How to Reduce LinkedIn Ad Costs Without Sacrificing ROI

If your LinkedIn ad campaigns are getting more expensive, check your bidding settings. 🔍

The default setting for most new campaigns now is 'max delivery'. This is an automated setting that allows LinkedIn to bid as high as necessary to spend your daily budget. There are lots of other advertisers also bidding for the same audience, and the highest bids get the most ad slots. 🏆

For most campaigns, though, this setting will be the most expensive way to run ads. And especially if you are tracking ROI, spending your daily budget at any cost necessary might not give you the CPL or Cost-per-opportunity that you want. 📊❌

Often, changing the bidding to manual CPC will bring down the cost of the leads. 🤑 Obviously, this is more work, as you need to adjust the CPC yourself to get results - too low and you won't get clicks, too high and the campaign is the same as max delivery. ⚖️ But if cost is important to you, and LinkedIn is one of your major cost buckets, it's probably worth the time. ⏳💡

⚠️ Big Caveat!!!** Make sure you are also tracking costs along the pipeline! 📈 Cost-per-meeting, cost-per-opportunity, cost-per-closed won. For any B2B company with a longer sales cycle, CPL becomes less relevant. Expensive leads that convert better are far more desirable than cheap leads that don't make it to SQL. 🚀

As a metaphor: imagine if Uber had a setting that said 'book me a ride at any cost', and a group of people are waiting for Ubers, and they all use this setting. The price will surge, and keep surging as all the riders will pay higher costs to get a car. 🚗💸 You are no longer selecting a cost; you let the app decide the cost to get you home. Naturally, it will be more expensive while it gets you home faster. 🚕💨 Manual CPC would be to fix a cost in your mind, and not take an Uber while the price is surging above that point. Maybe you need to wait for a bit, or walk a couple of blocks, but you get your lower price point. 🚶‍♂️💵