How to read these benchmarks
Three sources, labelled throughout:
- Kiin Labs 2026 — the Thought Leader Ads Benchmarks study: 2,563 thought leader ad campaigns, 464 accounts, $8.4M of TLA spend inside a $31M panel, B2B tech advertisers, US first and Europe second, 8 Sep 2025 to 7 Sep 2026, USD, LinkedIn Audience Network excluded. Every comparison is paired within account. ★★★ means 100 or more advertisers compared within their own accounts; ★★ means 25 to 100; ★ is directional.
- Kiin operating ranges — the below-average / average / strong thresholds Kiin uses to diagnose the 200+ B2B accounts it manages, benchmarked against 1,000+ accounts connected to Kiin Intelligence. Stated in GBP where that is how they are used.
- UK ranges — typical GBP ranges for UK B2B accounts, from LinkedIn Ads cost UK.
Medians, not averages: LinkedIn cost data is skewed by a few large accounts, and the spread from the 10th to the 90th percentile in cost per landing page click is 15.6×. A median tells you where the middle account sits; "good" is the top quartile; "exceptional" is the top decile.
One rule before any number: every click, CTR and CPC on this page is on landing page clicks (LinkedIn's landingPageClicks field), not LinkedIn's default clicks field, which counts likes, comments, shares, "see more" expansions and profile clicks. That single choice changes every benchmark by 3 to 10×. The reasoning is in what a good LinkedIn Ads CTR actually is.
The benchmark table: median, good, exceptional
Thought leader ads, engagement objective, 212 accounts. Kiin Labs 2026 ★★★.
| Metric | Median | Good (top quartile) | Exceptional (top decile) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Landing page CTR | 0.46% | 0.67% | 0.99% |
| Engagement rate | 4.46% | 6.44% | 9.26% |
| Dwell time | 7.0s | 9.0s | 10.4s |
| Cost per landing page click | $14.71 | $8.37 | $3.15 |
| CPM | $65 | $36 | $21 |
Kiin operating ranges, all feed formats, GBP:
| Metric | Below average | Average | Strong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Landing page CTR (any feed ad) | <0.4% | 0.4–0.8% | >0.8% |
| Engagement rate (thought leader ads) | <1% | 1–3% | >3% |
| CPM (single image, company page) | >£30 | £15–£30 | <£15 |
| Cost per landing page click (single image) | >£12 | £6–£12 | <£6 |
| Cost per landing page click (thought leader ad) | >£15 | £8–£15 | <£8 |
| Lead gen form submit rate | <20% | 20–40% | >40% |
| Lead gen form CPL | >£120 | £60–£120 | <£60 |
| Conversation ad open rate | <30% | 30–50% | >50% |
| Conversation ad click-to-open rate | <5% | 5–12% | >12% |
| Conversation ad CPL | >£100 | £50–£100 | <£50 |
What is a good CTR for LinkedIn Ads?
A good landing page CTR on LinkedIn is 0.67%; the median is 0.46% and the top decile is 0.99% (Kiin Labs 2026, 212 accounts ★★★). Kiin's operating range is the same shape: under 0.4% is below average, 0.4–0.8% is average, over 0.8% is strong, for any feed format.
The number you will see quoted elsewhere, 0.4–0.6% "CTR", is usually LinkedIn's total CTR on single image ads, and on thought leader ads total CTR is 4.56% — ten times the landing page figure, because 91% of those clicks are likes, comments, expansions and profile visits, not site visits. Total CTR correlates with engagement rate at r = 0.998; it is engagement rate with a different name.
Thought leader ads and company-page sponsored content have identical landing page CTR: 0.449% vs 0.441% ★★★. The difference between the two formats is entirely in CPM, not in click rate.
Weekends click through 9 to 10% better than weekdays and cost 1 to 4% less per impression ★★★. Video thought leader ads do not click better than single image; they cost 2.4× more per landing page click.
What is a good cost per click on LinkedIn?
A good cost per landing page click on LinkedIn is $8.37; the median is $14.71 and the top decile is $3.15 (thought leader ads, 212 accounts ★★★). The cheapest landing page click in the dataset is $11.75 median, on single image sponsored content run on the website visits objective (219 accounts); thought leader ads on engagement are $13.51 (193 accounts); video thought leader ads are $32.34.
The "$2–$5 CPC" figure published in most guides is cost per total click. It understates the real cost of a website visit by 3 to 10× depending on format. UK ranges: £2–£5 quoted CPC against a real £6–£40 per landing page click.
What decides your cost per landing page click, from 181 accounts ★★★: 63% of the variance is CPM (r = +0.745, the strongest relationship in the study), 28% is click rate. The cheapest 10 accounts pay $1.22; the most expensive 10 pay $61.92. Four settings separate them — audience size (105k vs 17k), budget pressure ($0.26 vs $8.38 a day per 1,000 members), bid ($1.82 vs $6.96) and share of spend on uploaded lists (4% vs 94%). An account with none of the four boxes ticked pays $25.46; with all four, $6.42.
Doubling a campaign's daily spend costs 26% more per landing page click and returns 59% more clicks ★★★ — diminishing, not collapsing. Bid type (CPC vs CPM) makes no difference to cost; bid amount does.
What is a good CPM on LinkedIn?
A good CPM on LinkedIn Ads is $36; the median is $65 and the top decile is $21 (thought leader ads, US-weighted, 212 accounts ★★★). Company-page sponsored content runs cheaper at a median of $48.80 against $74.71 for thought leader ads in the same comparison; the entire thought leader ad premium is media cost. UK single image CPM is typically £25–£60; Kiin's strong threshold for a company-page single image ad is under £15.
CPM moves with the calendar more than with anything you do to the ad. March CPM is 16% under the annual median; the same advertisers pay 30% more CPM in Q2 than in Q1 and 47% more per landing page click ★★★. December stays cheap; the January surge is real. Weekend impressions cost 1 to 4% less.
CPM also rises with seniority and audience contention. The trade is worth it: CXOs engage at 4.42% vs 3.46% for senior individual contributors at the same cost per click ★★, so a seniority filter costs nothing per click and buys a better reader.
What is a good engagement rate on LinkedIn Ads?
A good engagement rate on LinkedIn thought leader ads is 6.44%; the median is 4.46% and the top decile is 9.26% (212 accounts ★★★). Kiin's operating threshold is coarser — over 3% is strong — because it covers all formats, and company-page ads engage far lower than thought leader ads.
The author explains 67% of the variance in engagement between accounts ★★. The top 10% of authors engage at 10.55%, the bottom 10% at 1.22%, an 8.6× spread across 47 authors. Hooks, post length, whether there is a link (+2%, nothing), whether the post was boosted or purpose-built (+3%, nothing) and launch day (r = 0.00) do not move it once the author is held constant. Pick the person before you worry about the post.
Engagement is also the fatigue signal: it is down 9% once everyone in the audience has seen the creative once, and 22% after five times ★★★. Cost per click does not warn you; it moves a month late.
What is a good cost per lead on LinkedIn?
A good cost per lead on LinkedIn for B2B SaaS is under £60 on a lead gen form (average £60–£120), under £50 on conversation ads (average £50–£100), and £80–£300 on a landing page form (Kiin operating ranges). Cost per sales-qualified lead runs $59–$200 on retargeting and $150–$400 on cold audiences; retargeting beats cold by 2–4× on cost per SQL.
Two cautions. A lead gen form "lead" is a oneClickLeads submission, never a form open; form opens run several times higher and mean nothing. And CPL is the wrong final number: a £150 lead on a £50,000 ACV product is excellent, a £40 lead that never closes is not. The number that matters commercially is cost per qualified opportunity from the CRM, which for the accounts we run sits in the £150–£600+ range.
The kill rule Kiin applies: after ten leads, if CPL is more than three times target, the campaign does not improve with more budget. Diagnose in this order — landing page CTR, then CPM, then form rate, then demand exhaustion. Why a CPL is high, step by step, is in this diagnostic.
Conversation ads: open rate and click-to-open
A good conversation ad open rate on LinkedIn is above 50%; 30–50% is average and under 30% is below average. A good click-to-open rate is above 12%; 5–12% is average (Kiin operating ranges). Cost per send is set by the bid you type and the size of the audience — not by who is in it. In the same account, the highest-bid campaign pays 80% more per send and 44% more per lead than the lowest for the same open rate, and the median campaign pays 62% of its bid, so bid low; the reversal from Kiin's earlier advice is explained in how to bid on conversation ads. Inventory is one message per person per 45 days.
Judge conversation ads on opens, click-to-open and oneClickLeads, never on clicks — the clicks field on a conversation ad is meaningless. Retargeting audiences produce the cheapest SQLs (from $59); cold audiences run $150–$400. Bidding mechanics are in conversation ads bidding and the full playbook is here.
Lead gen forms: submit rate and CPL
A good lead gen form submit rate on LinkedIn is above 40%; 20–40% is average; under 20% signals form friction (Kiin operating ranges). Submit rate is oneClickLeads ÷ oneClickLeadFormOpens. A high open rate with a low submit rate means the offer earned the click and the form lost it — too many fields, a custom question that asks for budget, or a privacy line that reads like a contract.
CPL: under £60 strong, £60–£120 average, over £120 below average, on submissions only. Lead gen form leads are cheaper and worse than landing page leads on almost every account; the honest comparison is cost per qualified opportunity a month later, not CPL on the day. Whether they are worth running at all is in do LinkedIn lead gen forms work.
Video ads: view rate, completion and cost
Video thought leader ads cost $32.34 per landing page click against $13.51 for single image — 2.4× worse ★★★ — and are 14% of engagement thought leader ad campaigns but only 5% of the top quarter. Company-page video on the website visits objective is fine: $12.01 per landing page click, the second-cheapest setup in the dataset.
LinkedIn counts a "view" at two seconds, which on autoplay means "scrolled past slowly", so view rate is not a performance metric. Judge video on cost per 75% completion (videoThirdQuartileCompletions) and cost per landing page click. Completion rate is videoCompletions ÷ videoViews. Kiin does not publish a completion benchmark yet: the study measured video on cost per landing page click, where it loses to single image by 2.4× as a thought leader ad and roughly ties it as company-page sponsored content on the website visits objective.
What is a good frequency on LinkedIn Ads?
Campaigns report a frequency of 3.5; the account actually delivers 9.5 (154 ninety-day windows, 71 advertisers, LinkedIn reach API ★★★), because campaigns share people and each counts them separately. Every frequency cap and fatigue alert should use the account-level deduplicated number, which runs two to three times the campaign figure once more than a handful of campaigns are live.
Kiin holds monthly account-level frequency at 1.5–2× and treats 4× on a small audience as a budget problem, not a creative one. Fatigue is a frequency effect, not a time effect: cost per click, CPM and dwell are flat over eight weeks, while engagement falls 9% at 1× cumulative frequency and 22% at 5×. Refresh cadence comes from audience size — an audience under 10,000 sees a creative once in 14 days; over 100,000 takes 53 days ★★★ — so a small list needs a new creative every two weeks and a large one monthly.
What is a good reach or penetration rate?
The median thought leader ad reaches 20.5% of its target audience in 90 days; the top quarter passes 40% and only 11% pass 75% (401 campaigns, 50 accounts, deduplicated reach ★★). 68% of ninety-day reach arrives in the first 30 days, then it stalls: at one impression per member, only 24% of the next impressions go to someone new. LinkedIn re-serves before it prospects.
Reach as a share of audience is the number to report, not impressions. Cost to reach half an audience, modelled at observed CPMs: $448 for 3,400 people, $1,752 for 9,800, $3,544 for 27,000, $9,740 for 81,000, $15,832 for 260,000. Reaching deeper does not dilute engagement: the 75–100% penetration band engages at 5.58%, the highest. The 5×5 framework for setting penetration targets is in penetration rate.
Benchmarks by ad format
Median cost per landing page click by setup, Kiin Labs 2026 ★★★, market medians across different advertisers:
| Setup | Accounts | Median cost per landing page click |
|---|---|---|
| Sponsored content · single image · website visits objective | 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 |
Within the same account, thought leader ads beat company-page ads on the same objective: −22% per landing page click on engagement (n=106), −47% on brand awareness (n=32). But sponsored content on the website visits objective beats both, by 52 to 59% ★★★. Buy thought leader ads to be read and remembered; if the click is the job, sponsored content on traffic is the cheapest way to buy it. Engagement and brand awareness thought leader ads are tied on cost per landing page click within account, $17.24 vs $17.22 ★★; brand awareness reaches 77% more people per dollar and engagement gets 88% more engagement.
Format-level operating rules for all seven LinkedIn formats are in best LinkedIn ad format for B2B SaaS.
Benchmarks by audience size and seniority
Audience size decides cost more than any setting. On an audience under 10,000, brand awareness costs $4.75 per engagement; over 100,000, $1.06 ★★. Under 10,000 the engagement objective wins ($1.79); over 30,000 cold, brand awareness reaches 184% more people at 59% lower cost per reach. Kiin's first move on any account is to widen the audience past 30,000 before raising budget.
Seniority costs nothing extra per click. CXOs engage at 4.42% vs 3.46% for senior individual contributors at the same cost per click ★★, yet 79% of thought leader ad spend sets no seniority filter and no-filter campaigns pay the most per click. Always a seniority filter, usually Director and above.
An uploaded list performs like a cold audience, with a higher CPM — every paired interval spans zero ★★. True retargeting (site visitors, engagers) is the only warm audience. 49% of thought leader ad spend goes to uploaded lists on the assumption that they are warm; they are not.
UK vs US LinkedIn Ads benchmarks
| Metric | US (Kiin Labs medians, USD) | UK (typical range, GBP) |
|---|---|---|
| CPM | $65 TLA · $48.80 sponsored content | £25–£60 |
| Cost per landing page click | $14.71 TLA · $11.75 sponsored content | £6–£40 (£5–£7 single image, £8–£25 TLA) |
| Quoted CPC (total clicks) | — (not reported) | £2–£5 |
| Landing page CTR | 0.46% | 0.4–0.8% average |
| Lead gen form CPL | — | £40–£150 |
| Landing page CPL | — | £80–£300 |
| Cost per SQL | $59–$200 retargeting · $150–$400 cold | £150–£600+ |
| Typical tight B2B SaaS audience | 300,000–800,000 | 15,000–40,000 |
| Minimum media for a full-funnel test | $5,000/month | £3,000/month |
The US auction is the most contested on the platform; senior US B2B audiences routinely price at $60–$100+ CPM. The UK risk is the opposite: audiences of 15,000–40,000 saturate fast, so frequency, not CPM, is the number to watch weekly. Full UK detail is on LinkedIn Ads cost UK.
How to use these numbers
Benchmarks are for diagnosis, not targets. The order Kiin checks an account against them:
- Are you measuring landing page clicks? If the report says CTR and CPC, every number in it is 3–10× too flattering. Fix the denominator first.
- CPM. 63% of your cost per landing page click. Audience over 30,000, budget pressure under $2 a day per 1,000 members, at least half the spend on cold targeting, bid at $3 or under. Each box is worth 1.6–2.2×.
- Frequency and reach. Account-level, deduplicated. Under 20% penetration in 90 days is normal; over 40% is top quarter; account frequency above 4× on a small audience is a budget problem.
- Engagement rate, then landing page CTR. These move when creative or author changes. If they are below the median and CPM is fine, change the author before the hook.
- CPL last, and only on submissions, and only next to cost per qualified opportunity from the CRM.
If you want your account run against these rules, the scope is on LinkedIn Ads management. If you want to check your own numbers against 1,000+ accounts, the LinkedIn Ads MCP does it in a Claude session.