The short answer
Budget is a function of audience size. Not revenue, not a percentage of ARR, not what the board approved.
A campaign works when enough of your audience sees you enough times. If your budget cannot deliver that against the audience you built, the campaign will underperform no matter how good the creative is, and no amount of optimisation rescues it.
Most accounts that describe LinkedIn as not working are running a correct strategy at a budget that cannot execute it. The fix is usually to narrow the audience rather than to raise the budget, because one of those is free.
Every figure here comes from our own panel: 1,000+ advertiser accounts, 22,942 campaigns and $79 million of measured LinkedIn spend across 1.34 billion impressions in the twelve months to 7 September 2026. Medians across advertiser accounts, never pooled totals. LinkedIn Audience Network delivery excluded.
The formula
Audience size x CPM / 1,000 x impressions per person = budget needed.
Use 25 impressions per person as the planning figure. That comes from a simple rule: a minimum of five impressions each against a minimum of five pieces of content. Fewer than that and you are buying reach without familiarity, which is the most expensive thing you can do on this platform.
For CPM, use $57.38 as the panel median. Use $92.01 if you are buying the United States and $47.31 if you are buying the United Kingdom, because the gap between those two is the single largest cost variable in the calculation.
Worked example
Take a 20,000-person audience in the UK.
20,000 people x $47.31 CPM / 1,000 x 25 impressions = $23,655 to deliver the programme.
Over a six-month campaign that is roughly $3,950 a month. Over three months it is $7,885 a month.
Run the same audience in the United States at $92.01 and the programme costs $46,005, nearly double, for identical reach.
Now invert it. If your budget is $3,000 a month for six months, you have $18,000, which at UK CPMs buys 25 impressions each against roughly 15,200 people. That is your maximum workable audience size. Build a bigger one and you are spreading the same money thinner, which feels like more reach and performs like less.
This is the calculation almost nobody does before launching, and it is the one that determines whether the account has a chance.
The real minimum, and why $10 a day fails
LinkedIn will let you run a campaign at $10 a day. It should not be read as a recommendation.
At $10 a day and a $57.38 CPM you are buying about 174 impressions daily. Against a 20,000-person audience that is one impression per person every 115 days. Nobody remembers you. The campaign is not underperforming, it is not really running.
As a practical floor, we would not start a LinkedIn programme below $3,000 a month of media unless the audience is genuinely tiny, and a tiny audience brings its own problem: fatigue arrives fast. Engagement falls to 91 at one full pass of the audience and 78 at five, indexed to launch, and a small audience reaches five passes quickly.
So the workable zone is narrower than people expect. Too little budget against a large audience and nothing registers. Plenty of budget against a small audience and you burn it out. The formula is how you find the middle.
How to split the budget across the funnel
Only 35.7% of advertiser accounts run all three funnel layers. The most common gap is the middle, and the most common budget error is putting everything into cold reach.
A reasonable starting split is 60% to cold demand creation, 25% to retargeting, and 15% to conversion. The retargeting layer is cheap because the audience is small and warm, so it does not need much, but the programme does not function without it.
If you only have budget for one layer, do not start with cold reach. Start with retargeting against whatever traffic you already have, because it is the layer with the shortest payback and it tells you quickly whether your offer converts at all.
The market you buy in changes the number
The United States costs $92.01 per thousand impressions and $46.98 per landing page click. The United Kingdom costs $47.31 and $20.69. Germany is cheaper again on CPM at $31.71, though its landing page click through rate is a third of the UK’s at 0.09%, so the cost per click lands at $26.62.
That is 322 US accounts and 89 UK accounts with delivery.
The practical reading for a UK or European company: a pound of domestic spend buys roughly twice what a pound of US spend buys. Leading with the US is a decision that should rest on contract value, not on market size, and your agency should show you that arithmetic before recommending it.
Where the budget actually leaks
Before raising the budget, close the leaks, because they are larger than most increases.
Letting maximum delivery set your bid costs +103% per click against a manual bid. That is the single most expensive default in the platform.
LinkedIn Audience Network is on by default and spends your money off LinkedIn, on sites you did not choose. We have measured $274,000 of it across 107 accounts.
Brand awareness and video view objectives cost $53.03 and $82.48 per landing page click respectively, against $10.03 for website visits. If traffic is the goal and the objective is wrong, you are paying five to eight times over.
And 88% of lead form opens are abandoned, so a share of every pound you spend driving form opens buys nothing at all.
Fix those four and most accounts find the budget they were about to ask for.
Related questions
What is the minimum budget for LinkedIn Ads?
LinkedIn allows $10 a day, but that buys roughly 174 impressions, which against a 20,000-person audience is one impression per person every 115 days. As a working floor we would not start below $3,000 a month of media.
How much should a B2B SaaS company spend on LinkedIn Ads?
Calculate it from audience size: audience x CPM / 1,000 x 25 impressions. A 20,000-person UK audience needs about $23,655 to deliver the programme, or roughly $3,950 a month over six months.
Is LinkedIn more expensive than other platforms?
Yes on every raw metric, with a median CPM of $57.38. Whether that matters depends entirely on contract value. At $20,000-plus a $350 demo request is a good trade; at $2,000 it is not.
Should I increase my budget if LinkedIn Ads are not working?
Usually not first. Check bidding, LinkedIn Audience Network, campaign objective and lead form completion before adding money, because those four leaks are typically larger than the increase you were considering.