LinkedIn Ads CPMs Explained: What Impacts How Much You Pay?

Summary (from AI)

Transcript:

Hi, I'm AJ Wilcox. I'm the Chief LinkedIn Ads Fanatic here at B2Linked.com. Today, I'm going to tell you about CPMs on LinkedIn. For those of you who don't know, CPM stands for your Cost Per Thousand Impressions. It's how we pay for a lot of ads online. I'll start by saying that most of the time, paying by the click on LinkedIn is actually cheaper than paying by the impression.

So most of the time, I don't even really care what my CPM is, I care more about my Cost Per Click. So if you're wondering what kinds of CPMs you can expect on LinkedIn, you may find that you get better performance optimizing for the click. All right, but here's the answer. CPMs on LinkedIn vary wildly by whichever ad type you're using, and also what objective, and all of that.

And we've spent over $150 Million on LinkedIn at this point, So we've seen a lot: on some accounts, we find that we're paying as little as $15 to $20 CPM, which is really cheap. But we've also seen some advertisers who are having to pay all the way up to like $120 to $180 CPM. I'd say that if you're in the $80 to above, you're probably doing something wrong with your bidding. If you're paying less than that, though, you're probably doing a pretty good job. So I mentioned that you can usually get a better deal by paying by the click on LinkedIn. Most of the time, that's about 90% of the time, it's cheaper to pay by the click than it is by the impression.

So then your next natural question is going to be, What is Cost Per Click like on LinkedIn? Well, the average Cost Per Click on LinkedIn, if you're targeting anywhere in North America, which is the most competitive, usually that's going to be like $10 to $16, which may sound really high to those of you who haven't been in B2B very long, or maybe you haven't played with LinkedIn Ads yet.

But if you know what you're doing on the costing side of LinkedIn, you can actually do a lot better. For our clients, we usually average somewhere between about $7 to $8 per click, so it's definitely possible to get it lower. Now that cost per click is for traffic to a webpage, and there are different ad types and objectives where you can keep the traffic on LinkedIn and you can pay for different kinds of interactions.

When you do that, you will see a lower Cost Per Click. For instance, if you choose the engagement objective, you might see costs per click in the $1 to $3 range, and that might look really good, but also realize that when you're using that objective, LinkedIn counts any sort of action that someone does on the ad as a click.

And all of those little micro interactions add up. It's also important to note that LinkedIn by default will turn on something called the LinkedIn Audience Network. And this is where they show your ads off of LinkedIn and on partner sites or in apps as your ads. The costs per click on these are so much lower.

You might see if you accidentally left it on or maybe you intentionally turned it on, that you're paying like $1 per click or less. From all of the testing that I've done, I haven't found that traffic to be good quality. So I'd say you're probably better off shutting it off and going ahead and paying $7-$15 per click to get your traffic from LinkedIn. For more awesome LinkedIn Ads, tips, tricks, and how to's make sure to subscribe to the LinkedIn Ads show podcast and consider joining our private community.

The LinkedIn Ads Fanatics go to fanatics.B2Linked.com. We'll see you there.