TL;DR – How to Win with LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads are powerful for B2B due to their hyper targeting and active audience, but they can also be expensive. Here’s how we recommend getting the most from your spend:
- Structure by audience, not content assets
- Test targeting via Title, Function, Skills, and Groups
- Single Image Sponsored Content is the top performer
- Use valuable, low-friction offers to increase conversion
- Start with manual CPC bidding; scale once CTR > 1%
- Track click conversions, not view-throughs
- Leverage native LinkedIn retargeting (form opens, video views, etc.)
- Avoid Audience Expansion and overbuilt campaigns
Done right, LinkedIn can drive high-quality leads and pipeline, but only if you’re intentional about how you use it.
LinkedIn Ads Best Practices
LinkedIn is one of the most powerful channels in B2B, but it’s also one of the most expensive. That means strategy, structure, and precision aren’t just helpful, they’re essential.
At Enilon, we’ve managed LinkedIn Ads for clients across industries and sizes, and we’ve learned exactly what works, what burns budget, and how to build a scalable demand gen engine on the platform. Whether you’re launching your first campaign or trying to optimize an existing one, here’s our guide to running smarter, more effective LinkedIn Ads.
Start With a Smart Structure
Your account setup matters more than you might think. We recommend keeping things simple with one campaign group and organizing your campaigns by audience and format, not by content. This lets you optimize, compare performance, and keep your reports clean, without losing your mind in campaign manager.
Pro tip from our team: Don’t build one campaign per asset. Build one campaign per audience and plug new content into it over time.
Targeting: Four Reliable Paths to Your Audience
We recommend testing 3–4 targeting strategies for each persona. Why? Because each method pulls a slightly different flavor of your ICP, and performance (and CPL) can vary significantly.
Here are the four most effective approaches:
- Job Title
- Job Function + Seniority
- Skills + Seniority
- Group Membership + Seniority
You’ll want your audience sizes in the 20k–50k range for best efficiency. And always, always turn off Audience Expansion. LinkedIn will try to sneak it in, but it muddies your targeting and your reporting and often yields wasted budget.
Use the Right Ad Format for the Job
If you’re just getting started, go with Single Image Sponsored Content. It’s easy to build, performs well in the feed, and gives you space to tell a compelling story. Other formats work, but should be used strategically:
- Thought Leadership Ads: We love these for awareness and trust building. Choose 2-3 Thought Leaders within your organization, encourage them to start posting strategically. Take their best engaged posts and use those as your TL content for promotion.
- Text Ads: Cheap and great for brand reinforcement; ideal to run alongside other formats.
- Video Ads: Great for storytelling and brand engagement, but often more expensive per lead.
- Lead Gen Forms: High conversion rates, but may slightly lower lead quality—perfect for high-volume testing.
- Sponsored Messaging/Conversation Ads: Use sparingly and only when you have a VIP offer.
We often start clients on a mix of Single Image, Thought Leadership + Lead Gen Forms, then test into other formats once performance is stable.
Your Offer Matters More Than Your Creative
One of the biggest mistakes we see? Great ad design paired with a weak offer. If your CTA is “Schedule a Demo” or “Talk to Sales,” you’re likely over-targeting the bottom of the funnel, and paying the price in $500+ CPLs.
Instead, meet your audience where they are:
- Free checklist or worksheet
- Executive guide
- Industry benchmarks
- A truly useful webinar
- Framework or blueprint download
We call this the “valuable, but low friction” zone. The goal is to get more people into your funnel with content that builds trust, not resistance. Whether or not you gate that content is up to you. We tend to steer away from gated content as much as possible because we want it to be easy for people to learn as much information as they can about you and build trust and expert leadership.
Creative Tips That Actually Make a Difference
Your creative doesn’t need to win awards. It needs to stand out, get read, and drive action.
From our team’s experience:
- Think headline, not paragraph. Use just a few words on your image.
- Contrast is key—orange, green, and red visuals pop against LinkedIn’s blue/gray UI
- Intro text: Open with a benefit, end with a call to action
- Headlines: Keep it under 55 characters
We A/B test creative constantly for our clients, and small changes, like swapping out a background color or rephrasing a CTA, can improve CTR pretty dramatically.
Optimize Like a Pro (Don’t Let LinkedIn Auto-Pilot)
LinkedIn loves to spend your money—but doesn’t always do it efficiently. Here’s how we recommend bidding and optimizing:
- Always start with Manual CPC, set just above the floor
- Watch your CTR closely. If it’s above 0.45%, you’re in a good zone. If you hit 1%+, switch to Maximum Delivery (LinkedIn’s version of auto-bidding)
- Rotate ads using “Optimize for performance,” not “even rotation” (except in Sponsored Messaging)
- Monitor performance by audience type (titles vs. skills vs. groups) so you can reallocate spend intelligently
We’ve helped clients reduce CPL just by tightening bidding strategy and letting top-performing campaigns scale naturally.
Track What Actually Matters
Don’t rely solely on what you see in Campaign Manager. A few tracking tips from our demand gen and analytics team:
- Use UTM parameters to push campaign + audience data into your CRM
- Always separate click conversions from view-through conversions—the latter can be misleading
- Use the Demographics tab to validate who is actually seeing and clicking your ads
- Export performance data by ad and by day to build trending dashboards (we do this in Looker Studio and Excel)
Also: be careful with Sponsored Messaging metrics. LinkedIn reports “opens” as “clicks” unless you change the column view.
Retargeting That Actually Works
LinkedIn’s website retargeting isn’t great (thanks, cookies), but native engagement retargeting is really accurate.
You can retarget based on:
- Video views (25%+ watched)
- Lead Gen form opens (but didn’t submit)
- Ad clicks or interactions
- Company page visits
At Enilon, we layer these audiences into nurture campaigns or test lower-friction offers to them, this has significantly improved lead-to-opportunity conversion for our clients.
Avoid These Budget-Draining Mistakes
Here’s what to skip (because we’ve cleaned up the mess too many times):
- Audience Expansion (just… no, never use)
- Campaigns organized by content instead of audience
- 5+ ads per campaign (it’ll wreck your reporting)
- Letting LinkedIn auto-bid from day one
- Not excluding current customers or competitors
Final Thoughts From the Enilon Team
LinkedIn is a valuable platform, when it’s used correctly. It can produce high-quality leads, powerful brand lift, and insight into how your messaging resonates with real buyers.
But it’s not plug-and-play. It requires strategy, testing, and ongoing optimization.
If you’re looking to improve your current performance, or start with a strategy that’s built to scale, we’d love to help. Enilon’s team specializes in full-funnel demand generation, and LinkedIn Ads are a key piece of the puzzle.
Need help building or optimizing your LinkedIn strategy?
Let’s talk. Contact Enilon →
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