LinkedIn is a dynamic hub for B2B marketing leaders, enabling them to unlock access to a highly targeted, professional audience.
However, advertising on the platform requires a strategic approach that goes beyond ad placement. To truly excel, advertisers need to understand the platform's best-practices.
This article will delve into LinkedIn advertising benchmarks that hold the potential to steer your campaigns toward resounding success.
1. Optimal Audience Size and Target Facets
A critical aspect of LinkedIn advertising is defining your target audience, starting with audience size. The minimum audience size is 300 LinkedIn members; however, LinkedIn recommends an ideal range of 50,000-300,000 to drive results.
Audience size can also vary by campaign type:
- Sponsored content and sponsored messaging campaigns: 300,000+ audience members
- Text ad campaigns: 60,000-400,000 LinkedIn members
Those recommendations ensure a balance between reach and specificity, maximizing the potential for engagement. However, each campaign is unique, and testing is critical to finding the audience size that works best.
When creating your audience, consider using a minimum of three target facets that align with your campaign goals. Those could include job title, industry, company size, and seniority level. Consider your campaign's message and employ your buyer personas to select the targeting criteria that will resonate best.
2. Diversified and Pre-Tested Creative Units
Variety is the key to unlocking the full potential of LinkedIn advertising. To elevate the effectiveness of your campaigns, run six or more creative units per campaign. That not only facilitates A/B-testing but also increases ad rotation, leading to enhanced ad frequency. As a result, you can potentially reduce costs per click and cost per impression and even lower the cost per lead.
When testing ad variations, set up ad rotation to ensure that each variation of your ad is showing evenly. If your campaign is set to optimize for performance, LinkedIn will serve the highest-performing ad variation to more people versus giving the others a chance to pick up steam. Enabling ad rotation will give an accurate assessment of the test, and help you select the ad variation that resonates with your target audience.
Once the campaign is live, keep an eye on the average clickthrough rate (CTR) as a good indicator of when it's time to refresh the ad's content. When the CTR starts to decline, it's time to introduce new ad text or images. LinkedIn recommends refreshing ad content at least once per month to prevent a decline in performance.
3. Strategic Budget Allocation
Experienced advertisers understand the significance of budget allocation in their campaigns. To maximize outcomes, consider adopting these daily budget benchmarks:
- $50 or higher per campaign for awareness objectives
- $50 or higher for consideration objectives
- $100 or more for conversion-focused campaigns
Also, employing maximum delivery or lifetime budgets for awareness and consideration campaigns can give you a competitive edge during the bidding process, securing prime ad placements.
4. Patience and Duration
Rome wasn't built in a day, and the same principle applies to LinkedIn advertising. For accurate results and insights, it's recommended to run your campaigns for 30 days or more, allowing for sufficient data accumulation to assess performance and make informed optimizations. That could involve refining audience targeting, modifying ad creatives, adjusting bid strategies, or fine-tuning the allocation of your budget.