Hey friends,
Ad costs are up, lead quality is down, and traditional targeting doesn't work like before.
The average LinkedIn CPM has jumped 84% in the last twelve months, so brands are paying way more to reach their audiences.
The average cost of LinkedIn CPMs have gone from $38 in October 2024 to $70 in October 2025. You can find more LinkedIn Ads data here.
After auditing LinkedIn Ads accounts this year, I understand why.
One client came to us spending $25K/month targeting 1.2 million people.
Their lead quality was garbage, and cost per opportunity was over $3k. They were convinced "LinkedIn Ads don't work for our industry."
LinkedIn works fine. Their targeting was just catastrophically broken and they were spending nearly $10k/month showing ads to people who literally cannot buy from them.
This is the #1 problem I see in B2B paid ads. Not creative. Not offers. Not landing pages.
Targeting.
Here's my recipe to fix it 👇
Most LinkedIn Campaigns Are Built To Fail
LinkedIn ad costs are up YoY, but brands running campaigns with bad or broad targeting are going to be hit worse than others.
When campaigns target broad audiences and non-decision markers, they end up competing in the most saturated ad auctions. Premium industries like finance and tech/SaaS already have higher CPMs baked in, and if you target senior decision-makers, it will add another 20-30% to your costs.
Combine that with terrible targeting practices and you will get:
→ Low engagement from irrelevant audiences. LinkedIn's algorithm penalizes low engagement and will charge you 10-30% higher CPMs
→ Poor ad relevance score. If ads are irrelevant to the audience your target, LinkedIn will give them worse placement and up your prices.
The is why bad targeting tends to create a cycle that looks like this:
1⃣ Wasted impressions on non-buyers. Campaigns target 500k people with loose parameters. Ads get shown to entry-level employees who can't buy, so they don't engage. Even if these people fill out forms, sales will disqualify them instantly because they don't have budget authority.
2⃣ Ads have diluted frequency. LinkedIn marks your ads as low quality, and pumps up CPMs by 10-30%.
3⃣ Budgets get drained. Ads reach even fewer of the right people, so the marketing lead needs to beg the CFO/CEO for more budget to hit goals.
This can sink demand generation campaigns if maximum reach and frequency are the primary goals. When CPMs are $70+ and you waste 20-40% on non-buyers, you literally cannot afford to saturate your market with the remaining budget.
We Built A Formula To Fix Bad Targeting
We’ve pivoted all of our campaigns to use a targeting methodology we call Pinpoint Personas. The concept is simple: it only serve ads to prospects who have real buying potential for a product or service.
Here’s how you can implement it 👇
Step 1: Eliminate Non-Decision Makers
Most B2B purchases require budget authority or significant influence. You need to target seniority levels that have buying power, like directors, managers, VPs, and owners.
To stop wastage on spend, you must also exclude non-decision makers like:
Entry-level employees
Training roles that cannot influence decisions
Senior individual contributors with no budget authority
This alone can cut 20-40% of wasted impressions.
But job titles alone aren't enough. A "Senior Marketing Specialist" is an individual contributor, while "Senior Director" runs a department.
LinkedIn groups them both under "Senior" seniority, which is why you need to target these personas more granularly.
Step 2: Tighten Job Title Targeting
Even when you select exact job titles like "Marketing Director" or "Head of Marketing," LinkedIn will still show your ads to entry-level coordinators, senior individual contributors, and even unpaid interns.
LinkedIn won't let you simultaneously use job title targeting AND exclude specific seniorities. You can do one or the other, but not both.
The workaround we use is to build third-party contact lists using tools like Primer based on exact job titles. We can then import them as contact lists (not job title targeting) and add seniority exclusions on top.
Here’s how it works:
Build an audience filtered by exact job titles. Use Primer or another third-party tool for this, as they are more accurate than LinkedIn's native matching
Upload to Campaign Manager. Pull this data in as as a matched audience
Add seniority filters. Include titles like Director, Manager, VP, CXO, Owner
Add seniority exclusions. Exclude anyone who doesn’t have buying decision power (anyone in non-management roles with keywords like Entry, Training, Unpaid, and Senior)
This is a real campaign of ours that uses third-party data from Primer to tighten up audience targeting.
Now you're not wasting spend on low-intent users with no sway in purchasing decisions. All your budget goes to prospects with real buying potential.
Step 3: Check Your Target Forecasts
Go to LinkedIn Campaign Manager, click on a campaign, and in the “forecasted results” section, segment breakdown by seniority.
This will give you a breakdown of who will actually see your ads.
If you have used the Pinpoint Personas formula correctly, you shouldn’t see any entry-level or irrelevant roles here. You should also check job function and company size to make sure each segment aligns with your ICP to keep CPM costs low.
🗒 A note on LinkedIn Ads Audience Expansion
Audience Expansion will automatically push ads to people outside your targeting criteria who are "more likely to engage." This just gets your ads shown to people who might engage with content but have minimal buying potential.
Always turn Audience Expansion OFF (or tell your campaign manager to do it) when you run LinkedIn campaigns.
The Reality of How LinkedIn Ads Actually Work
Only 5% of your audience is in-market right now. The other 95% are not ready to buy yet, and there's nothing you can do about that.
Your job isn't to convert the 5% on the spot. It is to saturate the 95% so when they move in-market in 6-12 months, you're the first name they think of.
I hate to break it to you, but the best copywriting, creative, and landing page won't convert people who aren't ready to buy. Repeated exposure to a smaller, highly-relevant audience builds mental availability to turn these people into pipeline later.
When we analyzed our closed/won deals at KlientBoost, the first point of contact is almost always a senior leader—VP or above. So targeting managers and coordinators hoping they'll "influence up" is delusional.
"Sub-targets" engage with ads more and are cheaper to reach, so LinkedIn is happy to spend your budget on them. But you're spending money on people who can’t buy your product or service, so it’s a waste.
The exact job function(s) might be different for you based on your data, but the lesson is the same: only target people who have power over the purse strings.
Want to build mindshare with customers and make demand generation a key part of your marketing strategy? Read my breakdown 👇
How To Fix Rising CPM Costs on LinkedIn
Most marketing leaders are not in the weeds of their LinkedIn Ads accounts on a daily basis.
If your agency or in-house marketer is not communicating why CPMs are high (and not bringing solutions to the table to fix rising costs), that’s a problem.
Here’s what I recommend you do next.
If you are: The person responsible for campaigns with rising CPM and CAC 👇
Audit your demand gen campaigns. Go to Campaign Manager → Edit Campaign → Show Segments → Filter by Seniority. What percentage is going to entry-level and non-management roles?
Calculate your wasted spend. If 25% of impressions go to non-buyers and you spend $15K/month, you're burning nearly $4k/month on people who can't buy from you.
Turn off audience expansion. Check every campaign. Set a calendar reminder to check it monthly because LinkedIn will turn it back on and it will blow your budget.
Implement Pinpoint Personas. Rebuild targeting to only include decision-makers. Use job function + job title + seniority together for maximum precision.
Monitor segment breakdown monthly. Set a recurring task to check where impressions are going and adjust targeting if it drifts.
Switch to a 365-day attribution window. This will give you a much more realistic breakdown of the customer journey on LinkedIn.
If you are: Managing a team member or performance marketing agency and your LinkedIn Ads campaigns have rising CPM and CAC 👇
Check your CPM costs. Go to Campaign Manager → Campaign Groups and then look for the Average CPM column. This will tell you the price you are paying for CPMs for different campaigns.
Get data. Send an email or Slack message to whoever is running your campaigns for a detailed breakdown of current audience targeting including seniority filters, seniority exclusions, and audience size.
Implement Pinpoint Personas. Use this guide to ask for campaigns to be rebuilt using the Pinpoint Personas formula. You may have to buy a third-party tool like Primer to implement it, but it will pay for itself in recouped ad spend.
This is your best bet to cut waste in Q4 and run tighter campaigns. More importantly, you will actually reach the right target audience and build future pipeline.
Hope you’ve found this useful. Catch ya in the next one!
🤘
Patrick
P.S. If you're spending more than $10K/month on LinkedIn Ads and have rising CPMs, you're almost certainly wasting a chunk of your budget on non-buyers. I can audit your account and suggest some fixes to get you back on track, hit me up here!