A marketer at a small B2B VR training company posted his first LinkedIn campaign and what he found when he looked at it properly. The test was a 13 day sponsored video run, roughly $1,500 CAD, aimed at the United States and Canada across 15 job titles in HR, safety and learning and development. He says he left auto targeting on at setup because LinkedIn pushes hard for it during the build.
The strategy
On day three he opened the demographics report, which breaks delivery down by job function, seniority, industry and company size. According to the post, about 40 percent of impressions had gone to software, IT and finance titles. The company sells to operations managers at trade schools, healthcare facilities and industrial sites, so none of that was the target buyer. He expected some drift, but not that much that fast on a small budget.
On day four he made three changes at once. He switched auto targeting off. He added negative targeting for IT, software, sales and finance. He set a seniority floor at manager and above.
Two days later he reports impression volume down about 25 percent, which he expected, an audience mix much closer to the intended buyer, and CPC slightly lower rather than higher. The cost drop is the part that surprised him, since shrinking an audience is supposed to make it more expensive. He is new to paid and asks the thread whether over excluding is a real risk on small budgets, which is a fair open question.
Why it works
Audience expansion is judged on whether people engage, and software and finance job titles are the most active audience on LinkedIn, so an expanded audience drifts toward them by default. Cheap engagement from the wrong function is still cheap, which is why removing it does not automatically raise CPC. The demographics report is the only place that drift is visible, and on a 13 day test the money is gone before a conversion report would ever have told you.
How to stop LinkedIn ads reaching the wrong job titles
Open the demographics report by day three of any new campaign and read delivery by job function and seniority, not by click count. If a function you do not sell to is taking a large share of impressions, turn audience expansion off, add that function as an exclusion, and set a seniority floor. Then watch impressions, CPC and audience mix for 48 hours before deciding whether you have cut too far.
Credit: u/MelcherStudios on Reddit