Many advertisers are given limited budgets, then feel the pressure from higher-ups to drive performance.

 

They’re expected to get more with less.

 

Not to mention they’re advertising on LinkedIn Ads, a platform already notorious for being too expensive.

 

LinkedIn’s recommendations and default features often don’t help either, as these actually increase costs and are ultimately more harmful than helpful.

 

This all leads to advertisers quitting the platform too soon due to feeling priced out.

 

But here’s the silver lining:

 

LinkedIn advertisers can make every dollar count through lean LinkedIn Ads practices.

 

Here are 5 ways you can reduce your costs on the platform so you can maximize your return.

 

Let’s dive in 🤿

 

Micro-Segment Your Audience

 

Micro-segmentation is breaking up your audience targeting into multiple campaigns.

 

What this does is allows you to have greater control over your campaigns’ efficiency and costs.

 

You can capitalize on those segments that are generating the most positive results at the lowest costs.

 

For example, you might find that certain seniorities, company industries, or company sizes perform better than others.

 

You can then allocate more budget to those segments and pull back on others.

 

If targeting were to be combined into just one or two campaigns, you wouldn’t be able to optimize this granularly.

 

For more on audience micro-segmentation, check out episode 65 of The LinkedIn Ads Show.

 

Bid Low and Bid Manually

 

Bidding by impressions (or Max Delivery) will waste your budget 90% of the time.

 

In theory, it sounds nice.

 

Get your ads seen by as many people as possible.

 

But if your goal is to generate clicks, video views, leads, or conversions, you’re likely going to be disappointed.

 

That’s because, under this bidding strategy, LinkedIn spends your budget every time your ads serve an impression, regardless of whether or not someone takes action.

 

So what happens is that you end up spending more for those actions you want than if you were to bid manually.

 

By bidding manually, you retain greater control over how much you’re willing to pay for the actions you care about.

 

Taking this a step further, LinkedIn will offer a recommended bidding range when you choose to bid manually.

 

Unless you’re working with really large budgets, you can often spend your full daily budget per campaign by bidding lower than what LinkedIn recommends.

 

If you bid low and have trouble spending your full budget, test incrementally raising your bid from day to day until you are spending your desired amount.

 

For more bidding tips, check out episode 89 of The LinkedIn Ads Show.

 

Disable LinkedIn’s Default Settings

 

There are two settings that will drain your budget, give you little-to-no return, and are enabled by default every time you create a new campaign: Audience Expansion and LinkedIn Audience Network.

 

We’ve talked about Audience Expansion to death at this point, but as a quick refresher for those unfamiliar…

 

Audience Expansion extends your reach to those outside the targeting parameters you’ve clearly defined in your LinkedIn Ads campaigns.

 

So if you don’t want to waste money showing your ads to those who, under any circumstance, would not make a great customer for you, disable this by clicking the little checkbox under the Audience section when creating/editing your campaigns.

 

 

The LinkedIn Audience Network (or LAN) also sounds good in theory.

 

What it does is places your ads on trusted third party websites, so you can reach those within your target audience but off of the LinkedIn platform.

 

But in our experience (and many others have expressed the same), traffic from these sources is too low quality.

 

What we’ve found is that those who click ads from LAN spend only a few seconds on your site before leaving.

 

Many have even reported seeing bot traffic coming from LAN.

 

As much as we wish we could, we can’t recommend using LAN at this time and you’re better spending your budget on higher quality prospects.

 

You can disable it in the Placements section when creating/editing your campaigns.

 

 

Conduct A/B Tests

 

This one is probably a no-brainer, but conducting A/B tests is another great way to control your LinkedIn Ads costs.

 

A/B testing allows you to find the best combination of ad copy and creative that results in the highest return at the lowest costs.

 

When A/B testing on LinkedIn Ads, we recommend testing no more than one variable at a time.

 

That’s because testing anything more makes it difficult to determine what’s driving performance up or down.

 

We also recommend testing no more than 7 ads in a campaign at a time, as this is the max number of ads you need to maximize frequency.

 

But if you can limit yourself to only running 2 ads at a time, then the more quickly you’ll be able to gather statistically significant data to make an informed decision.

 

For more on A/B testing strategy, check out episode 36 of The LinkedIn Ads Show.

 

Run Ads During Peak Performance Days

 

Unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn’t give us any sort of ad scheduling or dayparting tool.

 

So it’s a bit of extra work to do this, but you can find which days of the week drive the highest return at the lowest costs, on average, and allocate more budget to those days while pulling back on low-performing days.

 

Without an internal tool to automate the bidding and budgeting changes each week, it can get a little tedious, but can also help you reduce costs in the long run.

 

At B2Linked, we’ve developed a tool that allows us to run ads on a schedule for our clients (one of the perks of working with us).

 

But if you want to learn how to run a weekly analysis report and manage the optimization yourself, check out this video from our YouTube channel.

 

And for more on ad scheduling and dayparting, check out episode 63 of The LinkedIn Ads Show.

 

Now What?

 

We hope this guide is helpful to you in reducing costs on the LinkedIn Ads platform!

 

If you’re feeling like you don’t have the time or expertise to manage it all on your own, we totally understand.

 

Our internal tools allow us to take out a lot of the grunt work, and execute and manage these optimizations at scale.

 

So if you’d like help maximizing your return by minimizing waste within your LinkedIn Ads account, consider booking a discovery call with us at B2Linked.

 

We’d absolutely love the chance to get to work with you!

 

Written by Eric Jones