How Much Does LinkedIn Advertising Cost in 2025?

When you advertise on LinkedIn, you compete with other advertisers to get your ad seen. If you target an audience in high demand, you can expect higher costs because of that audience’s value and increased competition for that audience’s attention.

Your budget directly influences how much LinkedIn advertising costs. That’s because it determines how much budget a campaign will have available for its lifetime or each day — and that shapes your bids.

LinkedIn offers multiple budget options:

• Lifetime budget: This is the best model if you want a campaign delivered fast for a specific budget. For a new, inactive campaign, the minimum lifetime budget is $100. Once the campaign begins, the minimum adjusts to $10 times the number of days the campaign is scheduled.
• Daily budget: Advertisers can use a daily budget for scheduled or ongoing campaigns. A daily budget tells LinkedIn how much you’re willing to spend per day on your campaign. You need to spend a minimum of $10 per day to use this option.
• Dynamic Group Budget: With this option, advertisers can use a lifetime or daily budget to create a campaign group budget and objective for all its campaigns (within that group). LinkedIn will then find the best auctions to enter.

When selecting a budget, consider all the other elements of your campaign.

You can choose from a few bidding strategies on LinkedIn, including:

• Maximum delivery, which uses your full budget to maximize results.
• Cost cap, which manages costs by setting a maximum cost per action (CPA).
• Manual bidding, which provides advertisers complete control over their bids.

These bidding strategies have different effects on how much LinkedIn ads cost.

Manual bidding, for example, can create higher costs because it doesn’t benefit from machine learning like maximum delivery does — maximum delivery uses machine learning to focus bids on users most likely to complete the desired action.

When considering which bid strategy to use, remember that it’s one of several factors influencing your advertising costs. You could use a machine learning strategy like maximum delivery, but poor audience targeting could lead to high costs and low returns.

All campaigns have one of the following objectives:

• Brand awareness
• Engagement
• Video views
• Lead generation
• Website visits
• Website conversions
• Talent leads
• Job applicants

Your objective determines your options for:

• Bidding strategy, like cost cap and maximum delivery.
• Optimization goal, like impressions, landing page clicks, and qualified leads.

These two elements determine how LinkedIn charges advertisers, like via:

1. Cost-per-click (CPC), where you pay when people click on your LinkedIn ad.
2. Cost-per-impression (CPM), where you pay for every 1000 impressions.
3. Cost-per-send (CPS), where you pay to send LinkedIn messages.

There are zero tricks when selecting an objective and optimization goal. Choose the ones that align best with your advertising goals. For example, if you want LinkedIn to generate qualified leads for your business, then choose the Lead generation objective and Qualified leads optimization goal.

Keep in mind that only some bidding options are available for specific ads. Use this table as a reference:

Ad relevance is a critical part of determining LinkedIn advertising costs because ads with higher relevance scores have lower prices for appearing on LinkedIn. In comparison, ads with lower relevance scores have higher prices.

Your ad’s relevance score is determined by its:

• Expected click-through rate (CTR)
• Historical ad performance
• Landing page experience
• Engagement metrics, such as likes, comments, and shares

Improving ad relevance is one of the most effective strategies for lowering LinkedIn costs.

Your part of the market can also affect your LinkedIn advertising pricing. For example, organizations in the recruiting space will often see higher costs because LinkedIn is a job-based social network.

Targeting the right people is one of the most effective tactics — across ad networks — for optimizing costs. Besides reaching the most relevant people, better targeting can create more relevant ads, which can improve your ad relevance score.

LinkedIn offers several targeting options, including:

• Language
• Company category, connections, followers, growth rate, industry, and more
• Demographics
• Education, including degree, field of study, and member schools
• Job experience, including title, skills, years of experience, and more
• Interests and traits, like groups, interests, and traits

Research your target market (and how they use LinkedIn) to improve your targeting.

Predictive audiences are similar to lookalike audiences. Based on a provided list, LinkedIn creates a predictive audience or a user group (based on the source list) that is predicted to perform your campaign objective.

With predictive audiences, advertisers can use LinkedIn’s machine learning and artificial intelligence to go beyond traditional targeting while also optimizing their advertising costs and returns.

Improving ad relevance is proven to reduce costs and increase campaign performance. That’s because ad relevance focuses on delivering a better message, offer, and experience to LinkedIn users.

Get a better ad relevance score by:

• Ensuring ad messaging aligns with the landing page
• Improving audience targeting to reach more relevant members
• Testing ad variations to find top performers

For the best results, monitor ad performance regularly to find opportunities faster.