Establishing a Bidding and Budgeting Strategy for Your LinkedIn Ads

Editor’s Note: This blog post is part of a 14-day series on running successful LinkedIn Sponsored Content. View the previous blog post here.

Now that we’ve shown you how to set up your LinkedIn Sponsored Content campaigns and establish your targeting strategy, it’s time to dig into how you’ll pay for your ads.

LinkedIn ads work on a second-price auction system.

When you set up a campaign, you set a bid for how much you’re willing to pay to show an ad to LinkedIn members. LinkedIn decides whose ad to place based on the highest bid. If you’ve advertised with us before, your past campaign performance will also be taken into account during the bidding process.

Once LinkedIn decides who wins the bid, you’ll only pay the amount needed to beat the second-highest bidder. This free ad calculator will help you decide how much to bid on your ads.

Optimizing your bidding strategy is key, as specific target audiences cost more or less depending on the popularity of the criteria you’ve selected. Here are some tips for creating a budgeting strategy that gets the results you need:

• Limit your targeting features to the ones you really need. If you have a lower budget, zero in on your targeting criteria to get a smaller pool of users.
• Set a competitive bid. Bid ambitiously at the high end of the suggested range in your ads interface to improve your chances of winning at auction and delivering your budget.
• Don’t set your budget caps too low. When you set a bid, you also set how much budget you’re willing to pay for the ads. Set a generous daily budget to start -- doing so will help you reach more of your audience.
• Ditch the daily budget. If you’re having trouble delivering impressions, avoid capping your budget at a certain dollar amount each day, try setting a total budget that gets spent over time. This will maximize the reach of your ads.

Tomorrow we’ll explore image testing for your Sponsored Content Campaigns. In the interim, download our Secret Sauce guide and get the formula for our approach to bidding and budget management on LinkedIn.