How to Run Ads on LinkedIn

Most of the CEOs I talk to have tried LinkedIn Ads at least once. They boosted a post, or someone on the team spun up a campaign, dropped a few thousand dollars, and quietly switched it off when no leads showed up. And the takeaway is almost always the same: LinkedIn Ads are expensive and they don't work. But the platform is rarely the culprit. The campaign got set up with no clear objective, pointed at the wrong audience, and then left running on autopilot.

I'm Raphael Presberg, Founder and CEO of Moriah, a LinkedIn marketing agency and a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Partner. LinkedIn Ads are one of the three pillars we run for established B2B companies, alongside personal branding and targeted outreach. So the question of how to run ads on LinkedIn lands on my desk pretty much weekly, and the answer is this: the mechanics are simple. The strategy is where campaigns get won or lost. This guide covers both.

What It Means to Run Ads on LinkedIn

Running ads on LinkedIn means using LinkedIn's native advertising platform, called Campaign Manager, to put a paid message in front of a precise professional audience: by job title, seniority, industry, company, or your own contact and account lists. You choose a business objective, define who sees the ad, set a budget, and LinkedIn serves your creative to the people most likely to act on it.

B2B companies pay LinkedIn's premium rates for one reason: targeting. No other channel lets you reach a specific decision-maker, at a specific level, in a specific industry, with this kind of accuracy. You're paying for the audience, not the click. That precision is also why a poorly aimed campaign burns through money so fast, and why a well-built one reaches buyers you simply can't find anywhere else.

Before You Run LinkedIn Ads, Get This Right First

Here's the part most guides skip. LinkedIn Ads rarely generate business on their own. From what I've seen, paid campaigns perform far better when they sit on top of two other things: consistent personal branding content from your executives, and targeted outreach to the accounts you actually care about.

The failure pattern I watch play out over and over is a company running ads into a vacuum. The ad sends someone to a profile with no recent posts and no credibility signals, or to a company page that's been quiet for weeks, and the click goes nowhere. Content published from a personal profile performs roughly 5 to 10 times better than the same content from a company page, so when your leaders are visible and active, your ads land on warmer ground and convert better.

That's why Moriah runs LinkedIn Ads as one focus area out of three, never as a standalone service. Personal branding, targeted outreach, and LinkedIn Ads run together, in parallel, all pointed at one business objective. For anything beyond pure awareness, you need all three working as a single business engine. Ads amplify what the other two pillars build. On their own, they're just spend. So before you pour budget into a campaign, make sure there's a reason for someone to say yes once they click.

How to Run Ads on LinkedIn, Step by Step

Once your foundation is in place, the setup itself is straightforward. Campaign Manager is organized into four levels: Account, then Campaign Groups, then Campaigns, then Ads. Here's the LinkedIn Ads setup process from start to launch.

1. Set Up Your Campaign Manager Account

Create a Campaign Manager account and connect it to your company's LinkedIn Page. You'll need a billing method on file too. And if you plan to track what happens after the click (you should), this is the moment to start thinking about the LinkedIn Insight Tag, covered in step 7.

2. Create a Campaign Group

Campaign groups are containers that hold related campaigns under one theme, budget, and schedule. For a first effort, one campaign group tied to a single business objective keeps things clean. Set a central budget at the group level and let Campaign Manager distribute it across the campaigns inside.

3. Choose Your Objective

Your objective tells LinkedIn who to optimize delivery toward, so pick it based on the outcome you actually want. The options fall into three families:

• Awareness: brand awareness and video views, for getting in front of a market.
• Consideration: website visits, engagement, and video views, for building interest.
• Conversions: lead generation (with native forms), website conversions, and job applicants, for capturing demand.

For most B2B companies chasing qualified pipeline, lead generation or website conversions is the right starting point. Don't pick awareness and then judge it by leads. The campaign will optimize for the wrong thing.

4. Build Your Audience

This is where campaigns are won. Define your audience using professional traits: job title, seniority, function, company name, company size band, industry. Layer a few attributes to sharpen the target, but resist the urge to stack so many that the audience shrinks to nothing and your cost per thousand impressions spikes. You can also bring your own data through Matched Audiences, which I get into in the targeting section below. And turn off audience expansion and the LinkedIn Audience Network for your first campaigns, so you see clean results from the exact audience you chose.

5. Select Your Ad Format

Pick the format that fits your objective and creative:

• Single image ads in the feed: the reliable default for most objectives.
• Video ads: strong for awareness and for explaining a complex offer.
• Carousel and document ads: good for step-by-step value and for lead magnets.
• Message and conversation ads: delivered into the LinkedIn inbox, useful for direct, personal offers.
• Text ads: low-cost, low-commitment placements in the sidebar.

Running lead generation? Pair the format with a native Lead Gen Form. Conversion rates on native forms tend to run far higher than sending people off to a separate landing page, mostly because the fields pre-fill from the member's profile.

6. Set Your Budget, Schedule, and Bidding

Set a daily or lifetime budget and a start and end date. Then choose a bidding strategy:

• Maximum delivery: automated bidding that aims to spend your full budget for the most results. The simplest place to start.
• Cost cap: you set a target cost per result and Campaign Manager works to stay near it.
• Manual bidding: you set the bid yourself, for when you want tight control.

For a first campaign, maximum delivery is a sensible default. Give it enough budget and enough time to exit the learning phase before you pass judgment. Killing ads after three days tells you nothing.

7. Install the Insight Tag and Set Up Conversion Tracking

The LinkedIn Insight Tag is a small piece of JavaScript you drop onto your website once. It lets you track conversions attributed to your campaigns and build retargeting audiences from your site visitors. Without it, you're flying blind past the click. So install it, define the conversions that matter (a demo request, a form submission, a booked call), and connect them to your campaign. That's how you measure cost per lead instead of just cost per click.

8. Launch, Then Read the Right Numbers

Publish your ads and let the campaign run. When you review it, look past the surface metrics. A cost per click that looks steep next to Google is normal on LinkedIn: the audience is pricier and more qualified. What actually matters is cost per qualified lead and what those leads turn into. Give it time, then adjust audience, creative, and bid based on what the data is telling you.

LinkedIn Ads Targeting: Getting the Audience Right

Targeting is the single biggest lever in running LinkedIn Ads, so it earns its own section. You've got two broad approaches, and the strongest campaigns combine them.

Attribute targeting uses LinkedIn's own data: job title, seniority, function, industry, company, and so on. This is how you reach a cold audience that matches your ideal customer profile.

Matched Audiences uses your data, and this is where B2B campaigns get sharp:

• Retargeting: show ads to people who already visited specific pages on your site, using the Insight Tag.
• Contact targeting: upload a secure CSV of email contacts to reach (or exclude) known people.
• Account targeting: upload a list of target companies (up to tens of thousands) and match it against companies on LinkedIn, the backbone of account-based marketing.

A practical starting structure: one campaign on a tight attribute-based audience for net-new reach, and one retargeting campaign for people who already engaged. Warm audiences almost always convert at a lower cost, so make sure retargeting gets its share of the budget.

How Much It Costs to Run LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn is the priciest of the major ad platforms, and it always has been. In B2B, cost per click commonly lands somewhere between $5 and $8 globally, closer to $8 to $10 in the US, with cost per lead often falling between $75 and $400 depending on your offer, your format, and how senior the audience is. Narrow targeting drives the cost per thousand impressions higher, since you're competing for a small, valuable pool.

The right way to think about cost isn't the price of a click. It's the value of a customer. In B2B, where a single account can be worth a great deal, a $200 lead that closes is cheap. Judge LinkedIn Ads on pipeline and revenue, not on whether the clicks come as cheap as some other platform's.

Common Mistakes When Running LinkedIn Ads

• Running ads with no content behind them. The click lands on a quiet profile or page and dies. Personal branding gives the ad somewhere credible to send people.
• Picking the wrong objective. Optimizing for awareness and then expecting leads to roll in.
• Over-narrowing the audience. Stacking so many filters that reach collapses and costs spike.
• Judging too early. Killing campaigns before they've exited the learning phase.
• Skipping the Insight Tag. No conversion tracking means you can measure clicks, but not business.
• Treating ads as the whole strategy. Ads amplify an engine. They aren't the engine on their own.

Why LinkedIn Ads Work Best as Part of a Business Engine

Let me be direct about how we see this at Moriah, because it shapes everything above. Ads are one pillar of three. Personal branding builds the credibility that makes your ads believable. Targeted outreach opens direct conversations with the accounts you most want to land. LinkedIn Ads amplify both, keeping your company in front of the right buyers at scale. When a client's buyers aren't yet active with content, we lean harder on targeted outreach and let ads support it. The mix shifts with the objective, but all three run together.

That combination is the whole point. Almost any business objective, whether it's qualified leads, new partnerships, breaking into a new market, or visibility with investors, has an answer once the right LinkedIn strategy sits behind it. Ads alone rarely get you there. Ads inside a coordinated business engine do.

Moriah runs all three pillars in-house for established B2B companies: strategy, content, outreach, and paid, executed for you rather than handed over as a course or a toolkit. It's a monthly retainer covering the full engine (in the United States, $4,000 per month), with no commitment: no minimum term, no lock-in, cancel anytime. We run it long enough to gather real data and prove results, and most clients stay well past that point.

If your LinkedIn Ads have never quite worked, the fix usually isn't a better ad. It's a better system around it. Book a call and we'll look at your objective and your numbers together.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I run ads on LinkedIn? Create a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account, set up a campaign group, choose a business objective, build your audience by professional traits or Matched Audiences, select an ad format, set your budget and bidding, install the Insight Tag for tracking, and launch. The mechanics take an afternoon. The strategy behind them is what determines results.

Where do I set up LinkedIn Ads? You set up and manage all LinkedIn Ads in Campaign Manager, LinkedIn's native advertising platform, connected to your company's LinkedIn Page. It's organized into four levels: Account, Campaign Groups, Campaigns, and Ads.

How much does it cost to run LinkedIn Ads? In B2B, cost per click commonly runs $5 to $8 globally and $8 to $10 in the US, with cost per lead often between $75 and $400. LinkedIn costs more than other platforms because you're paying for precise access to professional decision-makers.

What is the best objective for LinkedIn Ads? It depends on your goal. For qualified pipeline, lead generation (with native forms) or website conversions usually works best. Pick the objective that matches the outcome you want, since it decides who LinkedIn optimizes delivery toward.

What ad formats can I run on LinkedIn? LinkedIn offers single image, video, carousel, and document ads in the feed, plus message and conversation ads in the inbox, and text ads in the sidebar. Choose the format that fits your objective and creative.

How does LinkedIn Ads targeting work? You can target by professional attributes like job title, seniority, industry, and company, or use Matched Audiences to bring your own data through retargeting, contact lists, and account lists. Combining a cold attribute audience with a warm retargeting audience tends to work best.

What is the LinkedIn Insight Tag? The Insight Tag is a small piece of JavaScript you add to your website once. It turns on conversion tracking and website retargeting, so you can measure the leads and actions your campaigns actually produce instead of just clicks.

How much budget do I need to start? Give a campaign enough budget to exit the learning phase and gather real data before you judge it. A common mistake is spending too little for too short a time, then concluding LinkedIn Ads do not work. Plan to run long enough to see cost per qualified lead, not just cost per click.

Do LinkedIn Ads work on their own? Rarely. Ads perform best when they amplify consistent personal branding and targeted outreach. An ad that sends someone to a quiet profile or page tends to convert poorly, which is exactly why running all three together as one business engine beats ads in isolation.

Should I run LinkedIn Ads myself or hire an agency? You can run basic campaigns in-house, but getting objective, audience, creative, and tracking right (and coordinating ads with content and outreach) is where most of the value actually lives. An agency like Moriah runs LinkedIn Ads as part of a complete engine, executed in-house, so your paid spend pushes toward the same business objective as everything else.