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.
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:
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.
Let’s go through what factors contribute to the cost of SaaS LinkedIn ads:
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.
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.
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.
There are three main bidding strategies to consider:
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:
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.
This has a direct effect on your LinkedIn ads ROI. Select an ad objective that aligns with your business goals:
With LinkedIn ads, you get to target professionals based on specific criteria:
Spend some time planning precisely how to target your audience because - as discussed earlier - LinkedIn ads are more expensive than Facebook and Google ads.
Choose an ad format that suits your campaign objective:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Challenge
Airbase relied heavily on Google Ads for lead generation, limiting scalability and growth potential.
Strategy
We developed a tailored PPC approach that included:
Results
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:
Results
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.
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.
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.
The cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) typically ranges between $33.80 and $55, varying based on audience and competition.
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.
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