8 Tips To Improve Your ROI On LinkedIn Ads

Not sure you have heard.

But there has been a 900% increase in searches for LinkedIn Ads on Google.

But be warned, you can waste a lot of money on LinkedIn ads if you don't know what you're doing.

The average CPC for LinkedIn Ads is over $5.

The average CPC for Facebook Ads is under $1 in comparison.

As an agency we are fortunate to be able to run large LinkedIn ad budgets across multiple accounts, which has helped us to learn how to drive down CPC.

And today, I wanted to share some of our learns to help you drive down CPC, in case you are running LinkedIn ads or thinking about them 👇🏻

Tip 1: Choose the Engagement Ad Objective to Start with

Switching from "Website visits" to "Engagement ads" in the "objective field" decreased our CPC from $22.2 to $2.57 . Which means 8x more clicks to a website for the same $ spent for this client.

If you are setting up ads to a brand new audience, who have never heard about you, go with the Engagement objective to start building out your audience at a lower CPM vs Website visit or Website conversions.

Tip 2: Leverage Custom Audiences vs Linkedin Audience 

👉🏻 LinkedIn's search functionality provides useful firmographic data. Like location, job titles, industry, company size and more. Which helps you identify and contact key B2B decision makers.

Instead of using LinkedIn's default Ad audience search fields, you can import your own custom list.

From LinkedIn company pages to contacts.

Crunchbase contains useful intent signals like funding raised.

You can use tools like 'Built With' to understand technographics - a company's tech stack.

Built With is a great data tool for companies who need to verify if 'Salesforce' or 'Shopify' is used by a company. Then you can generate a list of these companies and upload them into LinkedIn.

The minimum campaign Ad audience size is 300 members.

We imported a list from Crunchbase, which delivered us lower CPC and higher CTR!

We were able to lower CPC from $1.75 to $1.23.

The key is relevance. And uploading relevant audiences will lower your CPC substantially.

You may need specialised software tools to get the right contact details that LinkedIn requires.

Be prepared for data cleansing in Excel/Google Sheets.

Tip 3: Start with a Small Ad Budget and Grow Over Time

The Minimum LinkedIn Ads budget is $10 USD per day.

Go slow, learn, adjust your ads and spend. This leaves you time to optimise your ads and landing pages that may not be converting.

Good things take time. Just because you are spending $10k on ads, doesn't guarantee results.

If you spend your budget quickly you get information fast on performance which is what you are paying for initially. But you use up your audience and you don't need to be aggressive on budget to learn.

You can still learn the same thing by spending $1k as you will with $10k.

Tip 4: Swap LinkedIn Ad Format 

If an ad seems expensive, try a different media format. 

Recently, we switched a Video Ad to an Image Ad. Keeping the same copy, same thumbnail.

Result = CPC went from $22 to $0.5. And CTR also 3x! While becoming 16x cheaper to show to 1000 people.

Tip 5: Improve LinkedIn Ad Copy 

Little copy changes can have a big impact.

You can see how small copy changes halved our CPC for our podcast campaign.

Quick copy tips to lower your CPC: 

• Insert numbers into the first line
• Ask questions in headline 
• Add emojis

Tip 6: Improve Ad Design 

Some of our campaigns start with sh*t images created in Canva and they look like 💩, because we want to focus on nailing messaging.

We call this a minimum viable ad (MVA).

Once you've nailed messaging (copy), improve graphic design. 

This approach drove CPC down from $2.6 to $0.9 for our Newsletter campaign in the example below.

Notice how crap our original ad design was?

Tip 7: Lower Ad Frequency 

If you have small audiences and a high budget - LinkedIn will happily show your ads repeatedly to the same people.

You can view your Ad Frequency as shown here:

Too high in frequency and you could waste ad dollars and your audience may experience Ad fatigue.

Too low an ad frequency and your audience may scroll past and simply miss your post. And they haven't seen you enough to remember you.

To improve your CPC, ensure average ad frequency is being kept to < 8 per month per ad.

Quick tip: 

One way to reduce ad frequency within an ad campaign is to add more ad variations.

Where do you get more ads from?

By repurposing your organic LinkedIn content as ads.

LinkedIn lets you sponsor your existing company page posts to your Ad platform. See below.

Tip 8: Retarget Engaged Ad Audiences in the Retargeting Layer 

B2B buyers aren't making impulse decisions just because they visited your website from an ad. 

It takes time for B2B buyers to educate themselves and understand the solutions available. To build trust and a business case for change. The typical B2B buying journey takes 20+ touch points and 1 - 6 months.

Which can increase depending on your price!

That's why you retarget engaged audiences with more ads over a 60 - 180 day period.

Save wasted spend and improve your CPC by only retargeting those who engaged with your ads. E.g. they clicked on your ads or viewed 75% or more of your video ads.

This is just the beginning. Once your ads are performing you'll need to look at your landing pages and optimise for lower funnel metrics.

But more on that in future.

I hope this newsletter helps you to drive down CPC on your ads.

Would you like to have a chat about your LinkedIn ad strategy? 

Feel free to book in a 29 minute strategy call with me 👇🏻

Stay creative, stay relevant and always add value.

P.S. if you're still yearning for more depth on LinkedIn ads - listen to my LinkedIn Ad strategy podcast with Justin Rowe🎙️