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Q3 2025 delivered the highest LinkedIn Ads pipeline ROI at 6.01x and the strongest average CTR at 0.96%

Performance measurement


MetricQ1Q2Q3Q4
CTR (%)0.82—0.96—
CPC (USD)10.48—15.72—
ROI (x)2.442.536.012.46

LinkedIn Ads Key Metrics & Benchmarks by Quarter, 2025

Reader Note:
Both halves are a best quarter picked out of roughly twelve in the dataset, which is where a high reading is most likely to be noise. Pipeline return is not revenue: it counts opportunities that HockeyStack's own position-based attribution model assigns to LinkedIn, and the qualification steps behind it, MQL and SQO, run on custom high-intent criteria the report does not publish. So two accounts could buy identically and report different figures. Alongside click-through rate, click price and return, the report gives the quarterly shape of the programme: the budget split 27.5%, 18%, a share higher than Q2, and 31% from Q1 to Q4; MQL efficiency of 27% of spend for 27% of MQLs in Q1, 18% for 30% in Q2, 22% for 22% in Q3 and 31% for 20% in Q4; an SQO conversion cycle lengthening from 24 to 45, 62 and 68 days; and pipeline of $646,667 in February rising to $1.5M by Q3 before slowing in Q4. One caution on the returns: Q1 to Q3 are reported as pipeline ROI and Q4 as revenue ROI, so the four quarters are not one series.
Evidence:
Observed behaviour
Vendor interest:
Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:
Observed data from more than 70 B2B SaaS companies over the past 3 years, ranging from $5M to $1B ARR and $5K to $120K ACV, covering $28M in LinkedIn ad spend.

Good for

Getting a rough orientation, and deciding what to check yourself.

Not for

  • Saying that one thing caused another, or predicting what you would get.
  • This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
  • This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
  • Nobody counted this directly — it's a calculation. The publisher worked it out itself, or took the ad platform's word for what its ads achieved.
  • The source never says how this number was measured.
  • This result turned up while the researchers were searching the data. It has not been tested a second time.
  • The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.

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