Picture the week before a small accounting firm's tax-planning webinar. The LinkedIn campaign has done its job: 140 people registered, the partners are pleased, and someone has already said the words "we might need a bigger Zoom plan." Then Thursday at 11 a.m. arrives and 67 faces show up. The ads didn't fail. The report just stopped counting at the wrong place.
That firm is an illustration, but the gap is not. Across 33,786 webinars run on Livestorm in 2025, the average share of registrants who showed up live was 47.7%. Roughly half the seats you paid to fill sit empty on the day, and LinkedIn's campaign report, which tallies registrations, has no idea.
This piece is for the small B2B business that runs the occasional webinar, workshop, continuing-education session or breakfast briefing and wants LinkedIn to fill it. Promoting the event is the easy half. Here is how to set it up so buyers actually attend, and what to do with the half who don't.
A Registration Is a Maybe With an Email Address
Start by being honest about what a registration is. Someone saw a topic that sounded useful, tapped a button, and handed over an email address for an event that was days or weeks away. That is interest. It is not a commitment, and it is a long way from a buyer.
The benchmark numbers make the point. Livestorm's 2026 report, built from 7.06 million registrations across 3,199 organizations, puts live show-up at 47.7%, almost exactly where it was the year before (48.9%). ON24, which counts replay viewers as attendees, reports that 60% of registrants watched in some form, and that 43% of attendees chose the on-demand version. So a little under half of your list comes live, and a meaningful slice of the rest will watch later if you make it easy.
Timing matters just as much. Livestorm found that 49.7% of registrations happen in the final seven days before an event, and 15.3% happen on the day itself. Only about one in six people sign up three or more weeks early.
Put those together and the shape of a good campaign changes. You are not running a two-week registration drive with an event at the end. You are running a campaign whose most important day is the event itself, with most of the work happening in the last week and the week after.
Your Webinar Can Run on Zoom. The Event Belongs on LinkedIn.
You have three ways to promote an event on LinkedIn, and the choice decides what you can do later.
A LinkedIn Event on your Company Page, promoted with Event Ads. You create the event on your Page (it can still link out to Zoom or any other platform) and promote it with LinkedIn's Event Ad format, which runs in the feed and shows the date, time and how many people are attending. Event Ads for a LinkedIn Event run under the brand awareness, website visits or engagement objectives.
An off-platform event ad. Since April 2026, LinkedIn lets you run an event ad without creating a LinkedIn Event at all. The ad points straight at your registration page on your webinar tool, and it adds the lead generation objective to the list. It is quicker to set up, but the ad stays static and the event doesn't exist on LinkedIn.
A regular ad with a lead form. A single image or video ad with LinkedIn's native lead form attached. If you have read our case for keeping people on LinkedIn instead of sending them to a landing page, you know why that form converts. It works for event registration too, but it has no event attached and no attendee count on display.
For most small firms we would start with the first route, for two reasons.
The first is the registration form. When a Page hosts the event, you can attach a form that comes pre-filled from each member's profile: first and last name, email, job title, company and country. Nobody types anything, which is why it converts. There is also a consent checkbox, and LinkedIn is explicit that you shouldn't send marketing emails to anyone who didn't tick it. Three pieces of fine print matter. The form only exists for events created by a Company Page, not by your personal profile, so build the event from the Page. You should add the form when you create the event, because people who registered before you added it are never asked to fill it in. And registrant data can only be downloaded for one year, so export it.
The second reason is the retargeting audiences that a LinkedIn Event creates, which we will get to below. The off-platform route doesn't give you those, and they turn out to be the most valuable thing the whole campaign produces.
Your Speakers Sell the Seat. Your Logo Doesn't.
Nobody registers for a webinar because of a company logo. They register because a specific person is going to say something useful about a problem they have. So put that person in the ad.
LinkedIn's Thought Leader ads let you sponsor a post written by an individual (your founder, your partner who's presenting, a guest speaker) so it runs under their name and face instead of your Page's. We have written about why a real person's post outperforms a company post, and an event is where that gap is widest. People come to hear a person.
There is one catch. LinkedIn's dedicated thought leader event ad only works when the speaker's post links to a LinkedIn Live event created by your Company Page, and only under the brand awareness or engagement objectives. If you are hosting on Zoom, use the simpler version: the speaker writes an ordinary post about the session with the registration link in the text, near the top so it shows before the "see more" cut, and you sponsor it as a regular Thought Leader ad. Get the link in from the start. It's their post, so you can't add it later.
Two more moves cost almost nothing:
- Sponsor the post that already worked. If the speaker's announcement picked up likes and comments organically, sponsor that post instead of writing a fresh ad. The engagement it already earned travels with it, and a post with forty comments under it looks like an event worth attending.
- Use the free invitations first. A Page event lets you invite your connections directly, and other admins on your Page can invite their connections too. Before you spend a dollar, have everyone on your team invite the people they know who fit. If your team posts regularly, this is where your employees' reach starts paying for itself.
Half Your Registrations Arrive in the Final Seven Days
If half your registrations arrive in the final week, a budget spread evenly over three weeks puts most of your money in front of people when they are least likely to act. Weight the spend toward the end, and keep registration open until the event starts. Close it a day early and you turn away the 15% who sign up on the day.
LinkedIn gives you a choice that makes this easier. An Event Ad can run as a single ad set covering the whole event, or as three separate ad sets for before, during and after. Take the three. The introductory text on an event ad (up to 600 characters) is the same in every stage when you run one ad set, so the line that sells the session a week out is still running after it's over. Separate ad sets let you write "Tuesday at 11" before, "Starting now" during, and "Watch the replay" after, and set a different budget for each.
One pacing quirk catches people. LinkedIn paces an ad set's budget to spend by 11:59 PM UTC on its end date. If you set the end time to the morning of the event, expecting the budget to run out by then, it won't. You will simply have money left over. Set the budget for the days you want rather than relying on the end time to cut it off.
LinkedIn Fills the Registration List. Getting People There Is on You.
Here is the part almost nobody plans for. LinkedIn used to give events a dedicated feed where organizers could nudge attendees. It removed that, and its help page now says organizers can no longer send attendees a notification that way. You can message attendees who are your connections, and that is it. Reminders are your job.
That collides with a delay most people never notice. LinkedIn says it can take four to five days from the moment someone registers to the moment they appear in your downloaded list. Now set that next to the timing data: half of all registrations arrive in the final seven days. If your plan is to download the list from LinkedIn and email it reminders, a big share of your latest registrants won't be in the file until after the event is over. That includes every person who signed up on the day. They registered, nobody reminded them, and they became part of the empty half.
Close the gap one of two ways. LinkedIn's registration form connects to other tools through Zapier, which can push each registrant into your email platform or webinar tool as they come in, so reminders go out on time. Or take the off-platform route and let registration happen on your webinar tool, which sends reminders automatically. Either way, a registrant should get a confirmation right away and reminders after that. Livestorm's report notes that its best-performing organizers remind people three days out, the day before, and the morning of, with a specific reason to attend each time. "Don't forget!" is not a reason. "We'll walk through the three deductions most contractors miss" is.
Pick the day with the same care. In Livestorm's data, Tuesday had the highest show-up rate at 51.7%, January was the strongest month at 50.4%, and summer was weakest, with August at 42.9%. A webinar in the second week of August starts with a handicap no ad budget will fix.
The No-Shows Are Your Warmest Audience
The people who registered and didn't come are not a lost cause. They raised their hand for your topic, which is more than any cold audience has done. They just had a meeting run over.
A LinkedIn Event built on your Page lets you build event audiences from four groups: people who selected to attend, people who registered and attended, people who registered but didn't attend, and people who engaged with the event without registering. We first mentioned this split in our piece on why the LinkedIn playbook was written for software companies. Here is how to use it.
Run the replay as an ad to the people who registered but didn't attend, within a day or two, while the topic is still fresh in their minds. Run a follow-up offer to the people who attended. And treat the engaged-but-never-registered group as warm prospecting, not as a failure.
Two limits apply. An event audience needs at least 300 members before LinkedIn will run ads to it, and many small-business events won't get there. And LinkedIn has no way to see who sat in your Zoom room, so if the event happened off LinkedIn, the true attendee list lives in your webinar tool. In both cases, export the list from your webinar platform and upload it as a contact list. Expect some loss in matching, and know that an uploaded list carries its own 300-member minimum too. If the event was small, add these people to the larger pool of leads who went quiet instead of building an audience for each event.
Registrations Make a Nice Report. Conversations Pay the Bills.
LinkedIn's campaign report will happily tell you the cost per registration, and it will look good. It is the wrong number to celebrate. The ones that matter are cost per live attendee, cost per replay viewer, and above all cost per sales conversation that came out of the event. Divide the spend by each and the real cost of a buyer becomes visible.
Getting from attendee to conversation is mostly follow-up, and it needs to happen within days, not weeks. Send attendees one short, personal message that refers to the session and asks one question, such as whether they'd like help putting what they heard into practice. Send no-shows a message that leads with the replay and asks the same question. Keep both to people who ticked the consent box, and make sure someone is actually responsible for the replies. A webinar that produced twelve warm replies and no owner for them is the classic version of the problem in marketing hands over the lead and nobody knows what happens next.
A word on incentives, because some event promoters swear by them: a raffle or a small gift card for attending will lift your show-up rate. It buys attendance, not intent. We covered the same tradeoff with paid meetings in our piece on LinkedIn's Conversation Ads: measure what the gift brings in by conversations, not by bodies in seats.
Done right, an event is one of the best first asks a small B2B business can make on LinkedIn. It is far easier to say yes to than a sales call, which is the case we make in nobody on LinkedIn wants a demo. But that only holds if the plan runs past the registration count: to the reminder, the replay, and the first message after.
The Registration Count Is Where the Work Starts
A LinkedIn event campaign should be judged on the conversations it produces, not the registrations it collects. Build the event on your Page so you get the form and the audiences. Put your speakers in the ads. Spend late, keep registration open, and send reminders from a tool that sees new registrants immediately. Then follow up with everyone, especially the people who didn't come.
This is the kind of campaign we plan and run for clients every week, from the first post to the follow-up message. If you would rather hand it off, our LinkedIn ads management team can take it. If you'd rather run it yourself, everything above is the actual method. Start by checking whether your next event is being built from your Company Page.
