£96K Gone: What Happens When You Trust LinkedIn's Default Settings

They launched the way most companies do. They followed the prompts and accepted LinkedIn's recommendations. Audience Expansion was switched on. Audience Network was left on.

Nothing in the setup explained what either setting would do to a tightly targeted B2B campaign.

For the first few weeks everything looked fine. Cost per click was reasonable, the budget was spending on schedule and the dashboard was green. The marketing team reported the numbers upwards with confidence.

Nobody had looked at who was actually clicking.

The first thing I check in any audit is placement. 62% of their spend had gone to the LinkedIn Audience Network.

Audience Network shows your ads outside LinkedIn, on third-party apps and websites. LinkedIn says your targeting carries over. In this account, the quality didn't. They were paying for clicks from games and news apps where nobody was in a buying frame of mind, and LinkedIn still reported them as performance.

They were selling software to CFOs and Finance Directors at mid-market UK companies. The demographic breakdown told a different story:

That's Audience Expansion doing exactly what it says. It took a careful finance-director audience and widened it to whoever was cheapest to reach.

Of 8,742 clicks, fewer than 400 came from people who matched their target audience.

The campaign wasn't underperforming. It was buying the wrong thing very efficiently.

Of the last 100 or so accounts I've reviewed, more than 70 had Audience Network taking half the budget or more. Most of the owners didn't know the setting existed.

LinkedIn isn't hiding anything. The settings are there if you go looking. But the defaults are built to spend your budget, and nothing in the setup flow warns you they work against a small, specific audience.

We rebuilt the campaigns from scratch:

• Audience Network off
• Audience Expansion off
• Exclusions for students, entry-level roles, freelancers and irrelevant industries
• Geography locked to the UK
• A list of target companies uploaded, so the ads only reached CFOs and Finance Directors at businesses they actually wanted to sell to

Reach dropped a lot. So did clicks. By LinkedIn's own metrics, the account looked worse.

Within six weeks they had more qualified demos than in the previous four months combined, and cost per acquisition was down 80%.

Fixing the settings gets your ads in front of the right people. It doesn't make them stop and look.

If the creative looks like every other corporate ad in the feed, people scroll past, click-through drops and LinkedIn charges you more to reach the same audience. I call it the boring ads tax. Here's how niche B2B firms avoid paying it: how 'boring' B2B companies build ads people actually stop for

If you're running LinkedIn Ads, look at two things this week: the placement breakdown (On Network vs Off Network) in Campaign Manager, and the job titles in your demographics report. If either surprises you, you'll know where to start.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes on it, book a 30-minute call.