---
title: "What LinkedIn Ads Cost in 2025: $202 a Lead Across 138 B2B Advertisers"
url: https://metadata.io/resources/blog/what-linkedin-ads-cost
description: "LinkedIn ads cost a median $202 per lead, $63.19 CPM and $9.39 CPC across 138 B2B advertisers in Metadata's 2025 benchmark of $57.6M in ad spend."
source: metadata.io
---

The typical B2B advertiser paid $202 for a LinkedIn lead in 2025. That figure comes from 153 advertisers and $57.6M of measured ad spend, not from a survey or a platform estimate.

## What do LinkedIn ads cost per lead?

**A LinkedIn lead cost $202 for the typical advertiser in 2025, measured across 138 B2B advertisers.** That is a median across advertisers rather than total spend divided by total leads, so a single large account cannot pull it around.

Cost per lead is the number most teams quote, and on its own it is the number most likely to mislead. It says what you paid to get a form filled in. It says nothing about whether that form became a customer. Both are in the table further down.

## What is a good CPM on LinkedIn for B2B?

**LinkedIn ran a $63.19 CPM in 2025, about four times Facebook’s $15.50 and three times Instagram’s $18.25.** A LinkedIn click cost $9.39, against $1.95 on Facebook.

The premium is real and it is large. Whether it is worth paying depends entirely on what happens after the click, which is where most published LinkedIn benchmarks stop.

## Are LinkedIn ads more expensive than Facebook for B2B?

**Per impression and per click, yes. Per customer, the ranking reverses.** LinkedIn cost $63,312 per customer at 0.57x first-year traceable payback, against $58,887 and 0.56x across the whole dataset.

So LinkedIn charged a large premium at the top of the funnel and landed within a rounding error of the dataset average at the bottom. A cost-per-lead dashboard would have told you to defund it.

## What every channel cost in 2025

| Channel | Cost per lead | CPM | CPC | CTR | Advertisers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn | $202 | $63.19 | $9.39 | 0.67% | 138 |
| Facebook | $145 | $15.50 | $1.95 | 0.79% | 71 |
| Instagram | $138 | $18.25 | $2.82 | 0.65% | 49 |
| Google Ads | $524 | $617.91 | $9.76 | 6.33% | 56 |

Metadata 2026 B2B Paid Media Benchmark. Medians across advertisers, 2025 campaigns. Google Ads CPM is high because search impressions are not comparable to social impressions; read its CTR alongside it.

## What a customer cost, and what came back

**Cost per lead cannot tell you where to move budget; cost per customer can.** Only LinkedIn cleared the publication thresholds for pipeline data. The other three channels had too few advertisers with traced revenue, or too much of that revenue sitting with one advertiser, so their numbers are withheld rather than estimated.

| Cut | Cost per customer | First-year traceable payback | Close rate | Advertisers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn | $63,312 | 0.57x | 21.4% | 114 |
| All advertisers with revenue data | $58,887 | 0.56x | — | 127 |
| Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads | withheld | withheld | withheld | — |

Withheld means the cell did not clear the publication gates: at least 8 advertisers, at least 3 closed-won deals, and no single advertiser holding more than 40% of the outcome. A number that fails those tests is one company’s result wearing an industry label.

## How can you lower LinkedIn ad costs?

**Two changes show up as measurable in this dataset.** LinkedIn’s built-in lead forms cost $193 a lead against $346 for landing-page campaigns. Document ads cost $142 a lead against $200 for image and $265 for video.

Neither is a guarantee for your account. Both are cheap to test in a week, and both are changes to where the capture happens rather than to how much you spend.

## How to use these numbers

Compare like with like. These are medians across advertisers for 2025 campaigns, so the honest comparison is your own 2025 median, not last month. If your LinkedIn CPL is above $202, that is a question worth asking, not a verdict — audience, offer and format all move it more than the channel does.

Then ask the question the CPL cannot answer: what did those leads become? The [first-year payback finding](https://metadata.io/benchmark-report-2026/insights/the-payback-floor) puts the whole dataset at 0.56x, which is the bar most plans quietly assume away.

Benchmark context: every figure on this page is drawn from Metadata’s [2026 B2B Paid Media Benchmark](https://metadata.io/benchmark-report-2026), built on $57.6M of 2025 ad spend across 153 B2B advertisers, with every published number gated on a minimum advertiser count and a concentration cap. See also [forms against landing pages](https://metadata.io/benchmark-report-2026/insights/forms-beat-pages) and [how Metadata connects to your CRM](https://metadata.io/platform/integrations).

Related: [what is a good CTR for B2B ads](https://metadata.io/resources/blog/what-is-a-good-ctr-for-b2b-ads) — 0.67% on LinkedIn against 6.33% on Google Ads, and why those two should never be compared.