What the LinkedIn Ad Library is
A public search tool at linkedin.com/ad-library. No login, no advertiser account, no cost. Type in a company and you see the ads it has been running on LinkedIn.
It exists because of advertising transparency regulation rather than because LinkedIn wanted to build a competitor research tool, which is why it is less discussed than Meta’s equivalent and why most B2B marketers have never opened it. Coverage starts at 1 June 2023, and each ad stays visible for one year after its last impression.
What it shows, and the EU difference nobody mentions
For every ad in the library you get:
- The creative preview, image or video, and the ad copy
- The ad format: single image, video, document, carousel, or a thought leader ad carried by a person rather than the company page
- The advertiser name and the payer name, which are not always the same company
For ads targeted in the European Union, the Digital Services Act forces three more disclosures, and this is the part worth your attention:
- Impressions. How many times the ad was actually served
- Targeting parameters. What the advertiser selected
- The dates it ran
Impressions are the number everything else hangs off. It is the only place LinkedIn tells you how big a campaign really was, and it turns competitor research from “look at their creative” into arithmetic.
What it does not show
Everything that decides whether the campaign is any good:
- Spend. Never published, anywhere, for any ad
- CPM, cost per click, cost per lead
- Click through rate, conversion rate, form completion
- Audience size, outside the EU disclosure
- Whether it worked
So you can see a competitor running six thought leader ads with a demo form attached. You cannot see that a demo form completes 3.9% of the time on a feed ad and 42% of the time in a conversation ad, which is the fact that decides whether those six ads are a good idea. That gap is what the rest of this page fills.
The method: five things to read, and the arithmetic
1. Read the format. Format sets the media cost. Company page sponsored content runs at $48.80 CPM on our panel; a thought leader ad runs $74.71 in the same paired comparison. The entire thought leader ad premium is media cost.
2. If it is EU targeted, estimate the spend.
impressions ÷ 1,000 × CPM = estimated spend
3. Read the targeting parameters. EU ads disclose them, and audience size moves CPM more than almost anything else. A cold thought leader ad on an audience under 10,000 runs $110.66 CPM; the same ad on a 30,000 to 100,000 audience runs $66.68. Knowing the audience band lets you pick the right benchmark instead of the average one.
4. Read the offer. If there is a lead gen form, what it asks for sets the price. Audit or assessment $260 a lead, book a call $342, free trial $362, request a demo $611. Divide the estimated spend by that number and you have an estimated lead count.
5. Read the carrier and the runtime. A thought leader ad carries the media premium above. And an ad still live after three months is usually working, because nobody keeps paying for a campaign that does not.
The benchmark tables
These are the numbers the calculator uses. Medians across advertiser accounts, never pooled totals, LinkedIn Audience Network excluded, 12 months to 7 September 2026.
| CPM by format | Median CPM |
|---|---|
| Company page sponsored content | $48.80 |
| Thought leader ad | $74.71 |
| Whole panel median | $65 |
| A good account, top quartile | $36 |
| Top decile | $21 |
| CPM by audience size, cold thought leader ads | Engagement | Brand awareness |
|---|---|---|
| Under 10,000 | $110.66 | $127.28 |
| 10,000 to 30,000 | $82.66 | $64.00 |
| 30,000 to 100,000 | $66.68 | $40.55 |
| 100,000+ | $104.77 | $29.46 |
| Cost per landing page click, by setup | Accounts | Median |
|---|---|---|
| Sponsored content, single image, website visits | 219 | $11.75 |
| Sponsored content, video, website visits | 74 | $12.01 |
| Thought leader ad, single image, engagement | 193 | $13.51 |
| Sponsored content, single image, engagement | 133 | $16.61 |
| Thought leader ad, single image, brand awareness | 59 | $16.73 |
| Thought leader ad, video, engagement | 63 | $32.34 |
A note on clicks. Every figure above is a landing page click, a click that reaches a website. LinkedIn’s default click field also counts likes, comments, “see more” expansions and profile visits. On a thought leader ad, 91% of the clicks the platform counts never reach a landing page: total CTR reads 4.56%, landing page CTR is 0.43%. Any competitor analysis built on the default field will understate the price of a visit by three to ten times.
| Cost per lead, by what the form asks for | Accounts | Median |
|---|---|---|
| Audit or assessment | 22 | $260 |
| Book a call or meeting | 41 | $342 |
| Free trial | 11 | $362 |
| Request a demo | 104 | $611 |
| Content offer, guide or report | 489 | $164 |
A worked example
A cybersecurity vendor, ads targeted in Germany so the EU disclosure applies. The library shows four single image ads from the company page, running eleven weeks, one of them with 310,000 impressions, targeting parameters showing IT and security job functions at companies of 200 to 5,000 people. The creative carries a lead gen form and the button says Request a demo.
Run the method:
- Spend. 310,000 ÷ 1,000 × $48.80 = $15,100 at the median. At a top quartile $36 CPM it is $11,200. So call it $11,000 to $15,000 for that one ad.
- Clicks. At $11.75 per landing page click for that setup, roughly 1,290 site visits.
- Leads. At $611 for a demo request, about 25 leads. At the good end of the range, nearer 85.
- The read. Four ads at that level across eleven weeks puts the campaign somewhere around $45,000 to $60,000, producing perhaps 100 demo leads. And the fact that they are asking for a demo on a single image feed ad is the single most expensive way to do it, which is useful to know if you compete with them.
The advertiser is anonymised deliberately. The method is legitimate because the disclosure is public and exists for exactly this purpose, but naming a company alongside a spend estimate that could be out by a factor of two is not something we would publish, and nor should you.
Where the method breaks
- Non EU ads have no impressions. Outside the EU disclosure you can read format, offer and runtime, and nothing else. No impressions means no spend estimate.
- Impressions are given as a range, not an exact figure, so the input is already approximate before the benchmark is applied.
- CPM varies enormously. $21 at the top decile, $110 for a small cold audience. An estimate can be out by two or three times.
- It cannot tell you about performance. A campaign running for six months might be excellent or might be on autopilot with nobody watching.
- Payer is not always advertiser. Agency managed accounts often show the agency as payer, which tells you something else useful.
Use it to size the opposition, not to audit them. The difference between a $10,000 campaign and a $200,000 one is a real strategic fact, and the library plus a benchmark panel is the only way to get at it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the LinkedIn Ad Library?
LinkedIn's public ad transparency tool at linkedin.com/ad-library. It lets anyone, with no login and no advertiser account, see the ads a company has run on LinkedIn. It covers ads that ran after 1 June 2023 and keeps each ad for one year after its last impression. It exists because of advertising transparency regulation, not as a marketing feature, which is why most B2B marketers have never opened it.
What does the LinkedIn Ad Library show?
For every ad: the creative preview, the ad copy, the ad format, the advertiser name and the payer name. For ads targeted in the European Union it shows three things more, because the Digital Services Act requires them: the number of impressions, the targeting parameters, and the dates the ad ran. That EU disclosure is the part almost nobody uses, and it is the only place LinkedIn tells you how big a campaign actually was.
Can you see how much a competitor spent on LinkedIn ads?
Not directly. LinkedIn never publishes spend. But for an EU targeted ad it publishes impressions, and impressions multiplied by a cost per thousand benchmark gives you a defensible estimate. A 300,000 impression single image campaign from a company page sits somewhere around $11,000 to $15,000 on our panel medians. The calculator at the top of this page does that arithmetic with the right benchmark for the format and audience size.
How accurate is a spend estimate from the ad library?
It is a range, not a measurement. CPM on our panel runs from $21 at the top decile to $110 for small cold audiences, so an estimate can be out by two or three times if the advertiser is unusually efficient or unusually wasteful. Use it to tell a $10,000 campaign from a $200,000 one, not to fill in a competitor's budget line.
What does the ad library not show?
Spend, CPM, click through rate, cost per lead, conversion rate, form completion, audience size outside the EU, and whether any of it worked. You can see that a competitor is running six thought leader ads with a demo form. You cannot see that the demo form completes 3.9% of the time in the feed against 42% in the inbox, which is the number that decides whether the campaign is any good.
How do you use the LinkedIn Ad Library for competitor research?
Four things are worth reading. What formats they run, because format sets the media cost. What the offer is, because asking for a demo costs $611 a lead against $342 for a call. Whether ads are carried by a person or the company page, since thought leader ads carry a media premium. And how long ads have been live, because an ad still running after three months is usually working.
Is the LinkedIn Ad Library free?
Yes, and it needs no login or advertising account. Anyone can search it by company, payer, keyword, country and date.
How far back does the LinkedIn Ad Library go?
To 1 June 2023. Each ad stays visible for one year after its last impression, so a campaign that stopped two years ago will not be there.