Let’s address the elephant in the room: LinkedIn ads are expensive. With an average cost-per-click hovering around $8-15 (compared to Facebook’s $1-2), it’s easy to blow through your marketing budget faster than a tech bro through venture capital.
I learned this the hard way when my agency’s first LinkedIn campaign for a B2B client burned through $5,000 with exactly zero qualified leads to show for it. Ouch.
But after managing over $1.2M in LinkedIn ad spend, I’ve discovered that the platform isn’t actually overpriced—most advertisers are just doing it wrong. Here’s what actually works in 2024:
Target job functions, not just job titles When we switched from targeting “Marketing Directors” to targeting the “Marketing” function + “Director” seniority level, our audience size increased by 327% and cost per lead dropped by 42%. Why? Because people get creative with LinkedIn titles. Someone who’s effectively a marketing director might be called “Head of Brand Experience” or “Growth Marketing Leader.”
The lead gen form sweet spot is 3-5 fields Not the 2 fields LinkedIn recommends (too many unqualified leads) or the 7+ fields most marketers use (massive drop-off rates). After A/B testing dozens of forms, I’ve found that Name, Email, Company, and Job Title give you enough qualification data without tanking completion rates.
Your “safe” corporate creative is killing your results The LinkedIn stock photo of diverse professionals smiling around a laptop? It’s visual white noise. When we replaced a client’s professional stock imagery with slightly rough-around-the-edges authentic photos of their team, CTR improved by 78%.
Document ads outperform traditional ads For the same budget, our Document Ad campaigns regularly generate 3-4x more leads than Image Ads. People on LinkedIn are there to learn—offering a valuable guide, template, or whitepaper in exchange for contact info is alignment with user intent.
The retargeting trick no one talks about Create a small campaign targeting a broad audience, but use it only to build a custom audience of people who engage. Then run your real campaign targeting only those engagers. Yes, this creates an extra step, but we’ve seen it reduce cost-per-lead by up to 60% for competitive keywords.
Message Ads (formerly InMail) live or die by your subject line After testing over 50 subject line variations, the highest open rates consistently come from personalized, curiosity-driven subjects under 30 characters. “Quick question about {Company}” has a 52% open rate for one of our clients, compared to 21% for their previous “Introducing Our Enterprise Solution.”
LinkedIn ads aren’t magic—they’re a specialized tool for reaching people based on professional attributes. Use them accordingly, and suddenly that $15 CPC seems like a bargain for connecting directly with the VP who can approve your six-figure contract.