LinkedIn Ads training: the business case counts for more than the buttons

A click on LinkedIn typically costs between 10 and 20 euros in our accounts, and more in some industries. If we purposefully set up the campaign for as much volume as possible within the same budget, that drops to 4 to 6 euros. By comparison, on Meta a click ranges from a few cents to 10 euros, depending on whether you are optimising for engagement or conversion.

Those figures are more important than anything to be found in Campaign Manager. Yet almost all LinkedIn Ads training courses are about campaign types, targeting options and where to find which setting. That's the easy part.

Why a click here is so much more expensive

LinkedIn is the only channel where you can combine job title, company size and sector. For many B2B audiences, that is the only way to reach precisely the right people.

Precisely why all other advertisers are bidding on those exact same people. An auction prices in scarcity, so you aren't paying for the platform but for the precision. That's not a systemic flaw, that's how it's supposed to work. But it does mean you have to do the maths beforehand instead of afterwards.

The trade-off between precision and volume

Here lies the difference between 10 to 20 euros and 4 to 6 euros per click, and so that is not a matter of a better advert.

If you target strictly by job title, company size and industry all at once, you are left with a small, expensive target audience that everyone is bidding on. If you intentionally make your targeting broader and optimise within that budget for as many relevant impressions as possible, you pay considerably less per click and let the platform figure more out on its own.

What the right choice is depends on how sharply your target audience is truly defined. If you sell software for one specific function in companies with more than five hundred employees, precision is worth the money. If you sell something that is interesting for many functions, then with sharp targeting you are paying for exclusion that you do not need.

Work backwards from the customer lifetime value

This is the sum that isn't in any training, and it's the only one that counts.

Start with the revenue a customer generates for you. Divide that by how many conversations you need for one customer, and then by how many enquiries you need for one conversation. Then you will know the maximum allowable cost per enquiry. Put the cost-per-click next to that, plus a realistic percentage of visitors who actually submit an enquiry.

If the resulting amount is lower than what you pay per click, no ad copy is going to make up for that. In that case, LinkedIn is not the right channel, or your offer is not yet valuable enough to advertise.

When LinkedIn really is the only route

There are target audiences that you cannot reach anywhere else. If you are specifically looking for HR managers at manufacturing companies with more than a hundred employees, there is no other platform where you can make that combination.

In that case, the question is not whether LinkedIn is expensive, but whether the value of a single client is high enough. With programmes costing tens of thousands of euros, a 15-euro click is not an issue. With a product costing a few hundred euros, it is unfeasible, even if the target audience is perfectly targetable.

And there is a middle ground that is often overlooked: if you can also reach those same people on Meta with smart targeting, that is usually the better deal. Less precision, much more volume for the same money.

What a LinkedIn Ads training should cover

Whether you choose a training course or deliver one yourself, these three things must be included. You can learn the buttons in an afternoon.

• The calculation for your own situation. How much should an application cost, given what a customer generates.
• The choice between precision and volume, and what that means in terms of cost per click.
• When it's better to choose another channel. A training course that only sells its own platform leaves you to discover the most expensive mistake by yourself.

That latter point is also why we rarely use LinkedIn as a standalone channel. It works best as part of a setup where other channels deliver the volume and LinkedIn reaches the people you cannot find anywhere else.