The short answer
Most UK LinkedIn Ads management sits between £1,000 and £4,000 a month for a small B2B firm, and the fee buys three things: someone deciding what to test, someone making the creative that gets tested, and someone reading the numbers well enough to know which change caused what. Anything above that is scale. Anything below it is usually a dashboard checker.
Ad spend is always separate and always paid by you, directly to LinkedIn. If a proposal blurs the two, that is the first question to ask.
The four pricing models, and who they suit
Each model quietly rewards a different behaviour. Worth knowing which behaviour you are paying for.
| Model | Typical UK price | What it rewards |
|---|---|---|
| Flat retainer | £1,000-4,000/mo | Predictability. The fee holds whether you spend £3k or £10k, so nobody is nudging your budget up to earn more. |
| Percentage of spend | 10-20% of spend | Bigger budgets. Fine above £20k a month, poor below it, because 15% of £4k does not pay for anyone senior to think about you. |
| Day rate / consulting | £600-1,200/day | Fixing and teaching. Good for an audit, a rebuild or training an internal marketer. Bad for the weekly grind of iteration. |
| Performance / per lead | Varies wildly | Lead volume, which is rarely what you want in B2B. It pushes cheap form fills and punishes the account-based work that closes deals. |
"Fifteen percent of a four thousand pound budget does not buy anyone senior thinking about your account."
The work that happens before launch
Setup is where most of the outcome is decided, and it is the part clients see least. On a normal onboarding this is two to three weeks of work that produces almost no charts.
- Audience definition. Named company lists rather than filters where we can get them. Job titles, functions and seniorities argued over properly, with exclusions written down.
- Tracking. Insight Tag, conversions, UTM discipline, first-touch capture, CRM fields. Without this you are buying opinions in month three.
- Offer and landing page. What the click lands on, what it asks for, and whether that ask matches how cold the audience is.
- Creative. Enough concepts to actually learn something. Three angles, not one ad in four sizes.
- Account structure. Campaign groups split so budgets do not cannibalise and so each test can be read on its own.
The work that happens every month
This is the part the retainer genuinely funds. A typical month on a £1,725 account looks roughly like this.
Two to four new concepts written, designed and shipped. Fatigue on LinkedIn arrives fast in small audiences, and the same three ads at week ten is the most common reason performance drifts.
Excluding the job titles that keep clicking and never converting, refreshing the account list, trimming locations, rebuilding retargeting segments.
Changes made deliberately, one variable at a time, and spaced so the learning phase is not reset every Tuesday.
Sitting with the actual leads and asking sales which were real. This is the only feedback loop that improves cost per qualified pipeline rather than cost per click.
A report a human wrote, with what changed, what it did, and what happens next. Not a PDF export of Campaign Manager.
Want a straight answer on what your account needs?
Book a 30 minute call. Tell us what you are running now and we will be honest about what it would take.
What a retainer does not cover
Being clear about the edges saves an awkward conversation in month two.
- Ad spend. Yours, paid to LinkedIn, on your card. £3,000 a month is a realistic floor for a UK B2B account that needs to learn anything.
- Video production. Editing existing footage, usually yes. A shoot day, no.
- A whole new website. Landing pages inside the campaign, yes. Rebuilding your site, separate.
- Your sales follow-up. Leads go cold in hours. No amount of media buying fixes a two-day response time.
- Data you cannot supply. If nobody will tell us which leads closed, we are optimising towards form fills and you will get form fills.
Against the cost of a full-time hire
The honest comparison is not agency versus nothing. It is agency versus the person you would otherwise hire.
| Route | Annual cost | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Mid-weight in-house marketer | £38k-48k plus NI, pension, tools, holiday cover | One person's experience, learning LinkedIn on your budget, and they also own the newsletter and the website. |
| Specialist retainer | £15k-25k | Fewer hours, but hours spent on this specific channel by someone who has already made the expensive mistakes elsewhere. |
| DIY, founder-run | £0 in fees | The cheapest option on paper and the most expensive in wasted spend and founder hours. Viable if you enjoy it and protect the time. |
There is a real point where in-house wins. Broadly: consistent spend above roughly £25k a month, several channels running, and enough internal creative to keep them fed. Below that, a full-time hire is an expensive way to buy part-time expertise.
What each tier buys at Evergreen
Our own pricing, so you have something concrete to compare a proposal against.
One channel, tracking sorted, steady iteration. Suits firms testing paid properly for the first time.
The common one. Campaigns plus creative production, account lists, retargeting and monthly lead quality review.
Multi-channel, multi-market, higher creative volume and deeper reporting into the CRM.
Full detail sits on the pricing page. Ad spend is on top in every case.
How to tell whether you are getting your money's worth
Cost per lead is the wrong number to argue about. Cost per qualified pipeline is the one that survives contact with your sales team.
- Count the new creative. If nothing new has shipped in six weeks, you are paying a maintenance fee.
- Ask what was learned, not what was done. A good month produces a sentence like "senior operations people convert at half the cost of directors, so we shifted budget". A weak month produces a list of tasks.
- Check the qualified number. Leads sales agreed were real, divided by spend, tracked over time. Everything else is decoration.
- Look at who is actually on the account. The person on the pitch and the person in Campaign Manager are frequently not the same human.
- Watch how they handle a bad month. Everyone looks competent when the numbers rise.
Read next
Common questions
If you want to know what your account would actually cost to run
- Audience and account list build, with exclusions written down before launch.
- Tracking and attribution wired into your CRM so month three is an argument about facts.
- Two to four new creative concepts shipped every month.
- Monthly lead quality review with your sales team, feeding back into targeting.
- Reporting on cost per qualified pipeline, not cost per form fill.
Starter £1,250/mo, Growth £1,725/mo, Scale £4,025+/mo. Ad spend is paid directly to LinkedIn and sits on top of the retainer. £3,000 a month is our realistic floor for a UK B2B account.