Worked scenario · max CPC per channel
A SaaS startup's $3,000 a month
By Oliver Wakefield-Smith, Digital Signet. Updated July 2026.
Split it $2,000 Google, $1,000 LinkedIn test. Google gets the larger share because its costs can be planned against a cited 2026 benchmark; LinkedIn has no benchmark that clears our sourcing bar, so it gets a capped experiment, not a guess. This scenario runs in USD throughout because the persona and the dataset both are.
The Google side: plannable
The closest dataset row is Business Services, at a $5.87 median CPC LocaliQ, 2026 data:
Lot 01 · Google at the B2B median
The dataset's measured cost per lead for the category is $93.69 LocaliQ, 2026 data, in the same neighbourhood as our worked $125.00. Category context on the B2B and SaaS benchmark page.
The LinkedIn side: measured, not guessed
LinkedIn documents an auction with minimum budgets and bids on its pricing pages LinkedIn, ads pricing and publishes no per-click rate. No current-vintage public benchmark for LinkedIn CPC clears our sourcing bar, so no LinkedIn click price appears on this page. The $1,000 is a measurement budget: run a month against your sharpest job-title audience, then divide spend by clicks to get your real figure. Why the premium exists and who should pay it: the LinkedIn Ads page and Facebook vs LinkedIn.
One ceiling, both channels
A max CPC (the most you can afford to bid) is target cost per demo multiplied by conversion rate. Take a $150 target cost per demo, a planning assumption for you to replace, at the category's 4.85% conversion rate:
Lot 02 · the affordability ceiling
The same ceiling judges both channels. If your LinkedIn test measures, say, a $12 CPC, each demo costs about $247.42 at the category conversion rate (CPC divided by conversion rate), and the channel only pays when your deal economics carry a demo at that price. Larger contract values move the ceiling up; that is the whole crossover logic. Set your own in the max CPC calculator, pre-filled with this scenario.
After month one
Reweight by measured cost per demo, not by clicks. A channel with expensive clicks and cheap demos beats one with cheap clicks and no demos; that inversion is common in B2B and is the reason the split starts even-handed. If Google demos arrive under your ceiling, scale Google before adding channels. If LinkedIn demos cost double yet close bigger contracts, the ceiling itself was wrong: recompute it per channel from each channel's deal sizes. Local-budget version of the same discipline: the plumber scenario.