If your team chose LinkedIn’s Brand Awareness objective to “build the brand,” you might have paid premium rates for a weak signal. AJ Wilcox criticized this on The LinkedIn Ads Show on August 14, 2026, noting that the objective is often misunderstood, billed by impressions, and generally less efficient than alternatives like Website Visits or Engagement.
Timing is crucial. In B2B SaaS, awareness faces pressure from finance, which demands clearer pipeline accountability, and from the reality that buying decisions involve multiple stakeholders—typically 6 to 10. The goal isn’t broad exposure but reaching the right people often enough that your brand is remembered when purchasing begins.
Thus, “avoid the brand awareness objective” is a useful rule, even if brand-building remains important. The issue lies in optimizing for a platform objective that prioritizes delivery, impressions, and spend over actual future consideration.
What the objective optimizes for, and why that’s a problem
Wilcox's critique is straightforward. On LinkedIn, the Brand Awareness objective requires advertisers to pay by impression, with costs often exceeding $150 CPM, and in some cases, much higher. In contrast, Website Visits campaigns typically range from $40 to $80 CPM, while Engagement can be bid on a cost-per-click basis, with engagement costs around $1 to $2.
This pricing gap is significant because awareness in B2B isn’t a one-time event. The research brief indicates that it’s measured through a mix of survey-based brand tracking and proxies like branded search volume, direct traffic, share of voice, and mention volume. If the platform charges high rates for impressions but measurement occurs elsewhere, the burden of proof becomes heavy.
Another issue is that LinkedIn controls how many impressions are shown and to whom, within your targeting constraints. This can be acceptable in formats like CTV, but often leads to paying for exposure before confirming audience engagement. This results in expensive reach with minimal feedback.
Brand-building still matters. Broad awareness usually doesn’t.
The research brief highlights an important distinction: B2B brand awareness is best for long-term demand creation, not short-term conversions. Experts argue that distinctiveness and consistency are more crucial than raw frequency. Repeated exposure without memorable brand assets generates activity metrics, not memory.
This is often obscured in dashboards. Impressions can rise while mental availability remains flat. Direct traffic can fluctuate for unrelated reasons. Branded search may lag, and survey lift requires planning. None of this behaves like paid search against high-intent demand, nor should it.
From an operational perspective, the naming of the objective can be misleading. “Brand Awareness” sounds strategic but can devolve into an excuse for reporting reach, frequency, and spend as if they indicate future pipeline. They are merely inputs—sometimes useful, but never sufficient.
The trade-off is clear: optimizing for cheap, broad attention usually compromises audience quality. Conversely, optimizing for a tighter audience and stronger signals may initially reduce volume but improve quality. For most B2B SaaS teams, this trade-off is worthwhile.
What to run instead this week
Here’s a quick plan: if the goal is awareness within a real ICP, skip the Brand Awareness objective. Instead, use Website Visits or Engagement with tight targeting, measuring downstream indicators outside the platform.
The hypothesis: Switching from Brand Awareness to Website Visits or Engagement for the same ICP audience will improve qualified traffic and engaged reach at a lower effective CPM due to stronger response signals than pure impression delivery.
Setup: One audience, one message, one landing page or high-signal post. Disable Audience Network and Audience Expansion, as recommended by Wilcox. Use a two-week test window. Owners: paid media plus Marketing Ops. Budget: keep it flat compared to the current campaign to focus on objective choice, not spend inflation.
Success = lower effective CPM and stronger downstream signals like branded search trends, direct traffic to the promoted page, or engaged visitors matched in CRM. Guardrails = stable click quality with no significant drop in qualified audience reach. Stop-loss = if costs rise significantly without any lift in leading indicators after the test window, cut it.
What to measure: Platform engagement is directional attribution, not proof. Pair campaign reporting with CRM tracking and, where possible, survey-based brand tracking. If awareness is meant to influence a buying committee of 6 to 10, your measurement should reflect role coverage, not just aggregate reach.
The better frame for 2026
The old debate of brand versus demand has aged poorly. The brief suggests a complementary view: brand-building should support performance, not replace it. In 2026, a statistic indicates that only 7% of B2B AI buyers say brand recognition influences their vendor selection in AI-generated responses. This underscores that classic awareness alone is a weaker moat than many teams believe.
Thus, the solution isn’t to stop building memory but to stop conflating the platform’s Brand Awareness objective with true memory-building. Real awareness in B2B SaaS is narrower, slower, and more measurable than the label suggests. It reaches multiple stakeholders, employs distinctive assets, and manifests later in branded search, direct traffic, share of voice, survey lift, and eventually pipeline.
The teams that waste the least on awareness are those that respect it most. They don’t buy the label; they build the signal.
