LinkedIn ads vs Google ads for B2B: pull your search volume before you argue

Pull your category's search volume before you compare anything

Open a keyword tool and total the monthly search volume for the terms a buyer would type at the moment they are ready to pay you. Not the informational terms. Not your own brand name. The commercial ones. That single number decides most of this argument before either platform is discussed, and the majority of teams comparing these channels have never written it down.

The reason it decides the argument is structural. Google sells you access to demand that already exists. If four hundred people a month search for what you sell, four hundred is the entire market you can buy, and your budget cannot raise it. LinkedIn sells you access to people who match a description, whether or not they are looking. Those are different goods with different ceilings, and comparing them on cost per click compares nothing at all.

Google's ceiling is demand. LinkedIn's ceiling is audience times frequency.

The two platforms have different limiting factors, and knowing which one binds you is the whole comparison. On Google your maximum output is set by a number you do not control. On LinkedIn your maximum output is set by two numbers you do control, which are how many people match your targeting and how often you are willing to pay to reach each of them.

That difference has a practical consequence. A LinkedIn budget can always be spent, sensibly or otherwise, because the audience is standing there. A Google budget in a thin category cannot be spent at all. Money sits unspent, the account manager raises bids to force delivery, cost per click climbs, and the campaign ends up buying broad and irrelevant queries so the budget has somewhere to go. That failure mode is extremely common and it is misread as a bidding problem every time.

Here is the LinkedIn ceiling made arithmetic, with the inputs stated. Suppose your targeting resolves to 25,000 members and you want each of them to see you eight times in a quarter. That is 200,000 impressions. At an assumed $60 cost per thousand impressions, which you should replace with the figure your own account actually pays, the quarter costs about $12,000. The ceiling is a computed number you can decide to buy or not. No amount of money buys the four hundred and first search.

The Supersonify Demand Floor

Run this before you write a media plan. It converts a search volume figure into the maximum number of qualified conversations Google can produce for you in a month, which is the only version of this comparison that survives contact with a finance team.

The framework deliberately produces an uncomfortable number. That is the point. Every ranking comparison of these two channels ends in do both, which is advice you can follow at any budget and learn nothing from.

What 300 monthly searches can actually produce

Take the chain and put numbers in it. Two assumption sets are used below, one optimistic and one conservative, and both are labelled because neither is a benchmark. Replace all eight inputs with your own before you use the output.

1. Optimistic assumptions: 70% impression share, 10% click through rate, 6% landing page conversion, 50% of those accepted by sales.
2. Conservative assumptions: 60% impression share, 8% click through rate, 5% landing page conversion, 40% accepted by sales.
3. Optimistic chain: 0.70 times 0.10 times 0.06 times 0.50 equals 0.0021, so roughly one accepted lead per 476 searches.
4. Conservative chain: 0.60 times 0.08 times 0.05 times 0.40 equals 0.00096, so roughly one accepted lead per 1,042 searches.

Monthly money term volume converted to a Google ceiling using the two assumption sets above. Every figure is arithmetic on stated assumptions, not a published benchmark.

Notice what does not appear in that table. Cost per click never enters the calculation, because the ceiling is a volume constraint rather than a price constraint. A cheaper click at 300 searches a month still buys you one conversation a quarter. This is why cost comparisons between the two platforms mislead so reliably.

The brand term trap that makes Google look better than it is

Split your Google conversions into branded and unbranded before you credit the channel with anything. In most B2B accounts a large share of paid search conversions come from people typing the company name, and those people were sent by something else. Last click reporting hands Google the credit for demand another channel created, and the report looks fantastic right up until you cut the channel that was doing the creating.

The test takes twenty minutes. Pull the search terms report, tag every term containing your company or product name as branded, and compute branded share of conversions. If most of your paid search conversions are branded, Google is harvesting rather than generating, and the honest description of the account is a defensive line rather than an acquisition engine.

How to read branded share of paid search conversions. The bands are a reading guide, not a measured norm.

At low volume, Google is insurance rather than a channel

Run both, but buy them as different products. This is the reconciliation the do both advice never gets to. In a thin category Google is worth owning because the few searches that exist are the most valuable moments in your entire funnel, and because the campaign's total cost is capped by the volume itself.

The high value moments are specific and they are all low volume. Somebody typing a competitor's name plus the word alternative is mid switch. Somebody typing your competitor's name plus pricing is comparing quotes. Somebody typing the problem plus the word urgent has just had an incident. Those queries convert at rates the rest of your marketing cannot approach, and there are almost none of them, which is exactly why buying them is cheap and why treating them as a growth channel is a category error.

• Buy competitor alternative and versus terms, exact match, small fixed budget, no growth target attached.
• Buy your own brand defensively if competitors bid on it, and report it as a cost of doing business rather than as acquisition.
• Buy problem plus urgency phrasings if your category has emergencies, because those searchers do not compare and do not wait.
• Put every other objective on the platform that can actually reach people who are not searching, and hold that platform to the pipeline target.

The other half of the argument is the buying committee. Search reaches the one person doing the research, and B2B purchases are rarely decided by that person alone, which is the problem covered in reaching the whole buying committee rather than only the champion.

A decision table for your exact situation

Route from your own volume figure and your sales motion. If you have not pulled the volume yet, the table below cannot help you, which is the entire argument of this article compressed into one sentence.

Route by demand first, then by committee size. Volume bands come from the arithmetic above, not from any published study.

How to pull the number without paying for a tool

Keyword Planner gives ranges rather than exact figures without an active spending campaign, and the ranges are enough for this decision. Follow these steps and you will have the figure in under an hour.

If the numbers say Google cannot carry the target and the budget is small, the next question is usually about representation rather than platform, and it is worth reading what a LinkedIn ads agency actually costs at your spend level before hiring anybody to run either account.

Running both without double counting the pipeline

Never add the two platforms' reported conversion counts together. Both platforms claim conversions they influenced under their own attribution windows, so summing them produces a number larger than the pipeline your CRM contains, and the gap gets discovered in a board meeting rather than in a report.

• Report platform reported conversions and CRM confirmed opportunities as two separate columns, permanently, so the gap is a known quantity rather than a surprise.
• Add a single self reported field on every form asking how the buyer first heard of you, and treat it as directional evidence rather than as attribution.
• Hold each channel to a different job. Search is measured on capture of existing demand. Paid social is measured on creation of new demand and on committee coverage.
• Give demand generation a lag equal to your median deal cycle before judging it, and write that lag into the reporting cadence so nobody re-litigates it monthly.

If founder content is part of how the demand gets created, the paid amplification question sits next door and is worth settling separately in whether thought leader ads earn their budget.