Earlier this year, I audited MNTN's LinkedIn Campaign Manager with a simple brief: look at the historical campaigns with signups and demos in mind, and suggest optimizations. It was a great exercise, and a good reminder that a strong product and a smart team can still end up with an ad account that quietly works against them.
Here's what I found, what I'd fix first, and why most of it applies to any B2B brand spending real money on LinkedIn.
The account at a glance
$867K across 28 campaigns in the period I reviewed
Only about 16% of that spend went to campaigns with an explicit lead generation objective
A Default Campaign Group running since 2017: 490 ad sets and $3.4M in lifetime spend, with no governing objective
One standout: a Max Conversions video campaign at a 6.13% CTR and $0.95 CPC, the best efficiency in the account
The brief was about signups and demos. So the first question was simple: how much of the budget was actually built to produce them? The answer was not much.
1. The structure had outgrown its owner
You could read the account's history in its campaign names. Some led with funnel stage, some with audience segment, some with format, and a few had no logic at all. Core, Agency, and GBS segments showed up partway through, but the older generic campaigns were never retired, so new and legacy campaigns competed for the same people.
The biggest line item was LinkedIn's Default Campaign Group, the catch-all bucket that collects anything not assigned elsewhere. It isn't a strategy. It's where campaigns go when nobody decides where they belong.
The fix: one naming convention ([Funnel] | [Segment] | [Objective] | [Format] | [Quarter]), a clean grid of TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU campaigns for each segment, and an audit of the Default group before anything gets deleted.
2. The targeting was precise, then undone by one checkbox
The lower-funnel lead gen campaigns were set up thoughtfully: a defined company list, customer exclusions, and multiple conversion signals. But Audience Expansion was switched on, which lets LinkedIn reach "similar" people outside the list. An audience that should have been around 100K decision-makers had grown to more than 1.4 million.
The fix: turn Audience Expansion off on every target-account campaign, and layer seniority and job titles on top of the company list.
3. The algorithm was optimizing without its most important signal
The primary lead conversion, CAPI Generate Lead, was inactive. When the main signal isn't firing, LinkedIn's bidding has nothing meaningful to learn from, so it optimizes toward whatever it can see. Meanwhile a page view was counted as a conversion, which inflates results without reflecting real intent.
The fix: restore CAPI first, before touching bids or budgets. Then remove soft signals like page views from conversion goals.
4. Every ad asked for a demo
Whatever the message, nearly every ad pointed to the same demo request form, last updated in February 2023. Awareness-style creative ("Drag. Drop. Launch.") was asking cold audiences for the biggest commitment in the funnel. The form also used just 4 of LinkedIn's 12 pre-filled fields, skipping job title, company name, and company size. That's the information Sales needs to route and qualify a lead, and LinkedIn fills it in for free.
The fix: match the offer to the stage. Content for cold audiences, retargeting for engaged ones, and demos for high-intent account lists. Then add the free fields to the form.
5. The best performer was hiding in plain sight
The Max Conversions video campaign beat everything else in the account on efficiency, yet almost all spend was going to single-image ads. When something works this well, document exactly how it was built and give it room to scale with a controlled test.
6. LinkedIn was doing its job. The decision moment wasn't covered.
This was the finding I found most interesting, and it wasn't inside LinkedIn at all. On G2's CTV advertising category page, MNTN appeared fourth with 60 reviews, behind StackAdapt with 869. Criteo was buying a sponsored placement on that same page. MNTN's rating was excellent. Its visibility at the moment buyers compare options was not.
LinkedIn earns the right to be considered. Review sites and search are often where the decision happens. If those aren't covered, LinkedIn spend builds interest that a competitor collects.
The fix: a structured review-generation push, a look at sponsored category placements, and comparison pages for high-intent searches.
The 90 day plan
Days 1 to 30: Stabilize
Restore CAPI Generate Lead
Turn off Audience Expansion on target-account campaigns
Pause and audit the Default Campaign Group
Roll out the naming convention and set CPL and CPA baselines
Days 31 to 60: Rebuild
Relaunch bottom-funnel campaigns under the segmented structure, with Target Cost bidding
Launch retargeting for site visitors, video viewers, and form openers
Test a lower-commitment offer and an updated lead form
Scale the winning video campaign with a controlled audience split
Days 61 to 90: Optimize
Report on pipeline contribution by segment, not just cost per lead
Set a weekly bid review and biweekly creative refresh cadence
Shift budget toward proven performers
The takeaway for any B2B brand
None of this came from a bad team. It came from an account that was set up well and then never revisited as the company grew. That's the most common pattern I see. Before you spend another dollar, it's worth asking three questions:
How much of your budget is actually built to produce the outcome you care about?
Is your platform optimizing against the right signal?
Are you showing up where buyers make the final decision?
If you're not sure, that's exactly what a Growth audit is for.