LinkedIn Sponsored Content: 70-Character Headline Limit

LinkedIn's Sponsored Content headline cap is 70 characters — a hard ceiling that truncates silently with no expansion link. This page documents the exact spec, what gets cut where, and how to fit a long value prop inside it without losing the punchline.

The spec (LinkedIn Campaign Manager, 2025):

• Single Image Ad headline: 70 characters max
• Video Ad headline: 70 characters max
• Carousel Ad intro text: 255 characters (separate field)
• Introductory text (above the headline): 150 characters before mobile truncation, 600 hard cap
• Document Ad headline: 70 characters

The 70 figure is counted in UTF-16 code units, not visible glyphs. ASCII letters, digits, spaces, and punctuation each count as 1. Most emoji count as 2 (surrogate pairs). Combining characters (accents on Latin characters, Devanagari conjuncts, skin-tone modifiers) can push a single visible character to 3-4 units.

What happens at character 71:

LinkedIn's Campaign Manager will let you paste up to ~200 characters into the headline field without warning during ad creation. At render time on the feed, the string is cut at character 70 with no ellipsis, no See more, no tooltip. The reader sees a sentence that ends mid-word. This is the single most common QA failure on LinkedIn ads — the ad looks fine in the build UI and breaks on the live feed.

Why 70 and not 90:

The limit is tied to the desktop feed card layout. Headlines render in two lines max under the creative at the standard 1200x627 image size. At LinkedIn's headline font size and weight, two lines of feed-width text fit roughly 70 characters before line three would be needed — and line three is cropped. Mobile (where most B2B impressions actually happen now) is more forgiving on width but stricter on vertical space, which is why the ceiling is the same number across surfaces.

Practical writing rules inside 70:

• Front-load the noun your buyer searches for. If you're selling to RevOps, the word RevOps belongs in the first 25 characters, not character 60.
• Aim for 60-66 characters. Leaves buffer for font rendering on Windows Chrome (which renders ~3% wider than macOS Safari at the same point size) and any A/B variant LinkedIn auto-generates.
• Avoid emoji in the headline. They eat 2 units each, render inconsistently across OS versions, and rarely lift CTR in B2B feeds.
• Skip em-dashes (—) — they're 1 character but visually heavy and waste pixel real estate. Use a colon or comma.
• Don't repeat your brand name if it's already in the introductory text or the page name above the ad. That's 15-25 wasted characters.

Worked example — trimming a long line:

Draft (94 chars): Introducing the new HR analytics platform that helps companies retain their best employees longer

This fails at 70, cutting to ...helps companies retain their best emp on the live feed.

Rewrite (64 chars): HR analytics that flags flight risks 90 days before they quit.

Same message, lower character count, leads with the noun (HR analytics), specific number (90 days), and a verb the buyer cares about (flags).

RTL and CJK notes:

Arabic and Hebrew headlines render right-to-left but count the same way per code unit. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters are 1 UTF-16 unit each (excluding rare CJK Extension B+ characters which are 2), so you can fit far more meaning in 70 units in those languages — typically 35-50 characters of readable copy.

Validator: https://getadplus.com/tools/specs-validator

Example

A cybersecurity vendor drafted: The endpoint detection platform built for security teams under 10 people (73 chars). Live, it rendered as ...built for security teams under 10 peop. Trimmed to 66 chars: Endpoint detection built for security teams under 10 people. Same hook, full sentence visible, and the keyword Endpoint detection now leads.

Questions