LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks 2026

How to read these benchmarks

Every number on this page comes from one of Kiin Labs' four 2026 studies, all built the same way from accounts connected to Kiin Intelligence via the LinkedIn Marketing API, 8 September 2025 to 7 September 2026, 14 currencies converted to USD, LinkedIn Audience Network excluded:

• Report No. 1 · Thought Leader Ads Benchmarks 2026 — 2,563 thought leader ad campaigns, 464 accounts, $8.4M of TLA spend inside a $31M panel. CTR, CPC, CPM, engagement, frequency, reach, calendar.
• Report No. 2 · Conversation Ads Benchmarks 2026 — 1,588 message and conversation ad campaigns, 263 accounts, $7.7M, 37,562 leads. Open rate, lead rate, cost per send, cost per lead, cost per booked meeting.
• Report No. 3 · Lead Gen Forms Benchmarks 2026 — 4,010 lead-generation-objective campaigns, 489 accounts, $13.6M, 86,051 leads. Cost per lead and form completion, content offers and demo requests separately, by industry, function, seniority, company size, region, format, audience and budget.

Five rules that decide how to read a row:

1. Medians across advertiser accounts, never pooled totals. One advertiser spending $500,000 counts once, like one spending $2,000. "Good" is the better quartile (p75 for rates, p25 for costs); "exceptional" is the better decile. n is the number of accounts the row rests on; no cell under seven accounts is shown.
2. Every click, CTR and CPC is on landing page clicks (landingPageClicks), not LinkedIn's default clicks field, which also counts likes, comments, "see more" and profile visits. Where a total-click figure is shown it is labelled. This single choice moves every CTR and CPC benchmark by 3 to 10×; the reasoning is in what a good LinkedIn Ads CTR actually is.
3. Cost per lead is never blended. A content offer (guide, report, webinar, template) and a demo or sales-call request are different products with different prices, so every cost-per-lead row shows both.
4. Benchmark tables describe the market; paired tables describe levers. "What advertisers targeting the US pay" is not "what targeting the US costs". Where the same advertiser ran both settings, the comparison is paired within account and carries a star: ★★★ 100+ accounts, ★★ 25 to 100, ★ under 25 or directional; ✱ means the 95% interval excludes zero; ns means it does not.
5. USD throughout. UK figures in pounds are on LinkedIn Ads cost UK.
6. Need a sentence, not a table? Every number here as one citable line with its source: 100 LinkedIn Ads statistics for 2026.

The headline table: every metric, median · good · exceptional

One row per metric, whole panel. Formats with their own study are broken out further below.

Rates: good = p75, exceptional = p90. Costs: good = p25, exceptional = p10. Thought leader ad rows are engagement-objective accounts with 2,000+ impressions; conversation ad rows are accounts with 1,000+ sends; lead gen rows are accounts with 5+ leads (cost) or 100+ form opens (completion).

Whole-panel benchmarks: every format, every objective

The three reports each cut one format deep. The tables below are the wide cut: every LinkedIn campaign with delivery across the accounts connected to Kiin Intelligence in the same twelve months — 22,000+ campaigns, 1,000+ advertiser accounts, $58.1M of spend, 1.32 billion impressions — with the 3,040 campaigns that used the LinkedIn Audience Network removed, spend converted to USD per account, and every figure the median across accounts (an account enters a cell with 2,000+ impressions, or 500+ sends in the inbox). Cost per lead is deliberately absent from these tables because the panel-wide data cannot split content offers from demo requests; the cost-per-lead section above is the Report No. 3 cut and it is the one to quote. Pulled from the frozen 15 September 2026 snapshot.

Whole panel, every feed format on every objective except lead generation (where the form opens inside LinkedIn and a landing page click is not the goal): 944 accounts with 2,000+ impressions; video rows accounts with 100+ views. Rates: good = p75, exceptional = p90; costs: good = p25, exceptional = p10. On the two traffic objectives alone (website visits and website conversion, 675 accounts) the median landing page CTR is 0.35% and the median cost per landing page click $10.47; with the lead generation objective included, the all-feed medians are $39.88 CPM, $4.94 per total click and $25.09 per landing page click, the last inflated by accounts whose clicks open a form rather than a page.

Lead generation objective, all offers pooled, accounts with 100+ form opens. The content vs demo split is in the cost-per-lead section.

Whole panel, message and conversation ads on every objective, 286 accounts with 500+ sends. Report No. 2's ladder (lead gen forms attached, 242 accounts) is the one to quote for lead gen; this is the all-objective base.

CTR benchmarks

A good landing page CTR on LinkedIn is 0.67%; the median is 0.46% and the top decile 0.99%. The "CTR" most guides quote is LinkedIn's total-click field; on a thought leader ad it reads 4.56% because it counts every like, comment and expansion. It correlates with engagement rate at r = 0.998: it is engagement with a different name.

On the lead generation objective, CTR is form open rate with a different name, and it explains only a fifth of the difference in cost per lead between accounts; form completion explains half.

Cost per click benchmarks

A good cost per landing page click is $8.37; the median is $14.71 and the top decile $3.15 (thought leader ads, 212 accounts). The $2 to $5 CPC in most guides is cost per total click and understates the price of a site visit by 3 to 10×.

Market medians across different advertisers. Within the same account, thought leader ads beat company-page ads on the same objective (−22% per landing page click on engagement, n = 106; −47% on brand awareness, n = 32) but sponsored content on website visits beats both by 52 to 59% ★★★.

63% of the variance in cost per landing page click is CPM (r = +0.745); 28% is click rate. An account with none of the four boxes ticked pays $25.46 per landing page click; with all four, $6.42. Doubling daily spend costs 26% more per click and returns 59% more clicks ★★★. Bid type makes no difference; bid amount does. Detail: what is a good cost per click on LinkedIn.

CPM benchmarks

A good CPM on LinkedIn is $36; the median is $65 and the top decile $21 (thought leader ads, 212 accounts). Company-page sponsored content runs at $48.80 against $74.71 for thought leader ads in the same comparison: the entire thought leader ad premium is media cost.

The same threshold appears on lead gen forms: above $2 a day per 1,000 members, form completion halves cross-panel (10.2% to 4.8%). Size the budget to the audience and widen the audience before raising the daily budget.

Lead gen forms: CPM peaks in December (index 116) and troughs in January (97) within account, and cost per lead does not follow it (98 to 103 all year). The full calendar, weekday and objective breakdown is on LinkedIn CPM benchmarks.

The lead gen form is not a free add-on: you pay for the objective in CPM before you pay for the lead. Brand awareness vs engagement on thought leader ads, paired: CPM −39% [−52%, −30%], n = 59.

Engagement rate benchmarks

A good engagement rate on thought leader ads is 6.44%; the median is 4.46% and the top decile 9.26% (212 accounts). The author explains 67% of the variance: the top 10% of authors engage at 10.55%, the bottom 10% at 1.22%, an 8.6× spread across 47 authors. Hook, length, link, boosted-vs-purpose-built and launch day do not move it once the author is held constant.

CXOs engage at 4.42% vs 3.46% for senior ICs at the same cost per click ★★: a seniority filter costs nothing per click and buys a better reader. 79% of thought leader ad spend sets no seniority filter.

Fatigue is a frequency effect, not a time effect: over eight weeks cost per click, CPM and dwell are flat while engagement falls. Detail in frequency and fatigue.

Cost per lead benchmarks

A good cost per lead on LinkedIn is under $67 for a content offer and under $131 for a demo request; the medians are $164 and $343. The blended median is $185 and it is useless: it describes the mix of offers in someone else's panel. Every table in this section shows content and demo side by side; every one is a median across advertiser accounts with the account count in brackets; every cell under seven accounts is withheld. Source for all of them: Lead Gen Forms Benchmarks 2026, 489 accounts, $13.6M, 86,051 leads.

Paired in the 50 accounts running both, a demo request costs +51% [−5%, +148%] more than a content offer, dearer in 30 of 50, ★★ ns. Pooled (spend ÷ leads) is $99 content / $424 demo and is dominated by the 34 accounts over $100k; not quoted.

By what the form asks for

A 4.8× spread from the cheapest ask to the dearest. Within content, no sub-type is cheaper than another inside the same account (all ns); the type of ask sets the price, the flavour of content does not.

By format carrying the form

Single image with a demo form is the most common setup in the panel and the worst: $600 a lead, 2.1% completion, 48 form opens per lead. Message ads are the cheapest lead on LinkedIn.

By audience type

A list pays 19% more per impression and gets 24% fewer leads per impression with the same open rate and completion. Retargeting is dearer in the table and a tie paired: a description, not a lever.

By region targeted

Europe is roughly half the US on content and the UK a fifth cheaper on demo. Paired, in accounts targeting both, US vs Europe is +12% [−12%, +51%], n = 23 ★, and on content alone US is −8%: most of the gap is who advertises in the US, not the auction.

By job function targeted

The spread on content is 3.3×; on demo 5.5×. Sales is the one function where a demo lead costs less than a content lead (n = 7, directional).

By seniority targeted

Seniority is flat: a C-suite lead does not cost more than a manager lead to target, and 94% of leads on filtered campaigns come from inside the filter. Inside the same campaign the senior leads who convert are the cheapest (see seniority of the lead).

By company size targeted

Enterprise-only looks 2.7× SMB-only on demo. Paired, enterprise-only vs no filter in the same account is −45%, 10 of 14, ★ ns: the table shows who targets enterprise, not what targeting enterprise costs.

By monthly lead gen spend

The biggest spenders pay four times as much per lead as the smallest. That is mix (US, demo, lists, small pools); no paired table shows a size effect in the auction. "You cannot do lead gen under £3k a month" is wrong for content.

By industry targeted · 13 of 107 rows

The full table, 107 industries with ten or more accounts, content and demo side by side, ranked cheapest to dearest: LinkedIn cost per lead by industry 2026.

By billing currency

CAD, DKK, BRL and CHF are under seven accounts on at least one side and withheld. A market fact about who bills in euros, not a currency effect.

Other cost-per-lead and cost-per-meeting benchmarks

The cheapest 10% of lead gen accounts got 537 leads on $8,021; the dearest 10% got 23 leads on $43,927. The cheap decile runs cold, on big audiences, for content, on documents; the dear decile runs demo forms to small US lists in single image ads. Why a CPL is high, in order: the diagnostic.

Demo request benchmarks: cost per demo lead by placement, ask, audience and pool size

The median demo request on LinkedIn costs $350 a lead; a good number is under $161 (top quarter) and an exceptional one under $71 (top tenth). The spread is set-up, not budget: the accounts paying $146 and the accounts paying $926 spend the same per month. Source: The Cost of a Demo on LinkedIn 2026 (Report No. 4), 268 advertisers, $8.25M, 20,277 demo leads.

By placement, ask, audience type and bid · account medians

By audience size · the rule flips with the placement

Feed: bigger is cheaper (ρ −0.41 ✱ cross-account, −0.33 ✱ within). Inbox: bigger is dearer (ρ +0.37 ✱, +0.28 ✱). Rule: feed 100,000+, inbox under 40,000. Saturation: once a feed demo campaign has delivered more than 4x its audience size, cost per lead is 2.2x where it started (lists 3.2x). Full tables, the four-tier split and the within-account best-vs-worst test: Report No. 4.

Conversation and message ad benchmarks

The median conversation ad account opens at 42.6%; above 48.8% is top quartile, above 53.9% top decile. Open rate explains 2% of the difference in cost per lead between accounts; cost per send explains 55% and whether openers click into the form 38%. Source: Conversation Ads Benchmarks 2026, 242 accounts with 1,000+ sends.

Conversation vs message ad on cost per lead is a tie inside the same account (Report No. 2: +36%, interval spans zero, 53 accounts; Report No. 3 on demo offers: +91% [−8%, +333%], n = 9). Message ads get 20% more opens; conversation ads 21% higher form completion. Pick by whether the offer needs a qualification step.

Paired within account: retargeting gets +71% lead rate and +18% opens vs cold and is −36% per lead vs an uploaded list ★★; its −23% per lead vs cold is directional. A list performs like cold and costs +21% per send. Bidding higher buys nothing: the highest-bid campaign in an account pays +80% per send and +44% per lead than the lowest for the same open rate, and the median campaign pays 62% of its bid — bid low.

Don't pause weekends: opens are dated when they happen, so Friday sends opened on Monday read as a weekend dip. No month moves cost per lead more than 8%.

Lead gen form benchmarks: completion, open rate, opens per lead, time to first lead

A good lead gen form completion rate is 18.7% in the feed on a content offer (median 10.8%) and 4.2% on a demo request (median 2.2%); in a message or conversation ad the median is 40.7%. Completion (submits ÷ form opens) explains 51% of the difference in cost per lead between accounts; CPM 31%; form open rate 18%. Source: Lead Gen Forms Benchmarks 2026.

Paired, a demo form in the feed completes 80% less often than the same account's content forms (46 of 48 ★★ ✱). On demo forms alone (Report No. 4, 268 advertisers): feed 3.9%, inbox 42% at the median account, paired +1,652% ★★ ✱ — see demo request benchmarks.

Open rates barely vary by format (0.13% to 0.58%); completion runs 1.2% to 20.3%, a 17× range. Leads per 1,000 impressions: feed 0.22 (content 0.28, demo 0.08); per 1,000 sends in the inbox 1.75 (content 3.26, demo 1.59).

Field count does nothing measurable (3 or fewer fields 9.0% completion, 8+ 4.0% cross-panel, ns paired). One field does: the phone number. The median form has 6 fields; 71% require a work email, 67% ask for job title, 35% for a phone number, 81% have no custom question, 6% send to a calendar.

26% of campaign-months with $200 or more of spend produce zero leads. Content needs $25 to $50 a day for a lead a week in half of months; even at $100 to $250 a day only 46% of demo campaign-months get a lead a week. Fatigue: cost per lead +37% by month three while CPM falls 9%; completion −22%; the refresh trigger is completion at week four.

Video ad benchmarks

Connected TV is benchmarked separately: LinkedIn CTV Ads Benchmarks 2026 (31 accounts, $25.76 CPM, 98.7% completion).

What the three studies can say about video, on cost. Every row is video against the equivalent static format in the same study.

Video is a fine traffic format on the website visits objective, a poor thought leader ad on cost per click, and the wrong format to carry a lead gen form. View rate, 75% view rate, completion and cost per view across the whole panel are in the table below.

Whole panel: video view rate, completion and cost per view

Accounts with 100+ video views on the setup. A view is LinkedIn's two-second view, so view rate mostly measures autoplay; judge video on cost per 75% view and cost per landing page click. Thought leader video is watched more (52% view rate on engagement) and clicked less ($53 per landing page click). Video on the website visits objective is the only video setup that buys a landing page click at feed prices ($11.66).

If the goal is the watch: objective and optimisation, paired within account

Every SINGLE_VIDEO campaign in the twelve months, Audience Network excluded, $50 and 2,000 impressions minimum, USD. Each row is the same advertiser running both settings; the ratio is the median across those accounts with a 95% bootstrap interval. A view is LinkedIn's two-second view; a completion is the full watch.

Engagement buys the same two-second view as the video views objective, plus the reactions and the clicks; the video views objective buys the watch-through, 25% cheaper per completion. Brand awareness is the worst objective for watching: it loses to video views on cost per view and cost per completion and to engagement on completion rate. The thought leader cut points the same way but rests on twelve accounts.

Video views objective: by optimisation and audience size, whole panel

Medians across accounts, cross-account (the paired table above is the evidence; this is the shape). Auto bidding buys cheaper impressions of which slightly fewer people view, and comes out cheaper per view and per completion. Minimums differ from the panel table above ($50 and 2,000 impressions here; 100 views there), so the two tables will not match to the cent.

Kiin rules for video, if the view is the goal

1. Use the video views objective. Not brand awareness (−18% per view, −32% per completion, paired in 54 accounts) and not engagement if the watch-through is the point (−25% per completion, paired in 90). Engagement is the choice only when you want the view and the reactions: same cost per two-second view, 78% more engagement, four times the landing page click rate.
2. Let LinkedIn bid. "Maximise video views" beats a manual CPV bid in the same account: CPM −21%, cost per view −10%, cost per completion −25%. Cross-account it is $0.076 against $0.129 a view.
3. If you bid manually, bid low. The highest-bid campaign in an account pays 90% more per view than the lowest, for a view rate 4% higher. Bidding higher buys the same views at twice the price.
4. Cold and big. $0.072 a view over 100,000 people; $0.148 under 10,000. Retargeting lifts view rate 13% and pays 17% more per view; a list pays more for nothing.
5. Judge it on completions, not on clicks. A video views campaign has a 0.04% landing page CTR and $97 landing page clicks. That is the format doing its job, not the campaign failing.

Frequency and fatigue benchmarks

Fatigue is driven by cumulative frequency, not days running. Refresh by audience size, not by the calendar. On lead gen forms, the fatigue shows up in completion (index 60 by month six), not in opens or CPM.

Reach and penetration benchmarks

Report reach as a share of audience, not impressions. The 5×5 framework for setting penetration targets is in penetration rate.

Benchmarks by ad format

One row per format, the metrics each format is judged on. Cost per landing page click and CPM are market medians across advertisers (Report No. 1); cost per lead and completion are lead gen form medians (Report No. 3); inbox rows are Report No. 2.

Paired within account: document vs single image on content −22% per lead ✱ ★★ (+174% completion); conversation and message ads vs single image on demo −49% and −40% ✱ ★; video vs single image with a form +60% ✱ ★; thought leader ad vs company-page ad on the same objective −22% per landing page click (engagement) and −47% (brand awareness) ★★★; message ad vs single image lead gen form −33% per lead, 65 accounts ★★. Operating rules per format: best LinkedIn ad format for B2B SaaS.

Whole panel, by format

Medians across accounts with 2,000+ impressions on the format, all objectives except lead generation pooled per account (the lead generation cut is the next table). Total CTR and CPC use LinkedIn's clicks field and are shown so the gap to the landing page columns is visible; never compare total CTR across formats. Text ads and dynamic ads are priced on a different impression basis and are not comparable on CPM.

All offers pooled per account (this table cannot split content from demo; Report No. 3's format table above does). Form rows: accounts with 100+ form opens.

Benchmarks by objective

Engagement vs brand awareness on thought leader ads, paired within account: cost per landing page click $17.24 vs $17.22, a tie; brand awareness CPM −39% and reach +77%; engagement gets +88% engagement per impression and +82% landing page click rate. Under 10,000 people the engagement objective wins ($1.79 vs $4.75 per engagement); over 30,000 cold, brand awareness reaches 184% more people at 59% lower cost per reach.

How Kiin chooses between engagement and brand awareness

Six rules from the thought leader ads study, every comparison the same advertiser running both objectives.

1. Brand awareness on cold audiences of 30,000 or more. It reaches 184% more people per dollar at a 59% lower CPM, and the cost per engagement is about the same. This is the only place it wins.
2. Engagement on anything under 30,000. Under 10,000, brand awareness reaches 1% more people and pays 49% more per engagement ($4.75 vs $1.79). The cheaper impression has nowhere to go.
3. Engagement on retargeting. Always. Brand awareness on a retargeting pool gets 17% more reach for 51 to 90% more per engagement. They already know you.
4. Engagement on uploaded lists too, even big ones. Brand awareness on a 30,000+ list still pays about 50% more per engagement (directional, 13 accounts). A small list on brand awareness is the worst setup in the data: +30% per engagement, −77% conversions per dollar.
5. The click never decides. A landing page click costs the same on both, $17.24 vs $17.22, and is never significantly different at any audience size. Most people assume engagement wins the click. It is a tie. Do not pick the objective for traffic.
6. Brand awareness buys reach, not depth. Same dollars, 77% more people, but 65 to 78% fewer comments, 22% less dwell and fewer shares. Choose it when you want to be seen by more people. Choose engagement when you want the people you reach to do something.

Whole panel, by objective

Lead generation rows have no landing page columns: the form opens inside LinkedIn. Judge that objective on form open rate, completion and cost per lead. Inbox by objective: lead generation open rate 44.1%, lead rate 0.18%, cost per send $0.43 (221 accounts); website visits 45.3%, $0.49 (84); website conversion 47.4%, $0.43 (51).

Whole panel, format × objective

Cells with 20 or more accounts. Landing page columns are not shown for lead generation rows: the form opens inside LinkedIn, so landing page clicks are near zero by design. The cheapest landing page click on the platform is single image on website visits ($11.33 across 493 accounts here; $11.75 in Report No. 1's stricter cut); the dearest common setups are video and document ads on objectives that do not optimise for the click.

Benchmarks by region: US, UK, Europe

Region is the campaign's targeted location, so every row is "what advertisers targeting the region pay", not what the region costs; the paired caveat is in the notes. USD throughout; the UK page in pounds is LinkedIn Ads cost UK.

Lead gen form rows: Report No. 3, accounts in brackets. Conversation ad rows: Report No. 2 campaign medians (US 686 campaigns / 142 accounts, UK 81 / 33, EU 229 / 56). Paired within account, US vs Europe on lead gen forms is +12% [−12%, +51%], n = 23 ★, and on content alone US is −8%: most of the gap is who advertises where. Thought leader ad spend in the panel: 68% touches the US, 23% the UK, 20% continental Europe; the US auction is the most contested inbox and feed on the platform, senior US B2B audiences routinely price at $60 to $100+ CPM.

Whole panel, by region

A campaign is assigned to a region when every location it targets falls in that bucket; campaigns spanning buckets are 'multi-region'. Region is the targeting facet, so this is what advertisers targeting the region pay. The US is the most contested auction on the platform on CPM and cost per landing page click; APAC and LATAM the cheapest.

All offers pooled; the content vs demo cost per lead by region is in the Report No. 3 table above. US lead gen CPM runs $126 against $51 in DACH and $55 in the UK: the US pays for the form in the auction before the lead.

Cost per send is the lever on conversation ads, and it is set by the region: $0.56 in the US against $0.21 to $0.31 across continental Europe, with higher open rates in Europe.

Benchmarks by industry: CPM, CTR, cost per click

What advertisers targeting each industry pay per impression and per landing page click, and the engagement they get, across every feed format and objective. The industry is the campaign's targeting facet, not the advertiser's own industry. Cost per lead by industry, content and demo separately for 107 industries, is on its own page.

145 industries with 20 or more accounts targeting them, alphabetical, all feed formats and objectives; a campaign targeting several industries counts toward each. Cost per lead by industry, content and demo separately, is on its own page.

Benchmarks by audience size, audience type, seniority and company size

Per-audience cuts with ranges, by format, seniority and company size: all seven side by side · HR · IT · finance · marketing · sales · C-suite · company size.

Audience size

Audience size decides cost per impression and per engagement on thought leader ads (widen past 30,000 before raising budget) and cost per send on conversation ads (no cold conversation ad under 15,000). On lead gen forms it decides nothing: rank correlation of size with cost per lead is −0.03 across accounts and −0.13 within them (n = 293 / 249), completion 10 to 14% in every decile. The 50,000-minimum rule is dead for forms.

Audience type

A list is not a warm audience on any format. Retargeting is the only warm audience, and its price advantage depends on the format: real on conversation ad response, a tie on lead gen form cost. How Kiin builds each: retargeting for B2B, the account list.

Seniority

Both halves of "seniors are expensive" fail. Targeting director and above costs nothing extra (+17% vs including managers, ★★ ns; CXOs engage at 4.42% vs 3.46% at the same cost per click ★★), and inside the same campaign the senior leads who convert are the cheapest: a C-suite lead about a third below the campaign average (about 14 accounts with demographic spend, ★ directional). Director and above are 26% of impressions and 40% of leads (263 campaigns, pooled); CXOs convert at 5.2 leads per 10k impressions vs 1.7 for entry level. Conversation ads: senior-only targeting $138 a lead vs $258 when managers or ICs are included (cross-panel).

Company size

Paired, enterprise-only vs no filter in the same account is −45% (10 of 14, ★ ns): the table shows who targets enterprise, not what targeting enterprise costs.

Whole panel: audience type, cold audience size, seniority and company size targeted

Cross-account medians; the paired within-account results are in the audience section below. Inbox: retargeting opens at 50.2% and costs $0.48 a send, cold 43.2% and $0.29, uploaded list 40.2% and $0.53 (172 / 141 / 136 accounts).

CPM falls monotonically with audience size on cold targeting: $73 under 10,000 to $24 over 300,000. Cost per landing page click follows it ($35 to $14). On the lead generation objective the same buckets run $68 / $62 / $49 / $49 / $45 CPM with completion 7.8% / 7.2% / 10.5% / 8.5% / 8.2%, and leads per 1,000 impressions flat at 0.26 to 0.29 until 300,000+ (0.46).

Director-and-above only pays a higher CPM ($50.33 vs $41.82 with no filter) and the same cost per landing page click ($23.44 vs $24.26), because the click rate is higher (0.24% vs 0.19%). Inbox: director-and-above only runs at $0.28 a send against $0.43 with no filter (54 / 253 accounts).

Paired comparisons: what moves the numbers inside one account

Every row is the same advertiser running both settings in the same window; the ratio is the median across those accounts with a 95% bootstrap interval. This is the table that separates levers from descriptions, and it is the one nobody else can publish.

Bold = a lever: significant and starred. "ns" = the interval includes no change; those are the settings people argue about most (retargeting on forms, bid strategy, seniority filters, field count, audience expansion, geography) and they are not levers. ✱ marks intervals that exclude zero where the interval itself is not shown.

Kiin operating ranges

The diagnostic thresholds Kiin applies across the 200+ B2B accounts it manages, for the metrics the studies do not yet cover or where a coarser all-format rule is useful. USD, rounded from Kiin's working GBP thresholds at $1.35 to the pound; the study quartiles above take precedence wherever both exist.

How to use these numbers

Benchmarks are for diagnosis, not targets. The order Kiin checks an account against them:

1. Are you measuring landing page clicks? If the report says CTR and CPC, every number in it is 3 to 10× too flattering. Fix the denominator first.
2. Which lead? Split cost per lead by what the form asks for before comparing it to anything. $250 is a good demo lead and a poor content lead.
3. CPM. 63% of your cost per landing page click. Audience over 30,000, budget pressure under $2 a day per 1,000 members, at least half the spend on cold targeting, bid low. Each box is worth 1.6 to 2.2×.
4. Completion, then form open rate, then CPM on a lead gen campaign: completion is half the cost, the click a fifth. A normal click rate with 2% completion is a form problem and no bid change fixes it.
5. Frequency and reach. Account-level, deduplicated. Under 20% penetration in 90 days is normal; over 40% is top quarter; account frequency above 4× on a small audience is a budget problem.
6. Engagement rate, then landing page CTR. These move when creative or author changes. If they are below the median and CPM is fine, change the author before the hook.
7. Cost per lead last, only on submissions, and only next to cost per qualified opportunity from the CRM.

If you want your account run against these rules, the scope is on LinkedIn Ads management. If you want to check your own numbers against 1,000+ accounts, the LinkedIn Ads MCP does it in a Claude session.