LinkedIn ads cost: when does it pay off for B2B?

LinkedIn ads cost at least 10 dollar a day or the equivalent in your currency, the minimum LinkedIn sets for any campaign, and a click usually costs 6 to 9 dollar: 6.40 dollar in the Netherlands and 9.16 dollar in the UK, according to a 2026 benchmark of 211 B2B companies. That is expensive next to Google or Meta. Whether it pays off depends not on the click price but on the cost per lead against what a client is worth: for a service worth 20,000 euro a year a 135 euro lead is cheap, for a 200 euro product it is unaffordable.

This guide lists the minimum budgets and the prices per click and per 1,000 impressions, works a monthly budget through to leads and clients, and says when Google Ads reaches the same buyer for less. What a click price is exactly is in CPC; the difference between B2B and B2C decides whether LinkedIn makes sense for you.

The LinkedIn minimum budget

LinkedIn charges no fixed price per ad. You set a daily budget, a lifetime budget for the run, or both, and LinkedIn spreads it over the week. These are LinkedIn's own rules, in October 2026:

You choose your ad account's currency when you create it, and it cannot be changed afterwards. If you pay in euro or pounds, pick that from the start.

Price per click and per 1,000 impressions

LinkedIn publishes no average prices. The broadest public measurement we found is ZenABM's, published in February 2026: 161,256 ads from 211 B2B companies in 29 countries, 5.5 million dollar in spend.

For comparison: a click on Google in Belgium costs 0.30 to 8 euro depending on your sector, according to a Belgian agency, and on Facebook and Instagram around 0.58 dollar. On LinkedIn you pay for something else: you choose who sees your ad by job title, industry, company size and seniority, and nowhere else is that as precise. What you pay per 1,000 impressions is the CPM.

Worked example: 1,500 euro a month for a B2B service

Take a business selling a service worth 20,000 euro a year to companies with 50 to 250 staff. It spends 1,500 euro a month on LinkedIn at 7 euro a click, a little above the Dutch median. According to the same benchmark about one in ten people fill in a LinkedIn lead gen form; for your own landing page we assume three in a hundred.

For a client worth 20,000 euro a year, even 2,500 euro per client is good business. For a product worth 2,000 euro a year it is not: at a 30 percent margin a lead may cost at most 60 euro. Work out your own line with the ROAS calculator.

Two caveats. Leads from a LinkedIn form are cheaper but often colder: LinkedIn fills in the name and company, so submitting takes one click. And the benchmark reports an average cost per lead of 120 to 150 dollar in Europe, so do not plan on the best case.

Why audiences shrink fast in smaller markets

LinkedIn lets you target by job title, industry, company size, region and language. In a market like Belgium, the Netherlands or Ireland an audience gets small quickly: owners of construction firms with 10 to 50 staff in one region may be a few hundred people. Campaign Manager shows your audience size before you launch.

• Too narrowmeans the same people see your ad again and again, and the price per impression rises.
• Too broadmeans paying for people who will never buy.
• Several languagesmeans several campaigns, each with its own copy, as in Belgium with Dutch and French.

Lead gen form or landing page?

Many B2B companies combine both: a form for a guide or a webinar, a landing page for a call. Split your budget across channels with the marketing budget calculator.

When Google Ads is cheaper for the same buyer

Buyers already searching for what you sell are cheaper to reach on Google: they type their question and you pay only when they click. LinkedIn is stronger when your buyer is not searching yet, or when you need to reach a very specific role.

• Choose Google Ads ifyour buyer searches for what you do; see Meta ads or Google Ads for how channels compare.
• Choose LinkedIn ifyour service is expensive, your buyer has a clear job title, and they do not yet know they need you.
• Choose both ifthe budget allows: LinkedIn builds your name, Google catches those who search afterwards.
• Choose neither ifyour site does not persuade or you do not track what an enquiry returns. Then the budget is lost.

Do it yourself or hire help?

Setting up a campaign in Campaign Manager yourself is doable: an account, an audience, an ad and a budget. What takes time is everything around it: an offer that persuades, a landing page, tracking per campaign, and adjusting each week on what a lead really returned. What a marketer or agency costs for that is in hire a marketer.

How we work

We build the landing page and tracking a campaign needs and set up the ads, with a fixed price per project after a first call. For B2B we first check whether your buyer searches, because then Google is often cheaper; see Google Ads and SEO. For Business Centrum, a payroll office in Ghent, Belgium, we built guides on employers' search terms; in five weeks the site went from 220 to 10,200 impressions a day in Google, without an ad budget. See the Business Centrum case.