The question I hear most often about LinkedIn ads is, “How much should I spend?”
The honest answer is that it depends on what you want to achieve, but that answer helps nobody plan a budget or make a case to their CFO.
After running a $490K LinkedIn ABM program over 16 months (which generated $5M+ in influenced pipeline and a 2x ROAS) and analyzing data from 211 companies in the ZenABM 2026 Benchmarks Report, Emilia Korczynska (VP of Marketing at Userpilot) has compiled the real numbers: what companies at different stages are spending, what the minimum viable budgets look like, and how to calculate your own budget based on your pipeline goals.
This LinkedIn ads budget guide covers:
Before we get into specific budget numbers, it is worth understanding why LinkedIn is expensive, because the cost is not a flaw; it is a feature of what makes the platform valuable for B2B.
LinkedIn uses first-party professional identity data: real job titles, real companies, verified seniority levels, and actual professional relationships.
That means when you target “VP of Marketing at SaaS companies with 200 to 1,000 employees,” you are reaching people who actually hold that title at companies that actually match that description.
No other advertising platform can make that claim with the same level of accuracy.
The cost difference is real: a click that costs $1 to $3 on Google Display can cost $8 to $16 on LinkedIn.
But the quality difference is equally real. LinkedIn is 277% more effective for B2B lead generation than Facebook and X/Twitter, according to a widely cited HubSpot research, and LinkedIn’s overall conversion rate averages 6.1% in the U.S., which is 63% higher than Google Search and 692% higher than Google Display.
“LinkedIn is like a sniper rifle. Each bullet is really expensive and you know it is going to land exactly where you want it. So you would use it for the highest value type of customer, the highest value type of lead.” AJ Wilcox, Founder of B2Linked ($200M+ in managed LinkedIn ad spend), in a podcast by Supermetrics.
The relevant comparison is never CPC against other channels.
It is the pipeline per dollar spent.
Emilia’s ABM program at Userpilot generated $10.79 in pipeline per $ spent on LinkedIn, and that level of return is what makes the higher per-click cost worthwhile.
Before we discuss the LinkedIn ads budget calculation framework in detail, here’s a quick breakdown by use case to give you a rough idea:
| Use Case | Minimum Monthly Budget | Recommended Budget | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retargeting only | $1,000 to $1,500 per month | $1,500 to $3,000 per month | Small audience, best used as a supplement to another primary channel |
| Thought Leader Ads (awareness) | $1,500 to $3,000 per month | $3,000 to $5,000 per month | Per campaign. TLAs have much lower CPCs, with a $2.29 median |
| ABM, one persona | $8,000 to $10,000 per month | $10,000 to $15,000 per month | Supports 10 to 15 ads with enough data per ad |
| ABM, two personas | $15,000 to $20,000 per month | $20,000 to $30,000 per month | Roughly double the single-persona budget |
| ABM, full program (3 or more personas) | $25,000 or more per month | $30,000 to $50,000 per month | Our program peaked at roughly $30K per month |
Note: If you just want to test whether LinkedIn works for your audience at all, experts like AJ Wilcox have noted that even $500 per month can produce statistically significant click and engagement data for early proof-of-concept campaigns. But if you want to judge pipeline impact (which you should, because that is the only metric that matters), you need to spend enough time and budget for accounts to actually progress through your funnel.
ZenABM can help you here.
It provides company-level LinkedIn ad engagement tracking, first-party intent signals tied to specific campaigns, customizable ABM funnel stages that sync automatically to your CRM, multi-channel engagement journey mapping, and revenue attribution dashboards that show pipeline per dollar spent.
Based on the ZenABM 2026 Benchmarks Report, which covers 211 companies and $5.5M in aggregate spend, here is what companies at each stage typically invest and how they should approach their budget:
| Company Size | Typical Monthly Spend | Recommended Approach |
|---|---|---|
| Startup (1 to 50 employees) | $1,500 to $5,000 | Start with TLAs only. Spend $1,500 to $3,000 on one TLA campaign targeting your TAL. Focus on awareness and building engagement data before scaling. Use ZenABM ($59 per month) to track which companies engage at the account level, because without that visibility you are spending money with no way to measure what it is doing. |
| Growth (50 to 200 employees) | $5,000 to $15,000 | Run one to two personas. Use TLAs plus image ads. Build separate cold and warm campaign layers. This is where structured ABM becomes viable. Use the budget formula below to size your spend around pipeline goals. |
| Mid market (200 to 1,000 employees) | $15,000 to $40,000 | Run a full ABM program with multiple personas, multiple campaign groups by intent, and a retargeting layer. This is also the point where intent-led outbound becomes realistic, because you have enough engagement data to trigger meaningful follow-up sequences. |
| Enterprise (1,000 or more employees) | $30,000 to $100,000 or more | Run multi-market, multi-persona ABM. This often includes one-to-few and one-to-one campaigns alongside one-to-many. Agency support is common at this level. |
These are benchmark ranges, not fixed prescriptions.
A startup with a $100K ACV and 500 target accounts may need $10K per month because each closed deal justifies significant acquisition cost, while an enterprise company with a $10K ACV and a broader demand gen motion may spend less on ABM and more on general LinkedIn campaigns.
The right budget is always a function of your ACV, your target account list size, and how many deals you need to generate.
The most reliable way to set your LinkedIn ads budget is to work backwards from your revenue target rather than picking a number that “feels right” and hoping it is enough.
Here is the formula Emilia recommends, adapted from Kyle Poyar’s ABX benchmarks:
Revenue target / ACV = deals needed.
Then apply the funnel conversion rates at each stage: deals needed / close rate / qualification rate / considering rate (18%) / interested rate (32%) / awareness rate (55%) = accounts to target.
Example: $1M revenue target / $50K ACV = 20 deals. 20 / 0.25 / 0.75 / 0.18 / 0.32 / 0.55 = approximately 3,367 accounts.
These stage conversion rates come from our benchmarks data across 211 companies. Your rates may differ, but these are reliable starting points if you do not yet have your own funnel data to work from.
To move 55% of accounts into the “Aware” stage with 50 or more impressions each, you need at least 3,367 x 50 = 168,350 impressions.
In reality, delivery is uneven across accounts (some will receive far more impressions than others), so it is safer to plan for two to three times that amount, which means roughly 500K to 1M impressions.
CPM method: 1M impressions / 1,000 x $55 CPM = $55,000. Over a 12-month campaign, that comes to approximately $4,600 per month.
CPC method: If you need 107 demos at a 1% landing page conversion rate, you need 10,700 landing page clicks. At an $8 average CPC, that means $85,600. Over 12 months, that is $7,133 per month.
These are baseline calculations. Add another 15 to 20% for testing, creative iteration, and the inevitable learning phase in the first few weeks of any new campaign.
If the resulting budget is not available, you adjust the goal or the timeline rather than the formula, because the math does not bend to accommodate wishful thinking.
You can use the ZenABM ABM Budget Calculator to run your own numbers without doing this math manually.
Budget dilution is one of the most common LinkedIn budgeting mistakes, and Emilia says she made it myself in the first three months of our program.
It happens when you spread spend across too many ads, and none of them gets enough data to produce a useful signal, which means you end up with 20 ads, inconclusive data on all of them, and zero optimization.
The constraint formula is simple: Monthly budget / 30 days / ($8 CPC x 4 target clicks per ad) = maximum ads you can run effectively.
With a $10,000 monthly budget: $10,000 / 30 / $32 = approximately 10 ads. Not 20. Not 30. Ten.
If you create 30 ads on that budget, LinkedIn will not serve most of them because your budget will concentrate on the early performers, and the rest will get almost no impressions, giving you nothing to learn from.
Make sure your budget matches your audience size. If you’re spending 2k/month and your audience is 300k people, no one’s seeing your stuff.” Philip Ilic, Founder of Kiin (150+ LinkedIn Ads clients)
As Ali Yildirim pointed out in his LinkedIn post about budget allocation guidance, this is basic math that most teams ignore.
If you have 5 ads in a campaign, each one needs 3 to 4 clicks per day to produce enough data for meaningful optimization.
At an $8 CPC, that means $25 to $32 per ad per day, or $125 to $160 per campaign per day.
For one persona at $10K per month (10 ads total):
Save carousels and video for when you have more budget or have identified what messaging resonates.
At $10K, focus on the formats that deliver the most signal per dollar.
Some budget llocation rules, I suggest, you paste on your desk:
Your budget expectations should always be grounded in format-specific benchmarks, because a budget built around generic “LinkedIn CPC” averages will be wrong the moment you choose a specific ad format.
From the ZenABM 2026 Benchmarks Report:
| Format | Median CTR | Median CPC | Efficiency Score | Budget Implication |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thought Leader Ads | 2.68% | $2.29 | 9.5/10 | Most cost efficient. Your budget goes 5 to 6 times further. |
| Single Image | 0.42% | $13.23 | 5.5/10 | Standard B2B format. Expect $10 to $16 CPC in North America. |
| Video | 0.24% | $15.61 | 4.0/10 | Expensive per click. Better for awareness than traffic. |
| Carousel | 0.32% | $13.30 | 4.5/10 | Similar to single image. Useful for product education. |
| Text Ads | Low | Low | 3.0/10 | Cheap impressions, limited clicks. Mostly useful for brand visibility. |
The efficiency advantage of TLAs is not marginal; it fundamentally changes what is possible for teams with limited budgets.
A $10K per month budget that leans heavily on TLAs can generate a similar number of landing page clicks as a $50K per month budget built only around single image ads, because the 5 to 6x CPC difference compounds across every dollar spent over the life of the campaign.
Your budget determines how much you spend in total, but your bidding strategy determines how efficiently each dollar is spent.
Most LinkedIn advertisers leave this on default and overpay significantly as a result.
LinkedIn’s default “Maximum Delivery” bidding optimizes for spending your budget as fast as possible, which sounds efficient but in practice means you pay far more per click than necessary.
Tim Davidson tested this directly across identical campaigns and found that Maximum Delivery doubled his cost compared to manual CPC bidding on the same audience with the same creative.
“Use the manual CPC bidding option and bid 10 to 15% lower than the range LinkedIn gives you and adjust if you are not spending your daily budget.” Tim Davidson, Founder of B2B Rizz
AJ Wilcox recommends starting even lower in North America, around $7, and then adjusting upward only if your daily spend consistently falls below 95% of your budget.
His reasoning: if you are spending your full budget at $7 per click, bidding $10 would simply give you fewer clicks for the same total spend.
The goal is to find the lowest bid that still lets you spend your full daily budget.
LinkedIn will suggest ranges like “$16 to $33 per click.”
Ignore them.
Start low, monitor daily spend as a percentage of budget, and increase your bid only if you are consistently underspending.
For TLAs, use the Engagement objective (Website Visits is not available for TLAs).
For single-image, carousel, and video ads, use Website Visits.
Avoid the Brand Awareness objective entirely, because it only allows CPM bidding with no control or flexibility.
LinkedIn CPCs are not static throughout the year, which means budgeting the same amount per month across all 12 months leaves money on the table in cheap quarters and overspends in expensive ones.
According to HockeyStack’s 2025 LinkedIn Ads Benchmark Report (covering $28M in ad spend across 70+ B2B SaaS companies):
If you are planning annual budgets, consider allocating more budget to Q1 (when clicks are cheapest, and you can build awareness cost-effectively) and less to Q3 (when competition peaks), unless your sales cycle requires you to ramp up in Q3 for Q4 pipeline.
More broadly, LinkedIn’s global ad revenue is projected to reach $9.7 billion in 2026, up from $8.2 billion in 2025, which means CPMs are trending upward by roughly 3 to 8% year over year as more B2B advertisers compete for the same decision-maker audiences.
Budget calculations from even 12 months ago may underestimate what you will actually pay today.
Some mistakes you must absolutely avoid while planning your LinkedIn ads:
A $2K monthly test that runs for 2 weeks tells you almost nothing about whether LinkedIn works for your audience.
LinkedIn usually needs at least $5K over 4 to 6 weeks to generate enough data for a meaningful conclusion.
Experts like AJ Wilcox have noted that $500 per month can test engagement signals in early experiments, but if you want to judge pipeline impact, you need significantly more spend over significantly more time.
If you run 20 ads on a $10K monthly budget, each ad gets roughly $16 per day, which is not enough for even 2 clicks at typical North American CPCs.
Cut the ad count to 10 and double the spend per ad so each creative gets enough data to tell you whether it is working.
If you run only single-image ads, you are often paying 5 to 6 times more per click than necessary.
The gap between $2.29 and $13.23 is too large to ignore, and for teams with budgets under $15K per month, TLAs should be the backbone of the entire media mix.
Daily budgets give you more control and more predictable pacing.
Lifetime budgets can front-load spend in ways that waste money early in the campaign before you have enough data to know what is working, and they make mid-campaign budget adjustments significantly harder.
LinkedIn campaigns usually need 1 to 2 weeks to optimize delivery, and you need to budget for that learning period without overreacting to early data.
Below $50 per day per campaign, you may never get enough delivery to exit the learning phase, which means the algorithm never has enough signal to optimize and your spend is essentially distributed randomly.
Four LinkedIn default settings silently burn your budget if you do not turn them off: Audience Expansion (broadens targeting beyond your specified audience), LinkedIn Audience Network (sends ads to third-party sites with low-quality traffic), Maximum Delivery bidding (overpays per click), and Budget Optimization (redistributes budget across campaigns in ways you cannot control).
All four are ON by default.
Turn them all OFF every single time you create a campaign.
A $13 LinkedIn click might come from a VP of Marketing at a target account who has budget authority and is actively evaluating solutions.
A $3 Display click might come from an anonymous user on a random website who will never buy your product. The real comparison is pipeline per dollar spent, not cost per click.
Judging LinkedIn by CPC alone systematically undervalues what it actually contributes to your pipeline.
LinkedIn is not a cheap channel, and pretending otherwise leads to underfunded campaigns that produce inconclusive data and get shut down before they have a chance to work.
The teams that succeed on LinkedIn are the ones that set budgets based on math (revenue goal, ACV, funnel conversion rates, and format-specific CPCs) rather than what feels comfortable, and then track performance at the account level so they can see which companies are actually progressing through the funnel rather than just counting clicks.
The single biggest leverage point in your LinkedIn budget is visibility into what your spend is actually doing at the company level. Without that, you are optimizing for vanity metrics (CTR, CPC, impressions) that tell you nothing about the pipeline.
With it, you can see exactly which target accounts engaged with which campaigns, how those engagements translate into intent signals and funnel progression, and how much pipeline each dollar of ad spend influenced.
That is exactly what ZenABM provides: company-level LinkedIn ad engagement tracking, first-party intent signals tied to specific campaigns, customizable ABM funnel stages that sync automatically to your CRM, and revenue attribution dashboards that show pipeline per dollar spent.
It starts at $59 per month with a 37-day free trial, which means you can have account-level visibility running before your next budget review meeting.
Start by calculating your budget with the free ABM Budget Calculator, then try ZenABM free for 37 days to see which accounts are actually engaging with your LinkedIn campaigns.
Some common questions about LinkedIn ads budgeting:
Based on the ZenABM 2026 Benchmarks, TLAs have a $2.29 median CPC, single image ads $13.23, video ads $15.61, and carousel ads $13.30. CPMs usually sit in the $40 to $60 range for most B2B targeting, though ABM campaigns targeting narrow account lists can see CPMs exceed $78 due to small audience sizes.
In North America, CPC can climb above $16 for competitive audiences targeting C-suite executives.
TLAs are dramatically cheaper per click, which is why they should anchor most budget-conscious LinkedIn strategies. Broader industry data shows average LinkedIn CPC at $5.50 to $9.25 for Sponsored Content overall, but this blends all formats; the format-specific benchmarks above are more useful for budget planning.
LinkedIn technically allows a $10 daily minimum, but that is too low to produce meaningful results. In practice, you need about $1,500 per month for TLA-only retargeting, $5,000 per month for a single demand gen campaign, and $8,000 to $10,000 per month for structured ABM around one persona.
AJ Wilcox recommends at least $5,000 per month to generate enough data for reliable optimization.
For teams that want to test engagement signals on a shoestring, $500 per month can produce proof-of-concept data, but pipeline conclusions require significantly more investment.
Work backwards from your revenue goal. Divide your revenue target by ACV to find deals needed, then apply stage conversion rates (such as 55% aware, 32% interested, and 18% considering) along with your qualification and close rates to estimate how many accounts you need at the top of the funnel.
From there, calculate the number of impressions or clicks required and multiply by CPM or CPC.
Add another 15 to 20% for testing and creative iteration. You can use the ZenABM ABM Budget Calculator to do this more easily.
Daily budgets are almost always the better choice because they give you more control over pacing and make mid-campaign budget adjustments easier. LinkedIn may overspend by up to 50% on a given day, but it will not exceed the campaign’s total budget over its lifetime.
Lifetime budgets can front-load spend too aggressively and make pacing harder to control, which is particularly problematic in ABM where you want consistent exposure over weeks rather than a burst of impressions in the first few days. A daily budget of at least $50 per campaign is the minimum for useful delivery.
LinkedIn uses first-party professional identity data (real job titles, real companies, verified seniority), which means you are paying for precision that no other social platform can match. The relevant comparison is not CPC against other channels, but pipeline per dollar spent.
Userpilot’s ABM program generated $10.79 in pipeline per $ spent on LinkedIn, LinkedIn is 277% more effective for B2B lead generation than Facebook and X/Twitter (per HubSpot research), and LinkedIn’s overall U.S. conversion rate of 6.1% is 63% higher than Google Search and 692% higher than Google Display.
Track your actual pipeline ROI with ZenABM’s account-level engagement tracking, intent signals, and revenue attribution so you can see your real return rather than relying on CPC as a proxy for value.
Manual CPC bidding, starting 10 to 15% below LinkedIn’s suggested range.
Maximum Delivery (LinkedIn’s default) optimizes for spending your budget as fast as possible, which typically means paying more per click than necessary.
Tim Davidson tested Maximum Delivery against manual CPC on identical campaigns and found that costs doubled.
AJ Wilcox recommends starting at around $7 in North America and adjusting upward only if daily spend consistently falls below 95% of your budget.
The goal is to find the lowest bid that still lets you spend your full daily budget.
