The Ideal Budget for Running LinkedIn Ads in 2023

What’s the ideal budget for running Linkedin Ads in 2023?

With over 900 million users, LinkedIn remains a great platform to reach your target customers. However, when it comes to running LinkedIn ads, people often get stuck on the minimum budget they need to start. Don’t want to waste thousands of dollars or use too little? In this article, we’ll outline your ideal minimal budget and show you how to get your LinkedIn ads up and running.

Let’s get into it!

What does the LinkedIn ad budget depend on?

To get started, you need to know how much it costs to run LinkedIn ads, and how much your budget should be. Let’s discuss two factors that can influence your budget:

1. Your traffic health

At the very minimum, you could get started with LinkedIn ads with a budget as small as $500 to $1,000. However, for that to be an effective use of spend, you should already have healthy traffic to your website and use that LinkedIn ad spend just for retargeting.

I would recommend $500 to $1,000 for the minimum spend. However, if I only had that amount of spend, it would have to be for retargeting, and I would need to already have quality traffic going to my website.

2. If LinkedIn Ads Retargeting Only makes sense

The second factor would be your minimum LinkedIn ads budget if your Linkedin ads were in a silo.

If you’re trying to build this individual channel out in a silo by itself instead of a retargeting campaign, how much would you need?

I would recommend a minimum budget of $3,000 a month and might need a 3-4 month runway to prove a positive ROI.

There are two scenarios:

• The first is if you already have healthy website traffic going to your website, and you’d like to leverage LinkedIn ads for retargeting.
• The second is when you build LinkedIn ads in a silo to get initial traffic, and then retarget that traffic and convert it without the help of other traffic to the website that would take a lot more budget to do comfortably in any kind of short time.

In the following sections, we’ll go into detail about how to run your ads campaigns in both scenarios.

Scenario A: Your budget range for building Linkedin ads in a silo

Many business owners usually take this approach because they think about these ad platforms in a silo.

The initial cost per click for a cold layer of LinkedIn ads is expensive.

First, you need to run them for enough time to get enough clicks. You need to run another layer to attract digital hand raisers who want your product, and once you have a decent amount you retarget them. Lastly, you have to build out the retargeting long enough to nurture the handraisers and finally convert them. As you can see, it can take a lot of time.

It can take a decent budget in order to collect that data, get that number of prospects, and then convert those prospects into customers. So if you were building in a silo, I’d recommend $3,000 a month as a minimum budget.

It would probably take about three-four months at that rate to get enough data and start having a break-even ROI. Then maybe three or four months down the line, you could see some profitability from the starting point.

Scenario B: Your budget range if you already have quality traffic going to your website

Let’s say you’re starting with retargeting. You’re running Google Ads, you have paid listing sites, you’ve been working at SEO, you have quality traffic going to your website, and that traffic is actually converting.

Now you have a profitable Google Ads channel. You could start retargeting by running your LinkedIn ads with $500 to $1,000 a month and see a positive ROI in the first 30 to 60 days.

Because the LinkedIn ads insight tag can pick up on all website traffic and not just the traffic that is produced by LinkedIn ads, you can actually use LinkedIn ads to retarget the traffic that other paid channels or organic channels are directing to your website.

You might be thinking, what’s the smallest amount you can start with? I actually started with $300 a month budget for LinkedIn ads and then grew to $500 – $1000 a month, and now it’s $5,000 – $10,000 a month. Now we use our current budget to carve out a cold audience.

Additionally, I would say for most B2B companies, starting with LinkedIn ads retargeting is the best decision because it’s not usually the first channel that they’re trying to make work and trying to make profitable. They have other things put in place, and LinkedIn ads are another channel they’re looking to expand into.

Now that you have a budget, what’s the actual strategy for running your ads?

Firstly, I’d say that LinkedIn ads are not a great place to start if you don’t have other ad channels in place. That’s also why you would need more money and more time.

But if you have these other ad channels in place and you’re looking to get into LinkedIn ads, start with retargeting and start with the focus and what your strategy is.

We’ve set the budget, you could get started with as little as $500 or $1000. So what’s the actual strategy?

The actual strategy would be to get back in front of your targeted prospects and build trust and credibility.

Now how do you make sure that they’re targeted prospects?

For example, you might be retargeting your 90-day website visits, but some people are coming for educational blog posts, and some are coming because of research or curiosity. Well, LinkedIn allows you to put their specific targeted filters on top of retargeting criteria.

So your ad criteria can be:

• 90-day website visitors, but only if they’re from the United States and Canada
• Only from these five industries that we best serve
• Only from these company sizes that we know have a problem and budget
• Only from these seniority levels or job titles that we know have decision-making power

Now you’d want to retarget that group of people with these ads. For the strategy, you’d run ads that help you build trust and credibility with your audience.

Now you already know that if they came through Google Ads, a paid listing site, and SEO, they have an idea of who you are and what you offer.

The next big obstacles you should overcome are why your customers should trust you and why you are the experts in your field.

Types of retargeting content you can put out include:

• Case studies
• Testimonials
• Client success stories
• Educational how to videos and posts
• Organic communities
• Your events (workshops / webinars)

These types of content build trust in the mind of the prospect and position you as the expert in your space.

For example, this journey would look like someone googling LinkedIn ads agencies in the United States and finding us and three or four other competitors. They’re often visiting four or five other competitors, so it’s actually really hard for those initial clicks to convert because it’s a very competitive space.

However, most of those people are in the research stage, so they’re actually not going to make that buying decision immediately. They’re going to buy in the next couple of months.

What I’d recommend you do after they leave your site over those next 90 days is to show them content through LinkedIn retargeting that actually tells them who you are, why they can trust you, and positions you as the expert. Your positioning is ultimately what allows you to convert visitors from curious prospects to actual paying clients.

Additionally, with LinkedIn, you have the ability to get hyper-targeted even with retargeting. You can also use a variety of different ad types and formats and placements and kind of really surround them.

So in that small group of retargeting over the next 90 days, you can easily dominate their feed and be the most visible expert. In the following months, you’re the number one person that comes to mind and that they want to take that next step with.

To Sum It Up

To get started with your ads, you need to get clear on how healthy your traffic is, and whether you’re retargeting users. Your ideal monthly budget can range from $500-$3000 as your ideal budget depending on whether you’re retargeting or not/if you have enough healthy traffic.

For better results, you can get hyper-targeted with your target audience. You can also use different ad types to nurture your audience, which ultimately build trust & awareness with your audience. This helps them see you as the number one expert and makes them more likely to buy from you.