LinkedIn Advertising Cost Per Conversion
Always fresh LinkedIn ad cost data from hundreds of millions of dollars of spend.
How Much Do LinkedIn Conversions Cost?
There is no set price for conversions on LinkedIn Ads.
Like Google Ads and Meta (Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads), LinkedIn sells ads in an auction environment. That means you compete for ad space, bidding against other advertisers.
Ad cost varies depending on the supply and demand of your target audience, whether you use the same or non-same targeting criteria across campaigns and targeting criteria, and the performance of your creative.
Other levers change ad cost, too:
- Overall budget
- Maximum bid amount
- How engaging your ad is (relevance and quality)
- Ad format
- Schedule and seasonality (competitive swings too)
- Objective (what your goals are)
- Past performance
When you set up LinkedIn Ads, you have access to tools and settings that give you some control over the cost of your campaign(s).
You set how much you want to spend on a LinkedIn campaign: for example, $100 per day or $1,000 per day ad spend. But LinkedIn controls the cost of each result you get (for a conversion, a download, or a click).
LinkedIn’s tools give you room to play with the cost per result or conversion to a degree, but the end cost will only match your desired cost if your inputs perform well overall.
LinkedIn advertising cost varies based on three factors:
- Your budgets & bids
- Your ad formats
- Your competition
Budgets & Bids
Ad Formats
Competition
1. Budgets & Bids
- What you’re willing to spend daily
- What you’re good to put down for the overall ad campaign
- The maximum bid per click you’re happy to pay
These all play into the end cost.
2. Ad Format
There are a lot of different ad formats within the LinkedIn Ads universe that all have different objectives/goals as well as performance expectations.
Some of these ad formats are:
- Single Image Ads
- Video Ads
- Carousel Ads
- Event Ads
- Document Ads
- Thought Leader Ads
- Click-to-Message Ads
- Connected TV (CTV) Ads
- Conversation Ads
- Message Ads
- Lead Gen Forms
- Text Ads
- Spotlight Ads
- Follower Ads
3. Competitiveness
Who else wants your ad spot? Audience demand and the audience adjustments you make are part of how much your average cost per conversion could go up and down.
LinkedIn wants users to spend time on the platform, so it rewards high engagement (compared to your competition) by charging you less for your ads.
Create a better user ad experience, pay less.
But if your ad doesn’t perform well—people don’t engage with it enough—you pay more for LinkedIn to keep showing it.
LinkedIn measures engagement (user value) by considering your bid (how much you’ll pay for clicks and impressions) and the amount of action that bid could get (based on historical ad performance, user behavior, and ad relevance/quality).
LinkedIn's Engagement Equation
The equation adds all engagements and subtracts by the volume of your impressions to understand your success rate to apply an “engagement score.”
Outside the equation are thumb/scroll stop rates and other metrics we can’t see inside the LinkedIn black box.
As a smart advertiser, you should use all possible ad formats (so you can compete across LinkedIn’s ad inventory) and monitor the leading indicators while balancing cost and business impact metrics.
Don’t be a LinkedIn advertiser who obsesses over micro metrics. Keep it broad and ask, “What impact does this have on our business?”
Set business goals for your LinkedIn Ads account. Then, sacrifice/ignore higher funnel/micro metrics for the sake of the more important, farther-down-the-funnel metrics.
And use our LinkedIn Ads cost charts above to find the average cost by your campaign objective.
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We Spent Hours Compiling The Best Questions & Our Favorite Answers, Enjoy
Don’t see an answer to your question? Ask it during your free marketing plan.
1
What is cost per conversion?
Cost per conversion is a calculation of your average cost per click multiplied by the conversion rate (the percentage of people who perform the action you want them to).
Some of these conversions that are popular on LinkedIn could be:
- Completing a lead form
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Downloading a whitepaper
- Requesting a demo
- Making a purchase
2
Why does cost per conversion cost so much?
It depends on the many factors that influence both your cost per click and your conversion rates.
If you compare LinkedIn to other ad platforms in terms of cost per conversion, then LinkedIn will commonly be more expensive because you’re competing against higher B2B average contract values.
3
Why is my LinkedIn cost per conversion so high?
Could be lots of reasons. But we won’t know until we take a close look during your free marketing plan. We typically find stuff like this:
- Not using all the creative ad formats available (which means you’re not participating in all the ad auctions)
- Audience fatigue (the same audience saw the same creative for a long time)
- Creative fatigue (combination of audience fatigue and 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/seen you yet, it won’t work)
- Your offer simply isn’t good enough
- Increased competition targeting similar audiences
- Campaign objective (different objectives have different KPIs/different costs)
- Individual ad format (newsfeed ads vs conversation ads have wildly different costs, for example)
4
What is a good cost per conversion on LinkedIn advertising?
You won’t like this answer, because “it depends.” Also, it’s not the right question to ask.
A good cost per conversion on LinkedIn Ads depends on what’s important to your business.
Does the cost per conversion ultimately lead to an acceptable customer acquisition cost (CAC)? If so, focus on driving more volume.Use this page 👆to see an average mix of our clients’ cost per conversion.
5
How do I lower my LinkedIn cost per conversion?
You can either lower your cost per click and/or increase your conversion rates.
The other part of the answer is easier – just get a free marketing plan from KlientBoost.
We’ll peek under the hood and check out your goals, campaign objectives, audiences, creative, and conversion tracking plumbing. Then we’ll see how much you can expect to cut your LinkedIn advertising cost by while still getting closer and closer to hitting your goals.