LinkedIn Ads: Common mistakes that could be impacting your campaign

LinkedIn ads can be an absolute game-changer if you’re looking to reach your most engaged audience in B2B marketing. But too often, brands treat it as just another PPC platform, copying and pasting over campaign strategies from Facebook or Google Ads. The result? Woefully underperforming campaigns and wasted ad spend.

It’s time to level up your understanding of what makes LinkedIn Ads so effective and deepen your understanding of common mistakes that many marketers fall for. In this article, we’ll take you through these issues one by one, arming you with tactics and strategies that can upgrade your LinkedIn Ads campaign today.

Let’s get started:

• Targeting audiences that are too broad or too narrow
• Not leveraging LinkedIn's audience expansion and lookalikes
• Using the wrong ad format for your objective
• Neglecting ad creativity and messaging
• Not optimising bidding strategies
• Final optimisations and thoughts

Introduction

LinkedIn Ads are a powerful tool for B2B marketing, offering access to decision-makers, professionals, and high-intent users. Unlike platforms like Facebook or Google, LinkedIn’s audience is more career-focused, requiring a tailored approach to advertising.

Traditional PPC strategies don’t always translate well to LinkedIn, making it crucial to understand the platform’s unique mechanics.

Targeting audiences that are too broad or too narrow

Even if you’ve crafted award-winning campaigns, they’re useless to your marketing efforts if they don’t reach the right audience at the right time.

The challenge of finding the right balance in audience size
LinkedIn’s success comes from precise targeting, but going too broad or too narrow can kill your campaign’s performance. A balance is needed to reach enough people without attracting irrelevant users.

How overly broad targeting leads to wasted ad spend
Targeting a wide audience may seem like a way to maximise reach, but it often results in low engagement. In the end, ads end up being shown to people who aren’t the right fit, leading to lower CTRs and higher costs.

How overly niche targeting limits reach and engagement
On the flip side, overly specific targeting drastically reduces your audience size, leading to low impressions and high CPCs. This can cause ad fatigue, where the same small group of users see the ad repeatedly, leading to diminishing returns.

At the end of the day, you don’t want to overload your audience.

The fix: Using LinkedIn’s layered targeting options effectively
Thankfully, you can work around the basic dilemma of niche vs broad targeting through LinkedIn’s built in targeting options. Combine job titles with seniority, industry, or company size for better audience precision. This way you can drill down to the most useful demographics for your brand.

You can also use member groups and interests to further refine audience targeting.

We’d recommend testing various audience sizes in different campaigns to see what’s working and adjust based on performance over time.

Not leveraging LinkedIn’s audience expansion and lookalikes

You’re missing a trick if you’re not making the most of LinkedIn’s algorithm and massive data sets. 

The importance of expanding beyond initial targeting lists
Sticking only to hand-picked audience segments limits your campaign’s growth potential. LinkedIn’s Audience Expansion feature helps you reach users similar to your targeted audience, instantly! 

How lookalike audiences can improve campaign performance
Lookalike audiences allow you to scale campaigns while maintaining relevance. They’re a huge time saver and can unlock previously undiscovered audiences for your brand, without doing endless variations of new user segment targeting.

The fix: Testing audience expansion while maintaining relevance
As with any machine learning or algorithmic automation in digital marketing, we’d recommend starting small. Begin with a smaller expansion percentage and monitor the results to see what’s working before throwing a substantial chunk of your budget at building things out.

Exclude low-relevance industries, job functions, or locations to make sure the targeting isn’t accidentally picking up segments that aren’t relevant. Then compare the performance with and without expansions to gauge effectiveness.

Using the wrong ad format for your objective

No one LinkedIn ad is the same. But the ultimate ads on the platform conscientiously consider what format is best for the overall goal of the campaign. Here’s what you need to know:

Overview of LinkedIn ad formats

• Sponsored Content: Native ads in the LinkedIn feed (good for engagement and lead generation).

• Message Ads: Direct messages sent to inboxes (best for personalised outreach).

• Text Ads: Simple, cost-effective ads in the sidebar (useful for brand awareness).

• Dynamic Ads: Personalised ads with user data (ideal for engagement).

• Video Ads: High-impact storytelling format (works well for product demos and thought leadership).

Why misaligned ad formats lead to poor engagement and wasted budget
Here’s the thing; if you choose the wrong format, you can end up spending more than you’d like and getting far worse results, for example:

Using Message Ads for cold outreach can lead to low response rates.
Running Text Ads for offers that require a high level of commitment from buyers often fails to convert.
Video ads can be expensive if the content isn’t engaging or targeted well.

The fix: Matching ad formats to specific campaign goals
It’s simple. Once you understand each format fully, you can align each campaign goal to the most suitable format.

Brand awareness → Use Sponsored Content and Video Ads.
Lead generation → Test Message Ads and LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms.
Retargeting → Use Dynamic Ads and Sponsored Content for nurturing.

Neglecting ad creativity and messaging

LinkedIn used to have a stereotype of being pretty bland. The sort of place you’d pop up a CV on if you were looking for work, then stop posting on entirely. The present-day LinkedIn is bursting with creativity, with users sharing the brightest observations and most riveting showreels. 

It’s time to match that creativity and professionalism in your ads.

Common mistakes in LinkedIn ad creatives
Using generic corporate messaging that fails to connect emotionally. No one needs another bulletin update from Steve in sales, when they could be finding out about an awesome new offer on your latest exciting product launch!

Stock images that don’t stand out in a professional newsfeed. The visual side of ads on LinkedIn should be closer to the level of entertainment found on TikTok or Instagram. Just because it’s LinkedIn, doesn’t mean it needs to be overly corporate.

Failing to highlight key benefits in the first few seconds of an ad. Like any video ad, users are looking for a quick delivery of the key benefits. Again, don’t let LinkedIn make you think users are just looking for powerpoint presentations.

Why LinkedIn users engage differently than on Facebook or Google
LinkedIn users are looking for insightful, industry-relevant content, not just entertainment.
Professional audiences respond better to data-driven messaging, thought leadership, and value-based ads. Consider how many decision makers there are on the platform; they want to know you can bring in results. 

Interestingly, because so much of LinkedIn is still treating the platform like a corporate space, you have an opportunity now to stand out through a balance of humour, entertainment and industry-specific value in your ads.

The fix: Personalising messaging for decision-makers and professionals
Be clear with every word of copy exactly who you are targeting with your ads. Use clear, benefits-driven copy that speaks directly to business challenges.

Each audience is different, so test short-form vs. long-form ad copy to see what resonates with your audience.

Not optimising bidding strategies

How you spend your budget is just as important as how much you are spending overall. It’s time to choose  a bidding strategy intentionally, with your specific marketing goals in mind.

The impact of choosing the wrong bid type
If you choose your bidding strategy blindly, you’ll end up with wasted ad spend, as your ads will be shown to the wrong audience, who engage with your ad in a way that isn’t useful to you.

How inefficient bidding leads to overspending or under-delivery
Overbidding can burn through your budget quickly without enough conversions. This often leads to inexperienced marketers spending even more on what they wrongly think is a lack of ad spend, when actually it’s the bidding strategy that’s at fault.

Contrastingly, underbidding may result in low ad impressions and weak performance, simply because you’re not fueling the fire.

The fix: Adjusting bid strategies based on campaign performance data
Start with manual bidding to control your costs,  gathering data as you go on what really resonates with your audience. Then test automated bidding strategies when you are confident to estimate how audiences will interact.

• CPC (Cost Per Click): Best for lead generation and conversions.

• CPM (Cost Per Mille/1,000 Impressions): Best for brand awareness.

• Automated Bidding: This can be useful but leads to overspending if it's not carefully targeted.

Regularly review your CPCs and CPAs to optimise performance. As you develop a more informed understanding of how your target audience interacts with your ads, adjust your bids based on time of day, audience engagement, and ad placement.

Final optimisations and thoughts

Before we wrap up, here are some useful hints and tips that you can put into action today. It’s a summary of a lot of what we’ve covered today.

A/B testing audience segments and creatives

• Test different headline variations, call-to-actions, and ad visuals.

• Experiment with audience exclusions to refine targeting.

• Compare lead quality from different targeting criteria.

Using LinkedIn’s reporting tools for data-driven optimisation

• Monitor click-through rates, conversion rates, and engagement levels.

• Use demographic reporting to see who is interacting with your ads.

• Adjust budget allocation based on high-performing segments.

Staying updated with LinkedIn’s evolving ad platform

• LinkedIn constantly updates its ad policies, targeting features, and algorithm.

• Stay informed through LinkedIn’s official updates and marketing blogs.

• Join LinkedIn Ads expert communities to learn best practices from other advertisers.

In Closing

LinkedIn Ads can be a powerful tool in your digital marketing arsenal, but only if used strategically. Small mistakes, like the wrong bidding strategy, missed errors in ad copy, or poor targeting, can add up to a significant reduction in ROI if left unnoticed. 

The trick to fixing these concerns? Consistent optimisation and mindful ad creation with these errors in mind. If you’re aware of what to look out for, your campaigns will be created intentionally, and any existing errors will become easily recognisable to you.

Ready to start running smarter LinkedIn Ads? Take these insights, apply them to your campaigns, and watch your results improve.

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