The US benchmark: CPM, click and lead
These are single-country campaigns only. A campaign targeting the US plus three other markets is excluded, because a blended figure tells you nothing about any one country.
| Metric | US median | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Single image CPM | $91.30 | Cost of a thousand impressions |
| Cost per landing page click | $21.68 | What a visit to your site costs |
| Cost per lead | $292 | Lead generation objective, all lead types |
Base: US-only campaigns, 268 accounts for CPM, 234 for clicks and 137 for leads, from Report No. 5. A note on which click to use: LinkedIn's default clicks field counts reactions, comments, shares, follows, profile visits and "see more" taps alongside real traffic. On thought leader ads 91% of those clicks never reach a landing page. Every click figure on this page is a landing page click.
Talk to Phil, who runs this research
He will benchmark your ad account against the 1,071 B2B accounts and $60M+ of LinkedIn ad spend behind these figures, and build you a business case from it — including where your US costs sit against the 268 US-only accounts in this study. Free. Read-only access. No pitch deck.
Book a call with Phil →The US against the UK
This is the comparison most teams actually need, because most of the B2B companies running LinkedIn seriously run both.
| Metric | United States | United Kingdom | US premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single image CPM | $91.30 | $51.37 | 1.8x |
| Cost per landing page click | $21.68 | $12.87 | 1.7x |
| Cost per lead | $292 | $160 | 1.8x |
| Accounts in base | 268 (137 with leads) | 79 (40 with leads) | — |
The important line is the click: a US landing page click costs 1.7x a UK one, and a US lead 1.8x.
For a company with a product that sells in both, that is a budget allocation argument, not a creative one. The same $20,000 buys roughly 920 US landing page visits or 1,560 UK ones.
Every major market, ranked
| Country | Single image CPM | Cost per landing page click | Cost per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | $91.30 | $21.68 | $292 |
| Sweden | $32.64 | $11.94 | — |
| United Kingdom | $51.37 | $12.87 | $160 |
| Denmark | $26.74 | $10.28 | $134 |
| Germany | $43.37 | $12.45 | $189 |
| France | $33.09 | $11.07 | — |
| Netherlands | $31.36 | $11.00 | $117 |
| India | $13.28 | $2.25 | — |
Two things worth noticing. Germany, France and the Netherlands all buy a landing page click for less than the UK, at $11.00 to $12.45. And the Nordics are dear: Sweden's click, at $24.07, is above the US, on a small base of 22 accounts. Figures from Report No. 5, single-country campaigns, accounts with seven or more per country.
Why the US costs more
The auction is the whole answer. LinkedIn prices by competition for a member's attention, and the US has the deepest pool of B2B advertisers bidding for the same job titles. Three things follow from that, all of which show up in the data.
CPM explains most of your click cost, not creative. Across 181 accounts, 55% of the variance in cost per landing page click is CPM and only 28% is click rate. You cannot write your way out of an expensive audience.
Letting the platform set the bid doubles the click. Maximum delivery bidding costs 103% more per click than a manual bid in the panel. That penalty applies in every market, but it is worth more money in the US because the base is higher. See LinkedIn bidding strategy.
Audience Network spend is invisible and large. Across 107 accounts the panel found $274,000 flowing to the LinkedIn Audience Network, off-platform inventory that is excluded from every figure on this page. If your Campaign Manager numbers look cheaper than these, check whether that is why.
Four ways to bring a US cost down
Set the bid yourself. The single largest controllable factor in the panel. Manual bidding indexed at 100 against maximum delivery at 203.
Pick the objective that matches the ask. In the UK panel, where the objective cut is cleanest, website visits run $10.03 per landing page click and conversions $10.26 with the best click rate of any objective at 0.45%. Brand awareness runs $53.03 and video views $82.48. The objective you choose moves the click cost by more than 5x.
Do not assume thought leader ads are the cheap option. Paired inside the same accounts, single image company-page ads run at a $48.80 CPM against $74.71 for thought leader ads, for essentially the same landing page click rate. See thought leader ads vs company ads.
Fix the page before you fix the bid. In the post-click panel, the relationship between landing page conversion rate and cost per lead was 72 times stronger than the relationship between bid and cost per lead. At a $21.68 click, doubling a 1% page to 2% is worth more than any bid change available to you.
Cite this page
These numbers are free to quote with a link to kiin.co/linkedin-ads-cost-us. Suggested wording: "Median US LinkedIn Ads cost per landing page click is $21.68, 1.7x the UK (Kiin Labs, 234 US accounts, 12 months to September 2026)."
All figures are from Kiin Labs: a panel of 1,071 B2B LinkedIn advertising accounts, $60M+ 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.