10 Questions For Success With LinkedIn Advertising

As a digital marketer specialising in Google, Facebook and LinkedIn Ads, I’ve had the chance to audit and build a lot of advertising accounts. I have studied each platform, tested different strategies first-hand, and leveraged the experience of my peers.

Working at an agency, we have internal processes for auditing ad accounts and playbooks for different types of client. Today I wanted to share a simplified audit for LinkedIn advertising in the form of a 10-point checklist that anyone can use.

If you take just one question away from this guide, I’m confident you will see improved performance. In particular, if you are answering yes to questions #6 or #7, you are in for a revelation, and potentially about to save 50% or more on your CPCs.

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1.     Are you tracking website visitors?

One of the first things I check for is an active LinkedIn Insight Tag that is firing correctly. I then look for populating audiences of website visitors and set up conversion goals.

If this is working, you should be able to learn more about your audience through the Website Demographic Tool. This is a hugely underrated tool that will show you unique insights about your website traffic – like their job title and the industries they typically work in. If you are sending traffic to your website without conversion tracking, how are you going to measure performance?

2.    Do you have an evergreen campaign structure?

If I open an account and there are dozens of paused campaigns, or a naming convention that references specific dates, the answer is likely no.

I advocate a simplified account structure where campaign naming convention reflects your objective, chosen ad format and the audience you are targeting. This allows you to work with a handful of campaigns, just swapping out your ads.

If you are creating a new campaign every time, you will be resetting the learning phase on your activity, holding back LinkedIn performance and likely increasing your initial costs.

3.     Are you testing different targeting strategies?

There are a number of ways you can reach your target audience on LinkedIn, whether it’s through job titles, member groups, industries or specific companies. As a performance-driven advertiser, you want to always be split-testing different avenues.

If you are running campaigns to a single audience, consider duplicating your ads and offer to try a different targeting approach. A typical experiment might be targeting job titles with half of your budget, and job functions filtered by seniority with the other half.

4.  Are you testing different ad creatives?

Along similar lines, I always look at the number of live ads per campaign. As a rule of thumb, you want to avoid only running one creative at a time. At the very least, duplicate your ad and swap out either the image/video or the copy to create a split-test.

I typically run 4 ads per campaign at once in what I call a 2:2 testing grid. What do I mean? I will test 2 image/video variants with 2 ad copy variants. For most budgets, this will be plenty to collate results on the two variables. Then simply turn off the worst performers and introduce a new variant to continue refining performance.

5.   Do you have Audience Expansion enabled?

This is often a quick win. By default, LinkedIn will recommend enabling Audience Expansion. If you’re new to the platform, there’s a good chance you went along with this.

From my experience, it is almost always worth turning off.

Audience Expansion gives LinkedIn the license to look beyond the targeting settings you have carefully constructed and add other people into the mix. Unfortunately, there’s no way to distinguish between your audience parameters and the people it added for you.

As advertisers, we always want as much control as possible which is why I turn this off. If you need added volume, it’s better to broaden your targeting manually.

6.    Are you using Automated Bidding?

Automated Bidding (AB) is another default campaign setting that causes a lot of trouble. This option lets the system bid for you, without the ability to set a bid cap. It’s worth noting that AB is a model where you pay by impression, not clicks.

The problem with this is that spend is not tied to results. The system aims to fully spend your budget, regardless of performance, which often sees high CPCs.

That’s not to say AB is never worthwhile.

For it to be cost-effective, you will need a CTR around 2.5x the average or above 1% for Sponsored Content. This is the level that paying for each click becomes less efficient than by impression. Until then, stick to Maximum CPC bidding.

7.    Have you accepted LinkedIn’s recommended bid?

If you’ve followed our advice above and chosen a CPC bid type, you will be faced with a recommended bid price from LinkedIn, and in the small print, a range that ‘similar advertisers’ are supposedly spending…

You have my permission to ignore this.

In this example, LinkedIn is suggesting a £7.93 bid, whereas other advertisers are spending between £5.88 and £12.62. This is fairly typical but you will often see much higher figures.

LinkedIn reps might tell you to bid at the very top of this range for a new campaign to incentivise the system. I would suggest bidding at or below the lower-end suggestion.

One strategy is to low-ball the system with a £1 bid. You will quickly be met with an error message that reveals the lowest possible bid it will accept (highlighted in red font), also known as the ‘floor bid’.

If you start here, in this case bidding £3.80, you could save a huge 52% on the recommended bid. If you can spend all of your daily budget at this price, you have beat the auction, securing the cheapest possible clicks. If you aren’t showing up enough to spend your full budget, either work on your CTR or incrementally increase the bid.

You can thank me later when your cost per lead halves.

8.   How do your click-through rates compare?

When evaluating the performance of their ads, the first metric advertisers rightly turn to is click-through rate. That’s the number of people who took action on your ad (the number of clicks) divided by the number of impressions (how many times the ad was seen).

If you’re new to LinkedIn, the challenge is knowing what a good CTR looks like. We use the following benchmarks for our favourite ad formats:

• Sponsored Content – 0.4% (click-through rate)
• Text Ads – 0.025% (click-through rate)
• Message Ads – 50% (send-to-open rate)

9.    Are your campaigns effectively converting?

This is another question we can try and answer objectively with data. The most important metric in any campaign is its conversion rate (or lead form completion rate).

According to WordStream, the average landing page across the internet in 2020 converts at 2.35%. This is a great reference point to start with if you are using LinkedIn to generate website traffic. If you are running Lead Generation campaigns, LinkedIn reports an average conversion rate for its Lead Generation Forms at an impressive 13%.

These numbers are definitely helpful benchmarks but do give consideration to the nature of your offer and its level of commitment. Naturally, the conversion rate for cold traffic to book a product demo will be significantly lower than someone downloading a free eBook.

10. Would YOU actually click on your ads?

This is the final question to ask ourselves as advertisers and something to always have in the back of your mind. Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience: would you stop scrolling and click?

The secret to success with LinkedIn advertising is being mindful of why your audience is on the platform in the first place. They are likely there for professional or personal development. Can you come up with an offer that aligns with this goal? Are you able to educate your audience around a topic that matters to them?

Whatever you choose to promote, make sure you offer true value in return for your ask. When writing copy or designing creatives, you have to grab attention and pass what I like to call ‘the scroll test’. 

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