LinkedIn Ads

7 Tips to Optimize Bidding in LinkedIn's Campaign Manager

Are you running an advertising campaign via LinkedIn Campaign Manager? Are you having trouble deciding between bid types? It’s always a good idea to be consistently monitoring your bidding strategies. Here are 7 tips for improving your bidding strategy to drive campaign ROI on LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

7 tips for improving your bidding strategy

1. Decide whether you are more interested in budget utilization or cost — or both. If you are most concerned with using your full budget, auto bid is your best option. Auto bidding takes the guesswork out of setting the bid while optimizing for results. The LinkedIn Campaign Manager system provides an automated bid for your campaign by drawing upon historical data from your existing LinkedIn campaigns and anonymized, aggregated data from our LinkedIn members.

If you’re uncertain of whether an existing campaign is a good candidate for auto bidding, review which campaigns are using more than 85% of their daily budget with manual bidding. This is an indicator of a healthy campaign. By setting auto bid for existing healthy campaigns, our system can likely achieve a lower cost per key result (e.g. lower your cost-per-click) and help you deliver higher ROI. 

2. Ensure that your automated bidding keeps costs at your preferred level, sometimes by lowering the campaign’s daily budget. Aim to lower your budget to the average daily spend level of when the campaign used “Maximum Cost” bid. This approach is the best way to lower your CPC. For example, if your campaign had a daily budget of $600, but is actually only spending $350, try lowering your daily budget to $350. Why? Automated bidding will not have to raise the bid significantly to try to spend the daily budget.

3. Monitor your manual bids. If you’re more concerned with cost rather than budget utilization, start with our Max Cost bid type (manual bidding) for three to five days and follow the recommended bid when launching your campaign. It is critical to continue to monitor manual bids to ensure the campaigns are delivering desired results. 

4. If your campaign is delivering the full daily budget, shade the bid lower. With this approach, you’ll find the lowest bid that can maintain daily budget utilization and performance. If your campaign is not delivering the full daily budget, increase/decrease the bid based on desired budget utilization. Additionally, determine if your campaign is healthy (>85% budget utilization). If it is healthy, consider switching to auto bidding to maximize your results and drive more ROI.

5. You can also control your costs by expanding your targeting to a broader audience. If your campaign is targeting a competitive audience (under <50K members), that could mean that your bid might have to bid very high to reach those exclusive members. 

6. Take a closer look at your campaign, and pause creatives that are delivering a lower click-through rate (CTR). Alternatively, swap out creatives that are producing a higher CTR. A guideline: A low CTR is anything under 0.15%. If your creatives have lower CTRs overall, trying refreshing with new design or copy. 

7. Estimate future performance by using the LinkedIn forecasting tool. Upgraded this past year, our forecasting tool now offers the ability to see a forecast from toggling between bid options: “Maximum bid” and “Automated bid.” Switching between the two will help you see an estimate that will enable you to understand what will get you the best results for a spend you are comfortable with. 

Put your these bidding strategy tips into action right away by visiting LinkedIn Campaign Manager today.