Running LinkedIn Ads in 2026

Introduction

This session, hosted by Praveen (Factors) with guest Joshua Stout, Founder of Beyond the Funnel, explored how LinkedIn advertising has evolved from its early recruitment-platform roots into today's primary B2B demand-gen channel, and what's actually driving results now that organic traffic, search, and old attribution habits are all being upended by AI. Josh walked through his current full-funnel playbook, a surprising reversal on gating content, the return of true one-to-one ABM, and how he gets clients past last-click attribution.

About Joshua Stout

Joshua Stout is Founder and CEO of Beyond the Funnel, a LinkedIn Ads consultancy for B2B brands, and one of only 80 LinkedIn Certified Marketing Experts worldwide. He's spent over a decade in B2B advertising, starting in recruitment advertising and LinkedIn outreach around 2017–2019, before running the ads department at his first agency during LinkedIn's post-COVID growth surge (700M to 1.3–1.4B users). He went on to oversee roughly 1,000 ad accounts and a 20-person team, grew a second agency's LinkedIn service to $600K in eight months, and launched Beyond the Funnel in September 2025 to run LinkedIn Ads his own way.

Why LinkedIn Is Absorbing More Budget Right Now

• Organic and inbound channels are in flux — Google's core updates (the May 2026 update especially) penalized AI-generated content hard, with some sites seeing 30–40% traffic drops; another major update is expected in August
• Search advertising costs are rising as AI Overviews get pushed above ads, while lead volume from search is declining
• Companies over-indexed on one channel (some at 80–90% inbound dependency) are the most exposed when that channel contracts — there's no fallback motion already built
• Josh's take: treat every platform as a tool in a toolbox, build an omnichannel strategy, and optimize across platforms rather than for single-platform attribution — there's no "set it and forget it" formula anymore, even LinkedIn organic reach has changed dramatically from five years ago

New Ad Formats and Underused Features

• Thought leader ads remain a top format — person-to-person credibility now outperforms company-page messaging
• Creator marketplace / partnerships: request permission to boost posts where others mention your brand — Josh has seen strong results here, more authentic than hiring influencers
• Premium placement: pay-by-impression placement under highly-engaged videos in the creator marketplace — new, high-investment, still untested by Josh's team
• Companies tab: shows organic and paid impressions by company, filterable and usable to build dynamic exclusion lists (e.g., exclude companies already over 2,000 impressions in 30 days) to fix budget concentration — Josh calls it one of the strongest optimization tools on the platform
• Company Intelligence API (Factors is a launch partner): extends the companies tab's paid+organic overlap data beyond LinkedIn's native 90-day window, letting teams retarget companies already engaging organically but not yet advertised to

The Full-Funnel Playbook

Josh's standard framework, built top-down:

• Top of funnel: ICP-driven single-image ads (his favorite format for flexibility and statistical reach), layered with short explainer/benefit videos and thought leader ads to build brand equity and intent
• Middle of funnel: retarget meaningful engagers (97%+ video viewers, CTA clickers — not just general engagement) with blogs, case studies, white papers, and ebooks to build trust and credibility
• Bottom of funnel: direct CTAs, testimonials framed as proof ("here's how we helped others — book a call"), and bold quantified benefits to drive urgency
• On the "stay on-platform vs. drive to website" debate, Josh sides with sending traffic to the website — he hasn't seen strong results keeping engagement purely on-platform, and prefers linking out even from boosted thought leader posts
• He tests both website conversions and on-platform lead gen forms in parallel to balance quality vs. volume, rather than committing to one dogmatically

The Doc Ads Reversal: Why Gating Now Works

• Josh spent years publicly opposing gated content ("give it away freely, get SQLs not MQLs") — doc ads changed his mind
• Testing gated doc ads at the top of funnel (not just mid-funnel, where gating is more accepted) produced better CPLs than mid-funnel gated docs, and traced back to some of the highest revenue/pipeline influence in attribution data
• His theory: gating creates a perceived "transactional value" — people consume gated content more thoroughly because they felt they paid for it with their information
• Caveat: this only works with genuinely high-quality, well-targeted content — not a form slapped on anything
• Now runs doc ads as a standing test across roughly 80% of his accounts

Common Budget-Wasting Mistakes

• Reach math failures: uploading huge account lists (e.g., 10,000 companies) against budgets too small to realistically reach them
• Audience network left on: can waste 70–80% of budget if enabled without a specific strategy
• Geo-targeting defaults: "recent" location targeting (any IP seen in-region within ~6 months) instead of "permanent," leading to irrelevant targeting
• AND/OR logic errors: unchecked filters that balloon audience size into the millions
• CTV on LinkedIn: platform is pushing it hard, but lacks clickable, trackable attribution; Josh has seen CTV work well through programmatic channels (much cheaper — $500 vs. LinkedIn's $20K+ minimums) but hasn't validated it on LinkedIn itself
• Carousel ads: each card click is billed separately; Josh recommends converting carousels into ungated doc ads instead (one CTA at the end)
• Generic creative and native industry filters: LinkedIn's built-in categories are too broad (e.g., no true e-commerce filter); build audience lists externally and upload them instead
• Max delivery bidding misuse: fine for tight timelines or very small/niche audiences, but often spikes CPMs (Josh cites cases hitting $300 CPM) when used broadly — usually needs to shift to manual bidding

One-to-One ABM Is Back

• Broad ABM (uploading a company list) is table stakes now; Josh's best results have come from true 1:1 ABM — the platform's original definition
• Case study: after standard targeting failed to generate engagement, Josh's team picked two specific companies, built account-named messaging, ran dedicated webinars promoted only to each company's employees, then repackaged those webinars as gated on-demand content — results have held for over a year
• AI has made this more feasible (faster creative and landing page production), though budget still splits thin if too many 1:1 campaigns run at once
• Rule of thumb: makes the most sense for high-value deals (Josh cites a client running 41 accounts in a month and booking meetings with 3 — a strong hit rate for 1:1 targeting)

Breaking Free from Last-Click Attribution

• Many clients are still locked into lead-gen-only strategies because executives demand direct, traceable conversions — even when marketers know it undersells LinkedIn's real impact
• Josh's real example: a lead gen doc ad conversion showed as a "view conversion," but the client's CRM logged the same lead as coming from Google — illustrating how last-click hides the actual multi-touch journey
• Lift analysis: split target accounts into "well-exposed to LinkedIn" vs. "not exposed," then compare downstream conversion rates (SDR call-to-meeting rate, funnel velocity) — consistently shows a positive lift for exposed accounts
• Additional signals recommended: branded search lift, high-intent keyword lift, before/after baseline comparisons
• Sets up multiple LinkedIn conversion windows in parallel: standard last-touch (30-day click/7-day view), an each-touch view, and an extended 90-day click/view window to better match long B2B buying cycles
• Praveen's framing for clients: show the CRO what even a modest lift in SDR conversion rate (e.g., 5% to 10%) is worth — that's the ROI case for LinkedIn spend

Audience Q&A Highlights

• Gift cards / incentivized conversions: produce noticeably more leads, but Josh has no reliable data showing they close at a higher rate than organic demo requests; works best paired with a strong closer and high-ACV offers ($50–100K+), typically via conversation ads rather than single-image ads (to avoid public ad-library clickbait)
• A/B testing strategy: launch 5 distinct creative concepts at once (varying format, length, and pain-point framing), let each run for a few weeks with roughly $100/ad spend to reach statistical significance, then narrow to test image vs. copy, then demographics — building a "hero campaign" around the highest-performing segment. Treat this as a continuously repeated cycle, not a one-time optimization

Conclusion

Josh and Praveen closed on a consistent theme: there's no fixed formula left in LinkedIn advertising — what worked last year (all-gated or all-open content, single-channel attribution, generic targeting) is already shifting. The through-line for teams at any budget level: diversify away from single-channel dependency, build a real full-funnel structure instead of funnel-stage exclusion, test gating rather than assuming it, invest in genuine 1:1 ABM for high-value accounts, and measure impact with lift analysis and layered attribution windows instead of last-click alone.