How Much Does LinkedIn Ads Cost in 2024?

If you've been hearing about the incredible potential of LinkedIn, and you're considering adding LinkedIn ads to your marketing strategy, you're making a smart move. However, before you dive in, it’s important to fully understand the ad costs for LinkedIn and ways to optimize them.

At TripleDart, we’ve successfully managed LinkedIn ad campaigns for hundreds of B2B companies. In this article, we’ll provide a comprehensive breakdown of LinkedIn advertising costs in 2024 and offer valuable insights to help you budget wisely and maximize your ROI.

How Much Do LinkedIn Ads Cost?

Like many other ad platforms, LinkedIn ads don’t come with a fixed price. Instead, the cost is determined by a variable bidding system, with prices varying based on multiple factors.

As of 2024, LinkedIn ads generally follow these three primary pricing models: 

1. Cost Per Click (CPC): The average CPC on LinkedIn typically ranges between $5.58 and $10, making it one of the most expensive platforms for this model. 

2. Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM): The price for 1,000 impressions on LinkedIn can vary from $33.80 to $55, depending on your target audience and the level of competition. LinkedIn’s higher CPM reflects its focus on B2B marketing and its exclusive professional user base.

3. Cost Per Send (CPS): This model is unique to LinkedIn’s InMail ads (1:1 inbox targeting) with an average price ranging from $0.20 to $1 per message sent. 

LinkedIn ads are generally more expensive than other ads platforms. For example, Facebook Ads can have CPCs as low as $0.97. Google Ads CPC typically ranges from $1 to $2.

Despite that, the main appeal for LinkedIn Ads is the ability of advertisers to reach key decision-makers directly through their advanced targeting options—such as job title, industry, and company size.

Read more: You can also read our B2B PPC Guide for 2024 if you are looking for an overall, platform-agnostic B2B PPC ads strategy.

What Factors Affect LinkedIn Ads Cost?

Let’s go through what factors contribute to the cost of SaaS LinkedIn ads:

Competition among those targeting the same audience

Bidding becomes more competitive (and expensive) when demand is high, such as for C-level executives or professionals in lucrative sectors like finance and technology. Similarly, targeting high-income regions or specific age groups can also increase competition and raise ad costs.

Campaign objectives

LinkedIn offers three campaign objectives: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Each objective shapes how your ad is optimized and how much you’ll spend.

LinkedIn uses your optimization goal and objective to target your ad. For instance, if your goal is to drive website traffic, LinkedIn will prioritize users likely to click through, which impacts your cost.

Ad relevance score

LinkedIn assigns a relevance score to ads which goes beyond engagement and rewards resonance with the target audience. It considers factors like click-through rates, comments, likes, and shares. Ad relevance score has an inverse relationship to LinkedIn ads cost - the higher your ad relevance to the selected audience, the less you'll pay for your ads. 

Bidding strategy

There are three main bidding strategies to consider: 

1. Maximum Delivery Bidding: LinkedIn automatically adjusts your bids to keep your campaign competitive, depending on your objective. While this can enhance performance, it may also increase costs as LinkedIn focuses on maintaining your ad's visibility.

2. Manual Bidding: For more control over your ad spend, you can manually set your bids. You have a more precise control over how much you pay for your chosen outcomes. However, this requires a solid understanding of your target audience and market competition; bidding too low could limit exposure (and waste your budget) while bidding too high could deplete your budget too quickly.

3. Cost Cap Bidding: This strategy allows you to set a maximum cost per action (CPA), such as a lead or conversion. LinkedIn then works to deliver results within your specified cost limit. Cost cap bidding helps balance ad campaign goals with budget, though it may reduce the number of results if the cap is too low for your target market.

Ad formats

Sponsored content: These are direct feed ads designed to blend in with organic content. But it also adds a “promoted” label under the source account name (see image below). Sponsored content can include single image ads, video ads, or carousel ads. Because they’re native and prominent, these ads command higher costs, especially if they attract high engagement rates. The image below is an example of image ads:

Sponsored messaging: While these “direct to inbox” ads can be highly effective for direct engagement (webinars, event sign-ups, etc), the ad cost goes up with the audience size. Here’s how Sponsored Message ads look:

Text ads: These simple ads appear on the side or top of the LinkedIn interface and are charged on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. While they are generally less expensive, they tend to have lower engagement rates than more visually appealing formats. See what Text Ads look like below:

How to Set Up a LinkedIn Ads Campaign 

LinkedIn Ads campaign setup seems deceptively simple. But, before you set up a campaign, you must carefully plan and strategize them to maximize the effectiveness of your budget. 

Below is a step-by-step guide to help you do just that.

Step 1: Open LinkedIn Campaign Manager

1. Log into your LinkedIn account.
2. Click on the "For Business" icon in the top-right corner of your homepage and select "Advertise" from the menu to open LinkedIn's Campaign Manager. Here you’ll create and manage your ad campaigns.
3. To start a new campaign, click ‘’Create’’.

Step 2: Choose the right ad objective

This has a direct effect on your LinkedIn ads ROI. Select an ad objective that aligns with your business goals:

• Select Awareness to increase brand visibility and recognition.
• Select Consideration to drive engagement, such as website visits or video views.
• Select Conversion to drive specific actions (lead generation, job applications, etc).

Step 3: Set up targeting options

With LinkedIn ads, you get to target professionals based on specific criteria:

• Demographics: location, age, gender, or company size.
• Professional Attributes: Job titles, industries, company names, skills, and LinkedIn group memberships.

Spend some time planning precisely how to target your audience because - as discussed earlier - LinkedIn ads are more expensive than Facebook and Google ads. 

Step 4: Select an ad format

Choose an ad format that suits your campaign objective:

• Sponsored Content: Ideal for mass engagement, shows up directly in user feeds.
• Sponsored Messaging: Ideal for direct 1-on-1 engagement.
• Dynamic/Text Ads: Ideal for low budget campaigns but may have lower engagement too.

Step 5: Decide your bids and budgets

Budget types: Choose between a per day budget or a total budget (maximum amount for entire campaign duration). This will determine how your ads are served and how much you'll be charged. You can cancel these campaigns at any time during the campaign run if the results are not satisfactory. 

Bidding strategies:

• Choose CPS for direct messaging ads. 
• Choose CPC for action-oriented campaigns like lead generation or event registration.
• Choose CPM for brand awareness campaigns.

Suggested bid: Enter a suggested bid, daily budget, start date, end date, and total budget based on LinkedIn ads strategy. LinkedIn uses an auction system for bidding that rewards engagement, meaning you can win an auction without necessarily being the highest bidder.

Step 6: Set up your ad creative

The design of your ad creative should be your top priority if you don’t want to waste money on your LinkedIn ads campaign. Here are the various parts to an LinkedIn ad creative:

• Ad copy: Write clear, concise, and engaging copy that resonates with your target audience. Ensure your messaging aligns with your campaign objective.

• Visual elements: Use high-quality images, videos, or graphics. LinkedIn recommends using visuals that are 1200 x 627 pixels for Sponsored Content in the feed.

• Call to Action (CTA): Include a solid and relevant CTA that encourages users to take the desired action, e.g. "Learn More," "Sign Up," or "Download."

How to Control Ad Spend on LinkedIn

Set and manage daily and lifetime campaign budgets

For example, if you're running a month-long new-product launch campaign (“awareness” as objective), a daily budget ensures that your campaign doesn't exhaust its funds too quickly. 

Conversely, a total campaign budget might be ideal for short, high-impact campaigns, such as promoting a time-sensitive webinar, where you want to ensure maximum exposure within a limited timeframe.

Use implement low-bid strategies and manual bidding

With these strategies, you get to control how much you pay for clicks or impressions. However, be cautious that low bidding can limit your ad’s visibility and effectiveness.

For instance, if you’re targeting a highly competitive audience segment like senior IT decision-makers, a low bid might result in fewer impressions and missed opportunities (simply because of the sheer size of this audience type on LinkedIn). On the other hand, if your audience is niche or less competitive, this strategy could be an efficient way to control costs while maintaining visibility.

Use micro-segmentation to refine your audience 

Micro-segmentation lets you refine target audience and enhance ad relevance score to reduce costs. For example, if you're marketing a B2B SaaS product for financial services, define who are your “most likely to convert” audience and create segmented audiences for them based on job titles, company size, or specific skills. This maximizes your ad budget's impact. An account-based marketing approach (ABM) can further help maximizing your ad ROI for B2B SaaS.

Read more: Here is how you can create your own 30-60-90 day plan for a first time account-based marketer.

Test and optimize your ad creatives and ad targeting

Regularly testing different ad creatives and targeting options helps you identify what resonates most with your audience. For example, you might start with a broad audience and multiple creatives, then analyze which combinations yield the highest engagement rates. Over time, you can narrow your focus to the best-performing segments and ad variations and thus direct your ad spend toward the most effective elements of your campaign.

Enhancing ad creatives

Boosting engagement and ad relevance score should not be the only objectives for revising your ad creatives. You want to optimize for engagement but you also want to achieve business objectives. If your visually striking ad does nothing for your brand objectives, it will only increase engagement and collapse the ROI from ad campaigns. For example, a visually striking infographic highlighting key statistics might work well for a thought leadership campaign, while a persuasive, direct CTA may be more effective for driving immediate conversions.

Review and adjust periodically

Continuously monitor your campaign’s performance and make adjustments as needed. Set a schedule of regular reviews to help you spot areas for improvement and ensure your budget is spent as effectively as possible. For example, you might find that your ads perform better during certain times of the day or days of the week, allowing you to allocate more of your budget during those peak periods for optimal results.

Delivering Results with PPC at TripleDart

Maximizing LinkedIn ad spend requires data-driven strategies and expert insights. You need domain expertise to plan your ads and targeting and you also have to manage the implementation of ads flawlessly so you don’t waste your ad spends. One size definitely doesn’t fit all. An experienced agency brings with it advanced strategies specific to your brand and your audience to ensure your ad campaigns deliver the max possible ROI each time. This partnership lets you focus on your business while seasoned and reliable LinkedIn ads specialists work on maximizing the impact of your ads budget. 

At TripleDart, we are a leading SaaS PPC agency and we craft customized PPC strategies that deliver measurable growth for our clients. Here’s a glimpse into our success stories:

Airbase

Challenge

Airbase relied heavily on Google Ads for lead generation, limiting scalability and growth potential.

Strategy

We developed a tailored PPC approach that included:

• launching targeted campaigns across multiple channels to increase engagement, conversion rates, and organic reach,
• expanding Airbase’s presence beyond Google Ads, incorporating review sites and Account-Based Marketing (ABM) for higher-quality leads,
• continuously refining ad targeting, ad creatives, and bidding strategies for maximum ROI, and
• creating over 100 LinkedIn assets, establishing ourselves as Airbase’s go-to partner for creative design.

Results

• 183% increase in Annual Contract Value (ACV) quarter-over-quarter.
• Scaled the sales pipeline from $300K to $900K per quarter.

ImageKit.io

Challenge

ImageKit faced high Cost Per Sales Qualified Lead (CPSQL), poor lead quality, and suboptimal account management.

Strategy

We executed a phased, detail-oriented approach, where we:

• optimized account structures, reducing unnecessary expenses, and enhancing account hygiene,
• shifted focus toward Digital Asset Management (DAM) to expand market share, 
• improved lead quality and reduced irrelevant traffic, and
• streamlined processes by addressing granular inefficiencies.

Results

• Reduced CPSQL from $1,500 to $900.
• Improved Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) percentage by 40%.
• Generated 20 new Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) through category expansion.

Ready to achieve similar results for your B2B SaaS company or you’re willing to leverage Linkedin Ads? Book a call today to explore a partnership with TripleDart for expert PPC strategies and Linkedin B2B lead generation that drive real growth.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How much do ads cost on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn ads costs vary widely depending on your targeting options, bidding strategy, and ad objectives. On average, businesses may spend anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 monthly.

How much do LinkedIn ads cost per click?

The cost per click (CPC) on LinkedIn ads generally ranges from $5.58 to $10, though it can be higher depending on competition and audience targeting.

How much do LinkedIn ads cost per mile (1,000 impressions)?

The cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) typically ranges between $33.80 and $55, varying based on audience and competition.

What percentage of your overall advertising budget should you allocate to LinkedIn ads?

Allocating 10-20% of your overall digital ads budget to LinkedIn B2B Marketing is a good starting point, especially if your target audience is primarily B2B professionals. Adjust based on performance and campaign goals.