5 B2B LinkedIn Ads tests to run in 2026

LinkedIn made some good moves last year that I’ve seen pay off for our suite of B2B clients. Now that we’re into 2026, with yearly marketing goals in focus, I’ve got some recommendations based on our 2025 learnings for you to test and leverage in the coming months. Those include:

• Video.
• Thought Leader Ads.
• Personalized creative.
• Qualified Lead Optimization.
• Ads duplication.

Let’s put a magnifying glass on each and explain the benefits you stand to gain.

LinkedIn video is a must

Even though Meta and TikTok are more natural fits for video, LinkedIn isn’t immune to the video movement — particularly short-form video (between 7-15 seconds). While having video content is an important line item on your marketing strategy plan, the right content is even more important.

There are plenty of ways to leverage video, including new-ish placements like First Impression Ads. What I recommend is that you try video ads in the feed first to compare performance and engagement with other types of in-feed ads you’ve been running.

The usual caveats apply here:

• Don’t just repurpose videos from other platforms. Beyond having a unique UI that could affect whether video content does or doesn’t stand out, LinkedIn spurs different behavior from its users. Test videos that speak to a professional challenge your brand can help solve, or highlight testimonials, tutorials, or case studies.
• Make sure you have a follow-up plan for users who engage, since one video isn’t going to convert anyone into a customer without lots of nurturing.
• Set a strategy for measuring the value of video engagements, from views to direct responses taking action on prompts like “Comment X for the full guide.”

Dig deeper: LinkedIn study reveals how B2B video ads can gain +129% engagement lift

People respond to people, so try Thought Leader Ads

One of the toughest parts of B2B advertising is engaging potential customers on behalf of a business or corporate entity. Thought Leader Ads (where companies can essentially boost content from employee accounts) have actually been around for a couple of years, but we got serious about testing them in 2025 and earned much higher engagement than with typical ads from business profiles.

TLAs open up some creativity, too. Humor-focused posts, for one, are a lot more natural a fit from a personal account.

As with other boosted content, be judicious about where you invest. If a post already has traction organically (and that’s become harder over the last year as LinkedIn has throttled back reach) and makes a good business case for working with your company, that’s a good candidate for a TLA.

A couple of caveats here, too:

• Make sure any employee whose content you boost has your brand as visible as possible on their profile and has creator mode activated so that users can follow them (which creates long-term value for future posts).
• Per LinkedIn (we’ve also seen this to be true), it’s best to repurpose content originally published fewer than 30 days before you boost the post.

Dig deeper: LinkedIn Ads retargeting: How to reach prospects at every funnel stage

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Personalize your creative

In the latter half of 2025, we ran a significant number of tests with personalized LinkedIn ads across different geos and using different campaign types.

In our global campaigns, we saw an average of >20% improvement in cost per lead, with higher CTR and lower CPC. U.S. campaigns were even more successful. CPLs dropped 33%.

Per our LinkedIn rep, European users in particular value privacy more than U.S. users, so it makes sense that personalization was more effective stateside. Either way, and even in U.S. campaigns, personalized ads began to show signs of fatigue after about a month. 

We responded by combining personalized and non-personalized ads into one campaign to lower the frequency of the personalized ads — and also allow for side-by-side comparisons in the same environment.

Dig deeper: LinkedIn’s new playbook taps creators as the future of B2B marketing

Test Qualified Lead Optimization

If you’ve run Conversions API (CAPI) and enhanced conversions in Meta and Google, you’re familiar with the idea of Qualified Lead Optimization. Essentially, this is LinkedIn’s way of letting you integrate your first-party data into the platform’s back end to help its algorithm find higher-quality users.

Now, this isn’t quite as effective as its Meta and Google counterparts yet, but we’ve seen an increase in the proportion of qualified leads.

To test it:

• Use LinkedIn’s CAPI to sync your CRM data and provide the platform with your definition of a qualified lead. 
• Set up a CAPI conversion event of qualified leads, and make sure those are being relayed to the Campaign Manager.

Use the new ads duplication feature

This one is tactical, but it’s saved me a ton of time in our accounts, so it’s worth making sure you’re aware of it.

In March 2025, LinkedIn launched a few updates to Campaign Manager, including a new feature that makes it easier to duplicate ads across campaigns and accounts. This has greatly improved our time to launch new campaigns – there’s no downside to getting your hands around it.

One more LinkedIn ad format to watch

We haven’t yet aggressively tested LinkedIn’s new CTV capability, but we’re keeping an eye on industry perspectives. This can be a great medium to gauge the messaging and positioning that works for your brand with niche targeting options before rolling out big-screen campaigns.

In the scheme of things, LinkedIn provided some quality-enough updates last year for us to shift more client budget there. As always, you need to carry the right expectations for the platform and make sure you have a strong methodology for measuring its value in your pipeline. 

With those in place, and with a rock-solid understanding of your ICP that lets you fully leverage LinkedIn’s targeting levers, I’m betting LinkedIn can be a pleasantly surprising source of growth in the coming months.

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