LinkedIn Ads Management
Your best fit B2B customer does not type their headcount, their sector or their job title into a search box. LinkedIn is the only channel where that buyer is addressable before they start looking, and it is also the easiest place in paid media to spend a great deal of money reaching almost nobody. We run it so it is the first, not the second.
Talk To Us About LinkedIn See Paid SearchSearch advertising catches demand that already exists. Someone types what they need, and you show up. It is the most efficient thing in paid media and it should usually come first.
The limit is that some buyers are not defined by anything they would search for. A housing association procurement lead, a finance director at a 200 person manufacturer, an HR head at a company with 2,000 employees: none of those people search for their own job title, their sector or their company size. They are defined by a firmographic, and no amount of keyword work reaches a firmographic.
That is the case for LinkedIn, and it is the only case we make for it. If your customers do search for what you sell, we will tell you to spend the money on Google Ads first.
LinkedIn clicks cost several times what the same business pays on Google, and they always will. That is not a flaw in the channel, it is the price of reaching someone precisely before they are in market.
It does mean the margin for error is thin. An account pointed at the wrong audience, or asking for too much too early, burns budget faster than any other channel we run. Most businesses that tell us LinkedIn did not work for them were running an account with three specific things wrong with it, and none of them were the channel.
Built for LinkedIn’s auction rather than ported across from a Google account, because the two behave nothing alike.
Budget sits at campaign level and audiences overlap silently, so one person in three campaigns is bid against by all three and you pay a higher price for your own impressions. Cold firmographic, named account lists and retargeting each get their own campaign.
Industry, company size and geography, then job function and seniority. Not job titles, which are self reported, fragment across hundreds of variants and quietly exclude most of the buying committee. Audience size is treated as an operating constraint, not a vanity number.
Existing customers, open opportunities, competitors, your own staff and recruiters all come out. So does each campaign’s later stages, so your cold and retargeting campaigns are not bidding against each other for the same person.
Document ads and thought leader ads consistently outperform the standard single image in B2B. Audiences are small, so a creative fatigues in weeks rather than months. The rotation is planned at build, not after click through rate has halved.
Insight Tag, Conversions API, then campaign and creative IDs passed through hidden form fields into your CRM. That turns cost per lead into cost per qualified opportunity, which is the only number worth optimising against and the one the platform will not show you.
Cost cap or manual bidding on a first build, frequency ceilings set against the real audience overlap rather than per campaign, and a spend pattern you can predict. If you have paused LinkedIn before for running away with budget, this is the part that matters.
Three things, and we find them in almost every underperforming account we are asked to look at. None of them are the channel’s fault.
Both are on by default. Expansion adds members you did not choose. The Audience Network serves outside LinkedIn entirely, across third party apps and sites. Between them they routinely take a large share of the budget somewhere you cannot attribute, and nobody switched them on deliberately.
This is how an account runs away with budget, and it is usually the reason a business that tried LinkedIn once is nervous about trying it again. A first build gets cost cap or manual bidding until there is evidence to change it.
A cold audience has not raised a hand, has not searched, and has no reason to give you half an hour. Put something genuinely useful in front of them instead and the same audience behaves completely differently. The demo request belongs to retargeting.
Almost always it was maximum delivery bidding running across overlapping audiences, with Audience Expansion and the Audience Network still switched on. Those three together spend quickly and report back numbers you cannot trace.
A first build from us gets cost cap or manual bidding, both defaults off, and exclusions between campaigns so they are not competing for the same person. Budget control is the first section of the plan rather than a footnote at the end.
They do different jobs, and the test is whether your buyer is findable by keyword. If people search for what you sell, start with Google Ads, because catching existing demand is always cheaper than creating it.
If your buyer is defined by a firmographic instead, company size, sector or job function, search cannot reach them at all before they start looking. That is the case where LinkedIn is not a supplement, it is the only option.
Partly, and it is worth knowing about. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, so Microsoft Ads can layer company, industry and job function data onto search campaigns as targeting or a bid adjustment, at search prices.
It is a genuinely underused tactic and we use it on most B2B accounts. It is not a substitute, though, because it still only reaches people who are already searching.
Lead Gen Forms convert far better, because the form arrives prefilled from the member’s LinkedIn profile. They also tend to produce weaker leads, because a two tap submission carries no intent cost.
That trade is fine as long as your CRM can tell you which campaign produced which opportunity. If it cannot, the forms will flatter the account and you will not find out for a quarter, so we fix the measurement first.
As a rough floor, a couple of thousand a month in media, and a customer worth enough that a handful of them pays for the year. Most B2B services and software businesses clear that comfortably. Low value, high volume businesses generally do not, and we would point you back to search rather than take the work.
Longer than search. Audiences are small, LinkedIn’s learning is slow, and B2B buying cycles are long, so judging the channel at four weeks tells you very little. A fair read needs a quarter, and a CRM that can still see which campaign started the conversation.
Always. Blending LinkedIn into a single paid media total hides whether it is earning its place, which is convenient for whoever manages it and useless for you. Separate lines, separate targets, separate decisions. See how we report.
If the honest answer is no, search was never going to reach them and LinkedIn is the conversation worth having. Tell us who you are trying to reach and we will tell you whether it is worth the money.
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