Is anyone actually making LinkedIn Ads profitable?

Worth checking one setup detail before you conclude the platform is too expensive, because it can be moving your cost per lead by a factor of three or more. Native Lead Gen Forms convert at roughly 6 percent on LinkedIn against about 1 to 3 percent for traffic sent to an external landing page, so if you are running clicks off platform you are paying LinkedIn's CPC and then discarding most of the clicks at the form. Same spend, same targeting, very different CPL. For context the benchmarks sit near $5.50 to $8 CPC for most B2B and $75 to $150 CPL, climbing hard for tech, finance and C-suite targeting. Where the thread is right is the ticket size arithmetic: at $100 a lead you need your close rate and deal value to carry it, and for low ticket offers no amount of optimisation fixes that. But test native forms first, because gating a whitepaper or webinar behind one is the single biggest CPL lever on that platform and it costs nothing to try.

GlitchyMoose said:

Hi guys,

I recently started testing LinkedIn Ads for B2B leads, but CPC feels really expensive compared to other platforms. I’m getting some leads, but the cost per lead is hard to justify for a small business.

For people running LinkedIn Ads, is it actually worth it for smaller budgets or better to focus on other PPC platforms? Any tips?

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I think LinkedIn works better for B2B services where one customer is worth more. For cheaper products, other platforms may give better results.