Advertising on LinkedIn is an effective way for both B2B and B2C businesses to reach prospective customers. But, like most advertising platforms, it can be difficult to understand how much you should spend on LinkedIn ads to see the best results.
What’s better is to understand how the LinkedIn ads platform works when it comes to bidding and budgeting and what you have control over with your campaign settings. In this post, I’ll walk you through each of these and help you determine for yourself how much your LinkedIn ads might cost you for a given campaign.
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How much do LinkedIn ads cost?
We’ll get into the determining factors of your LinkedIn ads cost next. But first, if you’re looking for a quick answer to how much LinkedIn Ads cost, the data shows about $5-10 per click.
Here’s how we got that answer:
- This LinkedIn article quotes the average cost per click on LinkedIn to be $5.26.
- Getuplead estimated the average cost per click on LinkedIn ads is $5.39.
- Surfside PPC found the average cost per click on LinkedIn ads to be between $5 and $10.
These are just a few of many average LinkedIn ads cost estimates out there. Notice how none of them are exactly the same, so while you can use this information as a general guideline, let’s take a closer look at how you can more accurately calculate and control your LinkedIn ads costs.
💸 Compare your LinkedIn ads costs to the averages in your industry for Facebook ads and Google Ads using our exclusive reports!
How buying ads works on LinkedIn
LinkedIn only really has one option for buying ads: an auction. Unlike other platforms like Facebook, there’s no option for reserve buying or target points.
Similarly to Google Ads, LinkedIn comes up with an ad rank each time there’s an auction, and the advertiser with the highest ad rank ends up in the space.
The LinkedIn ads ad rank is made up of two metrics: your bid value and relevancy score. The bid value is pretty straightforward. The more you’re willing to bid on your LinkedIn ads, the higher you’ll be able to push your ad rank.
We’ll talk more about bidding in a future section, so for now, let’s focus on the relevancy score portion. The relevancy score for your ads is made up of a few different factors including your audience targeting, your bidding and budget settings, and your predicted response rate, which is a machine-learning estimate of how likely it is that a given user will engage with your ad. Basically, it’s a “predicted click-through rate.”
If you end up being the advertiser with the winning combination of these factors, your ad will be the one shown to the user.
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Advertiser controls for LinkedIn ads costs
Now that we have those fundamentals out of the way, let’s focus on the controls you have when it comes to your LinkedIn ads cost.
How to control your LinkedIn ads cost with your budget
The first option you have to influence your spending on LinkedIn is to control your budget.
Each time you create a campaign, you’ll have three options for budgeting:
- Set both a daily and lifetime budget
- Set a daily budget
- Set a lifetime budget
As you can see in the image above, the default is a daily budget, which is a fairly common option.
With a daily budget, you provide an amount you want to spend per day, and LinkedIn will pace you out to spend that amount, on average, through a given time frame depending on your schedule.
For a continuous schedule, meaning a campaign with no end date, this is a virtual week that runs from Monday through Sunday. Since you’re averaging out to a daily amount, LinkedIn also specifies that you’re able to spend up to 50% over your daily budget on any given day, but you’ll land at the average daily amount for that week.
For a campaign with a set schedule, meaning you have an end date included, the campaign can still sometimes spend more than 50% of your daily budget, but you’ll average the daily cost at your set budget for the entire schedule.
Lifetime budgets are a little more straightforward. You provide the date range for your campaign to run and the total amount you want to spend and LinkedIn will take care of the rest. Again, the daily costs will fluctuate based on performance opportunities, but the total will never exceed your set budget.
The last option is actually the first in the dropdown: set both a daily and lifetime budget. This option combines the two above and lets you set the total amount of money spent on the campaign and direct your daily costs. LinkedIn is still able to spend upwards of 50% over your daily caps but won’t exceed the total budget. Using this option also doesn’t allow for an ad schedule, meaning you can’t set an end date. Your campaign will simply turn off once it’s out of budget.
Depending on what your goals are for your campaigns and how your budget is allocated to you, there’s likely an option for these settings that works best for you.
How to control your LinkedIn ads cost with your bidding strategy
The second option for controlling LinkedIn ads costs will be with your bid strategy. There are going to be three options you can choose from for your campaigns—which are:
- Maximum Delivery
- Cost Cap
- Manual Bidding
Depending on the campaign objective you choose, you may or may not have the option for cost cap or manual bidding, but maximum delivery will always be an option.
As a quick overview, here’s roughly how each LinkedIn ads bidding strategy works.
Maximum delivery
This is a fully automated bid strategy (meaning you have no input) where LinkedIn will set your bids for you and use machine learning to try to deliver as many results as possible while also trying to spend your full budget every day. Using the full budget here means it will follow the settings you have in place from the previous section, but again, can go up to 50% over a daily budget on a given calendar day.
This strategy is always selected for you by default. My biggest issue here is the “spend your full budget every day” part. Unfortunately, LinkedIn’s machine learning isn’t quite as strong as Google’s or Meta’s, so while it might be doing its best, I’ve found that campaigns using Maximum Delivery for certain accounts can struggle to hit what we need the campaign performance to be profitable.
Maximum delivery’s impact on LinkedIn ads cost: Your campaigns will pretty much always spend your full daily or lifetime budget, so whatever you’ve set for those settings, that’s how much you’ll spend. This is the easiest bid strategy to estimate costs for.
Cost cap
Cost Cap is also an automated bid strategy, but you provide a target cost per result you want the campaigns to hit and LinkedIn will try to deliver results to you at that rate. There’s no guarantee it can hit the numbers you provide and each conversion may vary in CPA.
Cost cap’s impact on LinkedIn ads cost: If your campaigns are hitting the Cost Cap you have set, meaning you have your Cost Cap set to $75 and your cost per result is $75 or lower, you’ll likely spend your entire daily and/or lifetime budget. If you’re not hitting that Cost Cap number, you’ll likely be below your full budget and if this low performance drags on too long, LinkedIn will likely throttle your campaigns down all the way to where they stop serving altogether, clearly not spending your budget.
Manual bidding
With manual bidding, you have full control. You set the bid level for your campaigns and that’s the maximum amount you’ll pay for the specific action you’re bidding for. In some campaigns, this will be by click, in others, the CPM.
From a very high level, I’ve always favored the manual bidding option for my campaigns, but that doesn’t mean that a different strategy won’t work for you. At this point, it’s better for me to direct you to an outside resource that walks through the intricacies of all the bid strategies rather than espouse one over the other. Each account (and campaign) is different, so this video will help you decide which bidding strategy could work best for you.
Manual bidding’s impact on LinkedIn ads costs: With Manual Bidding, you set how competitive you want to be. Like Cost Cap, this is a tough one to figure out how much you’ll spend, but LinkedIn does give us a little help here.
Each time you set a manual bid, LinkedIn provides you with a suggested range for that bid, as well as estimated performance based on the bid you have set.
In the image above, the suggested bid range is just below the bid I set on the left and the estimated performance is on the right. These are by no means promised metrics, but you can get an estimate of your LinkedIn Ads costs (and other stats) from this table. The higher your bid, the more you’ll spend (within your budget settings) and the lower your bid, the less you’ll spend.
How much your LinkedIn ads cost is up to you
You can control how much you spend on LinkedIn (and how fast you spend) using the right budget and bid strategy mix, but it’s impossible to know exactly how much you’ll spend without just doing it.
The one thing I’ll caution about, though, is that we don’t have clear benchmarks for this platform like we do for Google and Facebook. On average, you can expect LinkedIn ads costs per click to be much higher than the other networks. It’s the name of the game for the specificity in targeting, but now you know how the platform works and how you can use the settings at your disposal to control those costs and see good results.
For more help with LinkedIn ads, see how our solutions can maximize your budget and ensure campaign success for the lowest cost on LinkedIn and beyond!
