Ads and pipeline

LinkedIn ads are the most expensive mainstream ad inventory in B2B by a wide margin, and sometimes the only way to reach a specific set of people. Both facts drive the strategy.

What you are paying for

Targeting by job title, seniority, function, company, company size and industry — declared by the user and kept current because their career depends on it. No other platform has data this good for B2B.

CPMs are correspondingly high. Expect multiples of what you would pay elsewhere. The question is never "is this cheap" but "is this audience worth it".

Thought leadership ads

Promoting an individual's post as an ad. This has become the default for good reason: it combines the credibility of a personal voice with paid reach, and it does not read like an ad in a feed full of people.

If you run one paid format on LinkedIn, this is usually it.

Lead gen forms

Native forms pre-filled from the user's profile. Conversion rates are high because friction is near zero — and lead quality is correspondingly lower, because friction was doing qualification work.

If you use them, plan for qualification downstream, and feed the qualified outcome back as your conversion rather than the form fill. This is the same lesson as the PPC guide's conversion tracking module, and it bites harder here because the forms convert so well.

Matched audiences

Upload a target account list, retarget site visitors, build lookalikes. Account-based targeting is where LinkedIn's data advantage is largest — you can genuinely reach the buying committee at 200 named companies.

The measurement problem

B2B buying cycles run months. A click today becomes an opportunity in the next quarter, by which time last-click attribution has given the credit to branded search. LinkedIn will look terrible in your attribution model and may still be working.

Mitigations: long attribution windows, offline conversion import from the CRM, self-reported attribution at demo request, and — best — holdout tests by region or account list.

What trips people up

• Judging on cost per lead when lead quality varies enormously by format.
• Running last-click reporting on a channel with a two-quarter lag.
• Sending paid traffic to a generic homepage.

You have got this when

You can state what a qualified lead from LinkedIn is worth, and how you would know whether the spend was incremental.