#5 How much budget do you need for Linkedin Paid Ads

Good question and I have a few answers on this one as each person/business is different. 

First off, what’s your overall marketing budget and what other channels are you involved in? 

Really big difference in answers here on a budget if this is your first paid ads channel you are looking to carve out vs you already running 8k/month on google, 2k/month on Facebook, and now want to add in Linkedin. 

Also, do you have decent website traffic by any other means? Either organic maybe or good SEO in place?

Scrappy startup - initial channel

So let’s start with my scrappy startups who are either starting with Linkedin ads on its own or very limited paid ads to budget overall. 

The absolute bare minimum you’d want to invest for Linkedin ads would be $500-$1000 a month. 

Now with that amount of spend, I’d have you keep a few things in mind. 

First, 80% of the Linkedin ads results typically come in the retargeting phase. So you absolutely can’t judge the effectiveness of a Linkedin ads campaign by the initial cold ads you start running. 

The initial goal of the ads will be to just get in front of your prospects and get on their radar. It’s not until you track and retarget all those who show interest that the real results start to kick in. 

Second, if done right, the Linkedin algorithm and whoever is managing your account will ensure that you get more and more momentum over time. 

The results you see in month one are going to be bad probably. BUT if you learn which ads are performing well/poorly, and what audience types are most interested/engaged, you can see dramatic improvements from month 1 to month 2. 

I’ll dive more into that question on a different episode that details the timeline of results. 

Already have established channels

The next group I’ll talk about is if you already have established channels that produce consistent leads/conversions. 

Depending on your overall budget, I’d say you want to give Linkedin ads a fair shot which would be $2,000-$3,000 initially and then grow from there. BUT, if you are running other paid channels that are profitable, Linkedin ads will be a no-brainer, and here is why. 

Linkedin’s insights tag will track all website traffic and not just traffic sent to your website by Linkedin ads. This means that if google ads is a foundational channel for you, we can actually retarget google ads traffic with Linkedin retargeting ads and help you get even more out of that already great channel!

Pretty cool right? We can even get more specific and say we want to retarget traffic from 1 particularly successful campaign of google ads. This might be relevant if you have experimental google ads campaigns or some newer/weaker ones you don’t want to be lumped in there. 

We can also put filters on the backend inside of Linkedin to say that we want to retarget the website visitors but only if they also fit our criteria of job title, function, location, industry, company size etc.

What about our agency?

We spend around 8-9k/month on google ads, 2k/month on Facebook, and 5k/month on Linkedin. Linkedin paid ads is a really solid channel for us and really help enhance our google ads campaigns which is one of the reasons I love it so much.