While LinkedIn as an ad platform may seem like a bit of an underdog when compared to other ad giants like Meta and Google, there’s no doubt that it’s rising in popularity, and it’s one of the best advertising platforms for B2B businesses.
However, LinkedIn Ads are paid ads, which means you may have quite a few questions regarding the payment. Today, I’m going to walk you through one of the key elements you need to understand about LinkedIn ads, which is when they charge you for your ads.
How do you incur charges?
Before we dive into the intricacies of when LinkedIn charges you, you first need to understand how LinkedIn ads billing works. Depending on what ad setup you choose, you will either have a traditional PPC setup where you pay per click, or you will pay per impression. To get maximum delivery from your ad spend, you need to try to manage your cost-per-click effectively and reach as many LinkedIn users that fit your target audience as you can.
And how do they charge you?
There are two main ways that you can pay for LinkedIn ads: prepayment and post-payment. It’s pretty self-explanatory. With prepayment, you pay a fee to your LinkedIn account before launching your campaigns, and then the ad fees are deducted from this.
Post-payment, on the other hand, means that you will first launch your campaigns and then pay your fees via invoice as a payment method. However, this option is only available for people with solid account histories and creditworthiness, so make sure that your billing details are correct if you want your credit card payment to go smoothly.
Okay . . . but what is the billing frequency?
Alright, I’ve strung you along for long enough now, but here we go. When does LinkedIn actually charge you? You’re probably not going to like the answer, because the truth is that it depends.
According to LinkedIn, you can be charged via your chosen payment method daily, weekly, or monthly. But it’s also dependent on how quickly you reach your desired ad spend. You should also keep in mind that LinkedIn offers a lifetime budget option as well as a daily budget. The good news is that they charge you pretty consistently, and you have quite a but of control over when and how they charge you.
How to manage your LinkedIn campaigns
I also thought it would be helpful to share some tips on managing your LinkedIn ads campaigns alongside your budget so that you can make the most of your budget.
- Make sure you choose the right format: LinkedIn offers a variety of formats, from message campaigns to text ads to video ads and everything in between
- Get to know the app: the better you know LinkedIn, the easier it will be to manage your ads and your budget. Play around on the LinkedIn homepage, and simply look up what the platform has to offer you!
- Choose the right bidding strategy: you should also spend some time learning about bidding strategies. For example, manual bidding might be the best way of utilising your budget and reaching your target audience . . . but it might not. What works for one business doesn’t work for another, so make sure to test different things.
- Test different things: speaking of testing . . . you need to test everything. Test sending users to your website versus sending them to a landing page. Test one bid amount against another. If you want to successfully run ads, A/B testing should be implemented in your strategy.
In conclusion
This was quite a short post, because the truth is that the payment system for LinkedIn ads isn’t that complicated! It works pretty much like any other service, but you get to choose how much you spend, which is pretty cool, in my opinion.
Of course, if you are dealing with any ad platform, it’s important to keep a close eye on your ad spend to make sure that you are culling any ads that don’t perform well, and keeping only the profitable ones.
And if managing your LinkedIn ad spend and campaigns sounds too complicated for you, fill in the form below to let my ad agency handle it for you.