Manual bidding on LinkedIn is the single most important lever you have for controlling ad costs, and most advertisers either ignore it completely or use it incorrectly.
It’s the strategy that consistently delivers the lowest cost per click while still reaching target accounts.
And I’m not alone.
Every experienced LinkedIn advertiser I’ve spoken to, including former LinkedIn employees, says the same thing.
In this guide, I’ll share a comprehensive LinkedIn manual bidding strategy you can use, including the floor-finding technique that helps me pay 30%+ less than the suggested bid range, step-by-step setup instructions, and the decision framework for when to raise or lower your bids.
Short on time?
Here’s a quick overview:
LinkedIn offers three bidding strategies: manual bidding, maximum delivery, and cost cap.
Of these three, manual bidding gives you the most control over what you pay per auction, and for ABM campaigns with targeted audiences, control is everything.
Here’s what Maximillian Herczeg, a former LinkedIn employee and Founder at Kamrat, shared during the ZenABM ABM Bootcamp:
“Manual bidding basically covers most cases. It’s so good that LinkedIn actually hides it from you.” – Maximillian Herczeg, former LinkedIn employee, Founder at Kamrat
That’s right.
LinkedIn doesn’t make manual bidding easy to find.
The platform defaults to maximum delivery because it spends your budget faster, which is better for LinkedIn’s revenue.
You have to actively find and choose the manual bidding option, and LinkedIn even tried to remove it at one point.
I mean, the fact that LinkedIn tried to kill it but advertisers demanded it stay should tell you everything about its value.
To use manual bidding effectively, you need to understand LinkedIn’s auction mechanics.
LinkedIn uses a second-price auction.
Your Ad Rank in each auction is calculated as:
Ad Rank = Bid x Ad Relevance Score
The winner pays just enough to beat the second-highest Ad Rank, not their full bid amount.
This is critical for understanding why manual bidding works so well.
With manual bidding, you set the maximum you’re willing to pay per click (or per 1,000 impressions).
But because of the second-price mechanism, you’ll usually pay less than your maximum bid. The actual CPC depends on the competition in that specific auction.
With maximum delivery, LinkedIn bids as high as needed to win every auction, regardless of cost.
With a cost cap, LinkedIn aims for an average cost target. Only manual bidding lets you say “I will never pay more than $X per click” with certainty.
For reference, the 2026 LinkedIn ABM benchmarks show a median CPC of $13.23 for single-image ads and $2.29 for thought leader ads.
These numbers give you a baseline for setting your manual bids.
This is the core strategy that saves me, and every smart LinkedIn advertiser I know, significant money on every campaign.
The goal is simple: find the lowest bid that still gets your ads delivered to your target audience.
When you select manual bidding in Campaign Manager, LinkedIn shows you a suggested bid range based on what other advertisers targeting similar audiences are bidding.
This range is your starting reference point.
This is the counterintuitive part. Don’t start at the middle or top of the range.
Start below it.
So if LinkedIn suggests a range of $10-$25 per click, start at around $7.
Yes, this is well below LinkedIn’s minimum recommendation, and that’s the point.
Launch your campaign with the low bid and watch what happens.
Two possible outcomes:
If the campaign isn’t delivering, increase your bid by $1-2 (for CPC) or $5-10 (for CPM) and wait another 24 hours.
Repeat until you find the point where the campaign starts delivering consistently.
Once you find the minimum bid that gets consistent delivery, you’ve found your “floor.”
This is typically 20-40% below LinkedIn’s suggested range, which translates directly into savings on every click.
Here’s a practical example from a recent ABM campaign Emilia Korckzynska (VP of Marketing at Userpilot) ran at her organization:
Once you find that floor, ZenABM helps you judge whether it is the right floor, not just the cheapest one.
Its job title analytics can show whether the clicks are coming from relevant seniority bands and roles, while CRM sync and ABM stage tracking help confirm whether those lower-cost clicks are moving accounts toward the pipeline.
Here’s exactly how to configure manual bidding in LinkedIn Campaign Manager:
Choose your objective (I recommend Website Visits for most ABM awareness campaigns, or Lead Generation if you have a strong offer).
Set up your audience targeting for your ABM target account list.
In the campaign setup flow, scroll down to the Budget & Schedule section.
This is where bidding options live.
Click on the bidding strategy dropdown. You’ll likely see “Maximum delivery” selected by default.
Change it to “Manual bidding.”
LinkedIn may show a warning suggesting that maximum delivery is “recommended.”
Totally ignore that warning 😉
For most ABM campaigns, I recommend CPC (cost per click) as the optimization goal, because LinkedIn algorithm then optimizes for audiences that are more high intent.
See, when you bid on CPC, LinkedIn still shows your ads to your audience, but it prioritizes showing them to people more likely to click.
This natural optimization means your impressions go to higher-intent audience members.
Enter your starting bid using the floor-finding technique described above.
Start at 30% below the bottom of the suggested range.
Set a daily budget that allows for at least 5-10 clicks per day at your target CPC.
This gives you enough data to evaluate performance without burning through budget.
For budget planning, multiply your target CPC by your desired daily click volume.
LinkedIn may offer an option to “enable bid adjustments for high clicks.”
Do not check this box.
This feature sounds helpful, but it undermines the whole point of manual bidding by letting LinkedIn override your bids when it thinks a click is more valuable.
You must keep full control.
Once your campaign is running, you’ll need to adjust bids over time.
Here’s the framework I recommend.
Your bid is too low to win any auctions.
Action: Increase your bid by $2-3 for CPC or $10-15 for CPM. Wait 24 hours and re-evaluate.
You’re winning some auctions but not enough to use your full budget.
Action: You’re close to the floor. Increase bid by $1 and monitor. This is often the sweet spot, you’re paying a low CPC and getting steady delivery.
Your ads are popular, and the budget runs out by midday.
This might seem good, but it means you’re missing impressions in the afternoon and evening.
Action: You have two choices:
You’re getting clicks, but they’re not converting, or you’re reaching the wrong audience segments.
Action: This is usually a targeting or creative problem, not a bidding problem. Review your audience, ad copy, and landing page before adjusting bids. Use company-level tracking to verify you’re reaching target accounts.
This is a specific situation Maximillian Herczeg addressed:
“If you get bad results and hit the daily budget, increase the bid by a lot… What manual bidding does is it bids for a subset of your audience.”
When you bid low,
LinkedIn shows your ads to the cheapest segment of your audience, which may not be the most relevant.
By increasing the bid significantly, you access a broader subset of your audience, including higher-quality members who cost more to reach. This can actually improve results even though you’re paying more per click.
Some advanced LinkedIn manual bidding tactics you must consider:
This is a lesser-known technique that can save you significant budget on lead generation campaigns:
Instead of bidding per lead (which LinkedIn charges a premium for), bid per click.
You’ll pay less per click, and if your form and offer are strong, a healthy percentage of those clicks will convert to leads anyway. Your effective cost per lead can end up significantly lower.
And if you’re measuring this properly in ZenABM, you can go beyond CPL. CRM sync and ABM stage tracking help you see whether those click-bought leads actually came from target accounts and whether they progressed into real opportunities.
Don’t use the same bid for all your campaigns.
Different audience segments have different auction dynamics. For example:
Create separate campaigns for different segments and optimize bids independently for each.
LinkedIn doesn’t offer native day-parting, but you can approximate it.
If you know your audience is most active during business hours (common for B2B), set a slightly higher budget and bid during those times, then lower it outside peak hours by pausing and resuming campaigns.
Gabriel Ehrlich, Founder of Remotion, offers an important perspective on budget and bidding:
“I believe that you should be spending in direct relationship to your TAM.” – Gabriel Ehrlich, Founder of Remotion
“If you just doubled [budget], and your CPM went up because of that, then that’s a problem.” – Gabriel Ehrlich
Your bid and budget should scale proportionally to your target addressable market.
If you increase your budget without increasing your audience, you’ll see diminishing returns as your CPM rises.
ZenABM helps keep that grounded. Its ABM budget calculator gives you a quick way to model how budget, audience size, and frequency interact before you scale spend.
Some common LinkedIn manual bidding mistakes you must avoid:
That last point is exactly where ZenABM helps.
Company-level reporting shows which named accounts engaged, company exclusions help suppress wasted spend on bad-fit or saturated accounts, and automated BDR assignment plus custom webhooks help route genuinely engaged accounts into follow-up workflows faster.
Manual bidding is still the strongest default choice for most LinkedIn ABM campaigns because it gives you direct cost control, works well on smaller target lists, and lets you find a cheaper delivery floor than LinkedIn’s recommendations suggest.
But the real goal is not just cheaper clicks. It is cheaper clicks from the right accounts, the right personas, and the right stage of buyer intent.
That is where ZenABM adds a lot of practical value. Between company-level LinkedIn ad engagement, job title analytics, CRM sync, ABM stage tracking, account scoring, company exclusions, Zena for natural-language LinkedIn ABM analysis, and much more, you can tell whether your manual bidding strategy is actually improving pipeline quality, not just CPC.
Try ZenABM for free (37-day free trial) or book a demo now to know more!
Some questions about LinkedIn manual bidding strategy and their answers:
Manual bidding is a LinkedIn bidding strategy where you set the exact maximum amount you’re willing to pay per click (CPC) or per 1,000 impressions (CPM). LinkedIn’s second-price auction means you’ll typically pay less than your maximum bid, but you’ll never pay more. It gives you full control over your ad costs.
Start at 30% below the bottom of LinkedIn’s suggested bid range. For example, if LinkedIn suggests $10-$25, start at around $7. If the campaign doesn’t deliver within 24-48 hours, increase by $1-2 increments until you find consistent delivery. This floor-finding approach typically saves 20-40% compared to bidding at the suggested range.
For ABM campaigns, CPC bidding is generally recommended. When you bid on CPC, LinkedIn optimizes delivery toward audience members more likely to click, which tends to correlate with higher intent. CPM bidding makes sense primarily for brand awareness campaigns where your goal is maximum impressions rather than clicks.
Wait at least 24-48 hours between bid adjustments. Making changes more frequently creates noisy data and prevents you from seeing the true impact of each bid level. Once you find a stable floor bid, you can leave it for weeks at a time, only adjusting if delivery patterns change significantly.
LinkedIn defaults to maximum delivery because it results in higher spend velocity, which benefits LinkedIn’s revenue. Manual bidding gives advertisers more cost control, which means LinkedIn earns less per auction. According to former LinkedIn employee Maximillian Herczeg, LinkedIn even considered removing manual bidding entirely but kept it because advertisers demanded it.
Yes, and it’s actually the best bidding strategy for small audiences. Unlike cost cap or maximum delivery, manual bidding doesn’t need a large dataset to optimize. You set the bid, and LinkedIn either wins the auction at that price or doesn’t. This predictability is especially valuable for ABM campaigns targeting curated lists of 200-5,000 accounts.
