LinkedIn Ads Budget Calculator

It depends on three things: how big your ICP is, how much of it you want to reach, and how often. The calculator prices all three, then adds up what each campaign type costs to deliver its share. Set your ICP size and goal, adjust the campaign lines, and the total is your monthly media budget.

It varies far more than most people expect, and the campaign objective drives most of it. Engagement-objective thought leadership sits at the expensive end. Website-visit campaigns against a tight account list sit at the cheap end, and the gap between them is a multiple, not a few percent. The numbers in the calculator assume Manual Bidding, which is how we run accounts. Maximum Delivery hands price control back to the auction and normally clears higher. Pull your own last 90 days per campaign group and use those numbers: geography, seniority and audience size all move the price.

Because warm audiences are small. Fewer people means a thinner auction and a higher clearing price, so retargeting often costs more per impression than a well-targeted cold campaign. It earns its place by adding frequency to people you have already reached, not by being cheap.

Across all campaigns combined we target roughly 60% audience penetration at around 8 times frequency per month. That is an account-level goal, not a per-line one. No single campaign has to hit it, the combination does. Do not aim for 100%: a large share of any ICP is simply not active on the platform in a given month, and LinkedIn can only serve people it can actually deliver an impression to. The last slice of an audience is always the most expensive, which is why 60% is a realistic target and 100% is not.

Because cold audiences overlap. Two cold lines at 20% and 55% reach do not give you 75% of your ICP, they hit some of the same people. The calculator combines them as independent overlapping audiences, which lands at 64%. Retargeting is measured against a different base: its reach is a share of the people your cold lines already reached, not of the whole ICP. So 90% on a retargeting line means 90% of the people you reached, and the row shows what that works out to against the ICP.

Frequency is delivered in impressions, not euros. An equal split of impressions across an expensive and a cheap campaign type produces a wildly unequal split of budget. Planning in budget shares hides that. Planning in impressions shows it.

Usually because the current plan is not reaching the ICP at a meaningful frequency, it is reaching a fraction of it. This prices saturation. If the total looks impossible, the honest options are a smaller ICP, a lower frequency goal, or a cheaper campaign mix, not a smaller budget against the same ambition.

Yes. That is the version we build for clients, with real CPMs, reach and pipeline influence per campaign group instead of benchmarks. Get in touch and we will run it against your own account.