In most accounts we're running, costs are rising.
We're seeing it in LinkedIn, but not only LinkedIn. People we speak to across the industry are saying the same thing across platforms: cost per click, cost per lead, cost per thousand impressions - all of it is getting harder than it used to be.
That cost lands squarely on businesses.
At the same time, measurement has improved. Between better attribution set-ups, cleaner CRM feedback, and things like CAPI or server-side tracking, there is less room to hide behind soft platform numbers than there used to be.
That's a good correction.
The old playbook is harder to defend
For a long time, a lot of paid media reporting leaned too heavily on cheap clicks, low headline CPLs, and volume that looked efficient in-platform but did not always translate into much downstream.
That is getting harder to defend now.
One thing worth saying though: higher CPMs are not automatically a bad sign.
Sometimes they are just a sign that you are getting more specific.
When CPMs go up, it's not always bad
When you chop audiences up properly, remove broad segments, exclude weak-fit traffic, and focus spend on narrower parts of the market, CPMs can go up. You are often bidding in a smaller, more competitive pool.
That can still be the right trade if the people you are reaching are more relevant.
The mistake is treating CPM as a success metric on its own, or assuming every increase means performance has worsened.
Sometimes it means you are honing in.
The easy efficiency is gone
The bigger issue is that most of the easy efficiency is gone.
- Cheap clicks are harder to find.
- Loose targeting is more expensive to carry.
- Weak creative gets exposed faster.
- And poor measurement is less easy to hide behind.
So the job now is less about chasing cheap traffic and more about working the levers we still control.
Better segmentation. Better exclusions. More relevant creative. Stronger landing pages. Tighter feedback loops with sales. And more attention on what becomes qualified pipeline, not just what becomes a lead.
That shift is overdue.
The evidence from our own work
We have seen in our own work that when measurement is trusted and optimisation is tied to downstream quality, performance can still improve even when platform costs rise. In one programme, LinkedIn delivered 60% of qualified leads while spend reduced over time. In another, pipeline more than doubled and MQLs tripled despite B2B CPMs rising consistently.
That is probably the real change.
Paid media is less forgiving now
Paid media is becoming less forgiving of sloppy decisions.
Not impossible. Just less forgiving.
And that means the teams that do well will not necessarily be the ones with the cheapest clicks.
They will be the ones making better trade-offs with the levers they still have.
