Most companies running Account-Based Marketing (ABM) on LinkedIn are unknowingly wasting a huge part of their budget on a single mistake:
letting a few large companies consume most of their ad impressions while neglecting the importance of Linkedin ads impression capping.
I’ve seen this over and over again while running LinkedIn ABM programs – including a 7-figure ABM motion as VP of Marketing at Userpilot.
If you don’t cap impressions on a company level, your ads won’t reach enough accounts to ever hit your conversion or pipeline goals, which is why understanding Linkedin impression capping is crucial.
In this guide, I’ll show you:
ABM is not lead generation. It’s not about individual people clicking ads. Accounts buy – not individuals. That means your real goal with LinkedIn ABM is simple:
reach as many target accounts as possible with enough impressions to create awareness and intent.
If one large enterprise account has thousands of active LinkedIn users, LinkedIn will happily serve them:
The result?
Most LinkedIn advertisers look at:
But for ABM, the metric that actually matters is:
Company (aka account) penetration. You can’t get account penetration rate natively in Campaign Manager – but you can use ZenABM’s Linkedin ABM analytics dashboard to see how many companies out of your target list you have penetrated in a given time period – these are marked on the dashboard as the “identified” companies – as LinkedIn Ads API identifies only the companies that have been served 3+ impressions in any time period:
If your ads only reach 10–20% of your target accounts, your conversion math simply doesn’t work – no matter how good your creatives are.
Some ABM tools offer company-level impression capping as a paid feature.
For example:
That’s hard to justify for many teams – especially when LinkedIn already gives you the raw capability.
Here’s the part most people don’t know:
You can do company-level impression capping natively inside LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
Open LinkedIn Campaign Manager and navigate to:
Plan → Companies
On the right-hand side, use filters:
For example:
Click Create audience in the top-left corner.
This is critical.
A dynamic audience means companies will automatically enter and exit based on their impression count.
Finally, click “save” – your audience will start populating.
Once the audience populates, you’ll need to go to all your campaigns and *Exclude* this audience from all your campaigns:Â
This is the tedious bit that is taking some part. Which is exactly why you may want to use tools (like ZenABM) that allow you to exclude companies that have reached a certain number of impressions (= impression capping) from all your campaigns or several at once. But I wouldn’t say it’s worth $10,000 that some tools like Factors.ai charge for this – you can get it in ZenABM from $59 per month.
My preferred approach is actually this:
What happens then?
Yes – ideally, your ABM lists should contain companies of similar size.
But in reality:
Company-level impression capping is the only reliable way to enforce fair distribution.
If you’re running LinkedIn ABM and not capping impressions on a company level:
And the best part?
You don’t need an expensive ABM tool to fix this.
You can do it natively in LinkedIn Campaign Manager – and you just saved yourself about $10,000 per year.
If you want to go a step further and actually see which companies engaged, track intent, score accounts, and push everything into your CRM, that’s exactly why we built ZenABM.
Start a 37-day free trial here or book a demo and I’ll show you how to turn this into real pipeline.
