How to advertise on LinkedIn: your first LinkedIn Ads campaign and what it costs

LinkedIn lets you choose who sees your ads by job title, seniority and company size, using what people write on their own profiles. That precision is what B2B businesses pay for. This tutorial shows how to advertise on LinkedIn step by step, from the ad account to the first results, and what it costs.

My view of LinkedIn Ads is simple: they burn through cash fast, but done right, the clients they bring are bigger tickets. So the steps below give the safeguards (tracking, targeting, budget limits) as much room as the ads.

Menu names follow LinkedIn’s help pages in October 2026; if one has moved, the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions help centre has the current label. If you are still choosing a channel, my guide on how to get more clients compares them.

Is LinkedIn advertising right for your business?

LinkedIn Ads make sense when three things are true: you sell to other businesses, you can name the job titles of the people who buy, and one client is worth far more than the budget it takes to find them.

For consumer offers, Meta or Google usually fits better, as my comparison of Google Ads vs Facebook Ads explains. And if SEO or cold emailing already works for you, get the most out of it before adding a paid channel you will not have time to watch.

How much LinkedIn Ads cost in 2026

There is no price list: LinkedIn sells ads through an auction, and you pay per click, per thousand impressions, per view for video ads or, for message ads, per message sent. It does publish minimums on its budget best-practice page, at the time of writing (October 2026):

• $10 a day minimum daily budget, for any ad format, or the equivalent in your account’s currency;
• $100 minimum for the lifetime budget of a new campaign, which LinkedIn then adjusts to $10 times the number of days scheduled;
• about $25 a day is what LinkedIn suggests for a new advertiser.

Those are floors, not a plan. Thirty days at $25 is $750 before you know whether anything works, and LinkedIn’s help on campaign and ad set budgets notes that daily spend can run up to 50% above the daily figure you entered.

The useful number is what one lead is worth to you:

1. The average value of a new client: say £6,000 over the first year.
2. The share of qualified leads that become clients: say one in five.
3. The most you can pay per lead: £6,000 ÷ 5 = £1,200. Aim well below it: your time and margin cost money too.

If the same sum gives you a ceiling of £40 a lead, LinkedIn is unlikely to pay for itself, and my comparison of PPC vs cold email shows other ways to reach the same buyers.

How to advertise on LinkedIn: what you need before you start

• A personal LinkedIn profile, from which the ad account is managed.
• A LinkedIn Page for your business: most ads run in its name, and it is free.
• A landing page that matches the ad, with one offer and one way to get in touch. My comparison of a landing page vs a website explains when a dedicated page is worth it.
• Access to your website’s code or tag manager, for the Insight Tag.
• A payment card and your billing details.

The landing page matters more than the ad: a finance director who clicks will judge your business on it in seconds. I want my clients’ websites to look good enough that their prospects take them seriously, which also cuts down the haggling later. I also use Microsoft Clarity to see what makes visitors leave, and it is worth installing before the paid clicks arrive.

Last, the vocabulary: Campaign Manager organises ads in three levels. A campaign holds one or more ad sets, each with its own audience, budget and schedule, and each ad set holds the ads. Older guides call the first two levels campaign groups and campaigns.

Step 1: create your ad account in Campaign Manager

Campaign Manager is LinkedIn’s tool for creating, paying for and measuring ads:

1. Open Campaign Manager from Advertise in LinkedIn’s For Business menu.
2. Create an ad account: give it a name, choose its currency and link your company’s LinkedIn Page. The currency cannot be changed later, so choose the one your business keeps its accounts in: pounds for most UK businesses.
3. Add your payment card and billing details.
4. If someone else runs the ads, add them as a user instead of sharing your password.

Step 2: install the Insight Tag and set up conversion tracking

The Insight Tag is a short piece of LinkedIn JavaScript that loads on every page of your site. It counts conversions (a form sent, a call booked), builds retargeting audiences from your visitors and shows, in aggregate, the job titles and companies of the people who visit.

1. In Campaign Manager, open the Insight Tag page and copy the code, or note your partner ID if a tag manager asks for it.
2. Add it to code that loads on every page of your site: code injection on Squarespace, a header and footer plugin on WordPress, or a tag in Google Tag Manager.
3. Visit your site, then check in Campaign Manager that the tag receives signals.

Then open conversion tracking and create the conversion you want to count: a name, a type (a lead, a sign-up, a booked call), a value if you know it, and how it is detected. A visit to your thank-you page is the simplest method, since that page only loads after a form is sent. The Conversions API, for server-side tracking, can wait.

Step 3: choose your campaign objective

When you create a campaign, Campaign Manager asks for the objective first; it decides what LinkedIn optimises for, which formats you can use and how you pay:

Ignore the recruitment objectives, such as Job applicants, unless you are hiring.

For a first campaign meant to bring enquiries, I would choose Lead generation: the form opens inside LinkedIn, prefilled from the member’s profile, so nobody leaves the app or types their details. Choose Website conversions if your landing page already converts well.

Step 4: set your LinkedIn targeting by job, seniority and company

Targeting is what you pay LinkedIn for. Build the audience in layers:

1. Location, which is required: where your buyers are, such as Greater London, the whole of the UK or the Paris region.
2. Job experience: job titles for precision (architect, facilities manager), or a job function combined with a seniority level (operations, director) for a wider audience.
3. Company: company size, in LinkedIn’s bands such as 11-50 or 51-200 employees, industry, or a list of named companies.
4. Skills, only if the first layers still leave you too broad.

Then exclude your own staff, your current clients and your competitors.

LinkedIn will not run an ad set aimed at fewer than 300 members, and Campaign Manager estimates the audience size as you build it. If the estimate is in the hundreds, widen it; in the millions, narrow it.

Leave Audience expansion off for a first test: it adds people LinkedIn considers similar, and you want the results to tell you about the people you chose.

Step 5: add retargeting and contact lists (Matched Audiences)

Matched Audiences are built from your own data rather than from LinkedIn profiles. Three are worth knowing:

• Website visitors: people the Insight Tag recorded on your site, who then see your ad on LinkedIn.
• Contact lists: a file of email addresses that LinkedIn matches with its members’ accounts.
• Company lists: a file of company names, to aim a campaign at named target accounts.

Each audience needs at least 300 matched members before LinkedIn uses it, so a site with modest traffic takes a while to fill one. Upload only contacts you have the right to use this way, such as clients or people who gave you their details, and mention it in your privacy notice: the UK GDPR and the GDPR apply to these files.

LinkedIn retired lookalike audiences on 29 February 2024 and now points advertisers to predictive audiences, which start from your own data, such as Lead Gen Form submissions or tracked conversions, to find members likely to act the same way: a tool for your second campaign, once you have data.

Step 6: choose the ad format and placement

For a first campaign, three formats cover most needs:

• Single image ad: an image, a short text above it, a headline and a button. The simplest to produce and to compare.
• Document ad: a PDF read in the feed, such as a guide or a checklist, with the option to ask for contact details before the full document.
• Thought Leader ad: a post by a person, usually the founder or an employee, sponsored with their approval; it reads like a post, not an advert.

Video and carousel ads take longer to produce. Message and conversation ads land in LinkedIn inboxes, but the message ads help page says members in the EEA and Switzerland receive them only if they have opted in, which limits their reach in France and the rest of the EU.

If you already post from your profile, a Thought Leader ad puts money behind a post that has proved itself; what changed for unpaid posts this year is in my article on the LinkedIn algorithm in 2026. If you are thinking of a LinkedIn newsletter, my comparison of LinkedIn newsletters, email newsletters and Substack shows who keeps the subscribers on each.

Under placement, untick LinkedIn Audience Network for a first test: it shows your ads on partner apps and sites outside LinkedIn, and keeping them on LinkedIn makes the first results easier to read.

Step 7: set the budget, schedule and bidding

1. Budget: a daily budget (at least $10, or the equivalent in your currency), a lifetime budget (at least $100), or both. Decide first the total you are prepared to spend on the test, then set the budget from it.
2. Schedule: give every test an end date. An ad set with a daily budget and no end date keeps spending until you stop it.
3. Bidding: Maximum delivery bids automatically to get as many results as possible from the budget; Cost cap lets you set the average cost per result you accept; Manual bidding lets you set the bid yourself. Start with Maximum delivery, as LinkedIn suggests, and move to a cost cap once you know what a lead costs you.

A campaign with several ad sets can also have a total budget, shared between them.

Step 8: write the ads and build the Lead Gen Form

Write each ad for one role and one problem, with a separate ad set per role.

What I learned from cold emailing architects for a client applies here: busy decision-makers respond to short, specific messages and act through whatever is quickest. The architects were the ones who called most, using the phone number in the email rather than replying. On LinkedIn, the quickest route is a form that fills itself in.

Give each ad set two or three ads that differ in one thing, the image or the first line, to see which one works. Put the point in the first sentence: on a phone, LinkedIn shows only the start of the text.

Then build the Lead Gen Form, while you create the ad or beforehand:

1. Keep it short: name, email address, company and job title fill in from the member’s profile. Add a question only if you need it to qualify the lead.
2. Add the link to your privacy policy, which LinkedIn asks for, and a thank-you message with the next step: a phone number, a booking link or the promised document.
3. Check the email field: it fills in with the address the member uses for LinkedIn, often a personal one, so ask for a work email if you need it.

Leads appear in Campaign Manager for download, and LinkedIn can also send them to CRMs such as HubSpot or Salesforce. Call each one back the same day, while they remember your ad.

Step 9: launch and read the first results

LinkedIn reviews each ad before it runs, so allow some time before your start date. Then leave the ad set alone for the first days: changing the audience or budget every morning makes the results unreadable.

After a week or two, look at four things in Campaign Manager:

1. Cost per result (per lead or conversion), against the maximum you worked out earlier.
2. Click-through rate of each ad: pause the weakest, keep the best.
3. Demographics: the job titles, seniority and companies of the people reached. If they are not your buyers, fix the targeting first.
4. Lead quality: the only figure that pays the bills. Ten leads from the wrong companies are worth less than two from the right ones.

If the test budget is spent and a lead still costs more than a client justifies, stop: change the offer or the audience, or move the money to a channel that works. My tutorial on tracking your funnel with UTM links and GA4 shows which channel brings booked calls.

Your first LinkedIn campaign checklist

Before you launch, check that you have:

• a landing page ready, with Microsoft Clarity installed;
• the Insight Tag behind your cookie banner, and one conversion set up;
• one objective, and for each ad set an audience well above the 300-member minimum, with exclusions;
• Audience expansion and Audience Network set on purpose;
• a test budget you can afford to lose, and an end date;
• two or three ads per ad set, and a short Lead Gen Form;
• someone ready to call every lead back the same day.

If the sums do not work for your business, LinkedIn is not the only way to reach decision-makers. Cold emailing is the B2B channel I believe in most: my B2B cold emailing guide shows how to set it up yourself, and my cold emailing service page explains how I run it for clients.