Results
B2B: Recruiting Attorneys at $162 a Lead Across LinkedIn and Google
On this page
LinkedIn produced leads at $154. Google produced them at $170. Seventy-four leads in total, about $162 blended. LinkedIn came out ahead — by nine percent, on 74 leads, which is not a gap you should trust.
That's the honest headline and it's less tidy than the one we'd have liked to write. The expected story for LinkedIn is that it charges a premium per click and earns it back through precision. In this account it didn't happen that way at all: LinkedIn's clicks were cheaper than Google's, and they converted worse. The two effects roughly cancelled, and the channels finished within a rounding error of each other.
Why this is an unusual audience
The target was attorneys — to join a legal lead generation platform as supply, not to hire as clients. That's recruitment-shaped demand, and it changes which channel fits.
| What it means | |
|---|---|
| The buyer is defined by profession | "Attorney" is a job title, which is exactly what LinkedIn knows and Google infers |
| Almost nobody searches for this | An attorney doesn't wake up searching for a lead generation network to join |
| The value per acquisition is high | An attorney in a network is a recurring relationship, not a transaction |
| The population is small and specific | Precision matters more than reach |
That combination is the textbook case for LinkedIn, and it's rare. Most B2B companies asking about LinkedIn don't have it — which is why we usually route them to Microsoft Ads instead.
What actually happened between the two channels
| Cost per click | $15 | $23 |
| Conversion rate | Lower | Higher |
| Cost per lead | $154 | $170 |
| Who you reach | Only people whose profile says attorney | Anyone typing a related phrase |
LinkedIn was the cheaper click and the worse converter. That is the opposite of the standard account of this channel, and we're publishing it because it's what the account did.
Two things are worth taking from it, neither of which is "LinkedIn wins":
1. LinkedIn's click costs are not a fixed law. The "LinkedIn costs multiples of Google" rule of thumb is a general market observation, not a guarantee about your account. In a niche where Google's auction is expensive — and legal is one of the most expensive auctions in advertising — LinkedIn can undercut it. Check, don't assume.
2. The precision didn't show up where you'd expect. If LinkedIn's firmographic targeting were doing the work the sales pitch claims, it would show up as a higher conversion rate on a more qualified audience. Here it did the reverse. The likeliest explanation is that we were interrupting attorneys who weren't looking for anything, while Google was catching the ones already in motion — precision of audience is not the same thing as precision of intent.
Google was worth running and so was LinkedIn. At a nine percent difference across 74 leads, neither channel earned the right to take the other's budget. That's the actual decision this data supports.
The situation
| At the start | |
|---|---|
| What the company does | A legal lead generation platform — connects consumers with attorneys |
| Who they needed to recruit | Attorneys, |
What happened
| Metric | Blended | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead | $154 | $170 | $162 |
| Cost per click | $15 | $23 | — |
| Leads | — | — | 74 |
| Spend | — | — | $12,000 |
The last two rows are the real result. A lead here is an attorney who expressed interest; the number that matters is how many joined and what each cost. Cost per lead is an intermediate metric in every business, and more so in one with a qualification step this heavy.
Seventy-four leads is a small sample and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Split across two channels, that's somewhere in the region of thirty-five to forty each. A nine percent difference in cost per lead on samples that size is inside the range you'd get from two months of ordinary variance. Anyone presenting it as proof that one channel beats the other — including us — would be overreading it.
What we'd do differently
Retarget before you prospect is the standard LinkedIn lesson: reaching people who already visited the site is dramatically cheaper than reaching strangers, and it's where most LinkedIn budgets should start.
Is your situation similar?
All four of these need to be true before LinkedIn makes sense:
- You sell to businesses
- Your customer is worth $10,000 or more — at LinkedIn's click costs, low-value relationships never pay back
- You can define the buyer precisely — job title, industry, firm size. Vague targeting burns budget faster here than anywhere
- You can commit $2,000+ a month for 90 days — B2B cycles outlast short tests
This engagement met all four, which is why it worked. Most B2B companies we talk to meet two or three, and for them Microsoft Ads with LinkedIn profile targeting delivers the same firmographic data layered onto cheaper search clicks.
If you're recruiting rather than selling, the case is stronger than usual — recruitment targets are defined by job title, which is precisely what LinkedIn knows and Google can only infer.
More on LinkedIn Ads · B2B channel selection · what we charge
Written by Jared DeValk, founder of Nashville Digital. Published with the client's permission. Last reviewed September 2026.