LinkedIn CTV ads in 2026: what they cost, who is running them and whether they are worth it, from 31 accounts and $811,000

LinkedIn launched Connected TV in the US in 2024, added Paramount inventory and the Innovid and Sprinklr integrations in 2025, and has been expanding to Canada and the UK since. Until now the only numbers on it were LinkedIn's. This page is what 31 advertisers in Kiin Labs' 1,000-account panel actually paid and got, plus what the format is, the specs, and how we run it for clients at Kiin. Every figure is the median advertiser account unless it says campaign or pooled; ranges are the 25th to 75th percentile; USD; LinkedIn Audience Network excluded.

What LinkedIn CTV is and how it works

A CTV campaign is a video ad set in Campaign Manager on the brand awareness objective with the CTV-only placement selected. The ad is a 6-to-60-second spot (15 and 30 are the norm) that plays full-screen, sound on, non-skippable, in the ad breaks of streaming apps on smart TVs and streaming devices. LinkedIn matches its members to households through its publisher and identity partners, so the targeting is the targeting you already use in the feed: an uploaded company list, job titles, job function, seniority, industry, company size, and country or region. There is no click, no CTA and no landing page.

• Buying: CPM, auction with a manual bid or maximum delivery; the median campaign in the panel ran $75 a day for 40 days on a 120,000-member audience.
• Inventory: Paramount (added 2025), Roku, Samsung TV Plus, LG Channels, Tubi and other publishers through LinkedIn's partners; US first, Canada from 2025, UK from 2026. Innovid and Sprinklr integrations for advertisers who already traffic CTV through them.
• Measurement: impressions, reach and frequency, video starts and quartiles, completions, dwell (seconds of the spot watched), post-view conversions through the Insight Tag, brand lift and site lift studies, and engagement on the targeted companies in the Companies tab.
• What it is not: programmatic CTV bought on household demographics or third-party intent data. The reason to buy CTV through LinkedIn is that the audience is a named B2B list; the price is similar to programmatic ($20 to $45 CPM), the audience is not.

Who is running it: adoption month by month

Thirty-one accounts in a panel of about a thousand: 3% of LinkedIn advertisers, and the ones that do are large. The median CTV account spent $9,912 on the format in the year (middle half $2,643 to $19,801); the top three spent $101,622, $139,273 and $167,698. Spend peaked in Q1 2026 with the first wave of adopters and settled at $35,000 to $50,000 a month over the summer as tests ended and a smaller group kept it on. Twenty-eight of the 31 targeted the US, 19 Canada (usually alongside the US) and 2 the UK, where inventory arrived last.

The benchmarks: cost, completion, frequency, reach

Three things to read from it. The CPM is lower than the feed. The same kinds of accounts pay $36 CPM for a feed impression at the panel median, $65 for a thought leader ad, and $74 to $85 for enterprise-only or US targeting; a CTV impression at $25.76 is a 30-second, full-screen, sound-on, non-skippable view of the same person's household. Completion is not a metric. At 98.7% it says the spot is unskippable, nothing more; judge CTV on reach into the list and what happens to those accounts afterwards. Frequency is low and penetration is low. A median campaign shows the spot twice to 5% of the target audience over 40 days at $75 a day, which is a test, not a campaign; the accounts that kept it on ran $100 to $180 a day.

By market: US, Canada, UK

North America is the market. The two UK accounts ran six campaigns on national audiences of 720,000 to 2.8 million members, which is what UK CTV looks like while inventory is thin: broad targeting to get delivery. We expect the UK to look like Canada within a year.

By audience: lists, cold, retargeting, size and seniority

Fifty-eight percent of CTV campaigns ran on an uploaded list, which is the point of the format, and list campaigns cost the same per impression as cold ($25.30 against $24.60), reach the audience more often (2.00 against 1.62) and hold attention longer (31.6 against 21.0 seconds of the spot). Retargeting CTV, showing a spot to people who already visited the site or engaged with feed ads, costs 43% more per impression ($36.20) and is the smallest use. The one cost lever is audience size: under 50,000 members the CPM nearly doubles to $46.97, the same small-audience premium as the feed, because household matching on a small list leaves the auction with few impressions to sell. Seniority filters look cheaper ($22.18) because the campaigns that set them targeted audiences of 400,000 and up.

Conversions, and what CTV can prove

Eighteen of the 31 accounts recorded post-view conversions: a site conversion tracked by the Insight Tag within the attribution window after a CTV impression, with no click involved. 3,782 in total, 0.10 per 10,000 impressions at the median account and 0.51 at the top quarter; 3,125 of them on list-targeted campaigns against 467 on cold. That is the strongest signal the platform gives that the households it matched belong to the companies you listed. It is not attribution: a post-view conversion says someone at a targeted company converted after a spot aired, not because of it. The measurement stack we use, in order of weight: reach and frequency into the named list; brand lift or site lift if the budget clears LinkedIn's minimum for a study; engagement on the same companies in the Companies tab and in the feed retargeting campaigns; branded search and direct traffic from the target list's domains; then pipeline in the CRM against a holdout of accounts not in the CTV list. The feed campaigns running alongside are what the CTV lift shows up in, so run CTV as the top of a full-funnel structure, never alone.

Specs

Every other format's specs are on the ad specs page. Creative that works on television is not the feed cut: brand in the first two seconds, sound designed for a living room, one message, the company name spoken and shown, no "click below".

Is it worth it, and for whom

Yes, if three things are true. The account spends about $30,000 a month or more on LinkedIn, so CTV at $2,000 to $5,000 a month is a slice rather than the budget. There is a named account list of at least 20,000 to 50,000 members (the under-50,000 CPM penalty is real, and a list of 500 companies with the right titles gets there). And a broadcast-quality video exists or can be made; the thought leader and video-views campaigns usually provide it. Under those conditions CTV buys a full-screen, sound-on impression on the exact list for less than a feed impression on the same list, and the feed campaigns get cheaper on the accounts that saw it, which is the effect we look for in the Companies tab.

No, if the spend is under $30,000 a month (the $2,000 to $5,000 does more in retargeting and thought leader ads); there is no list, because cold CTV on titles reaches 3.7% of the audience at 1.6 frequency and dwells 21 seconds against 31.6 for lists; the buyer is outside North America for now; or anyone expects the CTV line in the report to show leads. It is a reach channel with a good price, and it is measured through everything else.

How Kiin runs LinkedIn CTV

• The same list as the feed. The account list from the ABM campaigns, with titles layered on, 20,000 to 60,000 members. CTV is the top of the structure that the thought leader, retargeting and message ad campaigns sit under.
• $100 to $180 a day, eight to twelve weeks. The $75-a-day, 40-day median in the panel is a test that reaches 5% of the list twice; the accounts that kept it running were at two to three times that. Aim for 20% penetration at a frequency of 3 to 5 across the flight.
• Manual CPM bid at the low end of LinkedIn's range, raised only when delivery stalls; the paid CPM in the panel bears little relation to the bid.
• Two spots, 15 and 30 seconds, rotated; brand in the first two seconds, the company name spoken, a single claim from the data, no CTA.
• Measurement agreed before launch: reach and frequency into the list, the Companies tab engagement level on targeted versus non-targeted accounts, feed CPM and landing page CTR on the same list before and during, brand lift if the flight clears the study minimum, and CRM pipeline against a holdout.
• Exclusions the same as the feed: competitors, agencies, companies under 11 people, existing customers unless it is an expansion play.

How we run it, with the within-account read on what happened in the feed when 12 accounts added CTV, is on the LinkedIn CTV agency page; how it compares with a DSP is in LinkedIn CTV vs programmatic CTV; the five-channel plan is on the paid media page.

Method and citation

Campaigns flagged CTV-only in Kiin Labs' de-identified LinkedIn Ads panel, with delivery between 8 September 2025 and 7 September 2026 and at least 1,000 impressions, 14 currencies converted to USD at September 2026 rates: 118 campaigns, 31 advertiser accounts, $811,149, 26.3 million impressions, 13.4 million unique members reached. Per-account metrics are the median across accounts; per-campaign metrics (frequency, penetration, dwell, audience size, budget, length) are the median across campaigns. Video starts, quartiles and completions are LinkedIn's fields; starts slightly exceed impressions in some campaigns and completion is capped at 100% in the reading. Post-view conversions are LinkedIn's field and depend on each advertiser having the Insight Tag and conversions configured. No cell with fewer than five accounts is shown. Free to cite with a link.