When you advertise on LinkedIn, an auction system determines when your ad is served and how much you’ll pay for the ad. Your ad competes with others that have similar formats and target audiences. The winning ad maximizes value for both the member and the advertiser, ensuring a positive experience across our platform.
In the auction, the key factors that determine which ads appear are: the ad's bid price and ad's relevancy to the member.
Important to know
We might make changes that could impact auction results and prices. These changes could be to improve ad quality and relevance, test or support different ad types and products, optimize the auction, or comply with laws and our internal guidelines to ensure a trustworthy platform.
Bid price
When creating an ad campaign, you choose a bidding strategy that determines how your bid is set in the auction:
- Maximum Delivery: Your bid is automatically optimized through machine learning to maximize your objectives within your budget.
- Manual Bidding: You set a specific bid amount, representing the maximum you're willing to pay for your key objective.
- Cost Cap: You provide a maximum average cost per key result, and the system aims to keep costs under this amount by prioritizing lower-cost opportunities in the auction.
Relevancy
Your ad's relevancy reflects how likely members will interact with it. Relevancy scores include factors such as member activity, page context, ad content, and targeting which are used to determine the likelihood that the member will click through and engage with your ads via comments, likes, and shares. The relevancy score can change over time based on member interactions with your content.
Together, the ad's bid price and relevancy determine when and if it will appear. LinkedIn continually refines its auction system to maintain quality and alignment with platform standards.
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