LinkedIn bidding tip: Don’t bid what LinkedIn recommends.

LinkedIn will work for business that have $5K lifetime value per customer.

LinkedIn is especially effective for B2B marketing.

On LinkedIn you will be able to select one of the three following optimisation goals.

1. Leads
2. Clicks
3. Impressions

If you choose a campaign type where you are generating leads on LinkedIn, then the best optimisation goal to choose is Leads.

Lead campaigns are particularly effective when you run ads on gated content.

Gated content also known as lead magnets are resources you create to educate your users.

Instead of publicly sharing the information, you put this information in an Ebook and run ads to get users to download the ebook.

Once the user downloads the Ebook, you have their contact information and you will be able to reach out to them to discuss your services.

When choosing the leads optimisation goal, you have access to various bid types and some dark patterns.

LinkedIn Bid Types

Obviously, LinkedIn deploys a dark pattern on the bidding screen.

Here how it looks

Notice how it says,

LinkedIn targeting and competitors

LinkedIn doesn’t provide more details about how this number is derived. However, notice the subtlety in the wording.

LinkedIn say “other advertisers”.

In our opinion, this is never the right way to ascertain your bid.

Our experiments suggests that if you have a job role or job related targeting methods, the bidding is based on other advertisers that may or may not advertise the same service.

Since, both of these target the same CEO or CFO, these are considered as “advertisers” to guide the suggested bid.

Obviously this is not a great way to utilize your budget because you don’t know what the other advertiser is capable of bidding.

So what’s the best way to bid.

If you alter the bid, LinkedIn will complain on lower bids.

LinkedIn dark pattern

See the example below

Obviously, if you run campaigns using $2 you will get very low impressions and very little clicks if at all.

So what’s the best way of determine what to bid for ?

Bidding Formula

The best way to get started on manual bidding is to use the following formula

This is effectively bidding at 75% of the recommended bid.

This woks well for most campaigns.

3/10 times you can further reduce this bid by another 10% without impacting your lead performance.

Assessing success

Once you have updated the bid at the 75% of the lowest recommended bid, how do you assess whether your campaign is performing at peak capacity ?

The best way to do this is to compare performance over a sample size and compare the budget and bid report type.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn’t have a comparison report as of Oct 2022.

This is where it gets unscientific.

Simply head to your LinkedIn advertising console and click the “Budget and Bid” report type for a selected period after your adjusted the bid.

Visually compare this to report from a previous time where you had a higher bid.

You should compare, cost per results.

Additionally, you should also compare your CTR on these campaigns via using the performance columns report.