and last name, email, and other fields (if you know them) like job title, company, etc. LinkedIn will then match the information you have to users on the platform and compile them into a list for you to target. Super slick and very easy.

These audiences (company or contacts) can be used for upselling, winning back lost accounts, or supporting an ABM campaign.

Predictive audiences

These audiences let you leverage LinkedIn’s AI and platform data to build audiences that are similar to your existing audiences or converters.

Predictive audiences let you select your source audience, then target location(s), then find new users LinkedIn believes are similar. This could be a good option for expanding your reach beyond your known contacts while honing in on their characteristics to maintain quality.

Retargeting

On the whole, retargeting is advertising to a list of users who have already engaged with your company in one way, shape, or form. LinkedIn gives tons of different ways you can do that.

The most common, and the retargeting you’ve likely heard of, is website visitors. Here, you’ll make a list of everyone who has been to your site before (or a subset of them based on certain pages, timing, etc.) and then use them as a targeting list in your account.

But there are other options for retargeting as well.

On LinkedIn, you can still use website audiences, but you can also retarget on all of the different sources above. If someone engaged with your video ad, submitted a lead gen form, responded to an event ad, or any of the other options above, you can make a list of them and target them in your campaigns.

Third-party audience lists

The last option I want to cover in the Audiences section is a third-party list.

These are still lists of users and can be companies or contacts, but the thing that sets them apart is their source.

Rather than downloading a CSV from your CRM and then uploading it to the LinkedIn Ads platform, you can simply integrate your CRM to automatically sync audiences. This is a huge time saver and can help keep your lists fresh so long as your CRM regularly adds new users and purges old users from those lists.

As you can see above, the most common CRMs are Salesforce, Dynamics 365, and HubSpot, but there is an option to request access to other CRMs if you want. You can get more information on this integration here.

Audience attributes

If you click around in the Audience Attributes section of the LinkedIn Ads campaign builder, you’ll quickly find there are A TON of different options to target. If I were to list all of them, this post would be 5x longer than it already is. So with that said, here is a selection of my favorite targeting options from most of the different portions of the Attributes lists.

• Company: In this section, the parameters you’ll be using to find your audience are based on the company (or companies) they work for and interact with. For this section, you can target users based on their company’s growth rate, the industry they’re in, their specific names, annual revenue, size as measured by employee count, and more. These types of targeting options are best when you might know the types of accounts you want to work with, but may not know the exact personnel involved. They’re also great when you do know the types of job titles you need, but might not be able to support folks in all industries.
• Demographics: Demographic targeting is pretty simple to understand. With it, you’re able to target users based on their inferred age or gender. To use either of these targeting options, you must first check a box to certify that you’re not discriminating based on either age or gender in your advertising and staying compliant with LinkedIn’s guidelines and any other protected characteristics.
• Education: If your target audience has a certain level of education, a special degree, or went to a specific school, you can use the Education section to narrow down to those targets and focus only on users who are right for your ads.
• Job experience: In total transparency, this is where I do the majority of my target audience building for my clients. That’s not to say the others aren’t useful, but for most of the companies I work with, this section is the lifeblood of our LinkedIn success. In this group, you’re able to target users based on their individual work history. This includes their job functions, how senior they are, their titles, the skills they need, and the years of experience they have in their current role. While everyone loves a job title-targeted campaign, I can attest that sometimes, the combination of job function and job seniority can make just as qualified of an audience at an often lower price.
• Interests and traits: The last group is focused on how people behave around the LinkedIn network. This can include the member groups that they opt into, the interests they express based on the content they engage with, or the traits they have that are noticed by LinkedIn. Those traits have a predefined list that’s relatively short, but could be super impactful if it hits exactly who you’re looking for.

My advice for using the audience attributes section

Unless you have a clear picture of your target audience, you likely will find the Audience Attributes section a bit intimidating to navigate and browse.

Instead of clicking into each section and seeing what’s predefined, I encourage you to simply start typing into the search box above the targeting options. Start looking for job titles, skills, and more that you believe are relevant to your audience and start from there. This can give you an idea of what’s available, and maybe open up some ideas you hadn’t thought of before.

LinkedIn advertising costs

Once you get your LinkedIn campaigns running, how much can you expect them to cost? Here’s a quick breakdown of LinkedIn advertising costs:

• On average, data shows LinkedIn Ads cost about $5-10 per click. In comparison, the average CPC in Google Ads is $5.42.
• For campaign budgets, LinkedIn suggests $25 for new advertisers and $50-$100 for existing advertisers.

Know that your LinkedIn advertising costs might fluctuate depending on your industry and which campaigns, ad formats, or audiences you’re using.

6 LinkedIn advertising tips and best practices

Before you go, I want to leave you with a few best practices to help give you some guardrails for your first set of campaigns on LinkedIn.

1. Keep audience size in check

From my experience, most campaigns that have a target audience size between 20K and 80K tend to do very well. That’s not to say that an audience that’s larger or smaller can’t perform well (larger usually for lower-ask CTAs like engagement, smaller usually for tougher asks like a free trial), but getting down to extremely small or up to extremely large folks can easily spend all of your money quickly with no return.

2. Avoid audience expansion and the LinkedIn audience network

Both of these options are expanding the reach of your carefully crafted campaign either from the audience or placement standpoint. Both can be a huge waste of money, so uncheck those boxes when you get to that portion of the campaign build.\

3. Manual bidding all the way

Speaking of things that can waste your money quickly: “Maximum Delivery” is the bid strategy that will absolutely do that. Instead, opt for manual bidding and set a very, very low floor. If you need more volume or when you start to see results, increase the bid and get more traction.

The screenshot below is an actual campaign in one of my accounts. I don’t care that LinkedIn suggests $27. My campaign is doing well and spending its entire budget at $15, so why increase?

4. Campaign objectives can make a huge difference

I showed you the difference in performance for a Website Visits campaign compared to a Conversion campaign in that section earlier, but I want to reiterate it here. The campaign objective you choose can have a massive impact on your outcomes. Make sure you’re choosing the right ones for the KPIs you’re being held to.

5. Create multiple ad variants

We advertising pros are constantly talking about “always be testing,” and that doesn’t stop here. Create 3-6 different variants of your ad to have running at any given point, and you’ll almost certainly see better results than you would with just one.

6. Bottom-of-funnel calls to action are almost always terrible

While we all want a sale in the end, asking for that in a first-touch LinkedIn campaign is a sure-fire way to see lots of impressions, maybe some clicks, and almost no conversions. Get creative and shift up-funnel to engage and entice your audience, then remarket to them with a lower-funnel CTA.

Get started with LinkedIn Advertising today

With the impressive benefits we covered, plus easy setup steps, I think every business should give LinkedIn Advertising a shot, regardless of what industry you’re in or which audience you’re trying to reach. The key is knowing what to do and what to avoid for a high-ROI campaign, like keeping your audience in check and choosing the most efficient bidding strategy for your goals. For more help with LinkedIn advertising, see how our solutions can maximize your approach!