LinkedIn Advertising Costs By CPC
Always up-to-date LinkedIn ad cost data from hundreds of millions of dollars of spend.
How Much Do LinkedIn Ads Cost?
Just like the other ad platforms of Google and Meta (Facebook/Instagram) are sold in an auction environment, LinkedIn Ads costs is set by the supply and demand targeting same or non-same audiences of other advertisers, in addition to other factors below.
When you set up LinkedIn Ads, you have access to many tools and settings to help control your LinkedIn ad costs. You can look at the cost of LinkedIn ads in a few ways:
- Your overall budget
- Your maximum bid amounts
- Your ad formats
- Seasonality/competitive swings
- Historical performance
- + other things
You can directly control the amount you want to spend on a LinkedIn campaign, for example $100 per day or $1,000 per day, but you can’t directly control the cost of each result you get (for example a conversion, a download, or a click). LinkedIn has tools to help you control the cost per result to a degree, but there is no telling if you will consistently get results for your desired cost (that depends on your overall performance of the inputs in the bullets above).
There are three main factors that make up the cost to advertise on LinkedIn: your budgets & bids, your ad formats, your competition.
Budgets & Bids
Ad Formats
Competition
LinkedIn’s goal is to increase the time their users spend on the LinkedIn platform and too many poor performing ads in users’ news feed will contribute to users leaving.
So if you have an ad or creative that doesn’t perform well because people don’t engage with it as much as they could, you will have to pay more to LinkedIn for them to deliver it to their users. On the other hand, if you create an ad/creative people engage with at a higher rate (compared to your competition), you won’t have to pay as much for the ad because you’re helping make LinkedIn a better experience for their users.
You can think of the parts that make up the cost of LinkedIn ads with the main parts of this equation (weighted differently):
LinkedIn's Engagement Equation
In addition to the equation above, there are thumb/scroll stop rates and other metrics we can’t see within the LinkedIn black box.
As an advertiser, all you need to do is focus on making sure you’re using all the ad formats possible (so you can compete in all of LinkedIn’s ad inventory) and keep tabs on the leading indicators to see what you can do while balancing cost and business impact metrics.
Many times, LinkedIn advertisers choose to not see the forest from the trees and obsess over micro metrics at the neglect of asking “what impact is that having on our business?”.
Once you have business goals set for your LinkedIn Ads account, you’ll find that you’ll have the sacrifice/ignore higher funnel/micro metrics for the sake of the more important, further down funnel metrics.
Wanna Lower Your LinkedIn Ads Cost & Increase Your Performance?
Get a Free Marketing Plan Now
Got More LinkedIn Ads Questions?
We Got Answers For You
Don’t see an answer to your question? Ask it during your free marketing plan.
1
Why is my LinkedIn CPC so high?
There are a lot of reasons why your LinkedIn CPC might be high. It’s something we diagnose during your free marketing plan. Here are a few reasons:
- Not using all the creative ad formats available (which means you’re not participating in all the ad auctions)
- Audience fatigue (the same audience has seen the same creative for a long time)
- Creative fatigue (combination of audience fatigue and already poor performing creative. This is especially true for non-retargeting campaigns)
- Your offer doesn’t match the intent of your audience (if you’re trying to drive demos from an audience that has never heard of your/seen you for the first time, it won’t work)
- Your offer simply isn’t good enough
- Increased competition targeting similar audiences
- Your campaign objective (different objectives have different KPIs/different costs)
- Your individual ad format (newsfeed ads vs conversation ads have wildly different CPCs for example)
We won’t truly know why your LinkedIn Ads cost per click is so high until we see and understand your entire funnel that we give during a free LinkedIn Ads diagnosis.
2
What does CPC mean on LinkedIn?
CPC stands for cost per click.
It’s the average cost your clicks are over the period of time you’re seeing within your LinkedIn Ads dashboard.
You can move this CPC up or down to be more or less competitive within LinkedIn’s ad auction ecosystem. You might think that a lower CPC is always better, but that could lower your reach and hamper your conversion volume.
3
What is a good CPC for LinkedIn Ads?
You’re gonna hate this answer, because “it depends”. And truly, it’s not the right question to ask.
A good cost per click on LinkedIn Ads depends on what’s important to your business.
Does the cost per click multiplied by your conversion rate equal a cost per conversion that ultimate leads to an acceptable customer acquisition cost (CAC)? If so, your focus should be on driving more volume, which is the opposite of worrying about your LinkedIn CPC.
You can use this page to see what the average mix of our clients are achieving when it comes to their cost per click.
4
How do I lower my LinkedIn CPC?
For a truly custom plan to lower your LinkedIn CPC, you need to get a free marketing plan from us.
Knowing your goals, campaign objectives, audiences, creative, and conversion tracking plumbing will allow us to help you know how far lower you can expect to cut your CPC while still getting closer and closer to hitting your goals.
The same answers we gave in the question of “Why is my LinkedIn CPC so high?” are relevant solutions to this question as well.