LinkedIn Ads benchmarks for C-suite and founder audiences 2026: what it costs to reach executives, from 251 accounts and $4.7M

This is the sixth of seven audience cuts of Kiin Labs' LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks 2026: what advertisers pay when the campaign's seniority targeting includes CXO or Owner and excludes managers, senior ICs and entry level. It is a seniority cut rather than a function cut, and the one where the gap between what the targeting says and where the impressions go is widest. The companion how-to is how to target CEOs on LinkedIn. Every number is the median advertiser account, not a pooled total; ranges are the 25th to 75th percentile, so half of accounts sit inside them; pounds are at $1 = £0.79. The whole-panel comparison is LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks 2026 and the series hub is benchmarks by audience.

The expected case, with ranges

Feed formats (single image, video, carousel, document, event), every objective except lead generation, median account. 207 accounts.

Against the whole 944-account panel (CPM $36.23, landing page CTR 0.23%, cost per landing page click $17.54), executive targeting costs 31% more per impression and 10% less per visit, because executives click through to landing pages at the highest rate in the series (0.29%). The impression is expensive and the visit is not; the top quarter of accounts pay $86 per thousand, which is US enterprise CEO targeting.

By ad format

Campaign medians for formats with at least seven accounts.

Thought leader ads are reported in the dedicated study, not by audience; message and conversation ads count sends rather than impressions and are in the conversation ads study.

Lead gen forms: completion and cost per lead

396 lead-generation-objective campaigns, 97 accounts, $980,268, 9,122 leads; 8 accounts got no lead at all.

9.5% completion at the median (4.2% to 16.7%) and $209 a lead, the second-cheapest lead in the series after SMB targeting. Document ads complete at 30.0%, the highest completion of any cut, at $209 a lead; single image, video and carousel 7.1% and $232. Executives fill in a form for a benchmark or a peer report and ignore a form for a demo; the demo is booked from the inbox, where the conversation ads study found senior-only targeting produced a $138 lead against $258 when managers were included. The full guide is LinkedIn lead gen forms: specs, setup, conversion rates and CPL.

By company size targeted

Company size is the lever for executive targeting. SMB-only (1 to 200 employees, which for a CXO filter means founders and owner-operators) produces the best landing page CTR in the whole series (0.38%), the cheapest click ($12.90) and the cheapest lead ($119 at 13.5% completion). Mid-market and enterprise executives cost the same click ($13.82 and $13.99) and a $250 lead. No size filter costs $25.41 per click and $264 per lead: the unfiltered CXO audience is one-person companies calling themselves CEO.

UK and US

The US costs 62% more per impression than the UK for executive audiences ($75 against $46) and 41% more per visit ($28.36 against $20.16), with a slightly higher landing page CTR (0.32% against 0.29%). Leads cost about the same ($346 against $379). US CEO targeting at enterprise scale is the top of the CPM range in the panel. The UK cost page in pounds is here; the global cost page is how much do LinkedIn ads cost.

Who actually sees the ads

LinkedIn's demographic report shows where the impressions went, whatever the targeting said. Pooled across the cut's campaigns, with the within-campaign index (100 = that campaign's average) for the cost and click rate of each segment:

This is the table that matters for executive targeting. Campaigns filtered to CXO or owner seniority delivered 17.3M impressions to directors and 6.9M to VPs, against 2.9M to CXOs and 1.6M to owners: the filter almost always includes director and VP, and LinkedIn serves the cheaper, larger tiers first. CXO impressions cost 16% more than the campaign average and owner impressions 13% more, so the executive share of a campaign is dearer than its average CPM suggests. On company size, 51-to-200-employee companies are the biggest slice at a $23 CPM; 10,001-plus employees cost $80 per thousand and 5,001 to 10,000 $93, with a 0.31 to 0.33% landing page CTR. If the plan says CEOs, check the demographics report at week two, because the report will say directors.

Audience size and frequency

The median campaign in this cut runs to 66,000 members (middle half 21,000 to 200,000). Within a campaign, as cumulative impressions pass through the audience:

Executive audiences fatigue faster than function audiences on the click and not at all on the CPM: click rate down 6% after one pass, 8% by three passes, and the CPM rises 2 to 9% past three passes because LinkedIn runs out of cheap executive impressions. The median campaign runs to 66,000 members. Refresh creative every two to three weeks and expect the CPM to climb, not fall, as the campaign ages. The reasoning is in LinkedIn ad frequency and fatigue.

How Kiin targets the C-suite and founders

• Title plus company size, not seniority alone. CXO seniority on its own is one-person companies; CEO, Founder, Managing Director, COO, CRO titles at 51-plus employees, 20,000 to 60,000 members, is the executive audience.
• Two campaigns: founders and enterprise executives. Founders at 11 to 200 employees ($119 leads, 0.38% landing page CTR) and executives at 1,001-plus ($250 leads, $80 to $93 CPM on the delivered side) behave like different platforms. Never in one ad set.
• Thought leader ads from a peer. Executives read posts from other executives; the company-page single image gets the click but not the read. The thought leader ads study has the numbers.
• Document ads for the peer report (30.0% completion in this cut, the highest anywhere), message ads for the meeting; never a demo form in the feed.
• Check the demographics report at two weeks and exclude director and VP if the executive share of impressions is under a third; accept the CPM rise.
• Board-level exclusions: investors, board members, advisers and consultants at one-to-ten-person companies, who are a large share of CXO-seniority members and never buy.

Who this is for

Companies whose buyer is the CEO, founder or a C-level executive: executive coaching and advisory, corporate finance and M&A services, board and governance tools, executive search, private banking and wealth for founders, enterprise platforms sold top-down, and any B2B business that sells to owner-operators at companies under 200 people.

Method and citation

Campaigns whose seniority targeting includes CXO or Owner and does not include Manager, Senior, Entry, Training or Unpaid, with delivery between 8 September 2025 and 7 September 2026, at least $50 of spend and 2,000 impressions, LinkedIn Audience Network campaigns excluded, 14 currencies converted to USD at September 2026 rates: 1,553 campaigns, 251 advertiser accounts, $4,737,545. Feed metrics are the median advertiser account across single image, video, carousel, document and event formats on every objective except lead generation; lead gen form metrics are the median account on the lead generation objective. No cell with fewer than seven accounts is shown. Benchmark tables say what advertisers who target this audience pay, not what targeting it does to your cost; where a within-campaign index is shown, it is the segment's cost relative to that campaign's average. Free to cite with a link.

The series: HR · IT and engineering · finance · marketing · sales · C-suite and founders · by company size. Each uses the same method and the same table shape.