Why LinkedIn Image and Text Ads Beat Video for B2B (and CPM Is Misleading You)

Most B2B teams I've audited in the last twelve months are over-allocating to LinkedIn video, and the cause is almost always the same: the campaign manager dashboard tells them video is the cheapest format on the platform. It is, on the one metric they're looking at. On the metrics that actually pay back, it's the worst sponsored format on LinkedIn by a margin most marketers haven't seen properly quantified.

The 2026 ZenABM LinkedIn ABM Benchmarks Report (211 companies, 2,828 ads, $5.5M of spend connected to CRM pipeline) is the most useful public dataset I've come across on this. The numbers below are from there, and the picture they draw is uncomfortable for anyone whose plan leans on video.

The CPM trap

Median CPMs by format in the 2026 dataset: text ads around $2, video $38.94, carousel $45.28, single image $59.15. Read in isolation, video looks like the smart awareness buy: cheaper impressions, professional environment, scrollable feed. The problem is what gets counted as an impression.

LinkedIn video auto-plays in the feed, which means an impression is registered while a member is still mid-scroll. Single image and carousel ads need the user to actually stop scrolling for the impression to count, which is a much higher attention bar. Once you account for that, the apparent CPM advantage of video mostly evaporates.

The metric that matters: cost per click

Median CTR by format: Thought Leader Ads (TLAs) 2.68%, single image 0.42%, carousel 0.32%, video 0.24%. Single image clicks at almost double the rate of video. TLAs click at more than eleven times the rate of video.

That maps to CPC like this. Single image: $13.23. Video: $15.61. Thought Leader Ads: $2.29. For every $1,000 of spend, you get roughly 71 site visits from single image, 62 from video, and 327 from TLAs. The dataset's "efficiency score" (cost per meaningful outcome) lands at 1.5/10 for video, 3.2/10 for single image and 9.5/10 for TLAs. Video sits at the bottom of every cut of the data I've looked at.

Why Thought Leader Ads are the unlock most teams skip

TLAs are sponsored versions of organic posts written by named employees of the company. They look like the rest of the feed because they are the rest of the feed, just paid. The CTR and CPC reflect that: members engage with them at near-organic rates while the brand pays at scale.

The friction is real. You need an employee willing to publish in their own voice. You need approvals that aren't designed for native posting. You can't recycle a stock-image campaign as a TLA. That friction is exactly why most teams stop at "we tried it" and keep pouring budget into video. The dataset shows the average B2B team allocates around 9% of LinkedIn spend to TLAs, against 31% to video. Inverting those two numbers is the single biggest reallocation opportunity I've seen in B2B paid social this year.

What text ads are actually for

Text ads sit at roughly $2 CPM, the cheapest format on the platform by a long way. Their CTR is close to zero, so they're useless as a click-driver. What they're good for is cheap presence: layered on top of an image or TLA campaign targeting the same audience, they buy you near-free additional impressions in the right-rail among a buying committee you've already paid to identify. They shouldn't be a primary format, but they're cheap enough that ignoring them entirely also leaves money on the table.

Where video still earns its place

Three cases. Top-of-funnel awareness for a large defined audience where the creative depends on motion (a product demo, a customer testimonial, an event teaser). Brand Lift Studies, where you're measuring recall not pipeline and the sample-size minimums favour cheap impressions. And category education in markets where the buyer needs a 15-second narrative to grasp the category at all.

Outside those cases, video probably doesn't deserve to be a default. The 31% budget share it currently gets in the dataset has more to do with how the dashboard reads at first glance than with how it performs once joined to pipeline.

A reallocation that usually works

For the last few B2B SaaS clients I've worked with, the rough shape that came out of the audit was: single image down to 35-40% (still the main workhorse), carousel up to 15-20% (consistently underused), TLAs up to 25-30% (the real unlock), video down to 15-20% (kept for the cases above), text ads at 5-10% as a cheap presence layer. None of those numbers are religious. The point is that "video and single image" should not be 60% of any thoughtful B2B LinkedIn plan in 2026.

The honest test

Pull last quarter's LinkedIn report. Add one column: cost per influenced opportunity, by ad ID, joined to your CRM. Sort. In every account I've audited recently, the format with the lowest reported CPM has not been the format with the lowest cost per pipeline, and video has consistently been near the bottom of that ranking. That's usually where the easiest reallocation in the LinkedIn plan is sitting.