Why LinkedIn costs what it does
A LinkedIn click in B2B commonly costs $8 to $15, and in competitive categories considerably more. Google Ads clicks for similar intent frequently cost a third of that. Understanding why explains when the premium is worth paying.
You are not buying attention on LinkedIn. You are buying the ability to put a message in front of a specific job title, at a specific seniority, at a company of a specific size in a specific industry, and to exclude everyone else. No other platform has that data at a comparable quality, because no other platform is one where people voluntarily maintain an accurate professional record of themselves.
That makes the economics straightforward. If your average deal is worth $50,000 and the buying committee is four identifiable job titles, paying $12 a click to reach exactly those people is cheap. If your deal is worth $5,000 and anyone might buy, you are paying a premium for precision you do not need, and a broader, cheaper channel will outperform it. Our cost per lead calculator is a quick way to work out which side of that line you are on before committing a budget.
The mistake that makes it more expensive than it should be
Most underperforming LinkedIn accounts are not badly targeted. They are targeted well and creatively exhausted.
LinkedIn audiences are small by design. When you narrow to a few thousand people at named companies, the same individuals see your ads repeatedly, and frequency climbs fast. Performance decays not because targeting drifted but because the audience has already seen the ad and stopped noticing it.
The defence is fresh creative on a schedule, before performance drops rather than after. This is why in-house creative production matters more in paid social than in search: an agency that has to commission each new asset externally cannot refresh often enough, so accounts settle into a slow decline that gets blamed on the platform.
Which platform does what
LinkedIn is where you find them. Cold targeting, ABM, and anything requiring firmographic precision. It carries most of the budget in most B2B accounts we run.
Meta is where you stay in front of them. Cold B2B targeting on Meta is weak because the professional data is inferred rather than declared, but retargeting is excellent and impressions cost a fraction of LinkedIn’s. The pattern that works is finding an audience on LinkedIn and remaining visible to it on Meta, which depends entirely on the pixel and event tracking being correct on your side.
X is narrow and situational. It works for developer, security, and crypto-adjacent audiences and for event-timed campaigns. It rarely justifies a standing budget line.
TikTok works for a younger practitioner audience or a product you can show working. For most enterprise B2B it does not, and we will say so rather than sell a test we expect to fail.
What a realistic budget looks like
The practical floor for LinkedIn is about $5,000 a month in media. Below roughly $3,000, campaigns cannot accumulate enough conversions to optimise on, and you spend the whole engagement in a learning phase that never resolves.
Spread is a more common mistake than size. A $6,000 budget concentrated on one audience with a clear offer will outperform the same amount split across four audiences, three objectives, and two platforms, because none of the four gathers enough data to improve. If budget is limited, narrow the targeting rather than widening it.
Management fees are separate from media. Ours run $4,000 to $6,000 a month depending on platform count and creative volume, charged as a flat fee. We do not take a percentage of spend, because an agency paid on spend has a reason to recommend more of it.
When paid social is the wrong channel
If people are already searching for what you sell, paid search will almost always return more per dollar, because it captures existing intent rather than interrupting someone mid-scroll. Paid social earns its place when demand has to be created rather than captured, or when the buyer does not know your category exists.
It is also the wrong choice when there is nothing to send people to. Paid social traffic is colder than search traffic and converts worse on a page that was not built for it. If the landing experience is weak, fix that before increasing spend.
And it does not work without creative capacity. An account that cannot produce new assets regularly will decay no matter how good the targeting is. If neither you nor your agency can sustain that, the honest answer is that paid social is not the right investment yet.
Where paid social does belong in the mix, it rarely works alone. It sits alongside paid search for capturing the demand it creates, organic for the credibility that makes cold targeting land, and the creative production that keeps it from decaying. If you would rather one team ran all of it, that is Marketing as a Service. If you have the strategy and need the hands, that is team augmentation.