Best Free LinkedIn Tools for B2B Marketing and Competitor Analysis

“Free trial or plan” sounds great until you log in to the platform and then your card is needed, or you realize that most of the best features are hidden behind paid plans. Below are some of the best tools B2B marketers can access for free to help them with ad creatives, competitor monitoring, lead capture and performance tracking: seven third-party tools and four free tools from LinkedIn itself.

Best Free LinkedIn Ads Tools: Quick Comparison

Here’s a brief comparison of what you get from each tool without paying and the access requirements:

How We Selected the Best Free LinkedIn Ads Tools

A free tool is useful if it is free with no time limit and gives you something meaningful, not just a trial. We evaluated each tool based on:

• What each gives you for free: competitor ads analysis, lead tracking, benchmarking.
• Whether it’s built for LinkedIn ads data.
• What it needs from you: an email, an account, a tag on your site, a CRM connection.
• What the free version leaves out.

The details are sourced from each vendor’s own tool, help and pricing pages, and G2 ratings, not hands-on testing.

Outreach automation tools and profile or content tools aren’t on this list because they solve a different problem.

Why Free LinkedIn Ads Tools Matter for B2B Marketing and Competitor Analysis

LinkedIn is the most expensive ad channel most B2B teams run, and spray-and-pray tactics will only waste more of your budget. So the cheapest wins come before spend: knowing what competitors already say, where your CPC, CTR and CPL stand, and whether conversions are tracked at all.

Free LinkedIn ads tools are useful for:

• Competitor research: their ad strategy, popular themes, visuals, offers and messaging angles. You see what’s already working for your shared audience and write better ad creatives inspired by the best-performing ads, not copying, as that can ruin your brand’s credibility.
• Benchmarking: you compare your ad costs and performance against peers and see whether your ads are performing well or if you are paying above or below your industry’s median.
• Conversion tracking: measuring your ad sets’ impact on buyers. You see whether they are working or not.
• Lead capture: free forms help you collect contact details of prospects so your sales team can follow up on warm leads.
• Audience and company insights: knowing who is engaging with your ads helps you improve targeting and reach the right people.

Best Free Third-Party LinkedIn Ads Tools

Here’s what each tool can give you in detail:

1. DemandSense Competitor Ads Analyzer

DemandSense is a platform for the marketer who runs LinkedIn Ads in a small B2B team. It puts three things in one place that usually live in three separate tools: attribution, optimization, and website visitor profiling. On top of that sits an MCP server.

DemandSense offers three free LinkedIn ad tools, no card or access to your LinkedIn ad account needed.

The first is the Competitor Ads Analyzer tool, which helps you analyze your competitor ads.

You enter your website, and DemandSense works out your industry and suggests about six competitors it finds advertising on LinkedIn in your niche, so it can surface rivals you hadn’t listed.

You pick one or two competitors, and about 30 minutes later you get a report showing:

• What each sells and to whom
• Tone and proof, CTAs, visual style and content mix
• Which messages the category has saturated and which positions nobody has claimed
• Their long-running winners and specific moves to test

Knowing what your competitors are doing makes it easier to identify gaps you can exploit and stand out from the competition.

To monitor competitors continuously, you need DemandSense Competitor Monitoring, which is available on the 30-day free trial.

2. DemandSense Ad Strategy Scanner

The Ad Strategy Scanner scans your own active LinkedIn ads and compares them with the top ad creative and messaging patterns in your category.

Unlike the Competitor Ads Analyzer that goes deep on named rivals, the Scanner reads your own ads against category-wide patterns.

The report covers visuals, layouts and formats; headlines, offers, CTAs and proof points against ads that keep running.

You get a creative score, the biggest gaps, and priorities to focus on for your next campaign, emailed to you in about 30 minutes, no card needed.

A well-written ad creative boosts your ad relevance score, and LinkedIn’s auction rewards more relevant ads with lower costs.

3. DemandSense Benchmark Checker

Not sure whether your ad costs are within range? DemandSense Benchmark Checker gives you a quick review of your LinkedIn ads CPC, CTR and CPL against your industry’s median, with a top-performer reference to show you where you stand on the three metrics.

The quick check requires no sign-up, but for the full report, your email is needed.

Before adjusting campaigns because you feel your CPC is too high, check it against your peers. It might be what everyone else is paying.

4. Factors.ai LinkedIn Advisor

Factors.ai LinkedIn Advisor is a competitor research tool that helps with analyzing messaging angles of your named competitors.

You enter your competitors’ URLs (three maximum), and the Advisor gives you a one-off report in up to 20 minutes showing your competitors’:

• Pain points
• Value proposition
• Recurring phrases and keywords
• Content type and format
• Differentiation strategy

Your business email is required for the report.

However, the report only covers messaging; no creative review or performance data. G2 4.5.

5. Vaizle Free Ad Spy Tool

Vaizle’s free Ad Spy tool lets you view recent competitor ads across LinkedIn, Meta and Google in one view.

You search by entering the keyword or advertiser name for Meta and LinkedIn and the advertiser name for Google, and it shows you the ads running in the last 30 days only. You can use it when looking for ad inspiration.

The searches are unlimited, and you don’t need to sign in or connect your LinkedIn ads account.

However, it only shows the creative: no spend, impressions, targeting or in-depth competitor analysis.

6. ZenABM LinkedIn TLA Generator and Single Image Ad Creator

This is for the marketer who needs help drafting ads. ZenABM TLA Generator helps with drafting Thought Leader Ad copy (a Thought Leader Ad is a person’s post promoted as an ad) from your website. You can also add a speaker, voice sample, topic and CTA link to give the Generator more context. You get three free generations, no sign-up.

ZenABM Single Image Ad Creator generates single image LinkedIn ads from 5 templates:

• Pain point
• Social proof
• Before and after
• With/without
• And competitor comparison

You can customize the ads with preferred colors, CTA button message, size (square 1200×1200 or landscape 1200×628), and even font, then download as PNG or JPG, without connecting your ad account.

The only limitation is that the templates are built for B2B SaaS and work best on a desktop or tablet.

The drafts give you a starting point, but you still have to refine the messaging to suit your brand and your audience so you don’t fall into the AI slop trap.

7. Dreamdata Free

Dreamdata is a B2B revenue attribution platform that offers a free plan as one of its pricing tiers, which gives marketers ad spend reporting, company identification and benchmarking.

What you get:

• Ad spend report, covering 2 months of history.
• Company identification and engagement scoring.
• B2B benchmarks.
• And an audience builder.

It requires you to connect your LinkedIn ads account and add a tracking script to your website, but no credit card is needed.

The free plan is limited to 2 months of history, 5 seats, 3 stage models, 1 sync and 2 notifications (Slack or Teams).

Best Free Native LinkedIn Ads Tools

LinkedIn offers these four tools for free to help marketers run and monitor their ads:

1. LinkedIn Campaign Manager

LinkedIn Campaign Manager is where marketers can view their ad performance and access controls like ad scheduling and budget caps. It’s free to use as long as you pay for the ads, the minimum budget being $10 per day or $100 for the lifetime budget, and every B2B marketer running ads on LinkedIn uses it by default.

You get three planning features free:

• Forecasted results: which shows you what to expect while you build a campaign
• Audience insights: job titles, companies and industries for matched or saved audiences
• Companies view: impressions and engagement per company with your paid and organic content, for up to 90 days, which you can save as a company list.

Campaign Manager also has audience attributes you can use to filter the audience and find your ICP on LinkedIn.

You need a LinkedIn ad account to access Campaign Manager.

You can connect it to your CRM directly through LinkedIn or through an attribution platform for you to see the downstream impact of your campaigns.

2. LinkedIn Ad Library

The LinkedIn Ad Library lets you view ads that have run on LinkedIn for free. You can search and analyze your competitor’s LinkedIn ads by advertiser, payer, keyword, country and date range, with keyword and date range being the most useful.

It covers ads that ran after 1 June 2023, and an ad stays searchable one year after its last impression (paused ads don’t vanish).

Every ad shows its preview, format, advertiser and payer. EU-targeted ads also show impression ranges by country, the dates they ran, and their targeting parameters.

But it doesn’t show spend, clicks, CTR or conversions for ads or analyze them for you.

3. LinkedIn Insight Tag

The Insight Tag is a code you add to your website to track conversions and website visitors.

Conversion tracking lets you measure the actions LinkedIn members take on your website after seeing your ads.

It also helps with website retargeting: you can create Matched Audiences from website visitors directly on the platform and target them in campaigns. And it gives you website demographics: the job titles, companies and industries of your visitors, in aggregate.

LinkedIn recommends using the Conversions API alongside the Insight Tag, so conversions are still counted when browser cookies are blocked.

4. LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms are native forms you attach to Sponsored Content and Message Ads that help you collect leads. You only pay for the ads, not the form.

The forms are pre-filled from a member’s profile, which makes them quicker to complete than website forms.

You can download the leads from Campaign Manager or sync the lists to your CRM for the sales team to reach out to them.

However, LinkedIn stores the form data for one year, and Lead forms on LinkedIn Pages are no longer available for new forms.

Native vs. Third-Party LinkedIn Ads Tools: What’s the Difference?

Native LinkedIn ad tools are provided by LinkedIn, and they give you:

• Your own campaign data: impressions, CTR, CPC, clicks, engagement.
• Conversion tracking for people who clicked or viewed your ads, both click-through and view-through conversions.
• Lead Gen Forms you attach to other ad formats to capture leads.
• Other advertisers’ ads in the Ad Library for inspiration.

While free third-party LinkedIn ad tools are provided by external platforms and give you:

• A read of competitors’ messaging and long-running ads, including trends and their weaknesses.
• A benchmark to compare against.
• A view across accounts and CRM data that Campaign Manager doesn’t show.

You need both tools, but start with LinkedIn’s tools, because the third-party ones work better once tracking is in place.

How to Choose the Right Free LinkedIn Ads Tools for Your B2B Team

The native and third-party tools complement each other. Here’s how you can use each for different needs:

• Before your first campaign: Campaign Manager forecasting, the Ad Library, the DemandSense Competitor Ads Analyzer. Ad Library shows you what’s running; DemandSense Competitor Ads Analyzer shows you the gaps and priorities to focus your campaign on.
• Reviewing your creative: DemandSense Ad Strategy Scanner provides a detailed analysis. ZenABM free tools help you draft better ad copy.
• Checking whether your numbers are normal: DemandSense Benchmark Checker, or Dreamdata Free if you need to check the numbers across different ad platforms.
• Tracking what ads lead to: the Insight Tag, Lead Gen Forms, Dreamdata Free.
• Agencies researching for clients: Ad Library and Vaizle for discovery; the DemandSense Competitor Ads Analyzer for the analysis.

For ad scheduling and other ads automation, you need LinkedIn automation tools.

Are Free LinkedIn Tools Enough for B2B Marketing?

Free tools give you snapshots: one report, one benchmark check, the last campaign’s numbers. They’re enough to start and to audit.

They stop when you need things to happen continuously:

• Tracking competitors week to week
• Capping how often one company sees your ads
• Pausing at a budget
• Or seeing which accounts turned into pipeline

The market keeps shifting, so you need optimization tools to manage and refine the ads as they run, and for these you have to buy the tools. Most tools offer a free trial so you can try them out before fully committing. If they offer a demo, ask them to use your own data to see if the tool will work for you.

From Free LinkedIn Tools to Pipeline: How DemandSense Fits

The free tools read the market and your last campaign but don’t follow your accounts and cannot prove campaign impact. DemandSense connects the data to your CRM and gives you account-level engagement insights read against pipeline.

You see the companies your LinkedIn ads reach, which engaged, and which became pipeline, from LinkedIn engagement, site visits and CRM deals.

For campaign optimization, DemandSense gives you ad scheduling, frequency cap, budget control, audience tuning and spend protection. You set the rules, and DemandSense controls when ads run, which companies see them and how often, and what the budget can spend; closed accounts are excluded and open opportunities added automatically to campaigns; Competitor Monitoring keeps the competitor read going week to week.

Closed-won deals and qualified opportunities go back to LinkedIn through the Conversions API that DemandSense connected, so LinkedIn can deliver the ads to people more likely to buy from you.

Try DemandSense 30 days free, all features included and no card needed.

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