With a little over a year’s experience with LinkedIn Advertising and some insights from a connection at LinkedIn, I’ve put together a list of 6 suggestions to help you increase the ROI and performance of your LinkedIn advertising campaigns.

Tip 1: Bid Popping

Bid popping is the strategy of bidding high at the beginning of the life of your ad to get your ad to the best audience possible and to get the best Click Through Rate (CTR) possible. But if you’re paying per click anyways, why does this matter?

LinkedIn is dedicated to making sure that it’s users have an enjoyable experience and are shown good content. To do this, they built a 0.35% CTR benchmark into their algorithm. If your ad is performing above this benchmark, LinkedIn will help you out by automatically giving you better ad placements. This way, good content that entices people has an advantage over the not so good content that might have a larger budget. Cool, huh? Again, the strategy is that having a higher bid will likely get more people clicking on it, increasing your CTR. After a week or two you can cut back on your budget and will be able to get higher bid positions at lower costs than you would have been able to before, and you can stay competitive with lower budgets. If your ad is going to have a longer life than just a couple of weeks, it is well worth the effort.

P.S.— If you’re familiar with Google AdWords’ Quality Score, this strategy can be used very effectively there as well.

Tip 2: Create Multiple Ad Variations

Multiple ad variations can help you in a few ways. First, running A/B tests is always a good idea. If you’re not testing your content, you are missing out on a learning opportunity. Most importantly, though, is that you get a chance to show your ad more often. LinkedIn only gives your ad one shot at each user per 48 hours but creating variations of your ad will allow each one to be shown in that same 48-hour window. Having 2-3 at a minimum per campaign would be a good idea.

Tip 3: Create LinkedIn Friendly Ads

There are a few things unique about LinkedIn ads that differ from other places. First, use stock imagery. Based on what historical databases at LinkedIn say, you can expect that users will respond very well to clean and simple images. In other words, exactly what you would expect from stock images.

It is also important to keep your character count below 140. Even though this is not  Twitter, it is a really good standard to keep. In today’s world, people’s attention spans are short, and the ability to say the same thing in fewer words is highly desired skill in today’s market. I’m not the only one that says that either. Adam Shiflett, the Marketing Director at DrivingSales, has said that “if your email has more than three paragraphs I won’t read it, just mark a time to come talk with me.” And if that’s not enough to convince you, data shows that ads with more than 140 characters start to see a diminishing CTR.

Tip 4: Optimize Targeting (Don’t Spend More Than You Need To)

When I built my first campaign I was told that we were targeting X job titles in  Y Industry, so when I got into the Campaign Manager to select my audience, I went straight to the ‘Job Title’ and ‘Industry’ fields to target “Job Title X” and “Industry Y.” Now, that’s a good way to do things, but I have learned that each filter you use charges you at different rates and that the “Job Title” just happens to be the most expensive one. Plus, you’re probably not reaching everyone you could be. Instead, I would be filtering by “Seniority.” You can easily include or exclude the different levels that you want (Owner, CXO, Manager, Entry, Etc.) and get those long tail job titles that you wouldn’t have thought to include in your job title search, and spend less money doing it. Win-win, right?

One additional pro-tip is filtering by relevant Member Groups. These people are raising their hands telling you that they are interested in seeing your content, are more likely active LinkedIn users, and are more likely to engage with content. It takes a little more effort to find the perfect groups but is well worth the effort.

Tip 5: Allocation of Budget (Where & How Much)

Now, there are two main types of ads that I use on LinkedIn: Sponsored Content and Text Ads. Best practices say that ¾ of your LinkedIn advertising budget should be spent on Sponsored Updates and the other ¼ on Text Ads.

Text ads don’t perform as well but also aren’t as costly. The purpose of text ads in your campaign is mostly to build brand awareness and get your name out there. I’ve personally seen a lot of these ads, read them, and never clicked. That’s a good thing for these companies. I’m seeing their content and becoming more aware of that brand while not costing them anything. However, if I do click that’s not a bad thing either. You now have a chance to convert them on your landing page at a lower price than Sponsored Content. The main downside is that these ads have very limited text and image space, so landing page conversion rates tend to be lower.

Tip 6: CPM Bidding

In all honesty, this article was written to be only five tips, but I just found out this tip this week and had to add it. If you have posted an ad and have gotten the click through rate over 1% you should think about changing from PPC to CPM. CPM stands for Cost Per Mille which means that it will charge you a fixed rate per 1000 impressions. If your add is picking up momentum and have this high click-through rate, you can save a lot of money by changing payment methods.

There are, of course, a lot of other things that go into a conversion than just these things, but I’m confident that applying these principles will help you increase your ROI from your LinkedIn campaigns. Don’t take my word for it, get out there and test out these theories. The market and tools are constantly changing so always be testing and always be improving.