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Valueships, a pricing consultancy for SaaS companies targeting CFOs and CEOs, spent about $6,200 on a three-format LinkedIn ads pilot. Only $391 went to thought leadership ads. In the June 5, 2026 session, Emilia Korczyńska reported 12 qualified meetings, over €200,000 in pipeline and more than €40,000 in closed-won deals from the Valueships TLA activity. The $391 figure covers TLA media spend, not the full three-format pilot or the cost of content and follow-up.
Emilia Korczyńska, VP of Marketing at Userpilot and co-creator of ZenABM, had been running ABM programs for over two years, generating more than $8M in influenced pipeline for her company. That figure covers Userpilot’s broader ABM program, not the $391 Valueships pilot. She had been trying to convince Kris to run thought leadership ads. The Valueships result shows what the format can do when credible content, a defined account list, and the offer line up.
What happened at Valueships
Valueships launched a pilot ABM campaign with three ad formats: thought leadership ads (TLAs), image ads, and carousel ads. The targeting was expensive: CFOs, CEOs, and senior SaaS executives in Western Europe, the US, UK, and the DACH region.
The Valueships figures cover the first two weeks after the campaign launched on February 20, 2026. TLAs accounted for about 6% of the total ad spend.
| Format | Results in the reported period |
|---|---|
| Thought leadership ads | Spend: $391; Impressions: 169,571; Landing-page clicks: 2,669; Cost per landing-page click: $0.15; CPM: $2.31; eCTR: 1.57% |
| Single image ads | Spend: $3,076; Impressions: 63,669; Landing-page clicks: 307; Cost per landing-page click: $10.02; CPM: $48.31; eCTR: 0.48% |
| Carousel ads | Spend: $2,736; Impressions: 49,412; Landing-page clicks: 234; Cost per landing-page click: $11.69; CPM: $55.38; eCTR: 0.47% |
Across the three formats, TLAs produced 83% of all landing-page clicks while using 6% of the budget. A landing-page click cost $0.15 from a TLA, compared with $10.02 from an image ad and $11.69 from a carousel. The full Valueships case study includes the individual ads and campaign data.
After the pilot, Valueships shut down the image ads and carousels and shifted the campaign budget to TLAs.
Emilia’s explanation was that people follow practitioners and experts they trust. She argued that this helps personal posts attract engagement beyond company-page content. TLAs let you combine the engagement dynamics of a personal post with the precision of paid targeting. You don't need the audience already in your network. You just need a post worth reading and a well-defined account list.
The metric LinkedIn doesn't show you
LinkedIn reports CTR as all clicks divided by impressions. Likes, "see more" clicks, shares, and comments all count. A post that goes viral but sends nobody to your landing page will show a strong CTR number.
When the goal is landing-page traffic, watch eCTR: landing-page clicks ÷ impressions × 100. Use the same ads and reporting window for both counts. For the Valueships TLAs, 2,669 ÷ 169,571 × 100 gives 1.57%. This measures traffic, not meetings or purchase intent.
Emilia calculated this metric herself: pull landing-page clicks from the engagement report, then divide by impressions for the same ads and time window. Keep all-click CTR, eCTR and landing-page click cost separate.
Two Valueships TLAs reached about 21% all-click CTR, with eCTRs of 4.69% and 3.02%. The first compared millennials defending skinny jeans with SaaS companies defending seat-based pricing. The second opened with Swan AI’s reported $51,217 Anthropic bill. Those are hooks from the source ads, not new performance claims about those companies.
Emilia connected the unusually low CPMs to strong engagement and ad quality. She described the Valueships CPMs as "unheard of for LinkedIn." The case does not establish that a given CTR guarantees a lower CPM.
Her testing approach was to run five to six ads at a time and aim for 10%+ all-click CTR. That was her creative-selection target, not a platform requirement or an eCTR benchmark. Replace weaker posts with content closer to what resonates, while checking traffic cost and downstream outcomes.
A larger-budget check at Userpilot
The $0.15 landing-page click was an exceptional result, not a benchmark every campaign should expect. Emilia also shared Userpilot's May 2026 results, where the gap between formats was much narrower:
| Format | Results in the reported period |
|---|---|
| Thought leadership ads | Spend: $27,302; Landing-page clicks: 1,747; Cost per landing-page click: $15.63; eCTR: 0.57% |
| Single image ads | Spend: $33,818; Landing-page clicks: 2,314; Cost per landing-page click: $14.61; eCTR: 0.46% |
| Video ads | Spend: $10,805; Landing-page clicks: 779; Cost per landing-page click: $13.87; eCTR: 0.42% |
| Carousel ads | Spend: $8,013; Landing-page clicks: 596; Cost per landing-page click: $13.45; eCTR: 0.37% |
At Userpilot, TLAs had the highest eCTR but also the highest cost per landing-page click. The Valueships result is useful as a creative and audience-fit case, not a cost promise. Evaluate eCTR, landing-page click cost, and pipeline influence separately.
What a winning TLA looks like
The highest-performing posts at Valueships shared a set of characteristics, and none of them looked like ads.
First-person and imperfect. The partners at Valueships wrote in their own voice: contrarian takes, funny memes, and real case studies. Emilia also advised teams not to over-polish posts or worry about occasional typos. She cited Jason Lemkin and Alina Vandenberghe as examples worth studying: they don't worry about capitalization, which helps their posts feel real.
Analogy or humor in the hook. The best-performing posts opened with something unexpected, not the product. Give the reader a reason to stay past the first line before mentioning a solution.
Real numbers. Named clients, results, and concrete benchmarks give executives something they can evaluate. Vague claims don't.
CTA low in the post. The link to your landing page belongs near the bottom, after the reader has followed the problem and the proposed solution. Don't put the link in the comments. You can't calculate eCTR from a comment click, and TLAs don't optimize for organic reach anyway.
One practical note on timing: post organically first. Wait a few days to see if it gets traction. If it performs well, edit the post to add the link in the body, then add it to Campaign Manager as a TLA. Emilia used organic traction to choose posts worth promoting; it is a selection signal, not a guarantee of cheaper paid distribution.
Five ways to source TLAs
For most teams the bottleneck is content, not budget.
Internal stakeholder interviews. Record conversations with your founders, sales leaders, or subject-matter experts. Feed the transcript into an AI writing system trained on your best-performing posts. The raw voice is already there.
Influencer sponsorships. Platforms like Passionfroot let you find niche influencers and pay them to write posts for you. More expensive, but influencers bring an audience that trusts them. Emilia sees influencer TLAs among the highest-performing sources by eCTR.
Existing brand mentions. Search LinkedIn for your company name. Find people who already post about you. Offer a small incentive (Emilia mentioned a $50 voucher), ask if you can sponsor the post. The author does not have to be your employee. Their public post must meet LinkedIn’s eligibility rules, and you need sponsorship permission.
Customer advocacy programs. Build a system where customers earn rewards for posting about your product. Results vary: some posts are great, some are unusable, and customer posts had the lowest eCTRs among the sources Emilia compared at Userpilot. Worth running, but don't rely on it as your primary source.
Ghostwriters. A professional writer interviews your internal team, builds a writing system, and produces posts on an ongoing basis.
From engagements to pipeline
Running TLAs without tracking what happens next leaves most of the value on the table.
Stefan warned against sending company-level engagement lists straight to SDRs. An engagement signal at the company level does not mean a specific person is ready for a sales call.
What works instead:
Tag campaigns by topic. If you run multiple TLA campaigns on different problems, label each one with an intent tag. Which problem did this account engage with? That's a signal about where they are in their thinking.
Push data to your CRM. Tools like Zen ABM surface company-level engagement and job titles from TLA interactions. Emilia suggested a threshold such as five or more engagements in a defined timeframe; choose it for your campaign rather than treating it as a universal buying-intent cutoff. Then mark that company as active, and push the intent tag via webhook to your sequencing tool or CRM. Valueships ran this: Zen ABM to Clay via webhook to outreach.
Measure with view-through attribution. Select the companies you opened deals with in a defined period. For each one, look at ad engagement in the 30 to 90 days before the deal opened. Which formats appeared in those earlier touchpoints? If TLAs show up consistently, they may be influencing pipeline even when "direct traffic" takes last-touch credit. This shows a pattern, not proof that an ad caused the deal.
Feed warm signals into organic nurture. In the second half of the session, Oleg showed how Extrovert fits after the account-level signal. ZenABM identifies engaged companies and job titles; Clay can find relevant contacts at those accounts. After qualification, add those contacts to Extrovert and stay present over the long game: comment on their posts, send context-relevant DMs based on what they publish, and build the relationship before the pitch. The signal does not prove that a specific contact engaged or is ready to buy. For qualification, separate account fit from the strength of the buying signal.
Turn a relevant post into a conversation
Oleg’s demo used a prospect’s post about fixing a slow pipeline, improving a profile and showing client results. The suggested DM connected that post with an earlier conversation and product updates. He said he would change the CTA before sending. The useful input was the prospect’s own post, not an assumption that they personally clicked an ad.
Extrovert’s Conversation Restarters use a tracked prospect’s post to suggest a relevant DM. The illustration below shows a post signal beside a suggested message. Review the connection to your offer and the CTA before sending.
Extrovert reads the prospect's posts and skips the generic ones: opinion, industry advice, motivational post, promotional post. One post, "Went to SF Tech Week", is a Restarter signal. The next follow-up comes early and mentions it: "Seen you went to SF Tech Week. How did it go?" The prospect replies.
The June session demonstrated an approval-first workflow. Today, Extrovert offers manual review and selected automatic campaign actions; an assistant connected through MCP can act within the permissions you give it. Use a review-led campaign when the context needs judgment. Extrovert is the relationship-follow-up layer here, not the tool that runs LinkedIn ads or identifies every individual behind paid engagement.
How to set up TLAs in Campaign Manager
Emilia recommended Campaign Manager rather than the native boost shortcut to keep control of account targeting. Her June workflow used Engagement and Single Image Ad. LinkedIn now lists Brand awareness, Engagement and Video views, with a matching supported post format, in its current TLA setup instructions.
For the text/image-post workflow discussed in the session:
- Check access first: you need the appropriate Page permission (super admin, content admin or Sponsored Content poster) and creative manager access or higher on the ad account.
- Create an ad set in Campaign Manager. Choose Engagement and Single image for this workflow. Match the objective and format to the post type for other supported TLAs; Website visits is not one of the objectives listed in LinkedIn’s TLA instructions.
- On Ads in this ad set, click Browse existing content.
- In the Content Library, choose LinkedIn members, then Posts. Search by member name or post URL. LinkedIn lists employees and first- or second-degree connections as searchable members.
- Select an eligible public post, click Request approval, then Send. The author must grant sponsorship permission; a commercial agreement alone does not replace it.
- Check Requests for approval, then sponsor the approved post in your ad set. Members can approve a single request or enable approval for pending and subsequent requests, so check the actual permission status rather than assuming every post needs a fresh manual approval.
- Confirm the intended post, targeting, budget and destination link before launch. Once delivery starts, use matching reporting windows to calculate eCTR and cost per landing-page click.
Authors can revoke sponsorship permission later. LinkedIn says that the affected ad then turns off; other ads in the ad set can continue delivering.
FAQ
What is a LinkedIn thought leadership ad (TLA)?
A TLA is a personal LinkedIn post, from an employee, customer, or outside voice, that a company sponsors as a paid ad while keeping the original author's name and profile attached. It runs through Campaign Manager, not the company page, and needs the author's permission before it can go live.
How is a TLA different from just boosting a post?
LinkedIn's native boost button skips the targeting options TLAs need. The session’s setup used Campaign Manager under Engagement, with the original post selected from LinkedIn members. Other supported objectives and formats depend on the post type. Sponsorship permission is required.
What is eCTR, and why track it instead of LinkedIn's reported CTR?
LinkedIn's CTR counts every click on a post, including likes, shares, comments, and "see more," not just clicks to your landing page. eCTR is landing-page clicks divided by impressions, multiplied by 100. It isolates traffic to your destination, not pipeline. Pull matching counts from the engagement report and calculate it separately.
Will TLAs get me the same cost-per-click Valueships saw?
No. Valueships' $0.15 cost per landing-page click reflects strong creative and account-list fit for that campaign, not a general benchmark. In Userpilot’s May 2026 figures, TLAs cost $15.63 per landing-page click, more than image, video or carousel ads in that table. Judge a campaign on its own eCTR and cost per click.
Do I need permission to run someone else's post as a TLA?
Yes. LinkedIn requires the original author's consent, whether that person is an employee, a customer, or an outside influencer. Campaign Manager supports sponsorship requests. Members can approve a single request or pending and subsequent requests, and they can later revoke permission. Check approval status and add the intended post to your ad set.
Where should the CTA link go in a thought leadership post?
Near the bottom of the post body, not in the comments. A link in the comments can't be counted toward eCTR, and TLAs aren't optimized for organic reach the way a comment-driven post might be.
Where does TLA content come from if I don't already have a large following?
Common sources include internal stakeholder interviews turned into posts, paid influencer sponsorships, existing brand mentions found by searching LinkedIn for your company name, customer advocacy programs, and ghostwriters who interview your team directly. Content tends to be the actual bottleneck, not budget.
How do TLA engagement signals turn into pipeline?
Track engagement at the company level and tag campaigns by topic so you know which problem an account responded to. Avoid routing raw engagement lists straight to SDRs: a company-level signal doesn't mean one specific person is ready for a call. Feeding qualified contacts into ongoing LinkedIn engagement, rather than an immediate pitch, tends to work better than acting on the signal alone.
