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Most LinkedIn ad examples you find online are from consumer brands or generic B2B campaigns.
They look nice, but tell you nothing about what works for account-based marketing, where you are targeting a specific list of companies and trying to move them through a buying journey.
In this guide, I will share real LinkedIn ad examples from ABM campaigns (campaigns run by ZenABM ad Userpilot – all tracked using ZenABM), organized by ad format and funnel stage, with the actual performance data behind each one.
You will see what worked, why it worked, and how to apply these patterns to your own campaigns.
In case you want a quick overview:
Before diving into specific examples, here is how each LinkedIn ad format performs in ABM campaigns.
These benchmarks come from our analysis of 500+ ABM campaigns tracked through ZenABM:
Ad Format | Median CTR | Median CPC | Best ABM Stage |
|---|---|---|---|
Thought Leader Ads (TLAs) | 2.68% | $2.29 | Awareness + Engagement |
Single Image Ads | 0.42% | $13.23 | Engagement + Conversion |
0.32% | $13.30 | Engagement | |
Video Ads | 0.24% | $15.61 | Awareness |
Text Ads | 0.02-0.05% | $0.50-3.00 | Always-on Awareness |
The performance gaps are massive.
Single-image ads are the workhorse of LinkedIn ABM campaigns.
They work across all campaign objectives and are the most versatile format for driving direct response actions like demo requests and content downloads.
The best-performing single-image ads consistently use a problem-solution framework.
The headline states a specific problem the target persona faces, and the image shows the solution.
One ad targeting CFOs struggling with budget visibility achieved over 2% CTR, nearly 5x the median for this format.
Key elements from top performers:
Remember: Have one clear problem or job to be done in your headline, one message at a time. Don’t create this feature soup where you’re just talking about your product. Start with the problem, then present the solution.
Competitor comparison ads work exceptionally well in the consideration stage of ABM.
This ad directly compared features against a well-known competitor, making it easy for prospects already evaluating tools to understand the differentiation.
The key is specificity. Instead of saying “we are better than X,” show a concrete comparison.
Charts, feature tables, and side-by-side screenshots all perform well in this category.
The analysis of 119 TLAs and top single-image ads showed that specific free trials consistently outperform vague offers. 37-day free trial” appeared in 5 of our top 20 performers.
Not “try it free”, the specific number creates credibility.
For creative best practices: LinkedIn Single Image Ads Best Practices for ABM
You need 5 to 6 single-image ads for your campaign to run effectively.
5 is the number recommended by LinkedIn.
I recommend creating 6, maybe even sometimes 7, so you can quickly eliminate the ones that are underperforming.
But do not go overboard.
Gabriel Ehrlich suggests a simpler rule:
“If you have a huge audience and a small budget, you don’t need a lot of ads. You can have 1 or 2 ads, that’s fine. If you have a large budget and you don’t have a lot of audience, then 10 ads, 20 ads is fine.”
The math for ad count is straightforward: divide your monthly budget by 30 to get daily spend, then divide by CPC to get daily clicks, then divide by 3-4 clicks per ad.
That is the maximum number of ads your budget can support.
This is another place where ZenABM helps beyond raw CTR.
Its company-level reporting and job title analytics make it easier to see which single-image creatives are attracting the right companies and the right personas, especially for competitor comparisons and free-trial offers where click quality matters more than click volume.
Thought Leader Ads are the top-performing LinkedIn ad format for ABM by a significant margin.
They look like organic posts from a real person, which means they blend into the feed and get engagement that company-page ads simply cannot match.
One of the top-performing TLAs was a personal story about switching from Excel to a product analytics tool.
The post used first-person voice, opened with a vulnerability hook, and placed the link in the bottom 25% of the text.
What made it work:
I like putting it like this: “Write your TLAs like you would write poetry, single lines at a time.”
The formatting matters.
Short paragraphs, line breaks, and minimal emojis consistently outperform dense blocks of text.
This TLA shared specific results, reaching $650K in the pipeline, and used social proof as the hook.
It had a 17% overall CTR and a 3.4% clicks-to-landing-page rate, which is far beyond what any company-page ad can achieve.
The pattern here is specific metrics as social proof.
Our analysis of 119 TLAs showed that 45% of top performers include specific numbers like “$650,000 in pipeline in 90 days” or “$12 in pipeline per dollar spent.”
We matched the thought leader to the target persona.
When targeting product managers, Emilia Korczynska (VP of Marketing at Userpilot and co-creator of ZenABM ABM Bootcamp) had a product manager at Userpilot post the ad.
This increases credibility because the audience feels like they are hearing from a peer, not a marketer.
Gabriel Ehrlich, Founder of Remotion (a LinkedIn ads agency), adds important nuance:
“There are different best practices for different audiences, and different best practices for different thought leaders.”
I agree. What works for one executive’s voice and audience may not work for another.
TLAs are not the place for hard sells.
“Thought leader ads to me, it shouldn’t be your whole strategy. It’s going to be just one part of it.”
For the complete guide: LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads for ABM
Tip: TLAs become much more actionable when you can measure what happened after the view or click. ZenABM helps here with company-level engagement de-anonymization, CRM sync, ABM stage tracking, and revenue attribution views, so you can tell whether a TLA is actually warming target accounts instead of just producing surface-level engagement.
Carousel ads are what I call “a really underappreciated format.”
They let you combine multiple messages into one ad, which makes them cost-efficient for projecting your entire campaign message to an audience at once.
One of the best carousel patterns for ABM is a tool comparison carousel.
Each card shows a different comparison point, pricing, features, and use cases, making it easy for prospects in the consideration stage to evaluate options.
What has worked with carousels:
The ad’s composition:
Users see about 1.5 cards at a time on mobile, so design the first card to create curiosity that drives swiping.
Deliver value early in cards 2-3 rather than saving everything for the end.
Video ads have the lowest CTR (0.24%) and highest CPC ($15.61) of all LinkedIn ad formats.
But measuring video ads by clicks misses the point entirely.
Video ads are about building brand recognition and trust with target accounts.
Short customer testimonial videos (15-30 seconds) where a real customer describes a specific outcome they achieved.
The key is specificity, not “we love this tool” but “we generated $2M in pipeline in 90 days.”
Technical requirements that matter:
Gabriel Ehrlich shares an important insight about video TLAs:
“We at first didn’t see anything very good with video ads on thought leader ads. And then we had one founder who was just killing it with video. What that leads me to believe is it’s not video is good, video is bad, it’s does this guy do a good video?”
Video ads are actually really expensive.
It’s really hard to create video ads that actually engage.
I recommend creating ads that look like UGC content, because people engage more.
User-generated content style videos, informal, phone-shot, authentic, consistently outperform polished corporate videos on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn’s own data confirms this.
Their most successful video ads are 10-15 seconds long, which is much shorter than most B2B teams produce.
Complete guide: LinkedIn Video Ads for ABM
Text ads appear in the LinkedIn sidebar and top bar.
They have extremely low CTRs (0.02-0.05%), but they generate thousands of impressions at rock-bottom CPMs.
For ABM, they serve as “surround sound”, keeping your brand visible to target accounts without burning through your budget.
“LinkedIn’s text ads and spotlight ads are extremely significant to my ABM strategy template as they generate a huge number of impressions for a very low CPM.” – Tim Davidson, Founder of B2B Rizz
Text ads, if you use the website visits objective, are practically free, so experts don’t actually count them when calculating how many ads they can run.
In fact, experts like Tim Davidson and Emilia Korczynska run text ads continuously against their entire target account list.
The goal is not clicks, it is brand impressions that build familiarity over time.
Best practices for text ad creative:
Document ads let users preview a PDF directly in the LinkedIn feed.
They can be gated (requiring a lead gen form) or ungated. For ABM, I generally prefer ungated document ads that deliver genuine value and build trust.
Sharing industry benchmarks or research reports as document ads works well for the engagement stage.
Users can swipe through a few pages in the feed, and if the data is compelling, they continue reading.
A word of caution on document ads: I would recommend thinking carefully about document ads. The cost per lead can reach extremely high for a low-intent asset. If someone downloads your report today, don’t assume they’re ready to buy.
The better approach is ungated document ads for brand authority, and only gate documents for highly engaged accounts in the warm layer.
Lacework, for instance, achieved 6x ROI by using ungated document ads for awareness, then retargeting engagers with direct response campaigns.
Deep dive: LinkedIn Document Ads: The Ultimate Guide with Examples
The biggest mistake I see with LinkedIn ads for ABM is using the same ad format and message for every stage of the funnel. Each stage requires different formats and messaging. Here is how to structure your ads based on where target accounts are in the buying journey:
ABM Stage | Ad Format | Ad Example Type | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|
Cold / Awareness | TLAs + Text Ads + Video | Personal stories, industry insights, brand awareness | Get in front of target accounts at low cost |
Warm / Engagement | TLAs + Single Image + Carousel | Tool comparisons, case studies, frameworks | Drive meaningful interactions |
Hot / Conversion | Single Image + Message Ads | Free trial offers, demo requests, competitor comparisons | Generate pipeline and meetings |
Maximillian Herczeg, a former LinkedIn employee and now Founder of Kamrat (a LinkedIn ads consultancy), explains the audience approach:
“For cold audiences, I recommend 30-50% penetration per month, meaning you want to reach 30 to 50% of the users in your pool. For warm audiences, it should be 70 to 90% audience penetration per month.
The recommended ad mix per campaign: 5 to 7 single-image ads, 5 TLAs, 1 or 2 carousels, and 1 to 3 videos, plus text ads as many as you want. This ensures variety while keeping each ad well-funded enough to deliver results.
The best LinkedIn ad examples for ABM are not just the ones with the prettiest creative or the highest CTR.
They are the ones that match the right format to the right stage, resonate with the right buying personas, and move the right accounts closer to the pipeline.
That is why winning ABM teams combine TLAs, single-image ads, carousels, video, text ads, and document ads instead of expecting one format to do everything.
If you want to see which of those ads are actually engaging your target accounts, influencing account progression, and contributing to revenue, ZenABM gives you the account-level visibility to act on that data with much more confidence.
Try ZenABM for free (37-day free trial) or book a demo now!
Some common questions about LinkedIn ad examples and their answers:
Thought Leader Ads that use first-person storytelling and specific metrics are the best-performing LinkedIn ad examples for ABM. Our data shows TLAs deliver 2.68% median CTR and $2.29 CPC. The best TLA examples open with a pain point, build a personal story, and place the link contextually in the bottom 25% of the text.
LinkedIn recommends 5 ads per campaign, and I recommend creating 6-7 so you can quickly eliminate underperformers. The exact number depends on your budget: divide your monthly budget by 30, then by CPC, then by 3-4 clicks per ad to find your maximum. Gabriel Ehrlich from Remotion agrees: “LinkedIn recommends 5, I like 5. The golden rule is decent, 4 or 5 is good.”
Based on our analysis of 119 ads: first-person voice (65% of top performers), specific metrics as social proof (45%), link placement in the bottom 25% of text (75%), and a problem-solution framework. Content with photos of real people, specific limited-time offers, and clear CTA buttons in the image outperforms generic brand graphics.
Yes, but measure them differently than other formats. Video ads have the lowest CTR (0.24%) and highest CPC ($15.61), so they are not ideal for driving clicks. Use them for brand awareness with target accounts, keep them under 30 seconds, and always add captions. Gabriel Ehrlich notes that success depends on the speaker: “It’s not video is good, video is bad, it’s does this guy do a good video?”
Use 1200 x 1200 pixels (square) as your default for single-image ads. It takes up more screen space on mobile where 57% of LinkedIn users browse. For carousels, 1080 x 1080 is the only option. For video, use 1080 x 1080 (square) or 1080 x 1350 (vertical) for maximum mobile visibility. See our full guide on LinkedIn ad sizes for all formats.
