Acceptance rate
Acceptance rate is the share of LinkedIn connection requests that people accept. You calculate it by dividing accepted requests by requests sent. It shows whether your targeting, profile, and connection note are convincing.
Acceptance rate is the first conversion in a LinkedIn outreach funnel. You send a connection request, and the person either accepts, ignores it, or declines. The rate is accepted requests divided by requests sent, usually tracked per week or per batch.
It matters because everything downstream depends on it. You can only message people who accepted, so a weak acceptance rate shrinks every later number. It is also a health signal: a rate that keeps falling can mean your list is off-target, your profile looks thin, or you are sending faster than the account can support.
In practice, teams watch acceptance rate by audience and by note style, change one thing at a time, and compare against their own baseline rather than someone else's benchmark. Count only requests that actually went out, not ones that were queued or blocked.
Example
Example with made-up numbers: you send 100 connection requests in a week and 30 are accepted. Your acceptance rate is 30 / 100 = 30%. If next week you send 100 to a different audience and 18 accept, the audience is the first thing to look at.
Common questions
How do you calculate acceptance rate?
Divide the number of accepted connection requests by the number of requests sent, then multiply by 100 to get a percentage. Always note the time window and which requests you counted.
What is a good acceptance rate?
It varies widely by audience, profile, and message, so there is no single right number. Build a baseline from your own campaigns and watch the trend rather than copying an outside benchmark.
Related terms
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