How to Run LinkedIn Ads in 2026

The short version

LinkedIn lets you target by job function, seniority, company, industry and your own Matched Audiences, which suits B2B companies, professional services firms and SaaS businesses selling to specific roles.
Costs on LinkedIn tend to run higher than on many other ad platforms, so judge campaigns on cost per qualified lead or sales opportunity, not cost per click.
Install the Insight Tag before launch, connect Lead Gen Forms to your CRM, and test one variable at a time: audiences in one round, creative in the next.

LinkedIn is the one major ad platform where you choose your audience by what people do for a living: their job function, seniority, employer and industry. For B2B companies, professional services firms and SaaS businesses, that makes it worth a serious look, even though it is rarely the cheapest place to buy attention.

Here is how to set it up in Campaign Manager. LinkedIn updates the interface regularly, so labels may differ slightly, but the decisions stay the same.

What You Need Before You Start

A personal LinkedIn profile to sign in to Campaign Manager, ideally belonging to someone who will stay with the business.
A LinkedIn Page for your company. Your ad account is linked to a Page, and most ad formats need one.
A defined buyer. Write down the roles, seniority, company sizes, industries and countries you sell to. Your targeting is only as good as this list.
An offer that suits a professional audience. A consultation, demo, webinar, guide or report usually lands better with people who have never heard of you than a hard sales message.
A plan for follow-up: someone to contact leads quickly, and a CRM, or at least a shared sheet, recording which leads become customers.

Step 1: Create Your Ad Account

Open Campaign Manager and create an ad account. LinkedIn asks for an account name, a currency, the LinkedIn Page to associate with the account, and your agreement to its advertising terms. The currency and the Page cannot be changed once the account is created (LinkedIn Help), so choose them deliberately.

Add a payment method, then give colleagues or your agency their own access with the right role rather than sharing a login.

Campaign Manager is organised in levels: the ad account, campaigns, ad sets and ads. Most decisions sit at the ad set level: objective, audience, format, budget and bidding. Older guides call these levels campaign groups and campaigns.

Step 2: Choose Your Objective

LinkedIn groups its objectives by funnel stage (LinkedIn Help):

Awareness: Brand awareness.
Consideration: Website visits, Engagement and Video views.
Conversions: Lead generation, Website conversions and Job applicants.

The objective decides how LinkedIn optimises delivery and which formats and bidding options you can use. For most B2B advertisers looking for enquiries, the choice is between two:

Lead generation uses Lead Gen Forms, which open inside LinkedIn, pre-filled with the member's profile data. Nobody has to leave LinkedIn or type their details, which makes submitting easy. The trade-off is that easy forms can bring in less committed leads, so watch quality.
Website conversions sends people to your own landing page and optimises for actions you track there. It needs conversion tracking working first.

If nobody in your market knows your company yet, a small awareness or engagement campaign that builds a retargeting audience can come first. Give it a clear job and a fixed budget.

Step 3: Build Your Audience

Location is required. Beyond that, LinkedIn's targeting options include (LinkedIn Help):

Job experience: job title, job function, job seniority, member skills and years of experience.
Company: company name, industry, size, growth rate and followers.
Education, demographics, and interests and traits, such as member groups and interests.
Matched Audiences: your own contact or company lists, website visitors and people who engaged with your content.
Predictive audiences, which LinkedIn builds from a source such as your leads or conversions.

A practical starting point for B2B is job function plus seniority, narrowed by company size or industry. That reaches the right kind of person without depending on how each one phrases their job title. Job title targeting is precise but misses people with unusual titles, so use it when the role is narrow and consistently named.

For account-based marketing, upload a list of target companies as a Matched Audience and layer seniority and function on top.

LinkedIn needs an audience of at least 300 member accounts to run an ad set (LinkedIn Help; check the current figure), but an audience that small leaves little room to learn. Aim for an audience you would happily hand to your sales team, then check the estimated size Campaign Manager shows.

Two settings deserve a deliberate decision: audience expansion, which lets LinkedIn reach people similar to your targeting, and the LinkedIn Audience Network, which shows ads on third-party apps and sites. Both add reach. For a first B2B test, it is reasonable to turn them off so you know exactly who saw the ads, and test them later.

If you sell in several countries, build separate ad sets per country or region, so you can see and budget for each market. Some targeting options have more limited reach in the EEA and Switzerland, so check audience sizes there.

Step 4: Choose Formats and Write the Creative

The main formats in Campaign Manager are:

Single image ads: the standard feed ad, and the simplest to test.
Video ads, for explaining a product or introducing the people.
Carousel ads, a swipeable series of cards for steps, features or case studies.
Document ads, which let people read a PDF guide or report in the feed. You can gate the full document behind a Lead Gen Form.
Thought Leader ads, which promote posts by individual members, such as your founder or employees, with their approval.
Conversation ads and Message ads, which arrive in the LinkedIn inbox. Use them sparingly and with a genuinely useful offer; for some audiences, such as members in the EU, delivery depends on member consent.
Text ads and Dynamic ads: smaller desktop placements and ads personalised with profile data.

Lead Gen Forms can be attached to most feed and messaging formats. Keep the form short and ask only what sales needs to qualify the lead.

For the creative itself:

Open with the problem in your buyer's words, not your product's name.
Use specifics: a client result you can document, a clear deliverable, a named process.
Write two or three versions with genuinely different angles, so testing teaches you something.

Step 5: Set Your Budget and Bidding

LinkedIn costs tend to run higher than on many other ad platforms, because you are paying to reach a specific professional audience that many advertisers want. That is why it should be judged on the cost of a qualified lead or sales opportunity, not the cost of a click.

LinkedIn's budgeting guidance states a minimum daily budget of $10 for any ad format (LinkedIn Marketing Solutions; check the current figure and the equivalent in your account's currency). That is the platform floor, not a recommended test budget.

You can set a daily budget, a lifetime budget or both. For a controlled test:

Run fewer ad sets with more budget each, rather than many small ones that never gather enough data.
Fix the test window in advance and agree what result would justify continuing.
Budget for each country or audience separately, so you can compare them.

LinkedIn offers three bidding strategies (LinkedIn Help):

Maximum delivery bids automatically, aiming to spend your whole budget, and charges by impressions.
Cost cap lets you set a cost per result that LinkedIn uses as a benchmark when bidding. It also charges by impressions.
Manual bidding lets you set the bid yourself; depending on the objective and format, you may be charged for impressions, clicks, sends or video views.

Maximum delivery is a sensible way to learn what results cost in your market. Once you know the cost per lead you can accept, cost cap gives more control, though a cap set too tight can limit delivery.

Step 6: Set Up Conversion Tracking

Install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website before you launch. It is a small piece of JavaScript that enables conversion tracking, website retargeting and aggregate insights about the people who interact with your ads, and you will find it under Signals manager in Campaign Manager (LinkedIn Help). LinkedIn says it should not be installed on pages that collect or contain sensitive data, so check where it goes.

Then create conversion actions for what matters: a demo request, a consultation booking, a contact form, a trial sign-up. Do not count simple page views as leads.

LinkedIn also offers a Conversions API, which sends conversion events from your server or CRM rather than relying only on the browser. Used alongside the Insight Tag, events sent both ways are deduplicated. It is particularly useful in B2B, where the conversion that matters, such as a qualified opportunity, often happens in the CRM weeks after the click.

If you use Lead Gen Forms, connect them to your CRM or download leads regularly, and record which become qualified. LinkedIn reports leads; only your own records show which were worth having. Our article on the numbers that matter covers what to report on.

Step 7: Optimise Through Audience and Creative Testing

Test audiences separately from creative. To compare two audiences, such as function-based targeting against a target-company list, run them as separate ad sets with the same ads. To compare messages, keep the audience fixed and vary the ads.
Check who you actually reached. Campaign Manager's demographics reporting shows the job functions, seniorities and companies reached. If budget is going to the wrong people, tighten the targeting or add exclusions.
Watch for creative fatigue. B2B audiences are often small, so the same people see your ads repeatedly. When an ad that worked starts slipping, refresh it.
Judge by lead quality. Compare cost per lead with what sales says about those leads. A cheaper audience that never buys is not cheaper.
Retarget. Use website visitors, video viewers and people who engaged with your ads as Matched Audiences for a follow-up offer.

Common Mistakes

Targeting only a handful of job titles, which misses buyers with different titles and shrinks the audience.
Leaving audience expansion and the Audience Network on without deciding to, then not knowing who saw the ads.
Launching without the Insight Tag, leaving you with no conversion data or website retargeting.
Following up Lead Gen Form leads days later, when the person has forgotten filling in the form.
Running a hard sell to a cold audience when a useful guide or webinar would start the conversation.
Spreading a small budget across many ad sets, so none gathers enough data.
Judging on cost per click rather than cost per qualified opportunity.

When to Hire Help

A focused LinkedIn test is manageable in-house if someone owns it and has time each week. Help makes sense when you need the Conversions API connected to your CRM, when you are targeting several countries or buyer groups at once, when you need a steady supply of creative, or when results have stalled and you cannot tell whether the problem is the audience, the offer or the follow-up.

LinkedIn works best as part of a plan: a clear marketing strategy, useful content, and search campaigns that catch buyers when they are ready, as covered in our guide to running Google Ads. Our paid media team runs LinkedIn campaigns for B2B and professional services firms, and our guides to choosing a digital marketing agency and digital marketing costs cover what to ask and what to expect.

How to Run LinkedIn Ads in 2026: A Step-by-Step Guide for B2B