In January I wrote about spending $250 on LinkedIn Ads and getting almost nothing for it. Sixty thousand impressions. Three hundred clicks. A 92% bounce rate. One server bug discovered. If you missed it, you can read Part 1 here: I Spent $250 on LinkedIn Ads. Here’s What I Actually Got.
I ended that post saying I still had $250 in LinkedIn credits sitting in my account. Maybe I’d run another experiment. Maybe I’d let them expire.
I ran the experiment.
The Comment That Stopped Me
Before I touched the campaign again, someone named Kamel Ben Yacoub left a comment that reframed everything:
“There is something wrong with your campaign — that’s impossibly cheap for LinkedIn. $250 spend ÷ 300 clicks = $0.83 CPC. Normal B2B LinkedIn CPCs are $8–15+ minimum. You probably got these cheap clicks because LinkedIn showed your ads to completely irrelevant people outside your target audience. That’s also why 92% bounced immediately — they weren’t your ICP at all.”
He listed four common campaign setup mistakes:
- Audience Expansion enabled (LinkedIn’s default)
- AI Accelerate campaign building mode
- LinkedIn Audience Network enabled
- Lower seniority targeting included — entry-level, trainee
I went back into Campaign Manager and looked. Audience Expansion was on. One checkbox. LinkedIn turns it on by default and doesn’t exactly wave a red flag about it during setup.
The mechanics of it: Audience Expansion tells LinkedIn to show your ads to people similar to your target audience when your defined segment isn’t generating enough impressions. Sounds reasonable. In practice, it means LinkedIn defines “similar” however it wants, CPCs drop because the inventory is cheap, and your ads get shown to people who have no reason to care about what you sell.
That explained the $0.83 CPC. Real B2B targeting on LinkedIn doesn’t cost $0.83 a click. You’re paying for irrelevance.
The Second Run
I turned off Audience Expansion. Left everything else as close to the same as I could. Restarted with the remaining $250 credit.
CPCs went up. Volume went down. Traffic behaved differently — actual time on site, actual page exploration.
At about $180 in spend, I got a connection request from Clint Adamson at Better Brix Distribution — an ICF (Insulated Concrete Forms) and building materials distributor based right here in Yakima, WA.
We’ve been talking websites, marketing, and business operations. I don’t know exactly where it lands yet, but it’s a real conversation with a real business owner in my target market. That’s more than the first $250 produced.
What I Actually Think Now
I want to be careful not to swing too far the other way. LinkedIn didn’t suddenly become a great platform because I checked a box. But Kamel’s comment was right — my results weren’t evidence of fraud, they were evidence of bad default settings.
LinkedIn’s defaults favor LinkedIn. Audience Expansion keeps CPCs cheap on paper, which makes your cost-per-click look efficient until you realize you’re buying clicks from people who aren’t buyers. The Audience Network extends delivery outside LinkedIn entirely, which is another way to burn budget on cheaper, lower-quality placements.
None of this is accidental. But it’s also not the same as bot fraud. It’s just a platform with incentives that don’t align with yours unless you know what to turn off.
If you’re running LinkedIn Ads and not seeing results, go check these four things before you give up on the platform:
- Audience Expansion → turn it off
- LinkedIn Audience Network → turn it off
- AI Accelerate mode → don’t use it
- Seniority targeting → cut the lower rungs, target decision-makers only
Your CPC will go up. Your click volume will go down. And you might actually reach someone worth talking to.
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.