FR
← Blog
Advertising

LinkedIn ads agency in Quebec: what to demand before you sign

September 2026 · Advertising · Quebec City

A LinkedIn ads agency working for a Quebec B2B company should answer four things before it touches your budget: which campaign objective it will use and what that choice takes away, whether your audience clears the minimum size LinkedIn enforces, who owns the Insight Tag and the conversion history, and which attribution window its report reads. It should also refuse to quote you a cost per lead up front. LinkedIn publishes no cost benchmark at all. Its own pricing page says only that cost is set by an auction.

This page covers LinkedIn and nothing else. Choosing a B2B agency in general is handled in how to choose a B2B marketing agency, and the full strategic frame lives on the B2B marketing pillar. If your market is consumer or local, the useful comparison is on the Facebook and Meta advertising page instead.

What a competent LinkedIn setup contains

LinkedIn sorts its campaign objectives into three funnel stages: brand awareness, consideration and conversions. Eight objectives sit inside them, from Brand Awareness through to Talent Leads. That matters because LinkedIn also documents that the objective you pick determines which ad formats, which bidding strategies and which optimization settings stay available to you. The objective is not a box ticked at kickoff. It is a door that closes for the length of the mandate.

Below the campaign sits the ad set. That is where the audience is defined, and the audience has a floor.

The minimum audience size required to run an ad set is 300 member accounts.LinkedIn, Targeting options for LinkedIn Ads

Three hundred member accounts is a small number nationally and a large one inside a Quebec niche. An audience built by crossing one city, one industry, one company size and one precise job title often falls under it. The same floor applies to retargeting: a retargeting audience must also reach 300 accounts before it will serve.

The third piece is measurement. LinkedIn documents that the Insight Tag goes in the site's global footer, right above the closing body tag, and that an ad account can have only one Insight Tag. Two administrative facts that turn structural fast: if the tag lives inside the agency's account, so does your conversion history and so do your retargeting audiences.

The questions to ask, and the answers that disqualify

Which objective, and what does it take away from me

A good answer names the objective, says which formats remain reachable and which optimizations open up. It also mentions a constraint most buyers never hear: a campaign optimizing to maximize conversions cannot be activated without a conversion attached to it. No tracking, no campaign.

A control question: two legacy objectives are marked "to be deprecated" in LinkedIn's own documentation, CREATIVE_ENGAGEMENT and WEBSITE_TRAFFIC. Ask whether either one appears in the plan. A current agency will know what you are talking about. An agency recycling a 2022 template will not.

Which format, by its real name

LinkedIn's current list includes single image ads, carousel image ads, video ads, document ads, text ads, conversation and message ads, and Thought leader ads. An agency that says "dynamic ads" or invents a format name is describing a product that does not exist under that name. For video, LinkedIn accepts three seconds to thirty minutes but recommends 15 to 30 seconds for broader placement eligibility. If nobody tells you that before the shoot, you will produce three minutes the platform distributes badly. That side of it is covered in the LinkedIn B2B video format.

Which bidding strategy, and what does my daily budget actually do

LinkedIn names four approaches: maximum delivery (automated), cost cap, manual bidding, and an accelerated delivery it describes as in testing with limited availability. An agency should be able to say which one it uses and why.

Insist on being warned about the 150 percent rule. LinkedIn documents that it can charge you up to 150 percent of your daily budget on a single day when it sees strong opportunities in the auction. Across a fixed schedule, total spend stays inside days of flight multiplied by the daily budget. But one day can still surprise the controller reading the statement.

How often will the same person see the ad

LinkedIn exposes a frequency cap over a 7 day span, set to any number between 3 and 30 impressions, currently fully available on connected TV (CTV) campaigns and rolling out to other brand awareness campaigns. In a Quebec market where your reachable audience is a few thousand people, that setting is the difference between being known and being a nuisance. An agency that has never thought about frequency on a small audience has never run one.

Which attribution window do you read

This is the question that separates an honest report from a flattering one. In Campaign Manager, LinkedIn recommends and defaults to a 90 day click and 90 day view window. Its developer documentation describes different defaults for the API: 30 days post click and 7 days view through. Those are two different surfaces, and both exist.

So the thing to ask is plain: which surface produced the number in my report. A conversion credited 88 days after a view is not the same event as a conversion credited 6 days after a click. An agency that cannot answer does not know what it is invoicing you as a result.

And the cost per lead, do you know it

The right answer is no, not before impressions have been served into your audience. LinkedIn publishes no cost per click, no cost per thousand impressions and no cost per lead. Minimum, maximum and suggested bid depend on the audience targeted and the account currency, and LinkedIn returns them at setup. An agency that quotes you a cost per lead before it knows your audience is repeating a number from another agency's blog. That is not an estimate, it is a quotation with no source.

What Quebec changes

Two things, concretely.

The first is scale. LinkedIn's ad targeting page advertises more than one billion members, 180 million senior level influencers and 63 million decision makers. Those are global figures LinkedIn publishes about its own member base. They say nothing about how many plant managers are reachable in Chaudière-Appalaches. An agency that opens its pitch with those numbers is selling a scale you will never buy. For a manufacturer in the Beauce region, the only number that matters is the one Campaign Manager shows when you cross geography, industry and target company size, and whether it clears 300.

The second is the crossing itself. LinkedIn documents combination restrictions that surprise people: job functions cannot be ANDed with an include clause on job titles, seniorities cannot either, and industries cannot be ANDed with an include clause on employers. Company size can be targeted inclusively or exclusively, never both. In practice, "operations directors, in plants of 51 to 200 employees, in Quebec" is not always expressible the way you picture it. An agency that knows the platform knows this before it promises you surgical targeting.

Retargeting deserves one line. For audiences built on ad engagement, on video views or on a Lead Gen Form, LinkedIn offers lookbacks of 30, 60, 90, 180 or 365 days. In an industrial sales cycle measured in quarters, 30 days covers nothing. Ask which window was chosen, and why.

When you need no agency at all

If your entire market fits on a list of forty companies you can name, do not hire anyone to run LinkedIn ads. The platform will not serve: the floor is 300 member accounts per ad set, and forty companies do not produce 300 reachable accounts unless you widen the targeting until the list stops meaning anything. At that point you are paying to talk to people you did not choose.

What replaces it is not advertising. It is selling and proof. Name the forty. Find who decides inside each one, and which of those people can say no alone. Produce one good video of your facility and one credible client testimonial, then use them in direct conversations, plant visits and the trade shows where those buyers already stand. A living company page and posts signed by your own executives carry the rest, with no media budget. The day your market grows to four hundred companies, the advertising question comes back.

How we work here

MarketingSTRAT is a two-person studio in Quebec City. Christian Gómez manages the ad accounts himself and shoots the videos himself. Émilie Simard is your point of contact from the first conversation through the end of the mandate. Nothing is relayed through an account manager.

On LinkedIn that changes one specific thing. The person filming on your plant floor is the same person who loads the video into the ad account and then watches what it does. The 15 to 30 second recommendation is not a note handed from one department to another: it is a decision made on the floor, on shoot day, by someone who knows where the shot ends up. The site states it its own way: Certified Human Content, NOT PROMPTS, NOT SLOP. CRAFT. Proof before polish.

It is a two-person studio, and that is said up front. If you need simultaneous campaigns across several languages and countries, with a guaranteed bench behind them, hire a team. Put exactly the same questions to them.

Sources

If you want a LinkedIn plan checked before you sign it, a fifteen minute call is enough to see whether the mandate holds up.

Book my call
Home · Portfolio

B2B Marketing · Industrial Marketing · Uncompressed · ClientGallery

© 2026 MarketingSTRAT