Stuffed, Starved or Satisfied
John Woods
December 11, 2025
Help yourself to a glass of bubbles and I’ll explain how you can apply your party planning skills to improve your LinkedIn Ads budgeting.
Is Your LinkedIn Audience Stuffed or Starved? Lessons from the Christmas Buffet
You wouldn’t cater the office Christmas party with four bags of crisps and a can of lager. Nor would you want to invite a few friends around and have enough left-over Prosecco to float a battleship.
We marketers are pretty good at party planning, right? We’d never allow anything like that to happen at one of OUR parties. We’d be sure to match the amount of food and drink to the number of attendees.
So, ahem… can we talk about our LinkedIn Ads planning? No names, no pack drill, but we see a LOT of LinkedIn Ads campaigns that are the B2B marketing equivalent of catastrophically under- or over-catered Christmas parties.
Help yourself to a glass of bubbles and I’ll explain how you can apply your party planning skills to improve your LinkedIn Ads budgeting.
On this page:
Too little spread too far – the Starved audience
You’ve a B2B marketing proposition that appeals to hundreds of thousands of people. But your budget is tight and you can’t overspend. So you end up with a targeting setup like this one:
With a budget of £10/day LinkedIn predicts these results:
The forecast CPCs seem reasonable at around £5/click. But think about those forecast impressions for a moment – you have an audience of nearly 400,000 people, and in one month you are showing a maximum of 9,300 ad impressions. Even if each impression is shown to a different person, that means less than one person in 40 will be seeing one of your ads!
That’s the equivalent of inviting hundreds of people to a party and spending a few pounds at the local corner shop on food and drink. The first few people to arrive will clean out the catering. Once your VIPs turn up later in the evening there will be nothing left for them but crumbs.
With a campaign setup like this on LinkedIn – you’ll spend all your budget easily. But most people in your target audience won’t see your ad at all. The ones who do see it will be the folks who are on LinkedIn all the time – job seekers, social media enthusiasts – and the more numerous junior stakeholders. That will use up all your budget, and the most valuable people in your audience won’t see your ad. That’s poor advertising strategy and you’re likely to get poor results.
Too much for too few – the Stuffed audience
Suppose instead you’ve a healthy budget of say £100/day to play with and you’ve been able to narrow down your target market to a chef’s-kiss-precise ICP of a few hundred people. Here’s an example of such an audience in LinkedIn:
For that audience and a £100/day budget the LinkedIn forecasting tool predicts an eye-watering CPC of £17.
With this campaign setup you’ve saturated the available ad impressions, so you’ll reach your target audience but you’ll pay way over the odds for each ad impression. Your budget will be burned up by super-high CPCs, and your campaign ROI will be terrible.
In our party analogy, with a campaign setup like this you’ve only invited a few close friends, but you’ve bought enough food and drink for an army. A lifetime of leftovers and a bit of embarrassment.
The happy medium – the Satisfied audience (and how to achieve it)
Good news – we can move on from the horrors of the Starved and Stuffed. You, me and Goldilocks are now going to hang out at the “just right” party.
Here’s an example of what “just right” might look like in the LinkedIn forecasting tool:
We’ve an audience of 11,000 people, and with our budget of up to £25/day we’re expecting to show between 7,400 and 20,000 ad impressions per month. That’s around one or two ad impressions for each member of the audience.
With a setup like that there’s a good chance that most of your target audience will see your ad at least once in a given month. Your budget and your audience size are nicely aligned.
If you want to be sure your LinkedIn Ads campaigns are the equivalent of a well-planned party, smart use of the LinkedIn forecasting tool is a great starting point. But the forecasting tool is just an estimate. Actual results vary. Once you’ve put your campaigns live, monitor them actively and be ready to adjust budgets, targeting or bidding strategies if you see “Stuffed” or “Starved” audiences.
There are some often-overlooked reports in LinkedIn Campaign Manager that are really useful for this aspect of campaign optimisation – look for “Delivery” metrics including Reach, Frequency and Audience Penetration. If your campaign is well set up to achieve a “Satisfied” audience then you should see monthly Reach not too far short of your total target audience size.
So in summary, if you want to reach your LinkedIn target audience effectively and without too much waste:
- Design your campaign setup so that your target audience size isn’t too different from your expected monthly impressions, given your available budget.
- Monitor your campaigns as they run and check your monthly Reach metric isn’t too far short of your target audience size. And be ready to adjust settings if need be.
Finding the sweet spot between reach and budget is what separates inefficient campaigns from high-performing ones. By sizing your audience sensibly, monitoring delivery metrics and adjusting early, you’ll avoid waste and maximise the impact of every pound spent. In short: plan smart, measure often and aim for “Satisfied” audiences every time. Your LinkedIn performance – and your stakeholders – will thank you.
Now, who’s topping up the Prosecco?
Get in touch
If you’d like any help with LinkedIn advertising, or any other aspect of B2B digital marketing, feel free to get in touch!