If you were to ask B2B marketers what their most important channel to invest in was this year, they’d probably say LinkedIn. And that makes sense. There is a lot that makes this platform desirable.
LinkedIn stands apart not just for its targeting options or bidding models, but because it’s one of the few places online where professionals are primed to think about work before they even log in. It’s a lot easier to grab attention when you’re not competing with a video of a family of raccoons throwing a party on somebody's patio.
The trouble is, while LinkedIn is a platform that we at Abe believe in so much that we literally built an agency for it, we will be the first to admit that it is not the easiest channel to use. Appearances can be deceiving if you're not looking at the right metrics or models. Understanding how well you’re doing on LinkedIn requires context, which, until now, was hard to find.
Fortunately, we’ve developed a LinkedIn Advertising Benchmarks for B2B report, drawing on a large sample of real client campaigns to provide meaningful reference points for budget planning, performance reviews, and strategic decisions.
We’ve made the main takeaways public in this article, but if you’re running LinkedIn ads, please do grab a copy of the free report once it's live. We worked hard to make sure it would be jam-packed with information to help you on your way.
This data comes from real campaigns run by yours truly as well as our sister agency, Directive Consulting.
The data comes from brands with monthly LinkedIn budgets ranging from $3,000 to $300,000. It spans small businesses and enterprise players, with a strong focus on B2B SaaS. All results were cleaned for outliers and anonymized to ensure data integrity and privacy.
The goal isn’t to prescribe a single “ideal” number, but to provide realistic, defensible ranges that marketers can use to evaluate their own performance.
Effective data analysis depends on context. Your data storytelling is only as good as your details. A good example of this is if you were presenting on LinkedIn advertising costs. On the surface, it might seem expensive, but that would only be the case if you're looking at lead costs comparative to other platforms. If you look at lead quality, suddenly LinkedIn looks like the most valuable channel to ever exist.
Your data storytelling is only as good as your details.
Benchmarks won't tell your unique story for you, but they will help you provide relative measures. As marketers who are relying on reporting to convey how well you're hitting your KPIs, we hope these benchmarks will help you to:
These are overall medians—but the report also includes low-range and high-range values, showing the variability you might expect depending on your industry, offer quality, and targeting strategy. For instance:
These spreads help marketers understand not only what’s “typical,” but what’s possible with strong creative, targeting, and value propositions.
One of the most consistent findings in our work is that LinkedIn ad performance can’t be separated from funnel stage strategy. Different formats excel at different goals. Most brands will want to do a mix of around 70% lead generation, 30% awareness. The exact blend will depend on your brand notoriety and market penetration. We would virtually never recommend that a brand spend nothing on brand awareness.
Most brands will want to do a mix of around 70% lead generation, 30% awareness.
Even for cautious budgets, allocating some spend to brand awareness campaigns supports long-term efficiency by increasing recognition before asking for a conversion.
This is the stage for value exchanges: offering genuinely useful content in return for contact information. Whether it's a whitepaper, webinar, or other gated resource, the content needs to answer real questions your audience has.
Here, relevance is everything. Conversation Ads, for example, work best when they feel personal and include compelling incentives—like free trials, credits, or carefully considered offers that encourage direct engagement.
It’s also important to recognize that performance varies significantly by ad format. Below are a few sample median metrics from our dataset, showing how costs and engagement typically differ across common LinkedIn ad types:
It’s easy to think of benchmarks as just numbers on a page. But they’re really about enabling better choices.
By understanding typical cost ranges and outcomes, marketers can communicate performance more credibly, plan budgets based on evidence,
LinkedIn remains one of the most valuable platforms for B2B marketing, but also one of the hardest to get right. If you don't have a LinkedIn advertising expert on your team, Abe would love to fill in any gaps you're experiencing. Get in touch with our friendly team today.