What LinkedIn CTV costs
Base: 31 advertiser accounts inside the Kiin Labs panel that ran CTV in the 12 months to September 2026, up from 2 accounts in September 2025.
| Metric | Cheaper quarter | Median | Dearer quarter |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPM, per account | $20.31 | $25.76 | $50.88 |
| Cost per completed view | $0.021 | $0.026 | $0.053 |
| Cost per 1,000 completed views | $20.58 | $26.12 | $53.14 |
| Completion rate | 97.5% | 98.7% | 100.0% |
| Dwell, seconds of spot watched | 19.9 | 29.1 | 40.2 |
| Frequency, impressions per unique member | 1.46 | 1.95 | 2.52 |
| Peak penetration of the target audience | 2.0% | 5.4% | 10.4% |
| Daily budget | $35 | $75 | $130 |
| Campaign length, days | 19 | 40 | 66 |
| Audience size, members | 15,000 | 120,000 | 730,000 |
The completion rate is the first thing people disbelieve. It is 98.7% because the spot is unskippable on a television screen, so a start is very nearly a finish. That makes cost per completed view an honest number here in a way it never is in a feed.
CTV against the feed
| Channel | CPM | Base |
|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn CTV | $25.76 | 31 accounts |
| LinkedIn feed, blended, same accounts, same 12 months | $96.43 | the same 31 accounts |
| LinkedIn feed, per-format medians | $36 to $85 | — |
That is the headline and it holds inside the same accounts, so it is not a comparison between cheap advertisers and expensive ones. CTV reaches the same B2B audience for roughly a quarter of what the feed charges per thousand impressions.
A caution we have to state, because we published it the other way round first and corrected it: there is no significant feed halo. An earlier reading suggested CTV lifted feed performance by 42%. It does not survive a within-account test and reverses sign. Buy CTV for its own reach, not for an effect on your feed numbers.
Cost by audience type and size
| Audience | CPM | Frequency | Penetration | Dwell | Campaigns |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cold attributes (titles, function, industry) | $24.60 | 1.62 | 3.7% | 21.0s | 37 |
| Uploaded company or contact list | $25.30 | 2.00 | 6.0% | 31.6s | 68 |
| Retargeting (site visitors, engagers) | $36.20 | 2.11 | 6.6% | 28.8s | 13 |
| Audience under 50,000 | $46.97 | 2.16 | 7.8% | 29.9s | 42 |
| Audience 50,000 to 200,000 | $24.39 | 1.70 | 3.4% | 32.8s | 23 |
| Audience over 200,000 | $24.77 | 1.64 | 2.0% | 21.1s | 45 |
Two things to take from this. A small audience is expensive: under 50,000 members the CPM nearly doubles to $46.97, which is the same budget-pressure effect that drives feed CPMs up on tight audiences. And the uploaded account list is the setup that earns the most attention, at 31.6 seconds of dwell, which is the whole argument for the channel.
Cost by market
| Market | CPM (account median) | Cost per completed view | Dwell | Spend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | $26.72 | $0.027 | 31.4s | $714,204 (104 campaigns, 28 accounts) |
| Canada, mostly bought with the US | $25.30 | $0.025 | 29.1s | $558,225 (74 campaigns, 19 accounts) |
| United Kingdom | Withheld, 2 accounts | — | 14.5s | $66,504 (6 campaigns) |
CTV is effectively a North American product today. The UK base is two accounts and six campaigns, which is why we withhold the CPM rather than publish a number that could move on one advertiser.
When it is worth buying
If you have a named account list and a video asset, yes. CTV is the only television inventory that can be bought against a B2B account list rather than a demographic proxy, and it does it at roughly a quarter of the feed CPM.
The practical floor is the one visible in the medians: a $75 daily budget over 40 days is about $3,000 a campaign, and the campaigns that work are reaching 50,000 members or more. Below that spend, or without a list to target, the money does more in the feed.
What it will not do
It will not produce clicks. There is no click on a television. It will not produce leads directly, and judging it on cost per lead will make it look catastrophic next to a lead gen form. And it will not lift your feed performance in a way we can measure.
What it does is reach a named list of companies on a television screen for 29 seconds at a $25.76 CPM. If that is worth something to you, the price is good. If you need pipeline this month, it is the wrong channel and a conversation ad or a lead gen form is the right one.
All figures are from Kiin Labs: a panel of 1,071 B2B LinkedIn advertising accounts, $79M of spend, 22,942 campaigns, 1.34 billion impressions, 2.4 million landing page clicks and 139,231 form submissions, for the 12 months to 7 September 2026. LinkedIn Audience Network is excluded throughout. Figures are medians, not averages, because the top 10% of accounts spend 64% of the money. Where a comparison says "paired", both options ran inside the same account, so account quality cannot explain the gap.