LinkedIn Lead Generation Cost USA and UK 2019 [REPORT]

LinkedIn provides you with better quality leads, precisely targeted leads. For B2B deals, especially when you get high lifetime customer value, it works like magic.  In comparison with Facebook, the cost for the LinkedIn lead generation is 5x maybe 10X more expensive. You will need at least 2000-5000$ just for testing, so you can find out which offers work best for your business type.

Before we start, I want to explain a few terminologies I will use, as you will have to understand them to get value from this short report.

ROAS: Return on advertising spend.
ROI: Return on overall spend.
LTV/LCV: In marketing, customer lifetime value (CLV or often CLTV), lifetime customer value (LCV), or lifetime value (LTV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.

Is LinkedIn Advertising Worth It?

To start with, you need to ask yourself the following question: What is the lifetime value of your client? Let’s take one year, for example.

If it’s over $2000 per year, you must get good ROI over the years using LinkedIn advertising.

LinkedIn Lead Generation Cost USA and the UK – REPORT

The cost per lead depends on the offer, bid, creativity, and targeting. The minimum price per click on LinkedIn for the USA and the UK is between $4-5.

I tested many types of offers; the minimum cost per lead I was getting was $9-13, which is good. This is the record/performance an advertising professional can get in the UK or US on the LinkedIn market.

The worst cost per lead I was getting was $111! If you are closing contracts over $20.000, or contracts with reasonable profit margins, then it’s okay, but doing different testings and optimization I managed to reduce it.  If your LTV is small, here are some suggestions on how significantly reduce cost per lead.

LinkedIn Lead Generation Cost Optimization Best Practices

When it comes to LinkedIn Lead Generation Cost Optimization, I would suggest doing the following:

Test your targeting:

Two general target mixed options work well for any niche. The first is to target groups and the second is to focus on the industry.

These options look like this:
1. The first is to target by job seniority in combination with the company’s industry.

2. The second is to target by job seniority in combination with the group they are a member of.

Here, for example, I was targeting jewelry business owners. The second option (the group one), was providing me with much cheaper leads in LinkedIn than targeting by industry (the first option).

Test your creative: 

Video vs. Photo 

I have found running photo ads on LinkedIn for different niches in general drives cheaper cost per lead.

However, I have also seen video ads outperforming image ads in some cases. So, try to test both and see which one brings better leads.

Usually, when I’m testing, first I start checking which image gives better CTR, then I pick up the winning image and start testing long copy vs. a short text.

When it comes to video, I test three different video types – short 15sec, long 1-2min, and 30-35sec.

Long text vs. Short Text Offer

After testing with video and images, we can find the winners. Now, it’s time to take those winners and check long copy vs. a short text.

My final conclusion is that that short copy outperforms long copy. But give it a try yourself, as you never know what will work best for you.

Test different LinkedIn advertising objectives:

For instance, you may test video views vs. website visits vs. engagement to see which ones bring you better cost per lead. Of course, for that, you need to have the right landing page.

Testing lead generation form [inside LinkedIn] vs. website conversion [having a landing page]

For me, as a digital marketing agency searching for leads, lead generation objective inside LinkedIn works better than the other options.

Test Different Formats: 

Testing different formats with different objectives is also a way of improving the performance of your LinkedIn advertising.

Single image ad, carousel, and video ad formats are most important to try and test in the first place.

In conclusion:

If you don’t have a budget for testing to play with LinkedIn ads, stick to a lead generation objective with an image ad format, as it works flawlessly for service businesses. For an e-commerce business, stick with a website conversion objective and carousel ad format + retargeting campaign with the same objective and format. Don’t forget that digital marketing is changing, and now, upfront ROI/ROAS is not a focus, as the focus is more on LTV (lifetime customer value) and on how to sell more products or services to the current customer base. Of course, if you don’t have this customer base yet, you can extract some strategies to use from the case study above:

Read another case study about Luxury Jewelry Marketing 1500% ROI from Facebook Advertising [Case Study]