Directors usually react to their first LinkedIn advertising quote the same way: that cannot be right. Clicks cost several times what they do on Google, and many times what they cost on Meta. Both facts are true, and neither tells you whether LinkedIn is worth it for your business.
Why LinkedIn costs what it costs
You are not paying for a click. You are paying for access to a precisely defined group of people, and the price reflects how many other advertisers want that same group.
If you target finance directors at UK manufacturers with 50 to 200 staff, you are bidding against every other business that wants to reach finance directors at UK manufacturers with 50 to 200 staff. That is a small, valuable and heavily contested audience. On Meta, you are bidding for attention among a vast general population. The difference in price is the difference in precision.
This is why comparing cost per click across channels is close to meaningless. A £8 LinkedIn click from exactly the right decision-maker and a £0.60 Meta click from someone who will never buy are not comparable units.
The three things that move your costs
How narrow your audience is
Counter-intuitively, very small audiences often cost more per click, not less. With a tiny pool, LinkedIn shows your ad to the same people repeatedly, frequency climbs, performance decays and your costs rise. Audiences in the tens of thousands usually perform better than audiences in the low thousands.
What you are asking for
An ad asking someone to download a short guide will cost far less per conversion than one asking for a sales call. Both can be right, but the ask has to match how warm the audience is. Cold traffic asking for a meeting is the single most common reason LinkedIn campaigns look expensive.
Your ad format
Single image ads in the feed are the workhorse and usually the most efficient starting point. Message ads that land in someone’s inbox are priced per send and feel more intrusive, so they need a genuinely good reason to exist. Video and document ads sit in between and suit awareness or credibility building.
How to think about a budget
Work backwards from what a client is worth rather than forwards from what you feel comfortable spending.
If a new client is worth £20,000 over their lifetime and you close one in four qualified conversations, a qualified conversation is worth £5,000 to you. That number, not the cost per click, decides whether a campaign is working.
On budget size: a campaign needs enough volume to produce a readable result. Spreading a small monthly budget across four audiences and six ad variations produces six sets of numbers too small to learn anything from. Fewer campaigns with more spend behind them will teach you more, faster. Give any test at least six to eight weeks before judging it — B2B buying cycles are long, and early numbers mislead.
When LinkedIn ads are the wrong channel
We talk clients out of LinkedIn advertising fairly often. It is the wrong choice when:
- Your buyer is not on LinkedIn. Trades, local consumer services and some operational roles simply are not there in numbers.
- Your average order value is low. If a client is worth a few hundred pounds, the maths rarely works.
- You have no follow-up process. Generating enquiries you cannot respond to quickly wastes the budget. Fix speed to lead first.
- Your website cannot convert the traffic. Paying premium prices to send people to a page that does not make the case is an expensive way to find out.
Getting more from the same spend
Three things reliably improve returns, in order of impact.
Retarget before you prospect. People who have already visited your website cost far less to convert than cold audiences. Most businesses should spend their first LinkedIn budget here.
Use your own data. Uploading a list of target companies or past enquiries gives you a far better audience than LinkedIn’s interest categories.
Warm the audience first. Run credibility content — a case study, a useful insight — to a cold audience, then advertise the meeting to the people who engaged. The second ad costs more per click and converts several times better.
Frequently asked questions
What is a sensible minimum monthly budget?
Enough to generate a statistically meaningful number of conversions in a month. For most B2B businesses that means a four-figure monthly budget on one or two tightly focused campaigns, not a few hundred pounds spread thin.
Should we run ads from the company page or a personal profile?
Paid ads run from the company page. Personal profiles are where organic reach lives — a director posting consistently will often out-perform the company page for engagement, which is a separate and cheaper strategy worth running alongside.
How long before we know if it is working?
Six to eight weeks for early signal, a full buying cycle for the real answer. Judging a B2B campaign after two weeks tells you about click costs, not about revenue.
Can we just do organic LinkedIn instead?
Often, yes — and for many established businesses it is the better first move. Consistent content from the leadership team builds the same credibility without the media spend. Advertising adds reach and speed once that foundation exists.
Make LinkedIn work alongside everything else
LinkedIn advertising works best as one part of a plan, not as an experiment running on its own. We help established businesses build content, campaigns and follow-up that fit together — see our LinkedIn and email marketing service, or talk it through with us.
