LinkedIn advertising has a reputation for being expensive. If you have ever run a LinkedIn paid advertising campaign and watched the spend disappear, you aren’t alone. The cost of running LinkedIn ads can seem higher than other platforms, but if you set them up right and run them correctly, you can get your return on ad spend. You can either hire a paid social agency to do it for you, or you can learn from articles like this one – and do it yourself. LinkedIn is the best platform for B2B growth, so learning how to maximise ROI and optimise your spend is extremely important for success.

As LinkedIn is the leading channel for B2B marketing, you can target audiences through a professional identity and job roles to reach the right people. LinkedIn isn’t something that is nice to have anymore; it is essential for B2B marketing strategies. LinkedIn now represents 41% of paid marketing budgets’ share among DreamData customers.

In this article, we will break down what you are paying for, why it varies so much from other platforms, and how to maximise your ROI and optimise your spend without sacrificing results.

Running LinkedIn Ads

Like other advertising platforms, LinkedIn ads work on an auction-based strategy. You start by placing a bid, which is sold through the ad auction and competes with other advertisers to win over your target audience. To capture your target audience, it depends on your bid and the desirability of your target audience.

The reason LinkedIn advertising can be more expensive than other platforms is because of audience quality. You are targeting professionals based on their job title, industry, company size, and seniority, which makes targeting precise. Tight targeting can lead to higher costs, but broad targeting can lead to increased competition and wasted spend.

According to the latest LinkedIn benchmarking report by DreamData, 81% of the B2B customer journey takes place before the sales pipeline, which means we need to look at how you are using LinkedIn advertising. The report also outlined that B2B marketers are turning away from non- branded Google Search Ads. And non-branded Google search costs are on the rise. Non-branded search is designed to increase visibility and traffic by using relevant and high volume key words related to your business.

Define clear goals. Are you looking to generate leads, gain website traffic, or increase brand awareness? Define your audience. Who are you trying to reach? What does your ideal audience look like? Look at relevance as these audiences are more likely to convert; these could be website visitors, previous customers, or users who have engaged with your content. You can then redefine your targeting over time and remove underperforming audiences and increase on high-converting ones.

Test different creatives, headlines, descriptions, and calls to action to find out what works and doesn’t work.

How To Maximize ROI

To maximize your ROI on LinkedIn, you need to reduce any unnecessary costs, but to keep the same revenue, you need to keep what works in your paid advertising campaign and cut out anything that doesn’t. To maximise your ROI and optimise your spend on LinkedIn, you will have to be selective with your audience targeting, from job role to location, to industry, to company size, to ensure you are reaching the people that you want to reach. Don’t be afraid to experiment, test different audiences to find the right audience that engages with your content, and exclude irrelevant segments to save budget.

You should focus on creatives that educate your audience; the creatives also depend on the stage of the funnel you are focusing on. The top of the funnel should focus on educating the audience and building your brand’s credibility. Middle of the funnel creatives should bring in social proof, and if you are focusing on the bottom of the funnel, then your content should look at urgency and pushing conversions.

We have seen that thought leadership content, especially founder-led, performs extremely well within B2B content, and getting that real and raw content helps increase credibility and expertise. Hearing from leadership voices and then combining that with employee advocacy to increase reach helps create content that feels genuine. Lastly, consistency matters; keep up regular posting to stay in front of the right people in order to stay relevant and remembered.

The Cost of LinkedIn Ads

Whilst LinkedIn ads appear to have the highest cost per click across platforms, it actually has the best cost per company influenced, which means influencing a buying committee has never been easier and cheaper with LinkedIn. LinkedIn also has the best ROAS across platforms and is actually the only platform that delivers positive ROAS for B2B clients. Within B2B industries, it takes around 10 stakeholders to make a deal, compared to just one with B2C audiences, which means that when you shift your perspective, the story is different.

Reporting On LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn ads only seem expensive if you are reporting on the wrong things. There are specific ways you should report on LinkedIn ads, and they differ from other platforms. When you look at click-through rate and cost per click, they don’t tell you whether you reached the right audience/ company. Most marketers have been trained to measure ads in B2C terms, whereas in B2B marketing, you are focusing on whole companies rather than individuals, so you need to look at performance like that.

If you are not tracking conversions, then you are throwing money away. You should track conversions with the LinkedIn Insight Tag, which is added to your website and helps fine-tune your campaigns using real data.

LinkedIn Ad Strategies

According to the Dreamdata report, B2B customer journeys have lengthened to around 272 days. It means that the journey to a lead is longer than you might have thought; however, it also means that buyers are more informed when they make their sales decision. When looking at LinkedIn ad performance, you need to build the relationship, earn trust, and stay front of mind. Thought leadership content consistently outperforms more traditional, sales-focused content on LinkedIn. It works because it builds a relationship with the founder, and users are more likely to recognise the brand.

When founders share their thoughts and insights, it builds authenticity, and the audience feels like they can learn something from them. Over time, this builds a relationship with their audience, and familiarity grows.

Scrolling on LinkedIn isn’t linear; people will see your ads randomly and not in order, they will scroll between meetings or in short bursts, so they don’t see all of your ads nor remember them. This means that you need to steer away from storytelling ads and focus on content that brings value to the audience, educates them, calls out real problems, and shares useful insights. This is how you can win in LinkedIn advertising in 2026.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is a powerful tool for B2B marketing, and utilising it in order to maximise ROI and optimise your spend can be extremely profitable. The cost of LinkedIn ads can be higher than other platforms, but they aren’t supposed to be.

You are paying for highly valuable and professional audiences that you may not be able to reach elsewhere. You should be focusing on precise and high-intent targeting, strong and insightful creatives, and then continue to optimise and refine the targeting based on the data and insights from results.

If you want to maximise your ROI and optimise spend on LinkedIn ads, this guide is the perfect start. Get in touch with us today.