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LinkedIn gives you six campaign objectives to choose from, and the Linkedin Campaign Objective you pick fundamentally changes how LinkedIn delivers your ads, who sees them, and what you pay.
It may sound complicated but it’s actually very simple – you want to limit yourself mostly to website visits for most ad formats, and engagement for TLAs – with a few small exceptions. I have spent $490K on LinkedIn ads and tested different campaign objectives across ABM campaigns so I learned a thing or two 😉
In this post, I will break down all six LinkedIn campaign objectives, explain which ones to use for each ad format (and which never to use), and share what a former LinkedIn employee recommends (and what he says to avoid entirely). This is actually backed by benchmark data from ZenABM’s 2026 ABM Benchmarks Report.
LinkedIn organizes campaign objectives into three categories based on the marketing funnel: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversions. Here is a quick overview before we go deep on each one:
Objective | Funnel Stage | What LinkedIn Optimizes For | My Recommendation for ABM |
|---|---|---|---|
Brand Awareness | Awareness | Maximum impressions | Avoid (except with TLAs – sometimes) |
Website Visits | Consideration | Clicks to your website | Use this for most campaigns |
Engagement | Consideration | Likes, comments, shares, follows | Good for retargeting audiences and must-have for TLAs |
Video Views | Consideration | Video completions/views | Use for video content only, and that occassionally for quick awareness campaigns |
Lead Generation | Conversions | Lead form submissions | Use with CPC bidding, but generally – avoid lead gen form ads |
Website Conversions | Conversions | On-site conversions | Avoid entirely – expensive, better to achieve with website visits. |
Let me go through each one in detail.
Website visits is the campaign objective I use for the vast majority of my ABM campaigns. When you select this objective, LinkedIn optimizes to show your ads to people most likely to click through to your website.
Max Herzeg, a former LinkedIn employee who spent 2.5 years at LinkedIn before founding Comrade, is unequivocal about this recommendation:
“f you want to bring people to your website and educate them, use website visits. If you want people to sign up for a demo, use website visits.” – Max Herzeg, former LinkedIn employee
Notice that he recommends website visits even for demo sign-ups – not website conversions, not lead generation. Website visits with manual CPC bidding gives you the most control over costs while LinkedIn’s algorithm finds the most click-prone people in your audience.
Pair website visits with manual CPC bidding. Start your bid at 30% below LinkedIn’s suggested range (as Max Herzeg recommends) and increase based on delivery. Use ZenABM’s company-level reporting to track which target accounts are actually clicking through:
The brand awareness objective optimizes for impressions. LinkedIn shows your ads to as many people in your audience as possible, prioritizing reach over engagement. You pay on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis.
I am not a fan of this objective for most ABM campaigns: I personally think the brand awareness campaign objective drives low quality leads and wastes a lot of budget.
The problem is that brand awareness optimizes for the cheapest impressions possible, not the most valuable ones. LinkedIn will show your ads to people who are easy to reach but may not be the right decision-makers at your target accounts.
Max Herzeg offers one scenario where brand awareness can work:
“Brand awareness [objective] can work in combination with TLAs.”
Thought Leader Ads already feel organic and generate high engagement naturally. Using brand awareness as the objective maximizes their reach across your target account list. Because TLAs look like regular posts (not ads), the “low quality” impression problem is less of an issue — people engage with them regardless.
That said, I still prefer website visits even for TLAs, because it gives me click data to measure engagement quality.
The engagement objective optimizes for social actions: likes, comments, shares, and follows. LinkedIn shows your ads to people most likely to interact with the content.
Max Herzeg highlights a specific use case for this objective:
“Engagement – lots of clicks, good for building retargeting audiences.”
This is the key insight. Engagement campaigns are not about generating leads directly – they are about creating warm audiences you can retarget later.
When someone likes, comments on, or shares your ad, they enter your retargeting pool. You can then run website visits or lead gen campaigns to this warmer audience at much lower costs.
The video views objective optimizes for people who are most likely to watch your video. LinkedIn tracks views (2+ seconds of playback) and completions, and prioritizes showing your video to users with a history of watching video content on the platform.
Video ads have the highest CPC among LinkedIn ad formats – median $15.61 for ABM campaigns, with a CTR of just 0.24%. But CPC is not the right metric for video. What matters is cost per view and video completion rate.
If your goal is to get people to watch the video, use video views. If your goal is to get people to click through to a landing page after watching, use website visits. I personally saw better pipeline results from video ads with the website visits objective. And for ABM, I generally recommend website visits because it gives you click data you can use to measure engagement quality per account.
However, for pure awareness plays – like getting your target accounts to see a high level product overview or customer testimonial to familiarize them with your brand – video views makes sense. You want maximizing views, not clicks.
The lead generation objective uses LinkedIn’s native Lead Gen Forms. When someone clicks your ad, a pre-filled form appears without leaving LinkedIn. I generally advise marketers NOT to use lead gen form ads at all – in theory, they are supposed to reduces friction and generate higher conversion rates than sending people to a landing page…but in practice, they give you sh*tty leads at an extremely high cost per lead. So no matter what your reps tell you – stay away from Lead Gen forms…drive people to a nicely converting website instead.
Here is something most advertisers miss: with lead generation campaigns, you can bid for clicks instead of leads. Since clicks are cheaper than leads, this can dramatically reduce your cost per lead. LinkedIn still shows your form to people likely to fill it out, but you pay per click rather than per lead submission.
Important caveat: lead gen forms keep people on LinkedIn rather than driving them to your website. For ABM, you may want people to visit your site so you can track their behavior and trigger other engagement signals. Consider whether a lead gen form or a website visit to a landing page better serves your full ABM strategy.
Website conversions is the objective LinkedIn wants you to use when your goal is on-site actions like demo requests, sign-ups, or purchases. It uses LinkedIn’s Insight Tag to track conversions and then optimizes delivery toward users most likely to convert.
Max Herzeg is direct about this objective:
Do not use website conversions. It’s actually not working well. It’s a more expensive version of website visits.” — Max Herzeg, former LinkedIn employee
The problem is that LinkedIn’s conversion optimization algorithm needs large volumes of conversion data to work effectively. Most ABM campaigns generate relatively few conversions (because you are targeting a specific, small audience). Without enough conversion data, LinkedIn’s algorithm cannot optimize properly and defaults to showing your ads inefficiently at a higher cost.
Instead, use website visits and track conversions through your own analytics. You get the same clicks at a lower cost, and you can use tools like ZenABM to track which target accounts convert:
Here is a quick reference table showing which objectives work best with each LinkedIn ad format:
Ad Format | Best Objective | Alternative Objective | Avoid |
|---|---|---|---|
Single Image | Website Visits | Lead Generation, Engagement | Website Conversions |
Carousel | Website Visits | Lead Generation, Engagement | Website Conversions |
Video | Website Visits | Video Views | Website Conversions |
Thought Leader Ads | Website Visits | Brand Awareness, Engagement | Website Conversions |
Text Ads | Website Visits | — | Brand Awareness |
Message Ads | Lead Generation | Website Visits | Brand Awareness |
The objective you choose directly impacts your costs. Here is why:
When you select an objective, LinkedIn’s algorithm optimizes delivery for that specific action. Website visits optimizes for clicks. Brand awareness optimizes for impressions. Each objective attracts a different pool of advertisers competing in the auction, which affects your CPM and CPC.
The median CPM across all ABM campaigns in ZenABM’s data is $78. But this varies by objective:
Gabriel Ehrlich from Remotion emphasizes the importance of monitoring costs relative to your target market:
“I believe that you should be spending in direct relationship to your TAM. If you just doubled [budget], and your CPM went up because of that, then that’s a problem.” – Gabriel Ehrlich, Remotion
If switching objectives causes your CPM to spike without a corresponding improvement in results, switch back.
Website visits, combined with manual CPC bidding. This gives you the best balance of cost control, delivery optimization, and measurable engagement. Even when your goal is conversions, website visits outperforms the website conversions objective in both cost and effectiveness.
Use website visits. Max Herzeg, a former LinkedIn employee, explicitly warns against website conversions: “It’s actually not working well. It’s a more expensive version of website visits.” Website visits delivers the same clicks at lower costs, and you can track conversions through your own analytics.
Only in combination with Thought Leader Ads, and even then, I prefer website visits. Brand awareness optimizes for cheap impressions, which often means reaching people who are easy to serve but not the most valuable decision-makers at your target accounts.
No. LinkedIn does not allow you to change the campaign objective after a campaign is created. You would need to create a new campaign with the correct objective. This is why choosing the right objective from the start is so important.
Website visits optimizes for clicks that take people to your website. Engagement optimizes for social actions (likes, comments, shares) that happen on LinkedIn. Use website visits when you want people on your site. Use engagement when you want to build social proof and retargeting audiences on LinkedIn.
You can, but it is not necessary. Website visits works across all funnel stages. If you want to experiment, try engagement for top-of-funnel awareness (to build retargeting audiences), website visits for mid-funnel consideration, and lead generation for bottom-of-funnel conversion. But website visits alone covers all three stages effectively.
