How much do LinkedIn ads cost in Australia?

What LinkedIn ads actually cost

How much do LinkedIn ads cost? More per click than Google, Meta, TikTok or anything else you are likely to run, and that is deliberate rather than accidental. You are not really buying a click on LinkedIn. You are buying the right to put something in front of a specific job title, at a specific company size, in a specific industry, and that filter is the actual product.

Any article that hands you one average CPC is quoting somebody else’s campaigns back at you. Your cost depends on the country, the seniority, the industry, the ad format and how many other advertisers want the same small pool of people. A finance director in Sydney is not priced like a warehouse supervisor in Toowoomba.

So the useful version of this question is not "what does a click cost". It is "what does a customer cost, and can I afford that". Everything below is how to work that out with your own numbers instead of somebody else’s.

LinkedIn costs more than you want it to, and possibly less than a customer is worth to you. Only the second half of that sentence is under your control.

CPC, CPM and cost per lead answer different questions

Four numbers get mixed up in this conversation, and only one of them pays wages.

• CPC (cost per click). What you pay when someone clicks. Handy for comparing platforms, close to useless on its own, because a cheap click on the wrong person is still money gone.
• CPM (cost per thousand impressions). What you pay to be seen. This is the honest bid type when you want a defined audience to know you exist, rather than to fill in a form today.
• Cost per lead. What you pay for an actual enquiry. This is the first number that means anything commercially, and it is a result rather than a setting. You do not choose it. Your audience, offer and landing page decide it.
• Cost per customer. Cost per lead divided by your close rate. The only figure that tells you whether the channel is a business decision or an expensive hobby.

LinkedIn also bills per send on its message formats, where you pay for a delivered message rather than a click. Different mechanic, same rule: judge it on what came out the other end, not on what it cost to get in.

The classic trap is comparing LinkedIn’s CPC to Meta’s and concluding LinkedIn is expensive. It is expensive. It is also selling a different thing. We run the same numbers from the other direction in how much Facebook ads cost, and the short version is that cheap traffic and qualified traffic are rarely the same traffic.

Why LinkedIn’s cost floor sits so high

Four forces hold LinkedIn prices up, and none of them are going away.

• The inventory is small. Nobody scrolls LinkedIn the way they scroll Instagram. Fewer sessions means fewer impressions, and more competition for each one.
• Everyone bidding is B2B. The auction is full of software companies, consultancies, recruiters and universities, all with deal values in the thousands or tens of thousands. They can afford a lot per click, and your bid sits next to theirs.
• The targeting data is unusually good. Job title, seniority, function, company size and industry come from profiles people maintain themselves for professional reasons, which is why LinkedIn’s ad platform offers precision the other networks only approximate.
• Narrow audiences bid against themselves. The tighter you target, the smaller the pool, and the more you pay to reach it repeatedly.

That last point catches people out. Narrowing the audience feels like a saving, because you are showing ads to fewer people. In practice it usually pushes your CPM up, because you are competing hard inside a small pool and showing the same person the same ad over and over.

What a realistic minimum budget looks like

LinkedIn’s published floor is low. The LinkedIn Marketing Solutions help center puts the minimum at around $10 a day per campaign, which sounds encouraging right up until you do the division. A $10 daily minimum and a viable budget are not the same number, and LinkedIn is under no obligation to mention the difference.

Run the arithmetic instead. Take a planning assumption of a few hundred dollars per enquiry, then check it against the forecast Campaign Manager gives you for your real audience. At that rate, $1,000 a month buys two or three leads. Two or three leads is not a data set. You cannot tell a good month from a bad one, you cannot judge creative, and you certainly cannot judge the channel.

A budget that can teach you something usually starts near $3,000 to $5,000 a month and holds for at least three months, because B2B sales cycles mean month one produces conversations and month three produces the answer. Call it $10,000 to $15,000 to find out whether LinkedIn works for you. If that number makes you wince, that is genuinely useful information, and noticing it now is free.

More budget is not a strategy. It only makes the current strategy louder. The reason to commit for three months is not that bigger is better, it is that you need enough leads to separate signal from noise. After that, spend follows evidence. We set the whole method out in how to set a PPC budget.

Two Australian details to sort before the first dollar. Your ad account currency is locked in when the account is created, so choose AUD unless you want an exchange rate applied to every invoice. And check how GST is handled on your billing, because it depends on the entity invoicing you and whether you have supplied a valid ABN. It is the same question we work through in do Facebook ads have GST.

The deal size where the math stops working

This is the part most people skip, and it decides everything. LinkedIn has a floor below which the math simply does not clear, and no amount of creative testing moves it.

Work backwards. Say an enquiry costs you $300, and one in ten enquiries becomes a customer. Both are placeholders until you pull your own out of the CRM. That is $3,000 of ad spend per customer, before you have paid a single person to sell or deliver anything.

So the question is blunt: is a new customer worth more than $3,000 in gross profit to you, across the life of the relationship? Not revenue. Gross profit, after the cost of delivering the work.

Do not run LinkedIn ads if any two of these describe you:

• Gross profit per customer under about $3,000. The numbers above stop clearing, and they get considerably worse if your close rate is one in twenty rather than one in ten.
• One-off jobs with no repeat work. Lifetime value is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that calculation. Without a lifetime, all you have is the first sale.
• A buyer you cannot describe by job title. You are paying a premium for professional targeting. If your customer is "anyone with a leaking roof", you are buying a filter you have no use for.
• No follow-up inside a day. Expensive leads go cold at exactly the same speed as cheap ones, which is the most costly way to learn that lesson.
• Revenue needed this month. LinkedIn builds pipeline. Search captures people already looking. If cash is the constraint, search is the honest recommendation.

If that is you, put the money into search, or into the website and the follow-up process that will have to work regardless of which channel you eventually run. Nothing about LinkedIn gets cheaper while you wait, but a fixed sales process makes every future dollar go further.

How to get your own number in an afternoon

Every assumption above is a placeholder for one of your own figures. Replacing them takes about two hours.

1. 1Build the audience in Campaign Manager without launching it. LinkedIn shows you the forecast audience size and a suggested bid range before you spend anything. That range is your real starting cost, not an average from a blog post.
2. 2Get your close rate from the CRM, not from memory. Enquiries in, customers out, over the last twelve months. If the CRM cannot answer that, fix it first, because you are about to buy expensive leads you have no way to grade.
3. 3Work out gross profit per customer, repeat work included. Revenue minus the cost of delivering it. This is the ceiling every other number has to fit under.
4. 4Do the division. Suggested cost per click, multiplied by the clicks it takes to get one enquiry, divided by your close rate. Comfortably under your gross profit per customer means you have a channel. Line ball means you have a project. Over means you have your answer.

Then decide whether you want to run it yourself. LinkedIn punishes part-time attention more than most platforms, because the feedback loop is slow and the tuition is charged at LinkedIn prices. By the time a weekly check-in spots a campaign drifting, you have already paid for the lesson.

That is the work our B2B paid ads service is built around: the arithmetic first, the advertising second. If your numbers clear and you still want the wider argument before committing, we take it apart in are LinkedIn ads worth it.

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