The seniority filter is the obvious tool, and it is the wrong one
Ask most people how to target CEOs on LinkedIn and they will say: set Seniority to CXO. It is right there in Campaign Manager, it sounds precise, and it is what the interface nudges you towards.
The data says otherwise. In Kiin Labs' analysis of $8.4M in thought leader ad spend across 464 accounts, 79% of spend sets no seniority filter at all. And where advertisers do set it, it barely moves the numbers: engagement rate sits between 4.30% and 4.42% across CXO, VP, Director, Owner and Partner, and cost per landing page click between $12.50 and $13.40. Flat.
Seniority is a coarse proxy. "CXO" on LinkedIn includes the Chief of Staff, the Chief Happiness Officer and everyone who titled themselves Chief Something at a four-person startup. It selects for a word, not a role.
What actually reaches CEOs — three levers, in order
1. Job titles, not seniority
53% of campaigns in the dataset target by job title instead, and the median campaign uses 28 titles. For a CEO audience the list is: Founder, Co-founder, CEO, Chief Executive, Managing Director, Owner, and the C-suite that sits beside them — CTO, CMO, CRO, CFO, CIO, CISO — depending on who actually buys what you sell. Titles are what people write about themselves; they select for the role.
2. The Entrepreneurship job function
This is the finding worth the whole post. LinkedIn's job-function taxonomy has a category called Entrepreneurship, and it is where founders and owner-operators sit. In the data it is the cheapest job function to engage, at $0.65 per engagement — against $1.14 for HR, over $3 for QA, and a landing page click cost of $9.60 that beats IT ($19.21) and Operations ($18.22) by half. Founders engage with founder content. Almost nobody targets the function.
3. Company size — the variable that matters most
Engagement falls monotonically with company size: 5.93% at 2–10 employees, down to 3.58% at 10,001+. Enterprise audiences engage 40% less. This is the real reason "target CEOs" goes wrong: the CEO of a 20-person company reads their own feed and replies to their own DMs. The CEO of a 10,000-person company has an EA, a comms team, and a feed they look at twice a year. Pick the company-size band where the CEO is the buyer, and stop paying to reach ones who are not.
Narrow beats broad — with one catch
Every dimension of narrowing pays: one job function costs $12.51 per landing page click against $19.12 for seven or more. Two or three seniorities cost $0.98 per engagement against $1.90 with none, at a CPM of $40 against $78. Director-and-above alone runs $1.23 per engagement; add managers and it is $2.07.
The catch is fatigue. Narrow audiences are small audiences, and under 10,000 people a thought leader ad fatigues roughly four times faster than on a large one. Fatigue is driven by cumulative frequency, not time — engagement is already down 4% when the average person has seen the ad half a time, and 9% after one full pass. A tight CEO list is exactly the kind of audience that burns out in three weeks. Rotate creative on a schedule and watch frequency, not calendar days. More in penetration rate and frequency.
Objective: engagement, not brand awareness
Brand awareness is the cheaper objective per impression, and on a large cold audience it reaches far more people per dollar. A CEO list is not a large cold audience. Within the same account, brand awareness with a seniority filter delivers 50% fewer tracked conversions per dollar than engagement. It buys cheap impressions on a small pool that has nobody new in it. Use engagement, and use it with a CPM bid where the audience is tight — most of engagement's click-rate edge is the bidding, not the objective. The full decision is in engagement vs brand awareness.
Format: single image, from a founder, no link
People buy from people, and CEOs especially do not engage with company-page ads. Run thought leader ads from your founder's profile — executives engage 28% more than individual contributors with them, 4.42% against 3.46%.
Two things the data is unambiguous about. Video is the wrong format for a thought leader ad; it costs more per engagement and holds attention for less time than a single image post. And the link kills engagement: 66% of posts that hit 10%+ engagement have no link in them, while only 18% of the worst-performing posts are link-free. A URL in the copy roughly halves the chance of a post taking off. Use the ad to be seen; capture separately.
The setup in Campaign Manager
- Objective: Engagement.
- Audience — Company attributes: set the company-size band where the CEO buys. For most B2B SaaS that is 11–200 employees. Add industry if your ICP is sector-specific.
- Audience — Job experience: add the job-title list. Founder, Co-founder, CEO, Managing Director, Owner, plus the relevant C-suite. Do not add Seniority on top; the titles already select for it and stacking filters shrinks the audience without improving it.
- Audience — Job function: Entrepreneurship, plus at most one or two functions that match the specific buyer.
- Audience expansion: off. It is on by default and it undoes the targeting.
- If you have named accounts: upload the company list as a matched audience instead of steps 2–4, then layer the titles on top. In the data, list-targeted campaigns and cold campaigns perform the same within account, so use the list for precision, not because it is cheaper.
- Creative: a single-image thought leader ad from the founder's profile. No link in the copy. First line under 75 characters — the median for posts that hit 10% engagement.
- Bid: CPM where the audience is under about 30,000; it takes the click-rate edge without paying for it.
- Frequency cap: set one, and plan a creative rotation at two to three weeks.
What to measure
- Engagement rate, the primary metric for a thought leader ad. Above 4% is the median for a well-targeted campaign; 10%+ is the top decile.
- Landing page clicks, never clicks. LinkedIn's
clicksfield counts likes and profile views. OnlylandingPageClicksis traffic. - Cumulative frequency, watched weekly. It is the fatigue signal and it is invisible in CPC.
- Who engaged. A CEO who liked or commented is a signal — capture them and route to outbound. That is where CEO campaigns actually convert.
Frequently asked questions
Should you use LinkedIn's seniority filter to target CEOs?
Not on its own. Across $8.4M of thought leader ad spend, 79% of budget sets no seniority filter at all, and where it is set, engagement rate and cost per landing page click are flat across CXO, VP, Director and Owner tiers. Seniority is a coarse proxy; job title and job function are what actually select for CEOs and founders.
What is the cheapest way to reach founders on LinkedIn Ads?
The Entrepreneurship job function. In Kiin Labs' data it is the cheapest job function in the dataset at $0.65 per engagement, against $1.14 for HR and over $3 for QA. Combine it with a company-size band and a job-title list rather than using it alone.
Does company size matter more than seniority when targeting CEOs?
Yes. Engagement falls monotonically with company size: 5.93% at 2–10 employees down to 3.58% at 10,001+, a 40% drop. A CEO at a 20-person company is reachable and engaged; a CEO at a 10,000-person enterprise is neither the person who sees the ad nor the person who acts on it.
Should CEO-targeted campaigns use engagement or brand awareness?
Engagement. Brand awareness with a seniority filter delivers 50% fewer tracked conversions per dollar than engagement within the same account. Brand awareness only wins on large cold audiences of 30,000 or more, and a CEO list is almost never that big.
How narrow should a CEO audience be?
Narrower than you think, on function and title — one job function costs $12.51 per landing page click against $19.12 for seven or more, and two to three seniorities cost $0.98 per engagement against $1.90 with none. But narrow audiences fatigue fast: under 10,000 people, thought leader ads fatigue roughly four times faster than on large audiences, so watch cumulative frequency and rotate creative.
Figures are from Kiin Labs' analysis of $8.4M in thought leader ad spend across 464 accounts over 12 months, Audience Network excluded. The full study, with paired comparisons and confidence intervals, publishes shortly.