Most people run B2B LinkedIn ads for one reason: LinkedIn is the only place that knows what somebody does for a living. Company, industry, job function, seniority. Google does not have that. Meta does not have that. So LinkedIn becomes the default B2B channel almost by elimination, and the account gets built there even after the finance team winces at what the clicks cost.
That assumption has a hole in it. LinkedIn is not the only place you can target by LinkedIn profile data. Microsoft Advertising can too, on Search campaigns, at search prices. Microsoft states this plainly in its own documentation: it is "the only advertising platform (other than LinkedIn) that allows you to target potential customers based on their LinkedIn profile information." You can filter by company, industry, or job function, the same three inputs a LinkedIn campaign manager reaches for first.
That sentence sits in a help article, not a sales pitch, which is probably why so few B2B accounts have acted on it. It is also not the whole story. The feature has a real limitation that changes how you use it, and most of what gets written about it skips that part.
What LinkedIn's cost actually comes from
LinkedIn does not publish a benchmark cost-per-click, and it has not since it removed the old minimum-bid floor on Sponsored Content. Its own pricing help page describes an auction, not a rate card: what you pay is set by "your campaign or ad set's optimization goal and bidding strategy," combined with "an online auction system," and your ad's relevance score moves the price up or down from there (LinkedIn Help, "LinkedIn's advertising cost and pricing"). No dollar figures, no ranges. That is a deliberate design choice on LinkedIn's part, and it means every "$8 to $15 a click" number you have seen floating around a blog post is somebody's account average dressed up as a platform fact. I am not going to repeat one here, because I cannot trace it to LinkedIn.
What I can say, because it follows from how the auction is built rather than from a number I cannot source: you are bidding inside a feed with a fixed amount of professional attention and a lot of well-funded advertisers chasing the same job titles. Scarce inventory plus concentrated demand is a cost driver regardless of what the exact clearing price turns out to be on any given account. I have not measured that. It is reasoning from how the auction works, and I am flagging it as reasoning on purpose.
What Microsoft's version actually covers
Microsoft's LinkedIn profile targeting is not limited to Search. Per the same documentation, it is "available for Search campaigns, Dynamic Search ad campaigns, Microsoft Shopping campaigns, Audience campaigns, and Performance Max campaigns." Company targeting tops out at 1,000 companies per ad group or campaign, and not every company, industry, or job function is in the list yet. It is real, if narrower in spots than LinkedIn's own picklist.
Setup lives at the ad group or campaign level, under targets. You search or browse companies, industries, and job functions, add the ones you want, and set a bid adjustment for each one you select. That last part is the detail that changes everything about how you should think of this feature, and it is the one most third-party writeups leave out.
The part almost nobody mentions: it is bid-only
Here is Microsoft's own language, and it is worth reading twice: "LinkedIn profile targeting will not narrow your ads' audience. For example, by targeting a specific company, you aren't excluding everyone who does not work for that company." Microsoft goes on to name the mechanism directly, comparing it to a targeting method most search advertisers already know: "you can think of LinkedIn profile targeting as 'bid only,' as opposed to 'target and bid'" (Microsoft Advertising Learn, "LinkedIn profile targeting").
Translate that out of platform jargon. On LinkedIn, the targeting decides who is eligible to see the ad at all. On Microsoft, your keywords still decide that. LinkedIn profile targeting only adjusts how much you are willing to pay when the click happens to come from someone whose profile matches what you selected. It rewards a match. It does not gate the room.
That is not a downgrade, but it does change what the feature is for. If your search campaign is already reaching the right query intent and you simply want to bid more aggressively when the searcher looks like your buyer, this does exactly that. If your keyword list is thin or off-target, LinkedIn profile targeting will not rescue it, because it never had the power to filter out the wrong searcher in the first place. The keyword still has to be doing the real work.
Where this is worth building, and where it is not
This is worth setting up when three things are already true: your Search campaign has query intent that maps to a real buying moment, your keyword coverage is already sound, and you have a defined list of target companies, industries, or job functions worth paying more to reach. Under those conditions, LinkedIn profile targeting on Microsoft Ads is close to free upside. There is no extra platform fee for using it, per Microsoft's documentation, and you are already paying search-auction prices rather than LinkedIn's feed prices for every click, matched or not.
It is not worth setting up as a substitute for getting the keyword list right first, and it is not a reason to skip the harder math of whether the channel can afford your sales cycle at all. That affordability question is a separate one and I have written through it in detail in B2B PPC for lead generation. If you are weighing Microsoft against Google more broadly, including where the real cost gap does and does not show up, I ran 90 days of matched account data on that comparison in Microsoft Ads vs. Google Ads.
The actual takeaway
LinkedIn's targeting was never the scarce resource. The data behind it is licensed to Microsoft too, and Microsoft states that plainly in its own documentation. What is scarce is a search account built well enough to make that data worth using: intent-matched keywords doing the real filtering, and a bid adjustment doing what it is actually built to do, which is pay more for the clicks worth more, not decide who gets in the door. Most B2B teams never learn Microsoft carries this data at all, and the ones who do usually treat it as a discount LinkedIn rather than the different mechanism it actually is. Get that distinction wrong and you will wonder why a "cheaper LinkedIn" did not move a single number.
If you want a second set of eyes on whether your B2B search account is structured to use this correctly, or whether the keyword layer needs fixing first, that is the kind of thing worth a direct look rather than a guess. I run paid media management for B2B manufacturers and considered-purchase companies, and you can book a straight 30 minutes with me to go through your account.