How to prepare for your first LinkedIn ad campaign
Launching your first campaign? These four simple steps will set you up for success.
Finding the right bidding approach is key to driving efficient results with your LinkedIn campaigns, and we are here to help! LinkedIn uses ad auctions to determine which ads our members see and how much you’ll pay. The ads that win auctions on LinkedIn are the ads that drive the most value to both members and advertisers. To win auctions and maximize your campaign’s success, your ads must have both a good relevancy score and an appropriate bid — and this combination determines when and if your ads will appear.
A bid is how much you are willing to pay for a specific action, like a click. Your bid type selection tells LinkedIn how to bid in the ad auctions. When you create a campaign in Campaign Manager, the advertising platform on LinkedIn, you’ll choose your bid type and set your bid. Your ad will then compete against other advertisers’ ads targeting the same audience.
We recommend starting off with our maximum delivery bid type, where LinkedIn’s intelligent system does the work for you. You can be assured that your marketing budget is being spent where it matters most to your business.
However, there are other bid types available depending on your specific marketing goals. Keep in mind that if your bids are too low, or not as competitive, you may miss out on an opportunity to reach your audience. Smart bid management will improve the quantity and quality of your results and improve your ROI.
Maximum delivery leverages machine learning to automatically bid for you to optimize your campaign objectives as efficiently as possible. If you care more about spending your whole budget, we recommend the maximum delivery strategy.
Best for: delivering your full budget and maximizing results.
Cost cap bidding has you set a maximum cost per key result, which Campaign Manager uses as a benchmark to automatically adjust bids in the ad auction. The system prioritizes lower-cost opportunities first, aiming to keep the average cost per result below the set cap while maximizing campaign performance.
Best for: getting the most results possible while controlling costs.
Manual bidding enables you to specify the maximum bid amount they are willing to pay for a defined key result, and the bid will not exceed that value. You’ll get real-time guidance and suggestions on competitive bids during our campaign set up.
Best for: controlling your bid amount.
You can find useful tips and ways to navigate bidding from the latest guides for bidding on LinkedIn.
How do I pick between the different bid types?
| Maximum Delivery | Cost Cap | Manual | |
| What it does | Gets most results while delivering full budget | Gets the most results possible while setting your max cost | Advertisers set their preferred bid for the auction |
| When to use | Full budget delivery | Cost per results control | Bid control |
| Why use it |
|
| Maximum bid control |
| Who sets the bid | Advertiser | ||
| Campaign objectives | All |
| All |
What am I charged for?
When you launch a campaign on LinkedIn, what you’re charged for is determined by your campaign’s optimization goal and bidding strategy, while the cost of your ads is determined by the ad auction. Learn more about objective-based pricing.
What is campaign optimization?
Campaign optimization ensures that your ads are served towards member accounts that are most likely to achieve your goals - like getting more clicks, impressions, or conversions. Campaign Manager will automatically recommend an optimization based on your campaign objective, but you can also change the optimization goal. In some cases, certain bidding strategies or data sources may be required to use a specific optimization.