To grab an opportunity to reach a broader audience and connect with professionals, LinkedIn could be a powerful way.
As there are many social media platforms, it is natural to wonder, why LinkedIn over the most used platforms like Facebook and Twitter? Here what makes LinkedIn stand out is its ability to drive real results for your business.
But is it worth investing in LinkedIn advertising? You can easily get an idea of its worthiness by looking at this statistics which is 82% of B2B marketers are already advertising on LinkedIn.
Then how much does it cost to advertise on LinkedIn?
That’s what this guide will walk you through, whether you’re new to LinkedIn or have already tried this advertising tool. Here you will get a clear idea of what you can expect in terms of LinkedIn advertising costs and how you can get a higher return on your investment in advertising on LinkedIn.
Table of Content
- How Much Does It Cost To Advertise On LinkedIn?
- How Can You Calculate The Cost Of LinkedIn Advertising?
- 4 Factors that Influence the LinkedIn Advertising Costs
- How can you Control Your Cost of Advertising on LinkedIn?
- Use Campaign Group Budgets
- Optimize Your Bidding Strategy
- Keep a Close Eye on Budget Usage
- Boost Your Ad Impact with Simple Testing
- Focus on One Country at a Time
- Use LinkedIn’s Built In Lead Generation Forms
How Much Does It Cost To Advertise On LinkedIn?
You can get an idea about how much advertising on LinkedIn costs.But, these are just the average Linkedin advertising cost not the actual cost of LinkedIn advertising, because actual cost is influenced by various factors about which we will be talking later in this blog.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
Every time someone clicks on your LinkedIn ads, you have to pay about $5 to $10. Although this much cost of LinkedIn advertising may be a bit costly for you. But trust me it is worth it because these clicks usually come from those people who are good potential customers for your company.
This works for both sponsored content and text ads and is great if you want to drive traffic to your website or landing page. You can also use videos, images, or text ads, and you need to decide what will grab your audience’s attention.
Cost Per Impression (CPM)
If you want to attract more people towards your brand, you can prefer to pay for impressions instead of clicks. Here impression means how many times your ads has been shown to people, not whether they click on it.
The average cost of advertising on LinkedIn for 1000 impressions is approximately $30 to $35. Even if it’s higher than your CPC, you may generally end up paying less because here you’re only paying for people to see your ad regardless of whether they click on it or not.
This is often used for sponsored content and text ads as well. Videos usually perform well with CPM because you pay for views, not clicks or interactions. Although you can use CPM for text ads, it is not recommended since text ads are better at getting people to engage and take action.
Cost Per Send (CPS)
If you want to send direct messages to people on LinkedIn through InMail, you must pay for each send. Here for every message you send, you have to pay around $0.50 to $1 LinkedIn advertising cost per message. This can be a useful way, if you want to connect with people who already know a little about your business and might be interested.
But be careful, if you target the wrong people or send the wrong message, it could backfire, since inboxes are personal spaces, and mistakes are hard to forget.
How Can You Calculate The Cost Of LinkedIn Advertising?
You can yourself calculate your LinkedIn advertising costs and investment in these 4 easy steps:
Step 1: Determine your audience size
You can use LinkedIn Campaign Manager to estimate your audience size.
Usually the ideal audience size is 50,000 to 400,000 members.
Example: Suppose you have an audience of 100,000 members.
Step 2: Determine the number of impressions
LinkedIn’s algorithms limit duplicate ads. Based on experience, the maximum frequency is approximately 1.8 times per member per month.
Formula to calculate no. of impressions:
Number of impressions = audience size x average frequency
For example: We assumed in the first step that there is an audience size of 100,000 and the maximum frequency is approximately 1.8 times, so here,
Impressions = 100,000 x 1.8 = 180,000 impressions per month.
Step 3: Calculate your CPC
LinkedIn’s campaign manager shows you an estimate of how much you might spend and how many clicks you’ll get. But remember these numbers are not always accurate.
So, to get a more realistic idea of how much money you’ll actually spend, you can add 20% to the estimated cost of advertising on LinkedIn.
And subtract 20% from the estimated clicks, and this helps you guess how many people will actually click on your ad.
Now, divide your adjusted spend by adjusted clicks to find out the CPC.
For example, if you plan to spend $500 and expect 100 clicks, then;
Add 20% to your spending: $500 + 20% = $600
Subtract 20% from your clicks: 100 clicks – 20% = 80 clicks
Divide now: $600 ÷ 80 clicks = $7.50
So, you pay around $7.50 LinkedIn advertising cost per click.
Step 4: Calculate your total ad spend
Now let’s say you are allowed to show your ad to 100,000 people in one month. You already know that your CPC is $7.50, but you still need to know your CTR. This tells you how many people click on your ad out of every 100 people who view it.
If your CTR is 0.30% this means 0.3 people out of every 100 will click your ad, here’s the formula to figure out how much you have to spend:
You can use this formula: Impressions x CTR x CPC
In this example: 100,000 views x 0.30% CTR x $7.50 per click = $2,250
So, you can spend up to $2,250 of your LinkedIn advertising cost on your LinkedIn ad campaign for the month.
4 Factors that Influence the LinkedIn Advertising Costs
As you may have noticed, in the first topic that we mentioned, there are some factors that affect the cost of advertising on LinkedIn, so now it is time to delve deeper into these factors.
When you run ads on LinkedIn, what you do first is start by setting a budget. Right?
So you almost estimate the most of the LinkedIn advertising costs you might spend. But it can be difficult to know what return you are getting for that cost of LinkedIn advertising and how much you’ll need to spend more to get good results. Here are the main factors that affect the cost of LinkedIn advertising and how you use your budget to run your ads:
Target Audience
I hope you already know LinkedIn sells its advertising sites through auction. Which means that if multiple businesses want to show ads to the same group of people, they’ll need to spend more money to reach them.
Bidding Strategy
LinkedIn gives you three options for how to bid or compete for ad space: maximum delivery bid, manual bidding, and maximum cost bidding. The option you choose will affect how much you pay for each click, view, or other action on your ad.
Campaign Goal
When you set up your ad, you choose a goal or campaign objective, such as getting more clicks or views. This goal determines the bidding options available and the type of action you pay for, which changes the cost to advertise on LinkedIn each outcome.
Ad Relevance Score
LinkedIn also looks at the quality of your ad to determine how much you pay. If your ad is interesting and relevant, LinkedIn will give it a higher score, which can reduce your linkedin advertising cost and help you reach more people for less money.
Here you can create good LinkedIn ads without getting affected by these factors by choosing the best LinkedIn advertising agency that can help you make the most out of your LinkedIn advertising costs.
How can you Control Your Cost of Advertising on LinkedIn?
As we mentioned above, the cost of LinkedIn advertising might get a bit expensive.
But don’t worry!
LinkedIn provides you with different tools and options, which can help you control the amount. With the help of these tools you can adjust your budget to suit your business and marketing goals and do not need to pay more than you want or outside your budget, we will discuss the same below in detail.
These are some of the ways you can use to manage your LinkedIn advertising costs.
Base Your Ad Budget on Your Goals
When you start an advertising campaign, it becomes really important to know exactly what you want to achieve. Then LinkedIn advertising works the same way.
This is because your goal helps you determine how much LinkedIn advertising cost you should spend.
These are some of the ways you can plan your goal.
Decide Your Goals
First, decide what exactly you want to do with your ads. For example, if you want to let more people know about your brand, you should use LinkedIn’s special advertising options like sponsored content, dynamic ads, or text ads.
Choose How to Measure Success
Always measuring your success will help you know whether you are doing your advertising right or not.
To measure your reach, it will help you know how many unique people saw your ads.
You can also check impressions, which are the times your impressions were viewed by people, even if the same person viewed them multiple times.
Decide How to Bid
If you use the CPM method we mentioned above. Then you will be able to pay based on the number of times your ad is viewed.
LinkedIn has tools that can help you choose the right ad types and determine your estimated budget based on what you want to achieve. These tools can help you control how much you pay for LinkedIn advertising costs and get the best results from your LinkedIn ads.
Use Campaign Group Budgets
You can manage the cost of LinkedIn advertising more easily if you group similar campaigns together with the help of campaign group budgets.
Here you don’t need to set your ad budget for each campaign individually, you can create groups of related campaigns and set one total budget for the entire group.
For example, if you’re running ads for the healthcare and manufacturing industries, you can create two groups, one for each industry. You can then give each group the same total budget to make sure your money is shared fairly between them. This way, you can control your spend across all your campaigns more efficiently.
Optimize Your Bidding Strategy
Bidding plays a crucial role if you want to get the most out of your ad campaigns without breaking the bank on LinkedIn advertising.
This is a smart way to keep your bids slightly above the minimum amount.
Review your ads every day to see how well they are performing. If your ads aren’t getting noticed, it may be because your bid is lower than others. When something like this happens, you can try adjusting your quote step by step.
Make sure that each change matches your budget and the expected goal you want to achieve. This way, you can optimize your LinkedIn advertising costs without overspending.
Keep a Close Eye on Budget Usage
LinkedIn gives you two ways you can set a budget for each campaign. The first is the maximum daily budget and the second is the maximum permanent budget. Here you have to choose at least one option for each campaign you run.
As you can see in the image, once you start your campaign, LinkedIn Campaign Manager will show you how quickly you are using your budget. If you notice that you’re not spending as much as you planned, it might mean you need to raise your bid. On the other hand, if you’re spending too quickly, you can lower your bid to keep your budget going longer.
Boost Your Ad Impact with Simple Testing
If you test your ads, it can make a big difference in how successful they are. This way you can use your campaign budget more effectively and wisely. You can also reduce the cost of getting results on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn itself suggests that you can improve your ads by trying different things like images, buttons, and messages.
The great part here is that testing your ads is not a difficult task, and you can do it easily with Campaign Manager. You can divide your audience into two groups and show each group a different version of your ad. This way, you can see which version works best in real time.
Focus on One Country at a Time
LinkedIn advertising costs, especially average cost per click, can vary depending on the country. This happens for a number of reasons, such as how many other people are showing ads there or the size of your audience. Another important factor is the difference in currency value between your country and the country where your ads appear.
To address these challenges, it’s a good idea to test and tweak your LinkedIn Ads strategy one country at a time. This allows you to learn how each market works and get the most out of your LinkedIn advertising costs. Using this approach, you can easily improve your results without wasting your resources.
Use LinkedIn’s Built In Lead Generation Forms
Would you believe it if we told you that you could cut your LinkedIn advertising costs using LinkedIn’s built-in lead generation forms?
Yes, this is correct!
These forms make it easier for people to share their information without facing any extra hurdles. This way, you can save on the cost of advertising on LinkedIn while making it easier for potential customers to contact you. It’s a simple trick that can help reduce the cost of LinkedIn ads and get better results.
Boost Your Leads & Cut Your LinkedIn Advertising Costs With Us!
You can get all the information about how much LinkedIn advertising costs, but to make LinkedIn ads really work for your business, you need to understand how to target the right people, set the right goals, and use smart strategies to get the best results.
This is where a Geek Master can help you out. With our data-driven strategies, we create campaigns that fit your budget and goals to get you the results you really want. There are many reasons why you should avoid risking your hard-earned money. For example, it may be difficult to advertise your product using LinkedIn’s targeting options, you might face problems while bidding etc. That is why working with a LinkedIn marketing agency like us can help you grow efficiently.
We make sure that you use your budget wisely, and you effectively reach the right audience. Now that you have read all about the cost of advertising on LinkedIn, you have a better idea of how to plan LinkedIn campaigns, then you can participate in every step of the way with us.
You can contact us now because we believe that a strong partnership between the agency and the business is the key to success.