2026 LinkedIn Ads B2B Benchmarks Report (Dreamdata)

Summary:

This report discusses how LinkedIn ads perform in B2B marketing, especially compared with Google Search and Meta, and how long B2B buying journeys really are.

It was published by Dreamdata, a company that sells a B2B attribution and activation platform. That commercial angle matters because the report is built from Dreamdata customer data and many findings support better attribution and more use of LinkedIn. The main goal is to show marketers what “good” looks like for LinkedIn budgets, returns, and journey influence.

Dreamdata used aggregated campaign and journey data from thousands of B2B customers, covering more than 66 million sessions and more than 3.5 million customer journeys.

It says it normalized data across accounts, used medians and quartiles to reduce the effect of outliers, included only accounts with a minimum spend, and calculated ROAS on closed-won deals over a 12-month period with its own data-driven attribution model. It also says impressions were excluded from that ROAS model.

Key insights:
• LinkedIn took 41% of paid social budget among Dreamdata customers and was the single largest named ad channel in the report.

• Google’s wider network still got more total spend when grouped together.

• LinkedIn was reported to have the highest ROAS at 121%, ahead of Google Search at 67% and Meta at 51%.

• LinkedIn also showed a big drop in cost per company influenced, from €154 to €70.11, which Dreamdata says reflects cheaper company-level influence.

Margin notes:
This is a vendor report from a company selling exactly the kind of attribution and LinkedIn tooling the report argues for, so vendor interest is high. The sample is only Dreamdata customers who agreed to benchmark use, not the full B2B market, which likely biases results toward firms already investing in attribution and LinkedIn. Some year labels are a little confusing because the report is titled 2026 but much of the comparison is between 2024 and 2025 data.

A major methodology change also matters: Dreamdata says its new IP-to-company engine identifies up to 15 times more companies, and LinkedIn’s Company Intelligence API added more company-level signals. That means some improvements may reflect better measurement, not only better marketing performance.

The report also mixes Dreamdata results with LinkedIn internal studies and LinkedIn partner tests, so not every number comes from the same method.