Satisfied with your LinkedIn Ads performance? You might be wondering, “Where do I go from here? How can I scale?”

There are 3 ways you can efficiently scale your LinkedIn Ads performance:

EXPAND YOUR REACH THROUGH NEW AUDIENCE TARGETING

You can do this in two ways. The first is by creating new ways to target the same audience.

If you’re currently targeting your audience by job title, for example, there are a plethora of additional ways you can expand your reach. Some include targeting by Skills, Groups, Job Functions, Lookalikes, or Company or Contact Lists (ABM).

You might also consider layering on additional criteria in order to pinpoint your exact target persona. Try also including Seniority, Company Size, Industry, etc. when defining your audience targeting.

You might argue that you’re already reaching your target audience with your current targeting, so what help is it to target the same persona in different ways?

Well, first off, if you’re using job title targeting, LinkedIn only recognizes about 55% of job titles, so there’s plenty more of your audience to capture.

And, in general, since LinkedIn’s targeting is based on what info members put in their personal profiles and how they input it, our ability to target our audience accurately is limited by the platform’s ability to interpret the data made available in its members’ profiles. So varying targeting options allow you to reach new members of the same audience because you’re targeting them based on different criteria.

Will there be some overlap between targeting types? Absolutely. But you’re almost always guaranteed to also reach new audience members.

The second way to expand your reach is by targeting all new personas.

We would only recommend doing this if it makes sense. No need to expand your reach to those who wouldn’t make an ideal customer for you or wouldn’t have some significant role in the buying process.

So if you feel there are opportunities available in targeting brand new personas, it can be a great way to scale.

And, as we alluded to earlier, targeting all those who have a role in the buying committee, beyond just your end user, is also well worth the investment.

OPTIMIZE FOR A HIGHER PERCENTAGE TO TAKE ACTION

This method revolves mainly around optimizing performance metrics like your clickthrough (CTR) and conversion rates (CvR).

If you’re consistently seeing a CTR, for example, of 0.4% (which is the average CTR for LinkedIn Sponsored Content Ads), doubling that to 0.8% would also in turn double your click traffic.

The same can be said for CvR. If you’re generating conversions at an average CvR of 10%, doubling that to 20% would also double the number of conversions you receive.

Sounds simple enough, right? Well, in theory, yes, but this is actually a lot harder to do in practice. Here’s how to do it:

Your ad performance at the click level (CTR) can be directly affected by the contents of your ad (ad copy, imagery, video, etc.), as well as how accurately you’re targeting your audience.

Your ad performance at the conversion level (CvR) can be directly affected by the contents of your offer (value proposition, landing page experience, friction of your CTA, etc.).

Changing any one of these aspects of your ads or your offer can change the way your audience reacts. In other words, your CTR and CvR will change for better or worse.

A deep understanding of your audience, the pains they struggle with, and how you can offer them a high amount of value with as little friction as possible is the key to eliciting a higher percentage of engagement.

INCREASE IMPRESSION SHARE BY RAISING YOUR BID AND/OR BUDGET

This is the most obvious one, but if you’ve already optimized for a higher CTR and CvR, you can capitalize by increasing your budget.

This is the most ideal way to scale. If something is working, there’s no need to make any fixes. Allocating more budget to your LinkedIn Ad campaigns in this case will allow you to optimize for volume.

Raising your bid is another way to increase your impression share.

For example, if your current bid is allowing you to show your ads to 20% of your target audience, raising your bid by $1 or $2 may increase your impression share to 35%.

Just note that there comes a point of diminishing returns where you increase your bid, your cost per click goes up, but your impression share only jumps up by a minimum amount.

There’s no transparency as to where this point actually is and it varies for every target audience, but it can be found through incremental changes. If you’ve tried scaling through the methods we’ve already outlined, then scaling through higher bids is the next option in your toolkit.

We recommend testing for the diminishing returns threshold by making small increases to your bid day after day. Note how much your click and impression count increases with each bidding adjustment. If you find that you’re not seeing a big difference in impression volume after bidding higher, you’ve found your bidding limit.

THE NATURAL FOLLOW-UP TO POSITIVE PERFORMANCE

When LinkedIn Ad performance is positive, the natural follow-up question is “How do we get the most out of this?” We hope this guide was helpful in answering this question and carries you forward in your efforts to scale.

What other LinkedIn Ads questions do you have? What challenges are you currently facing? Comment below!

P.S. If you want to avoid the embarrassment of reporting on poor ad performance to your boss for the nth time, consider booking a discovery call with us. Our 12 years of expertise, scientific approach, and proprietary ads management tools uniquely position us to help you optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads for efficiency.

If this sounds like something you’d like help with, we’d absolutely love the chance to get to work with you!

Written by Eric Jones

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