A while back we ran a campaign where the most interesting result didn’t show up where we were spending the money. We were running LinkedIn video to build awareness at the top of the funnel, and the thing that moved wasn’t a metric on the LinkedIn dashboard. It was paid search. Branded searches climbed, and demand in the bottom of the funnel rose noticeably, fed by a video campaign two steps removed from it. If we’d judged the video purely on its own completion rate or click-through, we’d have missed the point entirely.
That’s the story I keep in mind whenever someone asks me how to measure LinkedIn video. It’s the same instinct I wrote about with click-through rate a while back: in B2B the surface metric often points the wrong way, and the thing that matters is moving somewhere you’re not looking. In my last post I made the case for video in B2B generally, and why it works less by winning the moment and more by building the memory that puts you on a shortlist later. This time I want to get specific about the channel most B2B companies reach for first, and rightly so: LinkedIn. But I also want to do something the channel’s own marketing won’t, which is tell you which numbers to trust and which to treat with suspicion.
The natural home for B2B video
There’s a simple reason LinkedIn keeps coming up. Nowhere else can you put a film in front of people by job title, seniority, company, and industry with the same precision. You can show a video to heads of production at named accounts in a specific sector, which is about as close to your actual buying committee as paid media gets. Video plays automatically in the feed as people scroll, in the same environment where they’re already thinking about work rather than watching cat clips. For most B2B companies, if you only run video in one place, this is the sensible place.
LinkedIn has also leaned into the format hard. They reported video inventory growing 74% in 2025, which tells you both that buyers are watching and that you’ll be competing for their attention. That is the platform’s own figure, so take it as direction rather than gospel, but the direction is clear enough.
A second advantage people miss: You see who’s engaging, faster
Here’s something I rarely see mentioned. LinkedIn only reveals the demographics behind an interaction, which companies, which titles, which industries – once it has at least three of that interaction. For clicks, that’s three clicks before it tells you who was behind them. The same threshold applies to video, but measured in views: three views and the curtain lifts. And views pile up far faster than clicks, because plenty of people watch a few seconds in the feed who’d never click an ad. So you hit the threshold quickly and start seeing which named accounts and roles are engaging while a click-based campaign would still show you almost nothing.
This connects to my post on B2B intent signals. The Company Engagement Report is most useful when it tells you who’s warming up before they act, and video is one of the fastest ways to feed it. You’re not just building memory with the film, you’re generating an early, named signal of interest that sales can actually use, sooner than almost anything else we run.
One thing the research is clear about
I won’t repeat the whole case for video here, I made it last time. The short version is that the strategic research lines up well, and it says broad, creative brand-building drives B2B growth far more than the performance-obsessed default allows. The one thing I’d pull out is a warning: a dull video, however precisely you target it, still fails. The creative is the multiplier. LinkedIn gives you the aim – it can’t give you the idea. And take LinkedIn’s own research with a pinch of salt, since it happens to argue for spending more on LinkedIn.
Why the paid-video benchmarks don’t add up
Now the part the agency blogs won’t tell you. Go looking for benchmarks, what’s a good completion rate, a normal CPM, an acceptable click-through, and you’ll find plenty of confident numbers that flatly disagree with each other. Across recent datasets the cost per thousand views runs from roughly 350 to over 600 kronor, completion rates from 23% to nearly double that, click-through from 0.24% to about twice that. These aren’t rounding errors. There simply is no clean, independent benchmark, just a scatter of vendor numbers, measured differently and pointing different ways.
Worse, a single number lies to you even when it’s accurate. One detailed dataset found video had the lowest CPM of any format, which sounds like a win, alongside a lower click-through than a plain single image and a median watch time under six seconds. Read the CPM and video looks cheap and brilliant. Read the click-through and it looks weak. Both are true at once. That’s the whole problem with chasing a headline metric.
How to read the numbers instead
So don’t shop for a benchmark. Three things matter more.
First, know what the video is for before you judge it. Awareness and conversion films need completely different yardsticks, and judging one by the other’s numbers is how good campaigns get killed. If the job is memory, a low click-through isn’t a failure, it’s the wrong question. Often the most useful thing on screen isn’t a rate at all, it’s the list of companies and titles watching. Who is watching beats how many finished.
Second, front-load the message and keep it short. With a median watch time of a few seconds, whatever you need a buyer to remember has to land almost immediately. That’s the real reason for the under-30-seconds advice, and shorter still for awareness. Vertical or square, not landscape, because that’s how the feed is held.
Third, and this is the one that connects back to the story I opened with: watch your view-through conversions, not just your click-through ones. A view-through is when someone sees the video, doesn’t click, and turns up on your site and converts later. In B2B that happens constantly, because the point of the film was to be remembered, not clicked. I’ve seen it campaign after campaign, modest click numbers but a steady trickle of people who watched, left, and came back on their own terms. Look only at clicks and that entire path is invisible, and it’s often the path video actually works through.
The takeaway
LinkedIn is the right place to run B2B video, for a reason that has nothing to do with any benchmark: it puts a good film in front of exactly the people you want to remember you, and it tells you who they are. Be sceptical of the tactical numbers floating around, including LinkedIn’s own. The only benchmark worth trusting is your last campaign. Know what your video is for, beat your own previous result, and watch who’s engaging rather than someone else’s tidy statistic.
In the next post I’ll look at Meta, which most B2B marketers dismiss too quickly, and where the targeting logic is almost the mirror image of LinkedIn’s.
If you in the meantime want to discuss effective marketing, just reach out to:
Joakim Ebstein
Head of Digital Marketing
+46 725 555 984
joakim.ebstein@sfinxagency.se
