In most accounts we're running, costs are rising. We're seeing it in LinkedIn, but not only LinkedIn, and 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, and I think that is a good correction. 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.
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.
A rising CPM can mean the targeting got tighter
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. Sometimes a higher CPM is just a sign that you are getting more specific, and 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.
The easy efficiency is gone
The bigger issue is that most of the easy efficiency is gone. Cheap clicks are harder to find, and loose targeting is more expensive to carry. Weak creative gets exposed faster. And hiding behind poor measurement does not work as well as it did.
So the job now is to work the levers we still control: better segmentation and exclusions, creative that's actually relevant to whoever is seeing it, landing pages strong enough to justify the click, and tighter feedback loops with sales - all of it pointed at what becomes qualified pipeline rather than what becomes a lead.
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 finished the year at over twice where it started and MQLs tripled, despite B2B CPMs rising consistently.
Paid media is less forgiving now
Paid media is becoming less forgiving of sloppy decisions. The teams that do well will be the ones making better trade-offs with the levers they still have, and they will not necessarily be the ones with the cheapest clicks.
