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Paid Media
LinkedIn Ads for buyers search cannot find
When your addressable market is a few thousand companies, search volume is too thin to optimise and LinkedIn is the only place you can reach the right job titles reliably. It is also expensive and slow, which means the offer matters more here than anywhere else.
Overview
The targeting is the easy part. The offer is where accounts die
LinkedIn will happily show your ad to exactly the right director at exactly the right company, several times, at a cost per click that would be a scandal anywhere else. What it cannot do is make that person want a sales call. Accounts fail here almost entirely on the ask: a demo request shown to someone who has never heard of you, at four times the cost per click of search, with a form that wants their phone number. The channel works when the offer is proportionate to the awareness level — something genuinely useful first, the conversation later — and when you have the patience to measure it over a sales cycle rather than a month.
What’s included
- Audience construction by title, function, seniority, company and account list
- Offer and asset design proportionate to each awareness stage
- Campaign build across sponsored content, document ads, message and lead forms
- Conversions API and CRM-side measurement so patient cycles stay attributable
- Account-list matching and exclusion hygiene against existing customers
- Creative production and an iteration queue, since frequency burns fast here
Part of our Paid Media engagement · from transparent pricing.
Audiences
How we build the targeting, and what we leave out
LinkedIn's targeting options reward precision and punish breadth, because you are paying a premium for accuracy you then dilute. Most underperforming accounts we see are targeting an audience several times larger than the company's actual addressable market.
Account lists first
If sales already knows which companies matter, that list is better targeting than any attribute combination. Matched, maintained, and segmented by tier.
Title plus function
Job titles alone are chaotic across companies. Function and seniority together survive the fact that everyone invents their own titles.
Company attributes
Headcount, industry and growth signals to keep the audience inside the band where your product actually fits and your pricing makes sense.
Exclusions that matter
Existing customers, open opportunities, your own employees, competitors and agencies — all of whom will otherwise consume budget enthusiastically.
Audience size discipline
Big enough to deliver, small enough to stay relevant. We would rather run three tight audiences than one that technically includes the right people.
No interest-only targeting
Member interests are inferred and loose. Useful as a layer, never as the whole audience, whatever the forecast tool promises about reach.
Offers
What to actually ask a cold director for
The single highest-leverage decision in a LinkedIn account is the ask. Same audience, same creative, same budget: changing what you request moves cost per opportunity further than anything in the campaign settings.
Something useful, now
A teardown, a benchmark, a calculator, a template — delivered without a call. It earns the right to the next ask and it qualifies by who bothers.
Document ads
Native, read in-feed, no landing page to lose people on. Among the most reliable first-touch formats on the platform for considered purchases.
Lead forms, used carefully
They convert well and they convert loosely. Worth it when the follow-up sequence is genuinely good, harmful when leads sit for three days.
Demo requests, later
Reserved for audiences with prior engagement. Asking cold is how you arrive at a cost per lead that makes the channel look broken.
Retargeting with specificity
People who read the document get the next step, not the same ad again. Sequencing is where LinkedIn's engagement data earns its premium.
Honest gating
If the asset is thin, gating it buys you one bad lead and loses a buyer. We would rather ungate it and retarget the readers.
This is also the part of the engagement that most benefits your other channels: an offer that works cold on LinkedIn tends to work in outbound and in content.
Measurement
Attributing a channel that works over months
LinkedIn's own reporting is generous to itself, counting view-through and long click windows that flatter the channel. If you accept those numbers you will overspend; if you reject the channel because last-click shows nothing, you will underspend. Both mistakes are avoidable with the right plumbing.
Conversions API
Server-side conversion data from your CRM, so deals that close eleven weeks later still connect to the campaign that started them.
Stage-level reporting
Spend mapped to opportunity and closed-won stages, not to form submissions, with the cycle length stated so nobody reads month one as failure.
Attribution windows, stated
We report with the window declared and show what the numbers look like under a stricter one. A figure that only survives a ninety-day view-through window is not a result.
Account-level engagement
For ABM programmes, the unit is the account, not the lead. Engagement across the buying committee is the signal sales can actually act on.
Incrementality checks
Geo or account holdouts where the budget allows, because the only honest answer to ‘would they have bought anyway’ is a test.
Branded search as a tell
A real demand-creation effect shows up as more people searching your name. We watch that alongside the platform's own numbers.
The work
What a LinkedIn engagement actually contains
Flat monthly fee, published pricing, and this is the shape of the work.
LinkedIn is expensive enough that we would rather tell you in month three that it is not working than let a retainer run quietly for a year.
Honest limits
When LinkedIn is the wrong channel
This channel has the highest cost per click of anything we run. It earns that when deal values are high and buyers are identifiable by their job. Outside those conditions it is an expensive way to be ignored.
Low deal values
If an average contract cannot absorb a cost per opportunity in the hundreds, the arithmetic does not work however good the targeting is.
Buyers without job titles
Consumer purchases, sole traders, and roles that nobody puts on a profile. The platform's whole advantage disappears.
No patience for the cycle
If the business needs pipeline this month, search capture is the honest recommendation and LinkedIn is the wrong place to start.
Nothing useful to offer
Without an asset worth a stranger's attention, this becomes paid demo-request begging at premium CPCs.
Thin creative capacity
Frequency burns audiences fast. A library of two images will stop working within weeks, and no bid adjustment fixes fatigue.
Unmaintained CRM
Without stage data over a long window there is no way to tell whether this channel worked, and this is the channel where that matters most.
More Paid Media
The rest of the paid programme
Paid media overview
How the channels fit together and which ones your model actually needs.
Google Ads
Capturing the demand that already exists, measured against CRM stages.
Paid social
Demand creation and retargeting at CPMs LinkedIn cannot match.
Landing pages & CRO
Where the offer either lands or leaks, built per audience.
CRM
Stage data and sales follow-up, without which this channel is unmeasurable.
Case studies
What our engagements have produced, with the numbers we can evidence.
Questions
LinkedIn Ads questions, answered properly
Why is LinkedIn so much more expensive than other channels?
Because you are paying for accuracy rather than reach. On most platforms, reaching a specific job title at a specific company means buying a lot of impressions and hoping. LinkedIn sells that targeting directly, and prices it accordingly. The channel earns the premium when deal values are high enough that a costly opportunity is still cheap, and it does not when they are not — which is a budget question we settle before building anything.
How much budget does LinkedIn need to work?
More than people expect, because the premium CPCs mean a small budget produces too few data points to optimise against. The threshold depends on your audience size and category costs, both of which we check against live platform forecasts during the audit. We would rather tell you the channel is out of reach at your current budget than run it badly on a tenth of what it needs.
Should we use LinkedIn lead forms or send people to our site?
It depends on how good your follow-up is. Lead forms convert at a visibly better rate because they remove friction, and they also remove the self-qualification that friction provides. If leads get a thoughtful reply within hours, forms win. If they sit in a queue for three days, you have bought a list of annoyed strangers, and a landing page that filters harder is the better choice.
Can you run account-based campaigns against our target list?
Yes, and it is usually the strongest way to use the channel. We match your account list, segment it by tier and existing relationship, exclude current customers and open deals, and report engagement at the account level so sales can see which buying committees are warming up rather than just which individuals clicked.
How long should we give this before judging it?
At minimum one full sales cycle plus the ramp, and we will tell you what that means in weeks for your business before we start. Judging a patient channel on thirty days of data is how companies conclude LinkedIn does not work when what actually happened is that nobody had time to buy yet. We report leading indicators in the meantime and label them as such.
Do you produce the creative and the gated assets?
We produce ad creative and iterate on it continuously, since frequency fatigue is the main enemy here. Substantial assets — a benchmark report, a calculator, a teardown format — we scope explicitly, because they are real work and they are usually the difference between the channel working and not working. We will also happily work with assets your team already has, if they are good.
Will you tell us to stop if it is not working?
Yes, in the quarterly review, in writing. This is the most expensive channel we run and the easiest for an agency to keep billing against vague engagement metrics. If cost per opportunity is not defensible against your other options after a fair run, the recommendation will be to move the budget, even though that means less of our own retainer.
Can LinkedIn work alongside outbound sales?
Better than either works alone, and this is one of the clearest wins available. Ads warming an account list before sequences start changes reply rates, and engagement data tells outbound which accounts to prioritise. It needs the two sides to share a list and a definition of a warm account, which is coordination work we will do with you.
What about Sales Navigator and organic posting?
Different instruments on the same platform, and they compound. Ads buy reach against a defined audience; founder and team posting builds the familiarity that makes the ads land; Sales Navigator works the accounts that engage. We run the paid side and will say plainly where organic presence is the missing piece — it often is, and it is not something a budget can substitute for.
Which ad formats on LinkedIn actually work for considered purchases?
Document ads and single-image sponsored content carry most of the weight, for opposite reasons. Document ads let someone get real value inside the feed without a landing page, so there is nowhere to lose them, and the download itself is a qualification signal. Single-image content is cheap to produce in volume, which matters because frequency fatigue arrives quickly on small audiences. Video works when there is something to demonstrate. Message ads we use sparingly — they are intrusive, they are expensive per send, and they burn goodwill with exactly the senior audience you are paying a premium to reach.
Can we use LinkedIn just for retargeting?
You can, and it is the cheapest sensible way to start. Retargeting website visitors and video viewers on LinkedIn costs a fraction of prospecting against a cold audience, and it lets you prove the measurement plumbing works before committing real budget to demand generation. The limit is scale: retargeting can only reach people who already found you somehow, so it compounds whatever your other channels produce rather than creating anything new. Treat it as a cheap first test of the channel, not as the programme.
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