The cheapest LinkedIn ad is also the best one

In today’s Circuit:

🛠️ Operator Tip of the Week
📖 Fibbler's LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks - the numbers behind $200M in spen
📡 Across The Wire
🧪 Worth trying this week

If you're running LinkedIn Ads and measuring success by CTR alone, you're looking at the wrong scoreboard.

Fibbler's data shows Document Ads have a 0.11% CTR (looks dead) but 5.20% engagement - 9x higher than Single Image. The format that looks broken in Campaign Manager might be doing the most work. Measure by the objective, not by the default metric.

LinkedIn is the most expensive place in B2B to buy attention, and everyone already knows it. What Fibbler's latest benchmark shows is that the format you pick moves the bill more than almost anything else you touch.

They pooled more than 1,000 advertisers and over $200 million in spend across roughly four billion impressions, from August 2025 to July 2026, and the spread between ad types is wide enough that two teams with the same budget and the same audience can pay completely different prices for the same click.

Thought Leader Ads posted a median 1.35% click-through rate at $6.95 a click. Single Image Ads, the format most people default to, managed 0.38% and $16.03.

So the same dollar buys you roughly 3.6 times the clicks, and each one costs less than half as much. That gap is big enough to decide whether a campaign works or drains the quarter's budget while looking busy.

A Thought Leader Ad is just a personal post promoted as sponsored content, so your face shows up in the feed where a company logo normally would.

People scroll past brands and stop for people, which is probably most of what's going on here. The ad looks like the stuff they actually came to LinkedIn to read, so it earns the click before it ever registers as an ad.

Single Image at least clears a third of a percent. Everything under it falls off a cliff.

Document Ads land at 0.11% and $15.25 a click, Video at 0.09% and $30.55, Carousel at 0.05% and $28.98, and Event Ads at 0.04% and $28.50.

Plenty of teams run these because LinkedIn's interface nudges them there, and end up paying four or five times as much per click as they would with a promoted post. The format is doing more damage to your CPC than the targeting ever will.

The sticker shock is real. The median CPM across the whole dataset was $61.41, which is a lot to pay for a thousand impressions.

And yet somewhere between 75% and 82% of advertisers beat a 1x return on ad spend, and they managed it across every spend tier, not only the big budgets.

Median influenced ROAS came in around 7x, with pipeline efficiency near 41.5x. So the platform is expensive and it works, as long as you're measuring the pipeline it influences instead of just the cost of a lead.

Judge LinkedIn on CPL alone and you'll switch it off right before it pays you back.

Geography moves the price too. Fibbler puts Australia and New Zealand at a 0.51% click-through rate and $8.51 a click, roughly half what North America costs at $17.80, and with higher click rates on top.

The Nordics come in cheapest on cost per company influenced, around $6.45. So if your ICP lives outside North America, the unit economics are simply better.

Plenty of B2B teams point everything at US targeting by default and pay North American prices without ever checking whether their buyers are somewhere cheaper.

🔗 Fibbler LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks 2026

- Turn last month's best organic post into a Thought Leader Ad and compare its CPC to your current single-image campaign.

- Pull your own CPC by format and see how far your defaults sit from that $6.95 line.

- Add influenced-pipeline tracking before you judge any LinkedIn campaign on cost per lead.

- Pause your lowest-CTR format for two weeks and move that budget to a promoted post.