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Meta vs LinkedIn ads for B2B in Quebec

September 2026 · Advertising · Quebec City

Neither platform publishes a cost. Meta gives no cost per click, no cost per thousand impressions and no cost per lead, and neither does LinkedIn, in any currency, for any market. LinkedIn's own advertising cost page says only that the price is set by an online auction system. So the price comparison you came looking for does not exist at the source. What does exist, documented on both sides, is a comparison of capabilities: what each one lets you target, which audiences it accepts, how long it keeps them, and which attribution window it applies. That is where the decision actually gets made.

When an article tells you LinkedIn costs three or five times more than Meta, it is not quoting the platforms. It is quoting a third-party aggregator that added up accounts with nothing in common with yours. The same problem applies to Meta on its own, and I wrote a full page about it in Facebook advertising cost in Quebec. I manage the ad accounts myself, with more than 1M dollars in ad spend managed each year, and the gap between two Quebec accounts in the same sector is wide enough to make those multiples useless. The broader method sits on the B2B marketing page.

Targeting: two different definitions of your buyer

This is the real dividing line, and both platforms document their side of it. LinkedIn targets by declaration. Its targeting options page names the facets available: job title, job function, seniority, member skills, years of experience, industry, company name, company revenue, company size, member groups, education and location. Company size is chosen in documented brackets running from 1 employee to 10,001 and above. The API also exposes a buyer groups facet, which is LinkedIn formally acknowledging committee buying, with no statistic attached to it anywhere.

Meta targets by behaviour. Its documentation presents custom audiences as built from website and mobile app behaviour, CRM data and engagement signals. The documented subtypes are the general custom audience, the lookalike audience, the website audience, the engagement audience and the video audience.

Put that in your plant. If your buyer is best described by a title, say a maintenance director at a company of 201 to 500 employees, LinkedIn holds the declared data. If your buyer is better recognised by what he did, watching your production line video or sitting on your customer list, Meta holds the behavioural data. Most Quebec industrial SMEs have both kinds of buyer, which is why the question "which of the two" is badly posed from the start.

Audience floors, the number that stops the most projects

LinkedIn is explicit: the minimum audience size required to run an ad set is 300 member accounts. That threshold applies to facet targeting, to uploaded company and contact lists, and to retargeting. A website retargeting segment that does not reach 300 simply will not start serving.

Meta documents something different. A lookalike audience needs a source of at least 100 people, and the resulting audience is set between 1 and 20 percent of a country's population. For a plain custom audience, Meta publishes no minimum headcount at all; it documents the failure state instead, marking an undersized audience inactive and unusable. Notice the difference in kind: on LinkedIn the floor is a number announced in advance, on Meta it is a refusal you discover afterwards.

What to demand before any budget conversation is the audience size estimate, segment by segment. If your market fits in a list of forty named decision makers, no LinkedIn segment will clear 300 member accounts, and a supplier who hands you a campaign plan anyway has not checked.

How long audiences live, where a long cycle hurts

Both platforms keep people, but not for the same length of time, and that gap decides what is still alive in month twelve of your sales cycle.

A Beauce manufacturer whose sale closes in fourteen months should read those four lines as a calendar. Over that span, LinkedIn's 365-day window and the 730-day Facebook Page engagement audience are still standing. Meta's website audience, capped at 180 days, died long ago, and the 90-day lead-form audience was gone before the second follow-up. LinkedIn adds an administrative trap: a segment left unused for 30 days moves to archived, and one unused or not updated for 90 days expires. The audience you built can die of neglect.

Attribution and frequency: you are not reading the same numbers

Putting a LinkedIn report next to a Meta report means nothing until both attribution windows are named. Meta documents a default of 7 days after a click plus 1 day after a view. LinkedIn, in Campaign Manager, recommends and defaults to a 90-day click and 90-day view window, with options of 1, 7, 30 or 90 days. Two LinkedIn surfaces disagree here: its API reference documents defaults of 30 days post-click and 7 days view-through instead. I am giving you both, attributed to the surface each came from, because merging them into one number would be inventing one.

The practical consequence is blunt. A conversion can be credited up to 90 days after a mere view on LinkedIn, and only 1 day after a view on Meta, by default. A supplier who puts both platforms in the same table without naming each window is not comparing campaigns, he is comparing counting rules.

Frequency shows the same asymmetry. LinkedIn documents a cap you can set between 3 and 30 impressions over a 7-day span, noting it is fully available on Connected TV campaigns and rolling out to other brand awareness campaigns. Meta documents frequency as an estimated reported metric instead, the average number of times each person saw your ad. In a narrow Quebec market, where the same hundred buyers see your ads week after week, that difference matters more than any price.

How the two actually work together

LinkedIn names thirteen formats on its ad formats page: single image, carousel image, video, event, text, conversation, message, follower, spotlight, job, document, article and newsletter, and thought leader ads. Document ads accept PPT, PPTX, DOC, DOCX and PDF files, up to 100 MB and 300 pages, and everything downloads as a PDF. For an industrial firm that lives on spec sheets, that is a real capability. LinkedIn's Lead Gen Form is pre-filled with the member's own profile data. Meta, for its part, documents lead ads as a quick way for someone to sign up to receive information from your business, with three documented ways to retrieve the leads, including a real-time webhook.

So the arrangement that holds up does not pit the two against each other. LinkedIn is where you define who counts, by title, by company size and by account list. Meta is where you stay present for a long time with people who already reacted, thanks to engagement audiences that live roughly twice as long. What you should ask a supplier is not which platform he prefers, but which audience he still expects to have in hand in month twelve, and on which platform it will be living.

When the answer is neither one

For a lot of Quebec industrial SMEs the honest answer is neither, not yet. Not because advertising fails, but because nothing is ready at the end of the click. Three things have to exist before the first dollar: a page that answers the buyer's specific question rather than a homepage, a written definition of what counts as a qualified request, and measurement that records it. LinkedIn confirms this in its own way: a campaign optimising for maximum conversions must have a conversion associated with it before it can be activated, and several formats under the website conversion objective have conversion tracking marked as required. The platform itself refuses to sell part of its inventory to an advertiser who measures nothing.

The second case is the tiny market. Forty decision makers you can name one by one do not justify an auction platform, and LinkedIn's 300-member floor closes the door before the budget discussion even starts. Advertising earns its place when it supports that list and makes your name familiar before the call, not when it replaces the call. The detail on Meta campaigns themselves sits on the Facebook and Meta advertising page.

Sources

If you want to know which of the two platforms fits your market before committing a budget, we can look at your numbers together.

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