LinkedIn Ads: can you get more efficient marketing by overbudgeting and holding your manual bid the same?

We use LinkedIn Ads to find excellent participants for our online courses.

A question we had, that seemed to have no conclusive answers online was:

If you’re not spending your daily budget already, does increasing the daily budget further increase ad spending?

The traditional answer is ‘no’, with the argument that if you’re already not spending your daily budget, this is because your bid being too low is the bottleneck and it needs raising.

However, I was curious: the estimator for budget spent does seem to keep increasing as you increase the campaign’s daily budget. It’s plausible that increasing the total budget makes the algorithm more aggressive to try to spend it all.

And it’d be valuable to know because if the answer is yes, then we can continue getting more clicks for the same low manual bid.

So, I alternated the daily budget between $32 and $320 per day while holding the manual bid at a measly $1.50 per click, to see if this affected spending.

Results

Altering the target spend on this campaign resulted in an improvement in spend, even though both were far below target:

• with $32/day budget: $8.38

• with $320/day budget: $36.34

This suggests this tactic can be successful at tricking the LinkedIn Ads algorithm to distributing your ads to more people at the same (low) cost per click!

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If you’ve read this far, you might also like our experiment to find what creatives work best on LinkedIn Ads.