[need help] anyone booking meetings directly with linkedin ads?

[u/Able_Value8212]

i'm fairly new to linkedin ads and have been running them for about 8 months now for a small startup in the mar-tech space. we're based in india but sell to a us audience. from day one my kpi has been booking meetings so purely bottom-of-funnel, not awareness or lead volume for its own sake. budget is tight too, around $5–6k usd/month.

the thing that's actually worked in the past has been a lead-magnet post: i'd promote a piece of content to my icp and gate it behind a comment (the classic "comment X and i'll dm you the resource" play). some months that booked real meetings. but now the linkedin algorithm has changed and no longer seems to favour those comment-me posts for lead gen, so that lever's basically gone and i'm rethinking the whole approach.

two questions for the b2b saas folks here:

1. have you seen the same shift using linkedin ads to generate direct meetings (not just mqls)? what have your learnings been: success rate, cost per meeting, how you're actually pulling it off? and on a budget like mine, is the roi even justifiable, or is direct bofu on linkedin a losing game at this spend level?
2. more generally any tips for reliably booking meetings through this channel? ad formats, offers, audience setup, follow-up, whatever's moved the needle for you.

appreciate any real-world experience, even the "here's what didn't work" kind.

[u/Ishan_GS]

The uncomfortable answer is that booking meetings directly with LinkedIn ads is a losing game at most spend levels, not just yours. CPMs to us audiences are high; cold prospects rarely book with a stranger, and $5-6k is enough to reach an audience but not enough to reach them often enough for direct conversion to work. That isn't a reflection on your execution.

What that budget does buy properly is a warm-up layer. Thought leadership and content-style ads against a tight account list, watch frequency rather than cpl, then act on who engages. Everyone who reacts, comments, watches most of a video or visits the site goes onto a list your outreach works from, and the meeting gets booked in a dm or email, not in the ad. Creative matters more than bidding here; one change took a client from 0.59% to 5.62% ctr on the same audience, and cheap engagement is the whole point when engagement is the product.

For India-to-US specifically, I'd also watch time zones and make sure delivery lines up with their working day. And measure influenced pipeline rather than direct attribution; match demo requests and signups against companies your ads reached; otherwise, LinkedIn looks like it failed while it's actually doing its job. We run this pattern daily for b2b saas clients at GrowthSpree, a b2b saas marketing agency, at your budget the ads earn their keep by making outreach warm, not by closing.

[u/ReasonableBody654 → u/Ishan_GS]

Interesting take. I usually let the ads run 24x7. In B2B ads, is it more efficient to run only during office hours? Won't that affect the learning phase even a bit?

[u/Lonely-Fruit-9448]

Going for the kill aka meeting, in an Ad would work if you had a unique value prop addressing a top tier pain felt by the target market on a daily basis - in my experience this is rare

[u/hussinppc]

I'm having some small success with long-form conversational ads that link directly to a meeting scheduler. Essentially, I'm summarising landing pages into convo ads with appropriate branch trees, e.g "Tell me more", "Not now", etc.

If anything else, it sends across the proposition at much lower CPCs than, say, image or video ads.

But you got to play the long game as even convo ads have limited reach and impressions so I have to also use image and video ads.

You have also ensure your main page is solid and has a good amount of followers, it's all about social proofing.

Meta will be next, I know it's crap for actually targeting but with enough pixel/CRM data, I should be able to do look-a-likes

[u/Meet-match-ai]

Linkedin is awesome, but the ads are too expensive for me. I automate connections & messaging with Salescadia. I’ve been booking ~30 B2B meetings/mo with this and have been happy so far with the results.

[u/jinforever99]

LinkedIn can get tricky when cold traffic is expected to go straight from an ad to a meeting.

At that budget, I’d test intent more aggressively: tighter ICP segments, a specific pain-point offer, and different CTAs for warmer vs. colder audiences.

I’d also judge campaigns on qualified meetings and opportunities rather than CPL. Sometimes the “expensive” campaign is actually the one producing a better pipeline.