Judge LinkedIn Ads on Pipeline, Not CTR: How to Measure What Matters
Is LinkedIn telling you your campaigns are crushing it while sales says the leads are junk? Here's how we fix attribution, tie leads to CRM opportunities and use CTR only to grade creative.
Short answer: Use CTR to grade your creative and pipeline to grade your campaigns. Fix LinkedIn's attribution settings first (7-day click, 1-day view, last touch last campaign), tie leads to opportunities in your CRM, and send those results back to LinkedIn with the Conversions API.
Is LinkedIn telling you your campaigns are crushing it while sales says the leads are junk? Usually that's not a targeting problem. It's a measurement problem. Here's how we set it up.
Why are CTR and cost per lead misleading?
Both are easy to make look good without helping the business. A clickbait headline lifts CTR without bringing in buyers. A low-commitment offer drops your cost per lead and fills the CRM with people sales will never call. Judge only on those and your campaigns drift toward cheap attention.
CTR still matters, just for the right job. It tells you if your creative is working. 0.4% is average for sponsored content. Below that, fix the creative.
Cost per lead matters too, if you compare it to the right thing. $100 to $300 is normal for content downloads. Compare that to your medium- and low-intent non-brand Google campaigns, not your high-intent search terms.
Which LinkedIn settings inflate your numbers?
Attribution window. LinkedIn's default is 30-day click, 7-day view. Change it to 7-day click, 1-day view.
Attribution model. The default, last touch each campaign, double-counts conversions across campaigns. Change it to last touch last campaign.
Separate conversion actions for text and dynamic ads. You can't turn off view-through conversions, and those desktop ads serve at a really high frequency, so they'll take credit they didn't earn if they share a conversion with sponsored content.
Validated work email on lead gen forms. The default email field brings in personal emails. Use the work email field with Validate turned on.
How do you connect LinkedIn Ads to your CRM?
Put the Insight Tag on every page of your site.
Tag every click with consistent UTMs, and sync lead gen form leads into your CRM with the campaign and ad IDs on each record. Hidden fields on lead gen forms are static, so they won't do this for you.
Carry the source onto contacts and opportunities so you can report pipeline by campaign.
Connect the Conversions API and send back SQLs or opportunities. HubSpot is the easiest. Zapier works with most CRMs.
Build one report with spend, qualified leads, opportunities and pipeline by campaign, side by side.
How much data does the Conversions API need?
To optimize toward SQLs or opportunities, LinkedIn needs roughly 60 to 90 of those events over three months. To optimize for qualified leads, it's about 20 a week per campaign. Not there yet? Send back MQLs instead. Invest the time now so you can grow later.
Want to spy on the quality of your other channels?
You can use LinkedIn to see who's coming from Google, Meta or Bing. Build a website matched audience from your UTM parameters. Go broad with Contains utm_source=google, or get granular with Contains utm_campaign=HR_Software_Advice. Then look at the demographics: company size, industry, job title. It's a great way to see which search campaigns actually bring in enterprise traffic.
How long before you call a test?
Give sponsored content at least a week and Conversation Ads three to four weeks. B2B sales cycles are long, so closed-won data shows up late. Use earlier signals like qualified lead rate and meetings booked to make calls, then check them against opportunities as they come in. And remember, LinkedIn isn't algorithmic like Meta. Nothing gets better unless you change it.
FAQ
What is a good CTR for LinkedIn ads?
0.4% is average for sponsored content and above 0.6% is great. Use it to judge creative, not campaign success.
What attribution settings should I use in LinkedIn Campaign Manager?
7-day click, 1-day view, with the last touch last campaign model.
Can LinkedIn track offline conversions from my CRM?
Yes, with the Conversions API. It sends SQLs, opportunities or MQLs back to Campaign Manager so LinkedIn can optimize toward them.
Written by Trey Buchanan, founder of TB3 Digital. Trey has spent nine years in B2B paid media and has twice been selected for LinkedIn's Customer Advisory Board. This is one of the seven things we do on every account. See the full list in How TB3 runs LinkedIn Ads, or book a strategy call and we'll look at your account with you.
How Many Ads Per LinkedIn Campaign? Why We Run Five
LinkedIn shows each person up to five of your ads every 48 hours. Here's why we run five ads per campaign, how to duplicate winners to fill the slots, and how to refresh ads that are dying.
Short answer: Five. LinkedIn will show each person up to five ads from your company page every 48 hours, so five ads per campaign uses all of it. If you only have two or three good ones, duplicate your best performers to fill the slots. LinkedIn treats duplicates as new ads.
How many ads are in your LinkedIn campaigns right now? If it's one or two, you're leaving impressions on the table.
Why five ads per campaign?
LinkedIn's frequency cap for sponsored content is five ads per person every 48 hours. Run two ads and you're only using 40% of the frequency you could be getting. Fill all five and you can more than double your impression share with the same audience.
What if you don't have five good ads?
Duplicate your best ones. LinkedIn treats a duplicated ad as a brand new ad, so you get the extra impressions without making new creative.
How do you refresh an ad that's dying?
When CTR falls and costs climb, LinkedIn starts showing that ad less, because it uses past performance to decide future delivery. Don't just leave it there. Duplicate it in the same campaign and pause the original. The copy starts with a clean slate.
What should the five ads look like?
Square images, 1080x1080. They get 30 to 70% higher CTR than horizontal. For most accounts this is the single biggest creative fix.
Spend your time on the image. 80%+ of an image ad's performance comes from the image, so don't over-invest in testing body copy.
Stand out from the feed. Use colors that contrast with LinkedIn's white, grey and blue. Text on the image is fine if it adds context.
Test document and carousel ads. LinkedIn now rewards dwell time, how long someone spends on your ad, and those formats get more of it than a single image.
How do you judge them?
Give the campaign at least a week before you judge anything.
Look at CTR first. 0.4% is average for sponsored content and above 0.6% is great. Sales audiences should be 0.45% or better. IT audiences run lower, and that's ok.
Below 0.4%? That's a creative problem, not a targeting problem.
Pause the losers, duplicate the winners, and keep all five slots full.
What else eats into your frequency?
The five-ad cap is per company page, not per campaign. Run three campaigns at the same small audience and they fight each other for the same five slots. Also check ad rotation. It's a small setting on the ad level, not in campaign settings, and it defaults to optimize for performance, which pushes delivery to whichever ad pulls ahead early. Switch to rotate evenly when you want a fair test.
FAQ
How many ads should a LinkedIn campaign have?
Five, to use LinkedIn's frequency cap of five ads per person every 48 hours.
Does LinkedIn treat duplicate ads as new ads?
Yes. That's why duplicating top performers works for filling slots and for resetting tired ads.
What is a good CTR for LinkedIn sponsored content?
0.4% is average. Above 0.6% is great.
Written by Trey Buchanan, founder of TB3 Digital. Trey has spent nine years in B2B paid media and has twice been selected for LinkedIn's Customer Advisory Board. This is one of the seven things we do on every account. See the full list in How TB3 runs LinkedIn Ads, or book a strategy call and we'll look at your account with you.
LinkedIn Ads Exclusions: Who to Exclude Before You Target
Getting LinkedIn leads from outside your company size targeting? Those are gray zone leads. Here's how double exclusions get rid of them, plus who else to exclude from every campaign.
Short answer: Exclude current customers, competitors, your own employees and people who already converted from every LinkedIn campaign. Then use double exclusions: exclude the seniorities, company sizes and functions you don't want, not just include the ones you do. That's how you get rid of gray zone leads.
Are you having leads come in from LinkedIn outside of your company size targeting? You may be getting gray zone leads. Here's what that means, and how we set up exclusions on every campaign.
What are gray zone leads?
Gray zone leads come from companies that LinkedIn has in more than one company size bucket, or in no bucket at all. The same thing happens with people. LinkedIn isn't always sure which seniority or job function someone belongs in, so it puts them in more than one.
So you target 201-500 employees and still get leads from a company LinkedIn also has in 11-50. You included the right bucket, and the wrong one came along with it.
What are double exclusions?
Don't just do inclusion targeting. ALSO do exclusion targeting. For example:
Targeting Manager and above? Exclude Entry, Unpaid/Intern and Senior in the exclusion section.
Targeting 201-500 employees? Exclude 1-10, 11-50 and 51-200.
The next time you do this on company size, watch the audience estimate. You'll be surprised how much audience you lose, even though you thought you only included your target size. That drop is the gray zone you were paying for. Do this on every campaign.
Who else should you exclude?
Current customers, unless the campaign is built for upsell. Run those as their own campaigns.
Competitors, so you stop paying to educate them and sales stops chasing their "leads."
Your own company, plus agencies and partners who work on your account, so their clicks don't pad the numbers.
People who already converted. Build an audience from your lead gen form submitters and exclude it from prospecting.
What are the job function gotchas?
People can sit in two functions. Product marketers show up in both Product and Marketing. Exclude a function and you remove everyone LinkedIn puts in it, even people who are mostly in your target function.
CEOs are in Business Development. Not where most people expect. Targeting the C-suite by function? Include Biz Dev. CFOs can be in Finance or Accounting.
Recruiters are in HR. There's no recruiting function, so exclude recruiters by job title.
Job title targeting can't exclude by function, but job function targeting can exclude by job title. Plan your exclusions around that.
How do you set up exclusions?
Pull your lists from the CRM: customers, competitors and partners.
Upload them as Matched Audiences. Company lists for accounts, contact lists for people. Give them a day or two to process.
Add your own company as a company exclusion.
Add your double exclusions for seniority, company size and function.
Check the audience estimate before launch. Prospecting audiences should land around 40K to 200K. ABM lists shouldn't go below 3K to 5K.
Refresh the lists at least monthly.
FAQ
Why am I getting LinkedIn leads outside my company size targeting?
They're gray zone leads. LinkedIn has some companies in more than one size bucket, or none. Exclude the sizes you don't want, not just include the ones you do.
Can you exclude a list of companies on LinkedIn?
Yes. Upload them as a Matched Audiences company list and add it to the exclusions on every campaign.
Will exclusions make my LinkedIn audience too small?
The drop can be big, and that's kind of the point. That's audience you were paying for that didn't fit. If it gets too small, widen your targeting on purpose with more job titles or functions.
Written by Trey Buchanan, founder of TB3 Digital. Trey has spent nine years in B2B paid media and has twice been selected for LinkedIn's Customer Advisory Board. This is one of the seven things we do on every account. See the full list in How TB3 runs LinkedIn Ads, or book a strategy call and we'll look at your account with you.
Should You Split LinkedIn Campaigns by Region? Yes, and Here’s How
North America, then UK and Ireland, then Europe, then APAC. That cost order has held on LinkedIn for more than eight years. Here's why one global campaign costs you, and how we split by region.
Short answer: Yes, split them. North America is the most expensive region on LinkedIn, then the UK and Ireland, then the rest of Europe, then APAC, and that order has held for more than eight years. One campaign per region lets you bid less where it's cheaper and see which market is actually working.
Are you running one global LinkedIn campaign? Then you're using one bid for markets that price completely differently, and you can't tell which one is driving results. Here's how we set up regions instead.
Which LinkedIn regions cost the most?
North America: most expensive.
UK and Ireland: second.
Continental Europe: third.
APAC: cheapest overall. Australia runs higher, and Thailand and India are the cheapest.
Same audience, different region, very different price. You can bid a lot less in APAC than in North America.
Why does one global campaign go wrong?
One campaign means one bid. Set it for North America and you overpay everywhere else. Set it lower and North America won't deliver. You also lose your reporting. When results change, you can't tell which market moved. Don't run one global campaign.
How do we split campaigns by region?
Break out NA, UKI, EU and APAC at minimum, each in its own campaign group or at least its own campaigns.
Bid separately in each, starting at least 30% below that campaign's recommended bid.
Budget by where sales can close, not by where clicks are cheapest.
Set location to Permanent, not "Recent or Permanent." Recent includes people traveling through, and they're not your buyers.
Start with the same creative, then localize spelling, currency and examples once you know what works.
Name campaigns the same way every time, like Region_Audience_Objective, so reports stay readable.
What should you watch out for in each region?
EU and Conversation Ads: GDPR rules limit which EU members you can reach with messaging ads, so expect a much smaller audience there. Sponsored content isn't affected, and neither is the UK.
Fraud risk: Be careful in North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia. LinkedIn doesn't verify job titles, and you'll see people claiming senior titles at companies they don't work for. Use specific job titles instead of broad functions, use double exclusions, and add a qualifying question to your lead gen forms.
Germany and Japan: both have their own big professional networks, so LinkedIn tends to perform weaker there.
When shouldn't you split by region?
If a region's audience is too small to deliver on its own, combine it with a nearby market rather than forcing a campaign that won't spend. And if you only sell in one market, there's nothing to split. Focus on audience and offer instead.
FAQ
Do LinkedIn ads cost different amounts in different countries?
Yes. North America is the most expensive, then the UK and Ireland, then the rest of Europe, then APAC.
Should I use "Recent or Permanent" location targeting on LinkedIn?
No. Use Permanent. Recent includes travelers who aren't in your market.
Should LinkedIn ad creative change by region?
Start with the same creative so you can compare results, then localize the details once you know what's working.
Written by Trey Buchanan, founder of TB3 Digital. Trey has spent nine years in B2B paid media and has twice been selected for LinkedIn's Customer Advisory Board. This is one of the seven things we do on every account. See the full list in How TB3 runs LinkedIn Ads, or book a strategy call and we'll look at your account with you.
LinkedIn Manual Bidding vs. Maximum Delivery: Why We Bid Manually
Want to spend all your money and make everything cost too much? Use Maximum Delivery. Here's how we bid manually instead: start 30% below the recommended bid, then adjust 10% at a time.
Short answer: Use manual bidding, not Maximum Delivery. Start at least 30% below LinkedIn's recommended bid. If the campaign keeps hitting its daily budget, drop the bid 10% a day until it doesn't. If it won't spend, raise it 10% or widen the audience.
Want to spend all your money and make everything cost too much? Use Maximum Delivery. LinkedIn picks it for you on nearly every campaign, and it tells LinkedIn to spend your whole budget at whatever price the auction asks. Here's how we bid instead.
What bidding options does LinkedIn give you?
Maximum Delivery: LinkedIn sets your bids to spend your whole budget. You don't set a price.
Cost Cap: You set the most you'll pay per result and LinkedIn tries to stay at or under it. It's an option on Lead Generation campaigns.
Manual bidding: You set the bid. LinkedIn shows a recommended bid next to it.
Why don't we use Maximum Delivery?
Max Delivery only cares about one thing: spending your budget. It doesn't care what it pays to get there. On B2B audiences, where a lot of advertisers are chasing the same buyers, that means you pay more per click than you need to.
It also hides what's going on. When LinkedIn sets the price, you can't tell whether costs went up because of your audience, your creative or the auction.
Why start 30% below the recommended bid?
LinkedIn's recommended bid assumes your ad will have a low CTR. If your creative is any good, bidding at the recommendation means you'll burn through your budget way too fast. So start at least 30% below it and work from there.
How do you adjust manual bids?
Start at least 30% below the recommended bid.
Hitting your daily budget every day? Drop the bid 10% a day until you stop maxing out. LinkedIn doesn't pace spend like Meta does. Bid too high and it can spend your whole daily budget in the first 12 hours.
Not spending your daily budget? Either the bid is too low or the audience is too small. Raise the bid 10%, or widen the audience.
Re-check the bid range any time the audience size changes. Bigger audiences usually mean cheaper bids.
Use daily budgets only. Lifetime budgets pace terribly, and daily plus lifetime means managing caps by hand.
One more thing: LinkedIn runs on GMT, so your daily budget resets around 5pm Pacific. Keep that in mind when you look at daily pacing.
Which objective should you bid on?
If a campaign gets fewer than 10 conversions a week, use the Website Clicks objective with manual CPC instead of Website Conversions. LinkedIn doesn't have enough data to optimize for conversions below that. And remember, LinkedIn isn't algorithmic like Meta. Performance won't get better on its own. You have to make the changes.
When do Cost Cap or Maximum Delivery make sense?
Cost Cap is worth testing on Lead Generation campaigns when you know the cost per lead you need to hit. Maximum Delivery is fine for Awareness and Video Views, where click cost matters less. Heads up: the Awareness objective forces automated bidding. If you want CPC control on a brand campaign, use Engagement instead.
FAQ
Is manual bidding better than Maximum Delivery on LinkedIn?
For most B2B campaigns, yes. You control what you pay, and you can actually see why costs move.
How much should I bid on LinkedIn ads?
Start at least 30% below LinkedIn's recommended bid. Lower it 10% a day if you keep hitting your daily budget, or raise it 10% if you aren't spending.
Why does my LinkedIn campaign spend its whole budget by midday?
Your bid is too high. LinkedIn doesn't pace spend through the day like Meta. Lower the bid 10% a day until the campaign stops maxing out.
Written by Trey Buchanan, founder of TB3 Digital. Trey has spent nine years in B2B paid media and has twice been selected for LinkedIn's Customer Advisory Board. This is one of the seven things we do on every account. See the full list in How TB3 runs LinkedIn Ads, or book a strategy call and we'll look at your account with you.
One CTA per Conversation Ad: How We Build LinkedIn Conversation Ads
LinkedIn lets you stack buttons and branches into one Conversation Ad. Please don't. Here's why we use one CTA, a customer success sender, under 500 characters, and wait three to four weeks to judge.
Short answer: Give every LinkedIn Conversation Ad one offer and one button. Keep the copy under 500 characters, send it from a real person (a Director or VP in customer success works best, never sales), and give it three to four weeks before you judge it.
Conversation Ads are one of the best direct response formats on LinkedIn. For things like demo and contact-us requests, they get 3 to 5 times the form fill rate of sponsored content. They're also really easy to overbuild. LinkedIn lets you add a bunch of buttons and branching paths to one message. Please don't.
Why only one CTA?
Every extra button is a reason not to click. Your ad lands in someone's inbox next to messages from real people. Offer a demo, a guide, a webinar and a case study and it reads like a menu. The easiest choice on a menu is to close it.
Branches split your data. Each path cuts your opens into smaller groups, and most of them never get enough clicks to tell you anything.
You can't see which button got clicked. Campaign Manager doesn't show you which CTA someone picked. Only your LinkedIn rep can pull that. One button means you always know what the conversion was.
The only time I'd use more than one button is if you're deliberately building a choose-your-own-adventure flow.
Who should send your Conversation Ads?
The sender's photo, name and headline show up in the inbox before anyone reads a word, so the sender matters a lot.
Use a real person, not a brand page.
Customer success wins. Women with Director-level titles or higher in customer success get the highest open and response rates. A VP of Customer Success or VP of Customer Service is the ideal sender title.
Never use a sales title. People get InMails from sales reps all day. "Sales" in the headline tells them they're about to be sold to.
Pick someone who looks credible and approachable in their profile photo.
The sender doesn't have to answer anything, either. Recipients can't reply directly to a Conversation Ad.
How should you write the message?
Open with them, not you. Name their role or the problem they own.
One sentence on what they get and why it's worth their time.
State the offer plainly. A demo, an asset, an event seat. One thing.
Make the button say what happens next. "Get the ROI calculator" beats "Learn more."
Keep it under 500 characters. 700 is the absolute max.
How do you bid on Conversation Ads?
Conversation Ads are priced per send, not per click, so the rules are different from sponsored content. Start at the lowest bid LinkedIn allows. Most of the time you'll still hit your daily budget there. If you don't, raise the bid 10% at a time. Watch for the tipping point: sometimes one small bump unlocks 30 to 40% more spend because you just reached a new pocket of the audience. You can always pull it back.
How long before you judge a Conversation Ad?
Three to four weeks, minimum. Week one always looks bad because people haven't opened yet. Open rates catch up as earlier sends get opened. Here's what normal looks like once they settle:
Open rate: 40 to 50%. Below 35% usually means your audience doesn't spend much time on LinkedIn.
Open to click: about 1%.
Form fill rate: 10% or more of the people who open the form.
Conversation Ads rotate evenly, so A/B testing is easy. Test one thing at a time (sender, first line or offer) and call the winner on qualified leads, not clicks.
FAQ
How many CTAs should a LinkedIn Conversation Ad have?
One, unless you're deliberately building a choose-your-own-adventure flow.
How long should a LinkedIn Conversation Ad be?
Under 500 characters. Don't go over 700.
What's a good open rate for LinkedIn Conversation Ads?
40 to 50% is normal once the campaign has run three to four weeks. Below 35% is a red flag.
Written by Trey Buchanan, founder of TB3 Digital. Trey has spent nine years in B2B paid media and has twice been selected for LinkedIn's Customer Advisory Board. This is one of the seven things we do on every account. See the full list in How TB3 runs LinkedIn Ads, or book a strategy call and we'll look at your account with you.
Why We Turn Off LinkedIn Audience Expansion and Audience Network
You know that audience you built? Audience Expansion's job is to completely disregard it. Why we turn off Audience Expansion and Audience Network on every campaign, and what to use instead.
Short answer: Turn both off. Audience Expansion shows your ads to people outside the audience you built, and LinkedIn Audience Network sends your ads off LinkedIn to apps and sites where the traffic rarely converts. LinkedIn opts you into them by default. If you want more reach, use a Predictive Audience instead.
There are parts of the LinkedIn Ads platform that are sadly just a waste of your time. These two are at the top of my list. Turning them off takes about thirty seconds per campaign, and it's the first change we make in almost every account we inherit.
What does Audience Expansion do?
You know that audience you built? Audience Expansion's job is to completely disregard it. It lets LinkedIn show your ads to people it considers "similar" to your targeting. You picked specific job titles, seniorities, company sizes or an account list. Audience Expansion lets LinkedIn decide other people are close enough.
Not sure if it's on? Look for these in your demographics report:
Spend on companies outside the size range you targeted.
Entry-level people getting impressions when you targeted Manager and above.
Job functions you never picked showing up in delivery.
It's on by default for every new campaign, so you have to turn it off every single time.
What does LinkedIn Audience Network do?
Audience Network takes your ads off LinkedIn and puts them on third-party apps and websites. It gets selected automatically on Website Visits campaigns. The traffic is bot-like: one or two second visits that bounce. There are no bid modifiers, so you can't bid it down, and LinkedIn will happily spend a big chunk of your budget there.
You came to LinkedIn to reach professionals in the feed. Keep your money there, where the traffic quality is higher and bounce rates are lower.
What should you use instead?
If your audience is too small or you want to reach more people, don't let LinkedIn guess. Widen it on purpose:
Try a Predictive Audience. It starts from your own data, like lead gen form submitters or a CRM list, instead of LinkedIn's idea of "similar."
Add targeting you'd actually sign off on. Test job titles first, then job function, then member groups, then skills. That order holds for almost every account.
Re-check your bid after the audience grows. Bigger audiences usually mean cheaper bids.
How do you turn them off?
In Campaign Manager, open each active campaign and go to the audience section.
Uncheck Enable Audience Expansion.
In the placements section, uncheck LinkedIn Audience Network.
Add both to your launch checklist. New campaigns can switch them right back on.
What happens after you turn them off?
Reach drops, and your cost per impression might go up. That's fine. You're now paying to reach the people you actually picked. Judge the change on lead quality and pipeline over the next few weeks, not on impressions in the first few days.
FAQ
Should Audience Expansion be on or off on LinkedIn?
Off, on every campaign. It's on by default and it spends budget outside the targeting you set.
Is LinkedIn Audience Network worth it for B2B?
Not for pipeline. The traffic is low quality, there are no bid modifiers, and it soaks up budget.
What's a better way to scale a LinkedIn audience?
Use a Predictive Audience, or widen your targeting yourself with more job titles, job functions or member groups.
Written by Trey Buchanan, founder of TB3 Digital. Trey has spent nine years in B2B paid media and has twice been selected for LinkedIn's Customer Advisory Board. This is one of the seven things we do on every account. See the full list in How TB3 runs LinkedIn Ads, or book a strategy call and we'll look at your account with you.
How TB3 Runs LinkedIn Ads: 7 Things We Do on Every Account
Want to know the first thing I do when I take over a LinkedIn account? I undo LinkedIn's defaults. Here are the seven things we change on every account, and why.
Want to know the first thing I do when I take over a LinkedIn account? I undo LinkedIn's defaults.
LinkedIn builds its defaults to spend your budget, not to build your pipeline. So before we touch targeting, creative or bids, every account we run gets the same first pass. None of this is a hack. It's the setup work most accounts skip, and it's usually why they're paying too much. Here are the seven things we do on every account, and why.
01. Turn off Audience Expansion and Audience Network
Audience Expansion's pitch is basically: "You know that audience you built? How about I just completely disregard it." It shows your ads to people LinkedIn thinks are "similar," which in practice means entry-level people when you targeted Manager and above, and companies outside your size range. It's on by default for every new campaign.
LinkedIn Audience Network sends your ads off LinkedIn to third-party apps and sites. The traffic is bot-like, one or two second visits that bounce, and there are no bid modifiers to control it. We turn both off on every campaign. Want more reach? Try a Predictive Audience instead. More in our Audience Expansion field note.
02. Bid manually. Skip Max Delivery.
Want to spend all your money and make everything cost too much? Use Max Delivery. It tells LinkedIn to spend your whole budget at whatever price the auction asks.
We bid manually and start 30% below LinkedIn's recommended bid. If a campaign keeps hitting its daily budget, we drop the bid 10% a day until it stops. LinkedIn doesn't pace spend like Meta does, so a bid that's too high can burn a full day's budget in the first 12 hours. Full breakdown in manual bidding vs. Maximum Delivery.
03. Split campaigns by region
North America is the most expensive region on LinkedIn, then the UK and Ireland, then the rest of Europe, then APAC. That order has held for more than eight years. Put them all in one campaign and you're stuck with one bid for markets that price completely differently, and you can't tell which one is working.
One campaign per region fixes both. More in why we split campaigns by region.
04. Exclude before you target
Before we build a single targeting layer, every campaign gets the same exclusions:
Current customers, unless the campaign is built for upsell.
Competitors, so you stop paying to educate them.
Your own company, so your employees aren't padding the numbers.
The seniorities and company sizes you don't want. Including the ones you want isn't enough. LinkedIn puts people and companies in more than one bucket, so you have to exclude the rest too.
That last one is how you get rid of gray zone leads. Details in our exclusions field note.
05. Run five ads per campaign
LinkedIn will show each person up to five of your ads every 48 hours. Run two ads and you're only using 40% of that. We run five per campaign. Only have two or three good ones? Duplicate your best performers to fill the slots. LinkedIn treats a duplicate as a brand new ad. More in how many ads to run per campaign.
06. One CTA per Conversation Ad
Conversation Ads let you stack several buttons and branching paths into one message. We use one offer and one button, keep the copy under 500 characters, and send it from a real person, ideally a Director or VP in customer success. Never someone with sales in their title. One clear ask converts better and tells you exactly what worked. More in our Conversation Ads field note.
07. Judge on pipeline, not CTR
CTR tells you whether your ad stopped the scroll. It doesn't tell you whether anyone bought. We use CTR to grade creative (0.4% is the average for sponsored content) and we use opportunities and pipeline in your CRM to decide where the money goes. More in how we measure LinkedIn Ads on pipeline.
Want us to check your account against this list?
If you're spending $50K or more a month across paid channels and LinkedIn isn't pulling its weight, book a strategy call. We'll walk through what we'd change first.
Written by Trey Buchanan, founder of TB3 Digital. Trey has spent nine years in B2B paid media and has twice been selected for LinkedIn's Customer Advisory Board.