
In short: Your LinkedIn ads suck because your Quality Score sucks. It’s not LinkedIn’s fault, it’s yours, and chances are your poor score is dragging your campaigns down like an anchor.
Why should you care about this? A low Quality Score means higher costs, fewer eyeballs on your ads, and a lot of wasted budget. But before you beat yourself up, it’s not the end of the world and fixing your score isn’t rocket science. Just a few tweaks in the right spots and you can turn your underperforming creatives into a lead-gen machine.
Let’s check out what’s tanking your score, how you will fix it, and how to start running ads that actually deliver. (Spoiler: It’s not as hard as you think).
WHAT EVEN IS LINKEDIN’S QUALITY SCORE?
It’s LinkedIn’s way of telling you how good (or bad) your ads are. It’s pretty much a behind the scenes ranking system that measures how relevant and engaging your ads are for your specific audience. The higher your score, the less you’ll pay for clicks and the more LinkedIn will show your ads to the right people.
What makes up your Quality Score:
- Relevance: Are your ads hitting the audience you want them to, or are they skipping past your content faster than a boring tv show?
- Engagement: Do people actually click, comment, or share your stuff? Nobody likes a dead post.
- Landing Page Experience: If someone does end up clicking, does your landing page deliver on your ad’s promise, or does it look like it was designed while dial-up was still a thing?
A low Quality Score means you’ll be paying more, reaching less people and getting weaker results. I don’t think you want any of these.
HOW DO I BOOST MY QUALITY SCORE?
Glad you’re sticking around, think about it like this: You wouldn’t sell snowblowers to people in Miami, so stop throwing ads at people who aren’t your audience. In short: USE TARGETING!
Focus on job titles, industries and seniority levels that match up with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Exclude irrelevant groups. More isn’t better – more precise, however, is.
Use Matched Audiences for retargeting website visitors or upload your own contact lists (Webinar attendees, phone numbers, emails…).
If your targeting is too broad, you’ll be showing ads to the wrong people which is pointless. Tighten it up, unless you enjoy burning money.
Don’t Overlook Dwell Time
Here’s a quick one: LinkedIn now shows Dwell Time, a metric that tracks how long someone “dwells” on your ad, in other words, how long they watch your ad without interacting. A higher Dwell Time shows engagement, thus boosting your Quality Score. To improve it, use visuals that grab attention, interactive formats like carousels, and headlines that make people pause and take notice. It’s a really subtle stat, but it’s got big potential, so don’t ignore it.
YOUR ADS NEED TO BE ENTERTAINING
- Boring ads don’t just get ignored, they get punished. To boost your Quality Score, your ads need to stand out:
- Use Thought Leader Ads: Let your execs talk directly to your audience. People trust people way more than they trust brands.
- Keep it visual: Short form video content, vibrant images (no soulless corporate infographics) or GIFs. They grab a lot more attention than walls of text.
- Hooks: Start with some kind of question, bold claim, or shocking stat that makes the user stop scrolling. Example: instead of “Our product is the best for teams..” try “Your collaboration tools are killing productivity…”
What happens after someone clicks your ad?
Ever click on an ad promising a solution, only to be met with a generic website homepage? Yeah don’t do that. Your landing page needs to deliver exactly what your ad promised or else you’ll get a lightning-fast bounce. Make sure your page loads fast, people these days do not have the attention span to wait for your slow page to load. Optimize it.
Pro Tip: LinkedIn’s algorithm adjusts as your ads perform better. The more optimized your campaigns, the better your Quality Score gets over time.
Quick tips for instant improvements
If you’re short on time but need results fast, try these tips:
- Improve your headlines: Make them sharp, direct, and impossible to ignore
- Tighten your targeting: Stop wasting your ad budget on irrelevant audiences
- Start using Thought Leader Ads: This isn’t even negotiable anymore, if you want results, start using this ad format and you’ll se a lot more engagements
- Upgrade your landing page: Make sure it’s relevant to your ad, make sure it loads fast (utilize SEO) and make it action-oriented.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Your quality score is not just a random vague metric, it’s what separates you from low-cost high-impact advertising. A higher score will let you spend less cash, reach more potential customers, and potentially convert a good number of those.
If your ads aren’t performing as well as you’d like them to, throwing more money at them just isn’t gonna cut it. Instead, fix your targeting, make ads that people actually like engaging with, and have a landing page that can live up to the hype you produce.
LinkedIn WILL reward your effort and creativity, not laziness. So, stop settling for mediocre ads.