Hey friend,
There's three inevitable things in life: death, taxes, and daily calls on LinkedIn for B2B marketing to be “less boring.”
Just last week, a front page piece in The Drum claimed anything resembling a normal B2B ad should be burned.
This thinkpiece in The Drum last week spawned this newsletter
It's a nice headline. But it completely skips the more important question: why do most B2B ad programs fail in the first place? 🤔
We’ve onboarded 30+ B2B SaaS companies already this year that run LinkedIn Ads campaigns. After we audited their accounts, the least problematic thing about them was the ad creative. It’s that they weren’t using the three most important levers that come before it:
Tracking
Targeting
Bidding
And then the creative
The truth is, buyers don’t care about your content at all. They don’t care if it's funny or if it’s pretty. They don't care if there’s a story. Even the most brilliant creative will struggle to improve pipeline and revenue if it's being run on an account with broken fundamentals.
And I hate to tell you all… but mediocre creative on a well-built setup will drive pipeline.
The right message will land in front of the right person at the right time.
Here's what pulling each lever looks like 👇
Lever 1: Tracking
If you don’t use server-side and offline conversion tracking, it’s really hard (if not impossible) to make accurate campaign decisions.
30-50% of conversions are lost to cookie rejection and 95% of iOS users decline tracking. So, the signals used to judge what's working and what campaigns to cut can miss a huge chunk of data.
The fix is to get three foundations in place:
Server-side tracking. This captures the conversions that browser-based tracking misses due to cookie and ad blockers
Conversion windows set to maximum. 365 days for LinkedIn, 90 days for Google. B2B buying cycles don't close in 30 days. We have campaigns we paused months ago that still influence deals today because the recall they built compounded, but we can only see them using wider conversion windows
Offline conversion sync. This pushes MQL, SQL, and Closed/Won data back into the ad platform from your CRM so you can optimize based on revenue
An example of what our tracking looks like in LinkedIn Campaign manager to show closed/won deals. The data is piped in from Dreamdata.
If your tracking is broken, you risk killing ads that really work. I've seen teams cut LinkedIn Ads entirely based on incomplete attribution data and then wonder why pipeline drops off a cliff the next quarter.
If budget is a concern, I highly (highly!) recommend you repurpose a small slice of your ad spend to get this in place first. It's the highest-ROI $1K you can put into your paid program.
Lever 2: Targeting
This is the most common reason B2B ad campaigns fail: they target the wrong people at the wrong time in their buying journey.
A good ads program runs on repetition and recall. You need 80% audience penetration and 10+ frequency over 90 days for demand gen campaigns to work.
The exact benchmarks we recommend to clients for demand generation programs
But most B2B teams run a 1M+ audience on a $10K monthly budget and hit a tiny fraction of these reach and frequency targets. These ads just won’t reach in-market buyers and can't build recall with out-of-market ones.
When I scaled back our slightly bloated audience size last year, this is what happened:
Even a baseline of 50% reach and 8-10 frequency started to push qualified leads into our pipeline quickly.
Here are some levers to pull to hit these targets:
Use third-party targeting. Tools like Primer or Clay can build company account lists rather than relying on LinkedIn's native targeting filters, which are far too broad to maximize spend efficiently
Pull your last 365 days of Closed/Won data. Use it to identify which job titles actually submit your demo form or jump on a discovery call. Only target those in cold campaigns and save the rest of the buying committee for retargeting once they're in-pipeline. You'll spend less and get higher-quality leads
Build reverse ICP exclusion lists. If your ICP is $10M-$100M ARR SaaS companies in the U.S., upload an exclusion list of companies outside that range. Every impression on a bad-fit account is money that could have reached someone who might actually buy
This gives your campaigns the best chance of hitting people in your target audience enough times so they will remember you, especially when they move in-market.
We created a custom formula we use on every client account to make sure their demand generation goals are achievable with their budget.
The Reach Ratio™️ uses frequency, penetration, CPM, and audience size to calculate how much budget you really need to hit goals on LinkedIn.
Lever 3: Bidding
LinkedIn's default settings are optimised to line LinkedIn’s pockets, not your pipeline.
There are three settings in Campaign Manager that will quickly drain your budget:
Audience Expansion. LinkedIn uses this to show your ads to people "similar" to your target audience. In practice it dilutes your ICP targeting significantly and you lose control over who sees your ads
LinkedIn Audience Network (LAN). This will serve your ads across third-party sites and apps. Cheaper impressions on paper. In reality, it just accesses low-quality inventory far outside your ICP
Max Delivery bidding. LinkedIn's automated system that bids for the cheapest impressions to maximise reach, but almost certain to not hit the right people
My advice will always be to turn these off to maximize budget efficiency.
LinkedIn's campaign labels are also misleading.
The algorithm can't distinguish between someone clicking out of curiosity and someone ready to book a demo. It just finds people likely to complete the specific action you've optimised for, but those people aren't always your buyers.
I’m practicing what I preach here. Last year, awareness campaigns reached 6X more people at nearly the same CTR as a website visits campaign, while campaigns with brand awareness objectives drove 10X higher conversion rates than the conversion objective in multiple tests.
Use this as a guideline 👇
My advice is to use engagement, video views, and awareness objectives for cold prospecting. Website visits and conversion objectives have significantly higher CPMs and don't perform better for B2B pipeline.
Step 4: Creative
Once your tracking is clean, your audience is tight, and your budget isn't being eaten by platform settings… then you can pull your creative lever.
Even then, I still recommend prioritizing clear over clever.
I see beautiful B2B ads all over my LinkedIn feed that obviously cost a lot to put together. But 99% of the time, I instantly forget about them because I have no idea what the company sells.
Ad content has one job: Get people to connect your brand and product with their urgent problems and needs to be solved.
This is why “boring” ads work so well. Take a look at this CTV ad we ran last year:
It’s just audio we mashed together from client calls when they first came to us for help. We knew from analysis that customers come to us for a couple of painful reasons:
Their previous agency didn’t perform well
Their paid ad program wasn’t bringing in ROI
They needed to cut CAC and increase pipeline
The ad above pressed on these pain points. We’ve spent a total of $38k on it (across a couple of variations) and it cost pennies to produce as it was just stitched together audio.
It’s not the most polished CTV ad in the world, but we knew the messaging would land:
So far, it has influenced 27 closed/won deals worth roughly $1.6M in ARR 🤯
All it took was some out-of-the-box thinking from our own creative team.
I’m showing you this because it’s a perfect example of how the “boring” fundamentals can deliver real pipeline.
Once you know nail down targeting, tracking, and bidding, then you can focus on putting a clear, creative message in front of your audience that will land.
Hope you've found this useful, catch ya in the next one!
🤘
Patrick
P.S. if you want to level up your LinkedIn Ads account, I’m always up for a chat. Hit this link to get your free marketing plan and I'll show you exactly how to structure your 2026 campaigns.