The headline: same objective, thought leader ads win
These are paired comparisons. Both formats ran inside the same account, so account quality, audience and offer cannot explain the gap.
| Comparison | Cost per landing page click | Accounts | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thought leader ad vs company page ad, engagement objective | −22% | 106 | ★★★ |
| Thought leader ad vs company page ad, brand awareness | −47% | 32 | ★★ |
| Thought leader ad vs sponsored content, website visits | +52 to +59% | 119 to 127 | ★★★ |
★★★ = paired within account, significant, over 100 advertisers. ★★ = paired, significant, 25 to 100.
Two of those three lines favour the thought leader ad, and they are the two that describe how the format is actually used. The third is the exception, and it is covered below.
On-platform: 4x the engagement at a quarter of the cost
If you are running LinkedIn as a demand generation channel — and on LinkedIn most of your audience is not in-market today, so you should be — the metric that matters is not the landing page click. It is whether people stop, read, react and enter a retargeting pool you can work later.
| Feed format, all objectives except lead generation | Engagement rate | Total CTR | Cost per on-platform click | CPM | Accounts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thought leader ad, single image | 4.69% | 4.49% | $1.58 | $62.62 | 408 |
| Thought leader ad, video | 2.95% | 2.70% | $2.91 | $60.02 | 203 |
| Single image sponsored content | 1.16% | 0.65% | $6.32 | $48.02 | 774 |
| Carousel | 0.74% | 0.43% | $11.48 | $54.01 | 106 |
| Video sponsored content | 0.92% | 0.41% | $8.89 | $40.93 | 504 |
A thought leader ad earns 4.0x the engagement rate of a company single image ad and costs 4.0x less per on-platform interaction. $1.58 against $6.32. Nothing else in the feed is close.
For context on what "good" looks like, engagement rate under 1% is below average across all formats, 1 to 3% is average and over 3% is strong. The median company single image ad sits in the average band. The median thought leader ad sits above the strong threshold, and the top decile reaches 9.26%.
Dwell time follows: 7.0 seconds at the median, 9.0 in the top quartile, 10.4 in the top decile. People read them.
The comparison almost everyone gets wrong
You will see thought leader ads described as expensive, usually on the strength of two numbers: a $74.71 CPM against $48.80 for company page content, and a $13.51 cost per landing page click against $11.75 for single image.
The CPM gap is real. The click comparison is not a like-for-like, and this is the trap:
| Setup | Objective | Cost per landing page click | Accounts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sponsored content, single image | Website visits | $11.75 | 219 |
| Sponsored content, video | Website visits | $12.01 | 74 |
| Thought leader ad, single image | Engagement | $13.51 | 193 |
| Sponsored content, single image | Engagement | $16.61 | 133 |
| Thought leader ad, single image | Brand awareness | $16.73 | 59 |
| Thought leader ad, video | Engagement | $32.34 | 63 |
Read rows three and four together. On the engagement objective, the thought leader ad is $13.51 and the company ad is $16.61. The thought leader ad is cheaper. The $11.75 figure that makes it look expensive belongs to a different objective entirely.
Pooled across all objectives the format-level table above shows a higher landing page cost for thought leader ads, because most thought leader ad spend sits on engagement and brand awareness while most company ad spend sits on website visits. That is an objective mix effect, not a format effect. The paired, objective-matched comparison is the one to trust, and it says −22%.
One genuine measurement warning stands: LinkedIn's default clicks field counts reactions, comments, shares, follows, profile visits and "see more" taps. On thought leader ads 91% of those clicks never reach a landing page (4.56% total CTR against 0.46% landing page CTR). That field is the right one for measuring on-platform engagement and the wrong one for measuring traffic. Do not use it to claim traffic you did not get.
Where company page ads genuinely win
If the job is demand capture — somebody is in-market, you want them on a page, today, as cheaply as possible — single image sponsored content on a website visits objective is the cheapest setup in the panel at $11.75, and a thought leader ad on that same objective runs 52 to 59% dearer. That is a clear, well-evidenced result on 119 to 127 accounts and it should decide your capture budget.
It should not decide your demand generation budget, because cost per landing page click is not what demand generation buys. Most of your audience is not searching for you. The job of the top of the funnel is to build familiarity and a retargeting pool you can convert in the next quarter, and on that job the thought leader ad is 4x better per dollar.
There is also an in-campaign effect worth knowing: adding thought leader ads alongside other formats in the same campaign lifted landing page click rate by 44% in the webinar study. The format does not only perform, it lifts what runs beside it.
Engagement or brand awareness for a thought leader ad?
It depends which half of the funnel you are buying, and the trade is clean.
| Thought leader ads, paired within account | Result | Interval | Accounts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engagement vs brand awareness: landing page click rate | +82% | +22% to +117% | 35 ★★ |
| Brand awareness vs engagement: people reached per dollar | +77% | +45% to +96% | 59 ★★ |
| Brand awareness vs engagement: CPM | −39% | −52% to −30% | 59 ★★ |
| Brand awareness vs engagement: cost per landing page click | −6%, a tie | −30% to +39% | 36 ★★ |
Brand awareness reaches 77% more people per dollar at a 39% lower CPM. Engagement produces an 82% higher landing page click rate. Cost per landing page click comes out a tie, so the choice is genuinely about what you want: reach, or clicks and the engagement pool that comes with them.
One rule from the same study: never run video thought leader ads on brand awareness. Paired, that combination cost 99% more per engagement and lost 27% of dwell.
Both fatigue, and small audiences fatigue fast
Fatigue tracks cumulative frequency, not elapsed time, and it is invisible in cost per click.
| Cumulative frequency (impressions ÷ audience) | Engagement rate, indexed to launch | Click rate, indexed |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | 100 | 100 |
| 0.25 to 0.5x | 96 | — |
| 1x, one full pass of the audience | 91 | 90 |
| 5x | 78 | 65 |
Click rate decays faster than engagement rate, so a creative can look healthy on reactions long after it has stopped sending traffic. An audience under 10,000 people reaches one full pass in a median of 14 days; an audience over 100,000 takes 53. Rotate against frequency, not against the calendar.
The author matters more than any of this. Between the top and bottom decile of authors, engagement rate ran 10.55% against 1.22%, an 8.6x spread. Choosing whose profile the ads run from is a bigger decision than choosing the format.
How to run both
Demand generation, the majority of your budget: thought leader ads on an engagement objective. Cheapest cost per landing page click of any engagement setup, 4x the on-platform engagement rate, and the retargeting pool that makes everything downstream work.
Reach at the top of the funnel: thought leader ads on brand awareness, which buys 77% more people per dollar.
Demand capture: single image company page content on a website visits objective at $11.75, the cheapest traffic in the data.
Always: judge thought leader ads on engagement rate and landing page clicks separately, never on the blended clicks field. Rotate creative against cumulative frequency. Pick the author carefully.
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.