How to Lower Your LinkedIn CPC and CPM (Without Killing Lead Quality)
Cheaper clicks are only good news if the same buyers are still seeing your ads. Here's how I bring LinkedIn costs down without paying for it in lead quality.
James Green
11 min read
First, what's normal?
In the UK, an average LinkedIn CPC is £4.40 to £12 and an average CPM is £22 to £35. If you're inside those ranges, your costs aren't broken. They're LinkedIn.
Full figures in the LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks UK 2026 report. For the whole bill (spend, management and creative), see how much LinkedIn Ads cost.
The goal is cheaper qualified leads, not cheaper clicks
The easiest way to lower your CPC is to show your ads to worse people. Broaden the targeting, leave Audience Network on, and the click price drops straight away. So does everything that matters.
I've audited accounts celebrating £3 CPCs while sales chased unqualified leads for months. Every change below is judged by one question: are the same buyers still seeing the ads?
01Switch off Audience Network and Audience Expansion
These are the two settings that most often make LinkedIn look cheap and perform badly. Audience Network shows your ads on third-party apps and websites outside LinkedIn. Audience Expansion widens your targeting beyond the people you chose. In the £96k account I reviewed, 62% of spend had gone to the Audience Network. Of the last 100 or so accounts I've reviewed, more than 70 had it taking half the budget or more. More on these in the hidden LinkedIn traps.
02Start with retargeting audiences
Website visitors, video viewers and people who engaged with your ads already know who you are. They respond better, which makes them the most efficient place to spend first. Give them their own campaign so cold audiences can't swallow the budget. See my LinkedIn retargeting guide.
03Fix your creative to fix your CTR
LinkedIn rewards ads people engage with. A higher click-through rate lowers what you pay per click, so creative is a cost lever, not decoration. The average CTR for Sponsored Content is 0.44% to 0.65%; above 0.8% is good. If you're below average, start with the CTR diagnosis guide, then steal these B2B ad formats.
04Use manual bidding to start
LinkedIn's Maximum Delivery optimises for volume, not value, and its suggested bid is designed to win auctions rather than save you money. I start with manual CPC at around 80% of the suggested bid, watch delivery, and adjust from there.
05Get audience size right
Smaller audiences cost more per click. Bigger ones fill up with people who can't buy. The benchmarks report shows how CPC moves with audience size:
| Audience size | Typical CPC | What's happening |
|---|---|---|
| 2M+ ("Everyone") | £2-4 | Low competition, but full of non-buyers |
| 500K-2M | £4-7 | Moderate competition, mixed quality |
| 100K-500K | £6-10 | Good competition, higher quality |
| 50K-100K (Sweet Spot) | £8-12 | Targeted, engaged buyers |
| <50K (Hyper-targeted) | £10-15+ | Exact buyers, intense competition |
Source: benchmarks report.
06Choose the format for the job
Format changes your click price. Feed formats are cheapest per click; inbox formats cost more but reach people directly. Pick the format for what you need it to do, not for the lowest CPC. Full detail in LinkedIn ad formats ranked.
Text Ads
£3.20
avg CPC
Single Image
£5.80
avg CPC
Carousel
£6.50
avg CPC
Video
£7.20
avg CPC
Document Ads
£8.40
avg CPC
Message Ads
£12.50
avg CPC
Conversation Ads
£14.80
avg CPC
07Test Thought Leader and Document Ads
Boosting posts from a real person's profile tends to get more engagement than company page ads, because people engage with people. Document Ads are underrated for thought leadership content. Both are worth a test alongside your standard feed ads. See how I use Thought Leader Ads.
08Clean up your targeting layers
Every filter you stack (industry, seniority, company size, skills, groups) narrows the pool and pushes up competition for it. Contradictory or overlapping layers can price you out without making the audience any better. My preference for niche B2B: a matched company list with job titles on top, and nothing else unless it earns its place. See the list upload tutorial.
09Plan around timing and seasonality
Auction prices move through the year as other advertisers' budgets come and go. Late-year budget season tends to be busy. Don't panic-cut when prices rise for a few weeks, and don't read a quiet month as a permanent win. Compare like with like.
10Be deliberate about geography
The benchmarks report has UK costs typically 15-25% cheaper than the US, and EMEA CPL around £95 against £180 for North America. Only target countries you can actually sell to. Adding a cheap region just to bring the average down is the same mistake as broadening targeting.
What not to do
- Broaden targeting just to cut CPC. You buy cheaper clicks from people who will never buy.
- Turn Audience Network back on because the CPC looks better.
- Judge a change on CPC alone. Check what happened to lead quality and pipeline.
- Switch to Lead Gen Forms purely for a lower CPL without checking who is filling them in.
- Cut campaigns after a week of high prices. Give changes time to settle.
Campaign Manager checklist
Work through this campaign by campaign:
- 1. Audience Network is off on every campaign
- 2. Audience Expansion is off on every campaign
- 3. Retargeting and company-list audiences have their own campaigns and budget
- 4. Each campaign has at least two live ads, and the weakest has been paused
- 5. Bidding is manual CPC, starting below the suggested bid
- 6. Targeting layers are clean: no overlapping or contradictory filters
- 7. Audience size has been checked, not just accepted
- 8. Format matches the job (feed for reach, Thought Leader and Document for engagement, Message Ads for direct asks)
- 9. Geography only includes places you can sell to
- 10. Results are judged on cost per qualified lead, not CPC
Frequently asked questions
Want someone to find where your money is going?
An ads audit shows which settings, audiences and ads are pushing your costs up. Or I can run it for you.