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.