23 Sep, 2025
LinkedIn Advertising Best Practices: 10 Things We Fix in Every Account We Audit
Ask a handful of companies what they think of LinkedIn Ads and you will get two completely different answers. Some will say they tried it, saw no return, and switched it off. Others will tell you they are winning most of their pipeline there.
We see this up close, because we audit LinkedIn accounts for companies who suspect theirs is not working. The same handful of problems comes up almost every time.
The LinkedIn advertising best practices below are the ten things we look for. Getting all ten right is what turns LinkedIn from an expensive experiment into one of the highest-return channels you run.
Joe McLaughlin, our Director of Strategy, talks through all ten with our founder, Ryan, on episode 113 of SaaS Marketing Weekly.
Listen to Episode 113: 10 reasons your LinkedIn ads aren’t working
What are LinkedIn advertising best practices?
LinkedIn advertising best practices are the settings and creative decisions that determine whether your ads reach the right people, and whether they reach them often enough to be remembered. Get them wrong and the platform will happily spend your budget without ever putting you in front of a buyer.
They cover budget against audience size, company and job title targeting, funnel balance, creative, messaging, ad format, retargeting, and the landing page behind the click.
Most LinkedIn ads best practice guides are written by the platform itself. The ten below are the things we fix most often in other people’s accounts.
- Your budget does not match your audience size
- You are targeting the wrong companies
- You are reaching the wrong decision makers
- Your job title list is too broad
- Too much of your budget sits at the bottom of the funnel
- Your creative has too much going on
- Your messaging hides what you do
- You are using the wrong ad format
- You are not retargeting
- The landing page undoes the work your ads just did
1. Your budget does not match your audience size
This is the most common problem we find. Open a campaign and look at two numbers: the share of your audience you are reaching, and how often you are reaching them. As a rule, you want your LinkedIn ad frequency to be at least five. If your budget cannot get there, it is spread too thin for anyone to notice you.
Think about it this way. With an audience of 100,000 people, a £2,000-a-month LinkedIn ads budget will never work.
You have two ways out. Raise the budget to match the audience, which most companies cannot do, or shrink the audience to match the budget. Shrinking the audience produced the biggest improvement in our own account here at Rocket SaaS.
A market penetration calculator will settle it before you spend anything. Enter your audience size, your budget and the frequency you want, and it will tell you whether the two are compatible. If the maths does not work, no amount of creative will save the campaign.
2. You are targeting the wrong companies
LinkedIn charges a premium for its targeting, and plenty of accounts pay that premium, then point it at companies that were never going to buy.
Start with revenue instead of instinct. Look at which companies have already bought from you, put that list into a tool like Clay, and read the pattern by company size and industry. That gives you a definition of your ICP based on what has happened rather than what you assume.
Then build an account list and upload it as one of LinkedIn’s matched audiences, rather than relying on native filters. LinkedIn’s filters are good, but they are blunt.
We target HR tech companies, for example, and most of them classify themselves on LinkedIn as human resources. Native targeting therefore serves us HR companies of every description instead of HR software companies. An account list built in Clay isolates the tech companies within that category.
The clearest evidence shows up in audits. Open the engagement list on an account running native filters and you will often find household-name global brands sitting in it, nowhere near the client’s ICP.
How to sanity check an account list
You do not need to review thousands of companies. Sort the list, review the top hundred by hand, and count how many are a genuine fit. If 95 of them are right, the rest of the list is probably sound. If 60 are right, the list needs rebuilding before it spends another pound.
3. You are reaching the wrong decision makers
Here is the mechanism most advertisers miss.
“LinkedIn is very sneaky. It will always put more money into where it is cheapest.”
Joe McLaughlin, Director of Strategy
Junior job titles are cheaper to reach than senior ones, so leave a few titles in your targeting that sit slightly too junior and the platform will find them. We regularly audit accounts where over half the spend has gone to junior people.
There is a fair argument for putting ads in front of ordinary employees as well as your main contact. The more people at a company who have heard of you, the easier it is when a deal needs internal sign-off. That only holds as long as it does not come at the expense of reaching the people who sign the contract.
The check takes five minutes. Open your CRM, look at the job titles of the people who requested demos, and compare those with the titles running in your campaigns. When the two lists do not overlap, you have found where your money is going.
4. Your job title list is too broad
Ask a team who they sell to and they will list every job title they have ever spoken to, procurement included. The audience balloons.
That matters because job titles vary enormously in size. There are a lot of procurement managers on LinkedIn, so adding that one title can undo all the audience discipline from point one in a single click.
Audited accounts routinely carry twenty, thirty, or forty job titles. Ask how many have ever produced a lead or a deal, and for most of the list the honest answer is none.
5. Too much of your budget sits at the bottom of the funnel
Only about 5% of your market is in a buying window at any one time. This is the 95-5 rule, which comes from Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and was popularised by the LinkedIn B2B Institute. An account built entirely around demo ads is bidding for that 5% and ignoring everyone else, which is a particular problem when your budget is small to begin with.
Demand generation says the same thing in more words: you cannot force people into the market. Reaching the other 95% earlier with something useful is what makes them available to you later.
This also changes what you measure. At the top of the funnel, lead volume tells you very little. Look instead at click-through rate, at how long people stay on the page, and at whether the retargeting audience you are building is growing with the right people in it. We make the full case for this in our piece on why LinkedIn ads are not a lead gen channel.
6. Your creative has too much going on
An ad has one job on LinkedIn, which is to stop the scroll. People recognise an ad instantly, and they need a reason to give it another second.
“The ad should have ten words or less and a big font, big header, and not overly creative.”
Ryan, founder of Rocket SaaS
An ad carrying twenty or thirty words will not survive a thumb moving at speed on a phone, no matter how good the offer behind it is.
A busy design reads as work, and nobody scrolling LinkedIn between meetings wants to do work. One clear idea lands before they have decided whether to scroll past.
7. Your messaging hides what you do
There are two sides to any ad: whether it looks good enough to stop somebody, and whether what it says means anything once they have stopped.
The test is whether your ad shows the reader a problem worth fixing, in plain language, without making them work for it. Ryan’s pet peeve is ads full of buzzwords that mean nothing. Something like “supercharge your risk management with an AI integration platform” sounds impressive, and it tells the reader nothing about their own problem or how to fix it.
Startups and scale-ups cannot borrow the lofty language that Apple and Slack get away with, because nobody knows them well enough to decode it. Say plainly what the product does, in ten words or less. If you are unsure whether your message lands, start with plain ads and get more creative once you know it does.
8. You are using the wrong ad format
LinkedIn gives you video, carousel ads, single image ads, document ads, message ads and more, which is a lot of ways to spend money badly.
Ask yourself two questions. What gets my message across? And what can my team produce well? If nobody in the business is good on camera, video is not your format.
Carousels do not do well. A ten-slide carousel takes roughly ten times as long to produce as a single image ad, and it asks the reader to click through ten slides before reaching the point. Jamie rated them three out of ten on an earlier episode, which is about right.
Single image ads drive most of our own pipeline here at Rocket SaaS, and they are also the fastest format to make. Thought leader ads are the other format worth your attention, and we cover them properly in our piece on thought leader ads.
9. You are not retargeting
“Retargeting is simply going to be your fastest track to actually getting conversions.”
Joe McLaughlin, Director of Strategy
LinkedIn ads retargeting works because the audience already knows who you are, whether from your ads or a visit to your website.
The mechanics work in your favour too. A retargeting pool is smaller than a cold audience, so the same budget reaches a much higher frequency, which is point one working for you instead of against you.
One play worth running: give the heaviest retargeting to people who reached your pricing page and left. Most of them did not decide against you, they got busy, and a reminder lands differently with somebody who was that close to buying.
The split we aim for is roughly 70% cold audience targeting and 30% retargeting. Anywhere between 60/40 and 70/30 in favour of cold works. Weight it too far towards retargeting and you stop building the audience that feeds it. Our examples of effective B2B SaaS retargeting ads show what to run against that audience.
10. The landing page undoes the work your ads just did
You can get all nine of the above right and still waste your money here. LinkedIn is not naturally a conversion channel, so a click from it is an expensive thing to have earned.
“If you’ve done a good enough ad where people stop and click into it, you’ve earned their attention. Now make the most of it.”
Joe McLaughlin, Director of Strategy
Three things cause most of the landing page failures we see:
- The page loads slowly or feels off.
- The page was built for desktop and does not work properly on a phone.
- The messaging does not continue. The ad said ten words about one specific problem, the reader clicked because of that problem, and the page greets them with a broad all-in-one solution.
Smaller details matter once those are sorted, such as whether the product is shown properly or as a raw screenshot pasted onto the page, and whether a free audit or a strategy call would convert better than a demo request. Usually you can fix the page instead of rebuilding it.
The thing to remember is that your landing page has to carry on the conversation your ad started. Everything you spent getting the click is wasted if it does not.
Where to start if you have all ten
Most accounts we audit have several of these problems at once, so the order matters. Fix the budget and audience mismatch first, because nothing else works until the maths does.
Creative and messaging come next, since they are the things you control day to day and can change right now. The landing page comes last.
That sequence is what a LinkedIn account audit covers. Take a look at our LinkedIn Ads service if you would rather we ran it for you, or start with a free B2B SaaS website review. You can listen to the full episode on SaaS Marketing Weekly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Single image ads. They stop the scroll, they take a fraction of the time a carousel or a video needs, and they carry most of the pipeline in our own account. Carousels ask the reader to click through ten slides for the point, and most will not.
Video is worth the effort only when you have somebody in the business who is genuinely good on camera.
Work backwards through four things: whether the budget can reach the audience often enough, whether the audience is the right companies and job titles, whether the creative stops the scroll, and whether the landing page continues what the ad promised. Most accounts fail on the first.
The numbered list at the top of this article covers all four in the order we check them.
Occasionally, and LinkedIn publishes status updates when there is. Before assuming an outage, check whether the ad was disapproved, whether the campaign has budget left, and whether the audience is so narrow that delivery has stalled. Those account for most sudden stops.
A campaign that delivers without performing is a different problem, and the rest of this article covers it.
LinkedIn aims to review ads within about 24 hours, and it can take longer when volume is high. If an ad sits in review beyond that, check the creative against LinkedIn’s advertising policies, since a rejection often looks like a delay in the campaign view.
LinkedIn sets a floor per campaign, and you can find the current figure in Campaign Manager when you set your daily budget. The more useful question is whether your budget can reach your audience at a frequency of at least five. A small budget against a large audience buys occasional impressions nobody remembers, which is worse than a smaller audience served properly.
LinkedIn CPMs run well above other social platforms, because you are paying for job title and company-level targeting. Rather than chasing a benchmark figure, judge your CPM against whether the campaign achieves the penetration and frequency it needs on the budget you have. A high CPM that reaches the right hundred accounts five times over beats a low one that reaches nobody who matters.
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