What good looks like before you start
Optimizing means closing the gap between your account and the accounts that already pay less. The gap is wide: the top quarter of LinkedIn advertisers pays roughly half the median on every cost line.
| What you pay for | Median account | Top quarter | Accounts |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPM (per 1,000 impressions) | $36.23 | $20.34 | 944 |
| Cost per landing page click | $17.54 | $9.18 | 899 |
| Content offer lead (form) | $164 | $67 | 217 |
| Demo request lead (form) | $343 | $131 | 115 |
| Cost per message send | $0.42 | $0.23 | 242 |
Full tables, by format, objective and region, are in how much LinkedIn ads cost. Write your own five numbers next to these before you change anything, so you know which line you are fixing.
Step 1: switch off Audience Network and Audience Expansion
Of 1,069 advertiser accounts in the Kiin Labs panel, 46% had LinkedIn Audience Network switched on in at least one campaign during the year, and it took 8% of all spend. 28% had Audience Expansion on. Both send budget away from the audience you chose. They are the cheapest fix in most accounts we audit: two boxes, no creative work, and the spend goes back to the people you targeted. Where to find them is in the Campaign Manager tutorial.
Step 2: set the bid yourself
65% of advertisers in the panel used maximum delivery, LinkedIn's automated bid, at some point in the year. In the same account and objective, maximum delivery costs roughly double per landing page click against a manual CPC bid, with the same click rate, because LinkedIn bids whatever it takes to spend the budget (Kiin Labs Report No. 5). Start on a manual bid and raise it only if the campaign underspends. Bidding high is a separate mistake: on conversation ads the highest bid in an account paid 80% more per send for the same open rate. Detail by format is in LinkedIn bidding strategy.
Step 3: match the objective and format to the job
The objective sets the auction you enter. In the same account, the lead generation objective pays a 40% higher CPM than website visits (154 accounts), so a form has to earn that premium on completion. The format sets the price of a real visit:
| Format | Cost per landing page click | Accounts |
|---|---|---|
| Single image | $13.63 | 774 |
| Carousel | $14.01 | 106 |
| Thought leader ad, single image | $25.02 | 408 |
| Video | $33.68 | 504 |
| Document | $101 | 154 |
Buy website visits on single image or carousel. Use video and thought leader ads to build attention and a retargeting pool, judged on engagement. Every format is priced on LinkedIn ads cost by ad format.
Step 4: put the demo ask in the inbox
A lead gen form in the feed completes 7.6% of the time at the median account; in a message or conversation ad, 40.7% (Report No. 3). The same advertiser pays 57% less per demo lead in the inbox than in the feed (Report No. 4). If your demo ask is a single image ad with a form, this is the largest single change you can make to cost per demo.
Step 5: take friction out of the form and the offer
Two things decide completion. The fields: in the same account, a form that asks for a phone number completes 66% less often and costs 135% more per lead. The offer: a template or tool costs $110 a lead at the median account, an ebook or webinar $135, a report $199 and a demo $530. Lead with the cheapest offer that still qualifies the buyer, and retarget the people who take it with the demo ask. The copy matters too: ads whose first line is a question get 64% fewer leads per impression than ads that open with a statement (question hooks).
Step 6: size the budget to the audience
In the same advertiser, an audience under 30,000 people costs 32% more per impression than one of 30,000 or more, with no better click rate (Report No. 7). Narrow is not wrong, but it is dear: keep spend under about $2 a day per 1,000 members, and widen the audience before you raise the daily budget. Layering a job filter onto an uploaded list cuts cost per click by 26%. Targeting in detail: how to target ads on LinkedIn.
Step 7: refresh creative on frequency, not on a calendar
Fatigue follows cumulative frequency, not time. Engagement falls 9% once everyone in the audience has seen a creative once and 22% after five times, while cost per click stays flat, so CPC hides it. Read frequency at the account level: campaigns report 3.5 when the account actually delivers 9.5, because each campaign counts the same people separately (frequency and fatigue).
Step 8: report on the click that counts
LinkedIn's Clicks column counts reactions, profile visits and "see more" as clicks. Across the panel it counted 15.3 million clicks against 2.5 million landing page clicks, and at the median account only 16% of clicks reached the website. An optimization that lifts CTR but not landing page CTR has done nothing for pipeline. Add landing page clicks, cost per landing page click and form completion to every report: the setup is in the Campaign Manager reporting guide.
What not to optimize
- Weekends. They carry 18% of spend and get a 9 to 10% higher landing page click rate than the same campaign's weekdays. Switching them off removes your cheapest delivery (dayparting).
- The launch day. Friday to Sunday launches cost the same per engagement as Tuesday to Thursday.
- The bid upward. Raise it only when a campaign underspends, never to "win" an audience.
- A campaign in its first week. A content offer at $10 to $25 a day gets its first lead in a median 3 days; a demo offer takes 12. Judge after the first lead, not the first day.