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.