LinkedIn Ads

The only platform with reliable, self-declared professional data at scale: job title, function, seniority, company, industry, skills, and groups. That precision is why LinkedIn is the default B2B platform, and its cost is why it is rarely used for anything else.

Where ads run

• Feed (single image, video, carousel, document, event, thought leader ads)
• Messaging (conversation ads; message ads, restricted in the EU)
• Right rail and text ads (desktop)
• LinkedIn Audience Network (third-party sites and apps)
• Connected TV (CTV campaigns through partners, US)

Campaign types

• Brand awareness
• Website visits
• Engagement
• Video views
• Lead generation
• Website conversions
• Job applicants

Targeting

• Job title, function, seniority
• Company name, industry, size, growth rate, category, connections
• Skills, groups, education, degrees, fields of study
• Interests and traits
• Matched Audiences: contact lists, company lists, website retargeting (Insight Tag), engagement
• Lookalike replaced by predictive audiences
• Audience expansion (off by default; keep it off for precision)

Buying

Auction-based, billed by impression (CPM), click (CPC), or send (conversation ads); Reach and Frequency and reservation options exist for large brand buys. Minimum daily budget is $10. Cost per click typically runs several times higher than on Meta or Google Display, and cost per lead correspondingly, so LinkedIn is sized against pipeline value rather than compared on CPM.

Measurement

Insight Tag plus Conversions API; Revenue Attribution Report connects to CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics) to tie pipeline and revenue back to campaigns; Lead Gen Forms sync to CRM through native integrations or Zapier. Brand lift testing is available. The LinkedIn Ad Library is public.

Watch

Lead Gen Forms produce the cheapest leads on the platform and the most objections from sales teams; the fix is offline conversion import of qualified leads so the platform optimizes past the form. Thought leader ads (promoting an employee's or executive's post) and document ads are the formats that changed most in recent years. Company-level ABM targeting through uploaded lists is LinkedIn's most defensible use.

Documentation

https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms

See also: benchmarks for typical costs, and the glossary for any term used above.