The Setup
LinkedIn sent me one of those offers—spend $250 on ads, get $250 matched. Free advertising money. I clicked the link, set up my campaign, and figured I’d document the whole thing. “How to Get a Customer with LinkedIn Ads” was going to be a nice little marketing series for my blog.
That’s not how this turned out.
The Coupon Nightmare
I followed LinkedIn’s promotional link. Signed up. Started my campaign. Noticed there was no credit showing. Asked support. They said the credit would appear once I hit $250 in spend.
I hit $250. No credit.
Turns out, clicking their promotional link somehow created a separate ad account. My spend was in one account, the promo was attached to another. LinkedIn’s response? Spend $250 on the other campaign to get the match.
That’s not how coupons work.
Ten days of back-and-forth. Multiple support tickets. On December 25th, I got an email saying “once the $250 threshold is met, the credit will be automatically applied.” It wasn’t. On January 1st, I finally got a support rep who actually listened and manually applied the credit as “a gesture of goodwill.”
I’m not here to bash LinkedIn support. The last guy fixed it. But ten days to honor a coupon from a link I clicked on their platform? That’s a lot of friction for “free” money.
The Results
Here’s what $250 bought:
- 60,000+ impressions
- ~300 website clicks
- 92% bounce rate
Ninety-two percent. That means out of every 100 people LinkedIn sent to my site, 92 of them left immediately. They didn’t click anything. Didn’t read anything. Just bounced.
The only useful thing that came out of this? The traffic spike exposed a memory configuration issue on my server. So I guess LinkedIn helped me find a bug. $250 for a stress test.
I don’t know what LinkedIn’s algorithm optimizes for, but it’s not people who actually want to buy software.
The Kicker
Here’s the part that really gets me. During the same period my paid campaign was running, I also had organic traffic—people finding the site through search, Reddit conversations, direct links.
The organic traffic outperformed the paid traffic.
Fewer people, but they actually looked around. Clicked multiple pages. Read the content. The kind of behavior that might, you know, lead to a customer.
The red box is paid traffic—631 sessions funneling to one page and dead-ending. The green box is organic—smaller numbers, but look at the spread. People exploring Features, News, Resources, the Demo page. Actual engagement.
The Lesson
I’m a small business owner. $250 isn’t nothing. And LinkedIn’s ad platform took that money and delivered what amounts to bot-quality traffic.
If you’re a small business thinking about LinkedIn Ads, here’s my take: don’t. At least not yet. Not until you’ve exhausted the free options—posting content, engaging in comments, having real conversations in your industry.
Those 60,000 impressions didn’t get me a single lead. The conversations I’ve had on Reddit and LinkedIn comments? Those might actually turn into something.
I’ve still got $250 in LinkedIn ad credits sitting in my account. Maybe I’ll run another experiment and write Part 2. Maybe I’ll let it expire. Either way, I’m not expecting much.
Jeremy Bond is the founder of Bondbyte Inc. and creator of BasicBMS, a modular business management platform for growing service companies. He’s based in Yakima, Washington.