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Engagement, ads and pipeline · Guide · 14 min read

How to Run LinkedIn Ads: A Founder's Guide

By Zubair & Noman · Updated

Learning how to run LinkedIn ads as a founder comes down to five decisions: which Company Page and ad account to use, which objective to pick, which audience to target, which format to run, and how much to spend. LinkedIn's minimums are low, a $10 daily budget and an audience of at least 300 members, so the hard part is choosing what to promote. The lowest-risk choice is a post that already did well organically, run as a Thought Leader Ad or a boost.

We checked every product detail below on LinkedIn's own Marketing Solutions and Help pages on 7 October 2026, and each source is listed at the end. Ad prices come from two dated third-party benchmark write-ups, because the LinkedIn pages we checked don't publish typical prices. Our own ad management fee appears once, near the end.

Key takeaways

  • You need a LinkedIn Company Page associated with an ad account. The currency and the Page can't be changed once the account exists.
  • LinkedIn's minimums are $10 a day for any format and $100 for a new campaign's lifetime budget. The minimum audience is 300 members, and LinkedIn suggests at least 50,000.
  • Thought Leader Ads let a Company Page sponsor a founder's public post after the founder approves it. They support the brand awareness, engagement and video views objectives, not lead generation.
  • LinkedIn's own advice is to promote a post that "received higher than average engagement", with more than $25 a day.
  • Third-party benchmarks from mid-2026 put Sponsored Content at about $5 to $15 a click. Treat that as a planning range, not a quote.

Should a founder run LinkedIn ads at all?

Yes, once you have posts worth promoting and somewhere useful to send people. Before that, the money is better spent on the posts.

Ads make sense when you can name your buyers by title and company type, when you've posted long enough to know which of your posts get replies from them, and when your profile, landing page or booking page can handle the attention you buy. Paid also moves faster than organic, which is the honest case for it. The honest case against is that a promoted post still has to be worth reading. If it isn't, you've paid to show it to more people.

If you haven't built that organic base yet, start with LinkedIn ghostwriting or your own posting rhythm and come back to ads in a few months. How paid sits next to content-led and outreach-led approaches is covered in our guide to inbound vs outbound LinkedIn lead generation.

What do you need before you run LinkedIn ads?

Four things, and the first catches many founders out.

  • A LinkedIn Company Page. LinkedIn's Help page says: "You must associate a LinkedIn Page with your ad account to create ads or utilize all features in Campaign Manager." If you don't have a Page, you can create one during setup. How a Page and your own profile divide the work is in company page vs founder profile.
  • An ad account. From LinkedIn, choose For Business, then Advertise. You'll review the account name, Page and currency, agree to the LinkedIn Ads Agreement and Advertising Guidelines, and create the account. You're granted account manager and billing admin access. "The currency and LinkedIn Page can't be changed once the account is created", so choose both carefully.
  • The right Page role for Thought Leader Ads. You need super admin, content admin or Sponsored Content poster access on the Page.
  • The LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website. LinkedIn describes it as lightweight JavaScript that enables conversion tracking, website retargeting and audience insights. Install it before your first campaign if you plan to retarget visitors, because a tag can only record visits that happen after it goes on the site. That last point is our inference from how tags work, not a LinkedIn statement.

How to run LinkedIn ads in six steps

LinkedIn's own guide lists six steps: choose a marketing objective, select audience targeting criteria, choose an ad format, set budget and schedule, set up ad creative, and measure and optimise. For a founder promoting a post, they look like this:

  1. Objective. Brand awareness or engagement, for a Thought Leader Ad.
  2. Audience. Your buyers, by job title or function, seniority, company size and location.
  3. Format. A single image or video post, or an article or newsletter.
  4. Budget and schedule. A fixed test, such as 14 days at a daily figure you can afford to lose.
  5. Creative. The post itself. You don't write new ad copy.
  6. Measure. Compare paid and organic results on the same post.

The next sections take the choices in turn.

Which campaign objective should you choose?

Choose the objective that matches the one outcome you want from this campaign. LinkedIn's Help page lists eight objectives in three groups, and the objective decides which formats you can use.

Objective LinkedIn's description Where a founder might use it
Brand awareness "I want more people to know about my brand or organization." Reach for a post with a clear point of view. Thought Leader Ads are available.
Website visits "I want more people to visit a website destination on or off LinkedIn." Sending buyers to a guide or article. Thought Leader Ads aren't available.
Engagement "I want more people to engage with my content posts." Comments and follows on a founder post. Thought Leader Ads are available.
Video views "I want more people to watch my videos." Video only.
Lead generation "I want to collect more quality leads on LinkedIn." Lead Gen Forms, pre-filled with profile data. Not available for Thought Leader Ads.
Website conversions "I want people to complete actions I've defined." A download or booking on your site, tracked with the Insight Tag.
Job applicants "I want qualified candidates to apply with my organization." Hiring.

Talent leads, the eighth objective, is only available to companies with an active LinkedIn Recruiter contract.

Which ad format should a founder use?

Use a Thought Leader Ad when the asset is a founder's post, and standard Sponsored Content when the asset is an offer. LinkedIn's Help page maps each format to the objectives it supports.

Format Objectives it supports Where a founder might use it
Thought leader ads Brand awareness, engagement A founder's public post, shown to a defined buyer audience
Single image, carousel and document ads Brand awareness, website visits, engagement, lead generation, website conversions A guide, a checklist or a lead magnet
Video ads Those five, plus video views A founder talking to camera
Message ads Website visits, lead generation, website conversions A direct invitation to a defined list
Conversation ads Brand awareness, website visits, engagement, lead generation, website conversions A multi-option message sequence
Text ads Brand awareness, website visits, website conversions Small desktop placements

Message and Conversation ads sit in members' inboxes, so use them sparingly and only with an offer that earns the interruption.

How do Thought Leader Ads work?

A Thought Leader Ad sponsors a real post from a person's profile, run from your Company Page, with that person's permission. LinkedIn's Help pages set out the flow.

  1. You need super admin, content admin or Sponsored Content poster access on the Page.
  2. In Campaign Manager, you create an ad set with the audience, placement and budget, then choose brand awareness, engagement or video views.
  3. In the ad, choose Browse existing content, select LinkedIn members, search by name or post URL, and click Request approval.
  4. The author gets an email and chooses to approve or decline. If you run your own Page, the author is you. If a colleague or agency runs ads for you, you stay in control.

The rules matter. The post must be public, and the member's profile must display their full name. Text, single image, video, article, newsletter and LinkedIn Live Event posts are eligible. "Celebrations, documents, polls, and multi-image posts" aren't, and neither are reposts. The ad formats are single image, video, newsletter or article, and event.

The author keeps the controls. They can turn on auto-approval for public posts they write, or turn it off. They can also revoke approval on a single post, and "any posts currently running as thought leader ads for the advertiser will stop running."

On reporting, paid metrics sit in Campaign Manager, and the author can see combined organic and paid metrics on the original post. LinkedIn's page on the format shows customer case studies rather than aggregate benchmarks, so don't plan around a promised uplift.

Why boost posts that already worked organically?

Because a post that already drew replies from your buyers has shown it can hold their attention, so you're paying to extend a result and not to test a draft. LinkedIn gives the same advice: "Look back on your recent posts for one that's received higher than average engagement (likes, shares, comments)."

A simple way to pick:

  1. Look back over your last 60 to 90 days of posts.
  2. Rank them by comments from people in your target market, not by total likes. This is our rule, not LinkedIn's.
  3. Prefer posts that state a point of view over announcements and news that will date.
  4. Check the post is eligible: public, and not a repost, poll, document or multi-image post.
  5. Write down the organic numbers before you start. LinkedIn advises saving the baseline so you can measure the impact.

There are two ways to promote it. A Thought Leader Ad runs through Campaign Manager, so you control the audience, budget and schedule. Boosting is the lighter route. LinkedIn's boosting page lists personal post boosting, "Boost a post you shared from your personal profile without needing a Company Page", alongside Page and event boosting. LinkedIn first tested it with a small group of members. When Social Media Today reported the test on 16 December 2024, LinkedIn described "limited objective and targeting options", so check whether you see the option on your own posts before you plan around it.

Illustrative example, not a result. Say you run a 20-person fintech in Dubai. One post from the last quarter, on why finance directors rarely sign off alone, drew about three times your usual comments, mostly from finance leaders. You run it as a Thought Leader Ad on the engagement objective, aimed at finance directors and CFOs across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, at $50 a day for 14 days. That's $700. At the end, you compare new followers and conversations from target-company people against your organic baseline.

How should you target your audience?

Target by who your buyers are, then check the audience is large enough. Location is required. LinkedIn's targeting options include company (name, size, industry, followers), job experience (title, function, seniority, skills, years of experience), demographics, education, and interests and traits such as member groups.

Matched Audiences let you upload a list of companies or contacts, and retarget people who visited your website or engaged with your ads. Predictive Audiences build an audience of people likely to act like your source data.

On size, LinkedIn states: "The minimum audience size required for an ad set is 300 member accounts, but we suggest a minimum of 50,000 to drive results." Its boosting tips add: "don't make your audience too small."

That matters in the UAE. NapoleonCat counted 9.58 million LinkedIn users in the UAE in September 2026, but a stack of filters such as CFOs, companies of a certain size and one emirate narrows that fast. That's our observation, not a LinkedIn figure. If your audience looks thin, widen the location to the GCC or loosen seniority before you cut the budget.

How much does it cost to run LinkedIn ads?

LinkedIn's minimum is $10 a day for any ad format. The minimum lifetime budget for a new campaign is $100, and once it launches it adjusts to $10 multiplied by the days scheduled. Campaign Manager suggests a default budget of $25 for new advertisers, and for boosts LinkedIn says to "budget more than $25 per day."

LinkedIn's how-to guide names three pricing models: cost per send for messages, cost per click and cost per impression. The pages we checked don't give typical prices, so we used two third-party benchmark write-ups:

  • Factors.ai (24 June 2026): about $5 to $12 per click and $30 to $90 or more per thousand impressions, with senior enterprise audiences towards the top of the range.
  • ClickMinded (updated 8 July 2026): about $6 to $15 per click and $30 to $90 per thousand impressions, with founders, VPs and CFOs usually costing more.

Both are marketing vendors summarising other sources, and neither is specific to the UAE. Prices vary by country, audience size and objective.

Here's what that means for a test. At $50 a day for 14 days, you'd spend $700. At the $30 to $90 range, that buys roughly 7,800 to 23,300 impressions. It's a small audience, and that's the point of a test: you're checking whether the post travels, not buying market share.

How do you know whether it worked?

Judge it against the objective you picked. Reach and impressions for awareness. Comments and follows for engagement. Form completions for lead generation. Conversions you've defined, through the Insight Tag, for website conversions.

For a founder with a long sales cycle, our view is that conversations are the better signal: connection requests from target accounts, replies, and prospects mentioning the post on a call. A 14-day test tells you whether the post travels. It doesn't tell you what revenue follows, which takes months. This takes months, not weeks, and one test shouldn't decide whether ads work for you.

Which mistakes cost founders the most?

  • Promoting a post nobody replied to. The budget buys more of the same silence.
  • Choosing lead generation with only a post. Thought Leader Ads don't support it. Send people to an offer, or use a format that does.
  • Targeting too narrow, or too wide. Below 300 won't run, and a broad net spends money on people who'll never buy.
  • Judging a test by impressions alone. Reach is cheap to buy and tells you little on its own.
  • Choosing the wrong currency. It can't be changed after the account is created.
  • Stopping after a week. Run a test long enough to compare against your baseline.

When should you hand LinkedIn ads to someone else?

Later than you might expect. If your budget is closer to $25 a day than to $3,000 a month, run it yourself for a month. The setup takes an afternoon, and you'll learn which posts and audiences respond.

Consider help when spend runs to a few thousand dollars a month, when you're testing several audiences at once, or when nobody has time to read the results each week.

We manage ads for a fee from 15% of ad spend, with a recommended minimum spend of $3,000 a month. Ad spend is billed to your own LinkedIn ad account. We don't publish ad results on this page. The service is described on our LinkedIn advertising page, and the content that gives ads something to promote is covered under content-led LinkedIn lead generation.

Talk through your first campaign

Thirty minutes is enough to look at your last 90 days of posts, pick the one worth promoting, and decide whether ads make sense yet. If they don't, we'll say so on the call.

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Sources

All pages accessed 7 October 2026. LinkedIn Help pages show relative "last updated" labels, which we note where they appeared.

Questions people ask

ZN

Zubair & Noman

Co-founders of ThoughtLeaders, a LinkedIn thought leadership agency for B2B founders and executives, based in Dubai. About us

Related: LinkedIn Advertising

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