How Much Do Paid Social Ads Cost in the UK? (2026 Benchmarks)

Two costs make up any paid social programme: the media, which is what you pay LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube or TikTok for space in the auction, and the management, which is what you pay an agency or an in-house hire to run it well. Most pricing guides conflate the two or dodge the numbers entirely. This one gives you typical UK ranges for both, explains what actually moves them, and is honest about the situations where the right advice is to keep your money.

The Quick Answer: Typical UK Rates in 2026

The table below shows typical market ranges for UK campaigns in 2026. They are not quotes and they are not Earworm client data; they are the ranges we would use to sanity-check a media plan before anyone commits budget. B2B targeting tends to sit in the upper half of every range, for reasons covered below.

One clarification before anyone recoils at the LinkedIn column: a high CPM is not the same as an expensive channel. LinkedIn charges five times Meta's rate because it can put your ad in front of precisely the finance directors you want, by name of employer if you like. If those impressions convert to pipeline, they are cheap. The right question is never which platform costs least per thousand people, but which costs least per qualified opportunity. Those are frequently different platforms.

What Drives Your Costs Up or Down

The ranges above are wide because four variables do most of the work.

Who you are targeting

Paid social is an auction, and the price of an impression is set by how many other advertisers want the same person. Broad consumer audiences are plentiful and cheap. The eight thousand UK finance directors your competitors also want are neither. The narrower and more senior the audience, the more you pay per impression, and the more each impression should be worth. Precision is a cost you pay on purpose.

B2B versus B2C

B2C campaigns optimise towards purchases and get feedback within days, so the platforms' algorithms learn quickly and delivery gets cheaper. B2B campaigns chase smaller audiences, higher-value conversions and sales cycles measured in months, which means less conversion data, slower learning and denser competition per head. Expect B2B CPMs to run two to five times consumer rates on the same platform. This is normal, not a sign your agency is failing.

Creative quality

Every platform rewards ads people actually watch with cheaper delivery, because engaging ads keep users on the platform. Weak creative therefore pays an invisible tax on every other line of the media plan. This is the biggest lever you control, and it gets its own section below.

Seasonality

Every Q4, retail floods the auctions and CPMs climb, often by 20 to 40 per cent on typical years, before collapsing in January. B2B has its own rhythms: a budget-flush scramble at financial year end, a summer lull when decision-makers are on beaches. If your buyers do not buy in December, do not pay December prices to reach them. Pause, bank the budget, and return when the retailers leave.

Minimum Viable Budgets for B2B (and When to Say No)

Here is the section most agencies will not write.

At typical B2B rates, around £2,000 a month in media is where a LinkedIn-led programme starts to function. That buys roughly 40,000 to 70,000 impressions, enough to reach a tightly defined audience of a few thousand people at a frequency where anyone remembers you, while generating enough conversion signal for the platform to optimise against. Below that line, the arithmetic quietly falls apart: spread thin, you achieve frequency with nobody; concentrated, the audience is too small for the algorithm to learn anything.

A decent paid social agency will tell you this in the first call. If the agency you are speaking to is happy to manage £800 a month of media for a £1,200 fee, you have learned something useful about them.

What Agencies Charge to Manage It

What a UK paid social agency charges to run your account follows two dominant models, with hybrids in between.

• Percentage of spend. Typically 10 to 20 per cent of monthly media, sliding downwards as spend grows, usually with a minimum monthly fee of £1,000 to £2,000 that makes small accounts viable for the agency. Simple to understand, but note the incentive: the agency earns more when you spend more, whether or not the spend performs.
• Flat retainer. Typically £1,500 to £4,000 a month for SME B2B programmes, more for enterprise accounts with multiple markets. Predictable, and usually the better structure at modest spends, where 15 per cent of media would not buy enough of anyone's time to do the job properly.
• Performance-based. Fees tied to leads or revenue. Rare in B2B for a good reason: with six-month sales cycles, nobody can attribute cleanly enough to invoice against, and the models that claim to are mostly theatre.

The question that matters more than the model: is creative included? Most performance agencies quote management only, then either recycle whatever assets you have or bill creative separately at day rates. Given that creative is the single biggest driver of results, a well-negotiated management fee attached to weak ads is money carefully organised and poorly spent.

The Creative Lever: Why the Ad Matters More Than the Bid

A decade ago, a sharp media buyer could win on bid strategy and audience hacks. That era is over. The platforms have automated bidding into near-parity: every advertiser in the auction is using the same machine-learning delivery, so the differences between competent operators are now single-digit percentages. What has not been automated is the ad itself.

Creative is the last honest lever left in the auction. Everyone has the same bidding algorithms. Not everyone has an ad worth watching.

The mechanics compound. Better creative earns higher engagement, which lowers your CPM. It earns a higher click-through rate, which lowers your CPC. It pre-sells the offer, which raises conversion rate and lowers CPA. The same media budget behind a genuinely good video ad can produce a multiple of the pipeline the tired one manages, without a single change to targeting or bids. Then fatigue arrives: show any ad to the same audience often enough and performance decays, which is why a programme needs a bench of variants and a refresh cadence, not one hero asset flogged for six months.

This is the reason Earworm approaches paid social from the creative side. We were a production company before we were a media buyer: the same team behind our corporate video production work builds ad creative to broadcast standard, and our video advertising agency workflow turns one quarterly shoot into fifteen or twenty tested ad variants: different hooks, lengths and formats from a single day of filming. Distribution and creative in one place also means the feedback loop actually closes: the media data tells the editors which hooks to cut next week, not next quarter. You can see how that plays out in our case studies.

What a £5,000-a-Month B2B Programme Looks Like

The split below is illustrative, not a quote, but it reflects how a sensibly weighted UK B2B programme at this level tends to shake out.

Two things worth noticing. First, retargeting runs on the cheap platforms: you pay LinkedIn's premium to find the right people once, then re-engage them on Meta and YouTube for a fraction of the price. Second, creative holds 15 per cent of the total budget permanently, because the refresh cadence is not optional. Programmes that cut that line always meet it again later, restated as a rising CPA.

And judge the programme in quarters, not weeks. A B2B programme typically needs a full quarter to exit the learning phase, build retargeting audiences and produce readable pipeline signal. Any agency promising meaningful B2B results inside 30 days is describing clicks, not customers.

The Honest Summary

Budget £2,000 to £5,000 a month in media for a credible UK B2B programme, add £1,000 to £2,500 for management depending on model, and put real money behind creative, because that is the lever the auction cannot neutralise. Below those levels, fix the asset and the follow-up first; above them, the ranges in this guide should let you interrogate any proposal that lands on your desk.

If you would rather have the creative and the distribution handled by one team with one feedback loop, that is precisely what our paid social agency service was built for. Book a call and we will pressure-test your budget maths before you spend a pound of it.