LinkedIn Ads were eating away at our budget ridiculously fast.
At first I didn’t give it much thought because It’s not my money anyway, why should I care about the bidding?
Learned pretty quick company management does not share the same stance on it.
Upon further investigation, I managed to figure out what was decimating our ad spend and I even brought down our cost by 27%.
The LinkedIn objective trap that most marketers fall into
First, I realized LinkedIn’s objective system was sabotaging my campaigns before they even started.
LinkedIn forces you to pick an objective that dictates your bidding options:
- Brand Awareness – charged by impressions
- Website Visits – charged by clicks or impressions
- Engagement – charged for every tiny interaction
- Video Views – charged per view (2+ seconds at 50% on screen)
- Lead Generation – charged by form fills
- Website Conversions – charged by specific actions
I was using “Maximum Delivery” for Website Visits. Big mistake.
When I switched to the right objective with manual bidding, my costs immediately dropped by 12%.
The auction hack that saved me 15% more
LinkedIn doesn’t just give ad space to the highest bidder.
They look at three factors:
Your bid amount.
Ad relevance to your audience.
Historical performance.
I improved my relevance score by making my ads hyper-specific to my audience.
Tighter targeting + better creative = lower costs.
This single change cut my costs by another 15%.
Four bidding types, but only one slashed my costs by 27%
I tested all four bidding strategies LinkedIn offers:
Manual bidding: I control exactly what I’ll pay per click or impression.
Maximum delivery: LinkedIn controls everything and spends my budget as fast as possible.
Cost cap bidding: I set an average cost target, LinkedIn adjusts within that range.
Enhanced bidding: LinkedIn increases my bid up to 45% for “high-value clicks.”
Manual bidding won by a landslide. It was the foundation of my 27% cost reduction.
I went from paying $8.45 per click to just $6.17.
My CPM disaster (and what I learned the hard way)
So I got cocky.
After saving so much with manual bidding, I thought I’d try CPM bidding because some LinkedIn “guru” recommended it in a YouTube video.
Wow. Worst decision ever.
My costs shot up by $782 in the first week alone. I nearly had a heart attack checking the dashboard Monday morning.
Turns out my CTR was garbage, only 1.8% – nowhere near high enough to make CPM work.
After a panicked chat with my marketing buddy who’s been doing this for years, I learned CPM only works when:
- Your B2B campaigns already get 3%+ CTR (mine didn’t)
- Your retargeting is crushing it with 5%+ CTR (again, nope)
That $782 lesson was a painful one but it clarified a lot.
After my CPM fiasco, I developed this process through pure trial and error:
- Start bidding 15-18% below LinkedIn’s suggested range (they always inflate it)
- Check campaigns before lunch daily – if they’re spending too fast, drop bids by 5-7%
- If a campaign is crawling along with no spend by 3pm, bump bids up 8%
- Weirdly, my weekend bids can be 22% lower and still perform (everyone’s offline anyway)
- I track everything in a spreadsheet that only makes sense to me (don’t do that)
My boss thinks I’m a genius, but ‘m not telling him it’s just manual bidding and a spreadsheet.
My Expensive Automated Bidding Mistake
I’m very lazy.
I originally just chose automated bidding because I didn’t wanna have to bother with it.
That laziness cost my company $4,367 in wasted spend in just under a month.
When I finally switched to manual bidding (after my boss started asking questions), we not only saved money but somehow our conversion rate jumped 8.3%.
Now I just spend about 30 minutes each morning adjusting bids slightly.
If we’re being honest, LinkedIn literally designed their platform to extract the most money out of advertisers.
They try their best to push automated bidding, “LinkedIn Audience Network”, and other proprietary BS. Don’t give into it.
Anyway, that’s my little short story, hopefully you can learn something from my mistakes.
