The Headline Numbers
Typical UK ranges for B2B campaigns. These are directional — your vertical, audience size and objective move them considerably.
| Metric | Typical UK range | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| CPM | £25 – £60 | Cost per 1,000 impressions. Higher for tight, contested audiences. |
| CPC (total clicks) | £2 – £5 | The number usually quoted. Includes likes and profile clicks. |
| LP CPC (landing page clicks) | £6 – £40 | The real cost of a website visit. Wider range because the gap varies by format. |
| CPL (lead gen form) | £40 – £150 | On submissions only, not form opens. |
| CPL (landing page) | £80 – £300 | Higher volume of friction, usually better quality. |
| Cost per SQL | £150 – £600+ | The only number that matters commercially. |
If your numbers sit outside these, that is not automatically a problem. A £400 CPL on £50,000 deals is excellent. A £40 CPL on leads that never close is not.
Why Published CPCs Understate the Real Cost
Nearly every LinkedIn Ads cost guide you will read quotes CPC in the £2–£5 range. That figure is real, and it is also not the cost of getting someone onto your website.
LinkedIn's API returns a field called clicks. It counts likes, comments, shares, clicks on the poster's profile, clicks on the company page, and "see more" expansions — as well as clicks through to your site. Only the last one is traffic.
The separate field, landingPageClicks, counts only actual visits. Divide spend by that instead and you get LP CPC, the true cost per visit.
| Format | Typical clicks-to-LP-clicks gap | Quoted CPC | Real LP CPC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single image ad | 1.5 – 2× | £3.50 | £5 – £7 |
| Document ad | 2 – 4× | £3.00 | £6 – £12 |
| Thought leader ad | 3 – 10× | £2.50 | £8 – £25 |
Cost by Ad Format
Thought leader ads — lowest CPM and highest engagement, but the widest gap between clicks and landing page clicks. Cheap for building familiarity, expensive per website visit. Judge them on reach, frequency and LP CTR rather than CPC.
Single image ads — the most predictable. Smallest click gap, so the quoted CPC is closest to true. Best format for pure traffic.
Document ads — good cost per lead when the document is genuinely useful. Watch for people consuming the document in-feed without ever clicking.
Conversation ads — priced per send, not per impression. Inventory is limited to one message per person per 45 days, so bid maximum or you will not deliver. Judge on open rate, not clicks.
Video ads — cheapest CPM. LinkedIn counts a "view" at two seconds, which on autoplay means "scrolled past slowly". Cost per 75% completion is the honest metric and it is many times the cost per view.
What Actually Drives Your Costs
Audience size and contention. The single biggest factor. A 12,000-person UK audience of enterprise CISOs will cost several times more per impression than a 200,000-person audience of general marketers. You are bidding against everyone else who wants those same people.
Seniority. C-suite and VP targeting costs materially more than manager level. Often worth it; rarely worth it for top-of-funnel awareness.
Objective. Brand awareness optimisation and engagement optimisation produce very different costs per landing page click for the same creative and audience. Engagement usually wins on cost per actual visit, which is counterintuitive.
Relevance. LinkedIn's auction rewards engagement rate. A creative people interact with genuinely costs less to deliver than one they ignore, so creative quality is a cost lever, not just a performance lever.
Frequency and saturation. On small UK audiences, costs climb as you exhaust the audience. Rising CPM with flat targeting usually means saturation, not increased competition.
UK vs US Costs
The common claim is that UK CPCs are higher than US. In our experience that is too simple, and the honest answer is that it depends far more on audience and vertical than on country.
What is reliably different is audience size. UK B2B audiences are a fraction of their US equivalents — a tightly defined UK SaaS audience might be 15,000–40,000 where the US version is several hundred thousand. Three consequences:
- Saturation, not price, is usually the binding constraint. The same monthly budget that paces sensibly in the US will drive UK frequency into double figures within weeks.
- Costs rise over a campaign's life more visibly than in the US, because you exhaust the audience faster.
- Creative rotation matters more. More creatives in rotation, refreshed sooner.
So a UK campaign can show a similar CPC to a US one and still cost more per outcome, because it saturates and decays faster. That is the real UK cost difference, and it is not visible in a CPC benchmark.
What to Budget
| Monthly media | What it buys |
|---|---|
| Under $2,500 | One campaign. Not a funnel. Usually not enough for a real answer. |
| $4,000 | The practical floor for a genuine full-funnel test |
| $8,000 – $20,000 | Full funnel with proper retargeting depth and creative rotation |
| $30,000+ | Multi-persona, multi-vertical, sustained account-based programmes |
LinkedIn's floor is higher than Meta's for three reasons: clicks cost several times more, B2B audiences are smaller, and sales cycles mean you need months of data before results are readable. A £500 monthly test does not give you a small answer. It gives you no answer.
Also budget for the landing page. LP conversion rate is the biggest multiplier most advertisers ignore — 2% versus 4% means you need twice the budget for the same pipeline.
How to Reduce Cost Without Reducing Results
- Switch off audience expansion. On by default. It spends your budget on people you did not target.
- Review the LinkedIn Audience Network. Also on by default. Cheaper impressions off-platform, generally much worse quality. For most B2B accounts it is the largest single source of invisible waste.
- Exclude out-of-ICP titles and seniorities. Then measure how much spend was reaching them before. The number is usually uncomfortable.
- Use engagement optimisation for thought leader ads rather than brand awareness. It routinely produces more landing page clicks for the same spend.
- Rotate creative before fatigue, not after. Watch frequency against LP CTR weekly on UK audiences.
- Fix the landing page before raising budget. Doubling conversion rate halves effective CPL, and costs nothing in media.
The full structured version is the eight-layer audit, and the symptoms are in nine signs your agency is wasting budget.
Agency Fees Are a Separate Cost
Everything above is media spend paid to LinkedIn. If you use an agency, management fees sit on top: typically £2,000–£10,000 a month, or 10–20% of spend.
Kiin publishes its fees — $2,500, $5,500 and $9,500 a month (about £1,900, £4,100 and £7,100) — on the pricing page. The full breakdown of agency fee models, including why percentage-of-spend is a poor structure for the client, is in what a LinkedIn Ads agency costs.