Linkedin Ads Pricing

LinkedIn uses objective-based pricing. That means you pay for a specific action tied to your campaign goal – a click (CPC), an impression (CPM), a message delivery (CPS), or a video view (CPV). You pay for the outcome you picked. But the cost isn’t fixed. It changes based on who you’re targeting, how many other advertisers want that audience, how relevant LinkedIn thinks your ad is, what bidding strategy you’re using, which format you picked, and what the market’s doing that week. There are benchmarks – CPCs from $2 to $10+, CPMs from $5 to $35+ – but actual costs are highly contextual. Targeting senior executives in tech? It’ll cost more (documented up to $100). Optimizing for lead gen with the weak creative? It’ll cost more. Using a format nobody engages with? You’ll pay and still lose the auction. 

LinkedIn Ads Auction

To understand LinkedIn pricing, you have to know how the platform decides what you pay. If your relevance is bad, LinkedIn makes you pay more – or not show up at all. If it’s good, you win auctions, get better placements, and may pay less to do it. Marketers who know their audience, write ads that actually get engagement – those are the ones that cut through. And they may do it at a lower cost. 

Auction Process Overview

Every time someone opens LinkedIn – visits their feed, scrolls, clicks – an auction runs. It decides which ad shows up in that exact slot, for that exact member. It takes milliseconds.

Here’s what happens:

1. The action (like a LinkedIn member is scrolling the feed) triggers an ad request. LinkedIn checks which advertisers match the member’s profile. Anyone who qualifies enters the auction for that ad slot.
2. Each one submits a bid – what they’re willing to pay for a result tied to their campaign goal: a click, a view, a lead.
3. But bids don’t win alone. LinkedIn scores each ad by combining the bid with a relevance score – how well the ad matches that specific member.
4. Highest total score wins. That ad is shown.
5. This cycle runs every time an ad can be shown in the feed, in messaging – anywhere LinkedIn sells placement.

Key Components of the Auction

Every auction on LinkedIn is shaped by four interacting components. 

Targeting

t starts when advertisers define who they want to reach using LinkedIn’s filters: title, industry, skills, seniority, company size, location, groups. When a member matching that profile opens a page with an ad slot, the system generates an ad request tied to that individual. That request triggers the auction.

Bidding

Advertisers targeting that member submit a bid – the maximum they will pay for a specific result: a click, a thousand impressions, a video view, a message sent. Each bid is tied to a campaign objective. Ads only compete within their own format (like Sponsored Content bids compete with other Sponsored Content).

Ad Relevance

LinkedIn evaluates how relevant each ad is to the specific member. This is a prediction of how likely that person is to engage. Click, comment, like, share, convert. Relevance reflects intent, demographic match is not enough.

Ad Ranking

Final selection comes down to total score: bid x relevance. The highest combined score wins the auction. A lower bid can still win if the ad is significantly more relevant. This makes ad quality a performance lever. You have to outrank – not just outbid. 

The Second-Price Auction Model

Winning the LinkedIn auction means paying just enough to beat whoever came second.

LinkedIn runs a second-price auction. So when an ad wins, the platform charges the advertiser a marginal increment over the next-best bid. In practice, that means a penny more – or the smallest unit of currency – than the runner-up. 

You bid what you’re willing to pay for a result, but what you actually pay depends on the competition.

Ad Relevance Score

Bidding high on LinkedIn doesn’t guarantee winning. LinkedIn also scores ad’s relevance to determine which ad shows. It also shapes what you end up paying.

Here’s how it works. Every time your ad competes, LinkedIn predicts how likely a specific member is to engage with it – based on factors like their behavior, the context, your targeting, and the ad itself. That prediction becomes the ad’s relevance score. It’s calculated per member, per impression, and it feeds directly into the auction.

Ad Rank = Bid × Relevance.

This is where most advertisers miss the leverage. A highly relevant ad with a modest bid can outperform a higher bidder. And because LinkedIn runs a second-price auction, winning on relevance means you still only pay a small increment over the runner-up. Not your max bid – just what it takes to win.

LinkedIn doesn’t publish the weighting of signals, but the inputs are known: expected click-through rate, past engagement, ad content, targeting logic, and member activity. Some of this is user behavior. Some of it is platform context. 

When your ad is more aligned with the member, you win more often, at lower effective cost.

LinkedIn uses relevance scoring to keep the feed useful. Ads that feel like real content – timely, targeted, credible – are more likely to show up. That protects member trust. And it filters out advertisers trying to buy their way in without doing the work.

LinkedIn Ads Pricing Models and Influencing Factors

LinkedIn ad costs aren’t fixed. The pricing model changes with the goal – CPC, CPM, CPS, or CPV – and the final cost is shaped by demand for your audience, your bidding strategy, the ad format, and how well the system thinks your ad fits the moment it’s shown.

Billable Events

On LinkedIn, every campaign starts by choosing an objective – brand awareness, lead generation, website visits, video views – and that choice defines how you’re charged. LinkedIn charges you for the selected outcome – the “billable event”. 

That event changes depending on the objective. If you choose Website Visits, you’re charged per click – but not for every click. Just the ones that take users to your destination URL, assuming you’re using manual CPC bidding. With automated bidding, you may be charged by impressions instead. 

If the objective is Engagement, LinkedIn may charge for likes, shares, hashtag clicks, or other social actions – anything that counts as engagement under their rules. 

For Brand Awareness, there’s no action to click. The goal is visibility. That’s CPM – cost per thousand impressions. You’re paying for screen presence. LinkedIn counts an impression when 50% of the ad is in view for at least one second on desktop or 300 milliseconds on mobile. 

Video Views follow a hybrid model. Charges kick in after a user watches two seconds of video with at least 50% in view – or clicks the CTA. It’s a combination of viewability and interaction, and is priced based on video views under manual bidding.

Sponsored Messaging uses CPS – cost per send. You pay for each message delivered, not opened. That applies to Conversation Ads and Sponsored InMail. LinkedIn only counts sends that reach the inbox.

Lead Generation works a bit differently. You don’t pay per lead. You’re still charged by clicks or impressions, depending on your bid setup. But if you use Lead Gen Forms, LinkedIn’s system will optimize delivery to get you more leads – even though you’re not bidding directly on them.