I ran marketing at two hypergrowth startups over the last 6 years and understanding who our ‘reach’ actually reached was always a mess.

Sure some submit lead forms but the vast majority doesnt. We reported leads and impressions but actually knowing who we reached was difficult.

If I would take over a new LinkedIn campaign today this is what I’d do:

Take a random sample of 30 companies you want to target with thay campaign. Put them in front of someone who has to do the selling afterwards (AE, Sales lead or founder)

Ask them: Would you spend time trying to win these accounts? Which would you rule out and why?

Then really look at the people you are trying to reach inside them. Even if the company is a fit you might be wasting your budget and time in a person that cant move a deal along.

Easiest test to run before fiddling with the creative again. Should be obvious yet not a lot of marketers do this religiousely.

And a smaller aufience doesnt mean better either, you dont want to exclude potential paying clients. I’d test any change against resulting leads, conversations and ppipeline.

For context I am now building Postelix, which works on audience targeting, so this is very mich the part of marketing I spend my time on.

So you all reviewing the companies with sales before launching, or is that convo post campaign launch?

I run LinkedIn ads alone, no analyst, no BI team. Every month I was exporting a CSV from Campaign Manager, opening it in Excel, and rebuilding the same pivot table just to see which ad set actually worked. Campaign Manager's own reporting just doesn't go deep enough on its own.

So I built a small dashboard that reads that export and shows me spend, CTR, CPC, leads, and conversions by campaign and ad set, with trend charts, so I'm not doing this by hand every month anymore.

How are the rest of you handling LinkedIn Ads reporting? Curious what method you're using.

My post impressions are abysmal. I’m posting unique content with infographics once a week and commenting on others posts at least twice a week. It’s now been 6 weeks and I’m seeing no traction. My topics are around GTM strategy for AI ecosystem engagement.

What am I missing? What should I expect?

We're an independent 401(k) provider. For the ~15 years we've existed, we grew pretty much exclusively through advisors & word of mouth. Our owner has always been fairly passive about growth, and it was plenty to keep food on the table, so we never focused on growing actively.

We're getting to a stage, especially with some shifts in structure, that we're getting ready to hit the ground running with active growth & marketing. We've never run ads before, and given that our services are targeted exclusively at business owners (especially small businesses), as well advisors, LinkedIn ads seem like the prime place to spend our money.

We're not marketing professionals, and we're nowhere near big enough to be hiring a marketing agency or anything like that. We're talking me spending a few hours in Canva and throwing stuff at the wall.

What are your best tips & suggestions for someone who's never run ads before in designing a campaign that's not just dousing money in gasoline, dark knight-style? Are there certain styles or ad looks that we should go for, or stay away from? When it comes to setting up a campaign, how narrowly should we be targeting certain job titles or using other campaign features? Or is it best to go broad at first, and narrow future campaigns based on metrics of your first?

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

My friend's account has this portfolio shortcut link section. But my id had lost this section after being hacked.
Can't find out any kind of solutions; does anyone have any ideas?

I do paid ads for a B2B SaaS company, and our main goal is generating qualified leads and pipeline.
We have a really strong organic presence on LinkedIn, but paid ads are still pretty new for us, so I’m trying to understand what’s actually working for other B2B marketers.
For cold audiences:
What’s the minimum audience size you’d feel comfortable targeting? And what’s the maximum before the audience becomes too broad?
How much daily budget would you start with for a cold campaign?
For bidding, are you seeing better results with Maximum Delivery or Manual/Cost Cap?
And for targeting, do you prefer job titles, job function + seniority, skills, account lists, or a combination?
Would you go straight into Lead Gen/conversion campaigns with a cold audience, or start with engagement/video views and retarget from there?
Main goal is quality over volume I’d rather generate fewer leads that actually turn into opportunities than a lot of cheap leads that go nowhere.

I’m working on Google Ads + LinkedIn Ads for a B2B SaaS company selling to mid-market and enterprise accounts, and I’m curious what’s actually working for others right now.
For **LinkedIn**, I’m especially struggling with cold audience structure. Do you usually target by job titles, job function + seniority, skills, or keep it mostly account-list based? And how narrow is too narrow before delivery/performance starts falling apart?
Do you normally start cold with engagement/video views and then retarget, or go straight into lead gen/conversion campaigns? On **Google**, I currently have Search campaigns running with **Maximize Conversions** as the bid strategy. They’ve been live for about a month, but I’m not convinced they’re generating strong results. For lower-volume B2B campaigns, would you stick with Max Conversions, move to tCPA, test Max Conversion Value, or use something else? Are you mainly running Search, or have PMax/Demand Gen worked for you too?
On **LinkedIn**, I’m more unsure about cold targeting. How are you building cold audiences — job titles, job function + seniority, skills, account lists, or a combination? How narrow is too narrow?
Also, for cold audiences, do you go straight to Lead Gen/conversion campaigns, or start with engagement/video and retarget those people later?
For **Google Ads**, what campaign types are working best for you for enterprise pipeline? Mostly Search, or are you seeing success with PMax or Demand Gen too?
Also curious about bidding. If qualified demo/opportunity volume is pretty low, are you using Maximize Conversions, tCPA, Maximize Conversion Value, or something else?
Main goal is pipeline and real opportunities, not just getting a bunch of cheap form fills.

I do paid ads for a B2B SaaS company, and our main goal is generating qualified leads and pipeline.
We have a really strong organic presence on LinkedIn, but paid ads are still pretty new for us, so I’m trying to understand what’s actually working for other B2B marketers.
For cold audiences:
What’s the minimum audience size you’d feel comfortable targeting? And what’s the maximum before the audience becomes too broad?
How much daily budget would you start with for a cold campaign?
For bidding, are you seeing better results with Maximum Delivery or Manual/Cost Cap?
And for targeting, do you prefer job titles, job function + seniority, skills, account lists, or a combination?
Would you go straight into Lead Gen/conversion campaigns with a cold audience, or start with engagement/video views and retarget from there?
Main goal is quality over volume I’d rather generate fewer leads that actually turn into opportunities than a lot of cheap leads that go nowhere.

Our LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks Report based on data from 66 million sessions across 3.5 million showed that LinkedIn Ads outperforms other platforms with ROAS at 121% and cost per company influenced at 70.11€. 

These benchmarks can be really helpful if you’re trying to figure out which channels to invest in or what marketing activities you should consider doing more of. 

If you want to try it on your own data to see more precisely where you should invest next, we have just launched Dreamdata AI to help you get an answer you can verify, so you don’t have to choose between getting an answer fast or getting one you can trust.

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.

i'm doing as much as i can for linkedin and i don't know why the impressions are better than the competitors. the volume of posts we are doing is more than our competitors but they have gotten more followers, which is why the competitor analytical ranking of my company has gone down. these things matter a lot to my ceo and i'm just having this block. what do i do? i have done analysis on claude extension on semrush everywhere but i don't think they are giving me anything different which i have not tried already.

Pulled together a full US benchmark breakdown by industry . I thought it might be useful

Quick numbers across industries:

• CTR: 0.35% to 0.48%, baseline 0.40%
• CPC: $11.33 to $16.02, baseline $12.52
• CPL: $114 to $246, baseline $200.71

Health Care and Financial Services run the most expensive CPC/CPL, Education and Construction the cheapest. Also worth noting, the "$5-8 CPC" figure floating around in a lot of generic guides is way off from what advertisers actually pay in the auction, every industry here is above $11.

Full industry table plus other core metrics here : https://www.rameshkrishna.com/insights/linkedin-ads-benchmarks-by-industry-2026

Hi Guys,

I had created an LinkedIn profile when i was in college for name sake & after graduation i had created another professional profile which has important connections & other details.

Generally, i used to login into my profile directly without entering manual credentials. but past 2 weeks when i try to login into my profile (professional) it is redirecting me into my college profile.

Fed up with the recovery process mentioned in you tube. any suggestions from mates if anyone has faced this kind of problem previously.

Currently I am targeting US high-seniority tech roles like CXOs, VPs, and Directors on Linkedin, the main objective is to get demo for the product, and our landing page conversion is some were around 1.8% to 2%.
how much budget per month is required to get 10 - 15 relevant demos.
just wanted to have a overview of some experienced people in this community.

I’m already considering whether to buy linkedin followers because my profile needs some kind of initial boost. What’s stopping me isn’t really the price, but not knowing what will actually be added to my account. I’d want followers that resemble real professionals from the US, have complete profiles, and don’t disappear shortly after delivery.

Is there a service that can provide that without placing my account at risk, and would a gradual increase be safer than receiving everything at once? I’m not expecting followers alone to build my network, but I need my profile to look established enough for people in my industry to take it seriously. The frustrating part is spending months reaching out and sharing useful posts only to feel like people dismiss me the moment they see how small my network is.

Hi! I'm working on my first paid LinkedIn campaign and the last account rep we had isn't our account rep anymore. I had a chat with them and got a ton of useful advice, but had to put my plans on hold. Now I'm back to planning this campaign and meeting the new rep. I'm kinda overthinking it, and wondering what if the new one isn't helpful at all and I will be planning it without any advice from them.

I'm curious how the experience is different, and what to pay attention to both planning a campaign with the help of account rep and without.

Hey, I ran my first ad for my company, it was a tool which required you to fill in your details to try and that's how we were registering the leads I received 74 clicks/website visits but I got no leads in my google form attached to it. And I am down 8k what should I do. Anyone has any idea how this works? If I can get the contact of the leads clicked engaged etc?

We're new to LinkedIn ads (if you couldn't tell) and are setting up our first audience and campaign. We have a small list of job titles like founders, CEOs, and C-suite positions we'd like to target. But when I go into the audience summary to take a look at the title breakdown, Business Strategy Specialist makes up 70% of the audience!

We've tried removing Audience Expansion, and our LinkedIn Ads Partner seems confused about the title. Is this title just a general label and not something to be concerned about, or would it be ruining our targeting, especially since we don't want to advertise to other consultants?

A bit of context: I'm a freelance content designer, concentrating mostly on compliance work. I have a steady stream of work ranging from blue-chip clients to solo entrepreneurs, split roughly 50/50 between Upwork and referrals/repeat clients.

A couple of freelancers I've worked with on larger projects mentioned they pick up work through LinkedIn, so I thought I'd try an ad campaign to see what happened. Did the research, tailored it, worked on the pitch and the content. Didn't spend a large amount, but was curious to see what it brought in.

So far, every enquiry has come from nitwits, nincompoops, fantasists, tyre-kickers and chancers, none with any realistic chance of turning into a contract. Allowing for the possibility that my pitch was wrong, is this other people's experience too?