When planning a LinkedIn ad campaign, what attributes of your target audience do you focus on the most? Is it their location? Job roles? Interests? Those are all essential criteria. But have you ever thought about what time zone they’re in? Due to a quirk unique to LinkedIn, the time zone of your target audience could dramatically affect your ad budget and, by definition, the success of your campaign.
LinkedIn resets your daily ad budget at 00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) every day, regardless of where your target audience is located. Without prior planning, this time zone difference can create a misalignment between the time your budget resets and the time your audience is active online.
In this article, we’ll go in-depth on how time zone differences affect your LinkedIn ad spend. We’ll also show you how Linklo – the new LinkedIn scheduling tool – can help you optimize your ad spend and ensure peak engagement across the globe. Let’s get started.
Understanding LinkedIn’s 00:00 UTC Budget Reset
When you create a LinkedIn Ad campaign on Campaign Manager, you have two options for setting a budget:
- Lifetime – How much you would like to spend over the entire course of the campaign
- Daily – How much you want to spend per day
When you choose to set daily budgets, you’ll find that LinkedIn’s day begins – and the budget resets – at 00:00 UTC each day. That means that no matter where your target audience is -whether they’re in New York, London, Sydney, or anywhere else – your budget starts fresh at 00:00 UTC. At that moment, LinkedIn will start spending your money to show your ads to your target audience again.
So, why is this a problem? It’s because midnight UTC is not midnight across the globe. It’s not even the same day. When the UTC clock hits midnight on 9 September, it’s
- 1am in the UK (9 September)
- 9am in Japan (9 September)
- 10am in Australia (9 September)
- 8pm on the East Coast of the US (8 September)
- 5pm on the West Coast of the US (8 September)
We all know that people do different things at different times of the day, and there are times when people are less receptive to advertising. We also know that LinkedIn has a reputation for spending your daily ad budget as quickly as it can. For advertisers targeting audiences across multiple time zones, this global reset can lead to underutilized budgets at times when your audience is at its most active, which ultimately drags down your campaign’s performance.
How Time Zone Differences Impact Your Ad Spend
Whether you’re an advertiser trying to hit a specific region or running a globally focused campaign, the 00:00 UTC budget reset is something you need to consider and plan for.
Let’s illustrate it with an example. You’re an in-house headhunter seeking candidates for a high-paying new role. The role is 100% remote, so anyone can apply, no matter where they live. You know that the best time to get a response is when someone is traveling to work and browsing LinkedIn to pass the time, or when they’re just starting work and checking what’s happening in their network.
But the budget reset means that when LinkedIn begins to pump out your ads, your target audience will be in very different frames of mind depending on where they are:
- In Sydney, LinkedIn’s budgets reset at 10am. Therefore, your ads likely won’t hit your target audience during that lucrative traveling/just starting work window. By the time they start hitting, your people will be hard at work
- In San Francisco, the budget resets at 5pm. This means your targets might not see your ads until it’s time to go home
- In Tokyo, where the budget resets at 9am, you’ve missed the early morning rush hour. If you’re lucky, you might catch the time when they’re opening LinkedIn and checking their feed
It’s clear that whether you want to target one region or the whole world, there will always be a misalignment between budget resets and local engagement patterns. And that means wasted opportunities.
How To Adjust For Time Zone Differences
The key to avoiding the pitfalls of the 00:00 reset and reaching your target audience when they’re most receptive to your message comes down to one thing. Scheduling.
Before you push the button on your LinkedIn ad campaign, spend as much time as you can analyzing your target audience’s behavioral patterns. Consider:
- When are they active on LinkedIn?
- What times of day are they most engaged on LinkedIn?
- When are they most likely to be thinking about the problem you solve?
Then, ensure your ads are shown at those times by being clever with your scheduling. Turn your ads on and off so they’re only shown at the optimal times in each location. During lower engagement periods, pause or reduce your spend to save fresh budget for when your audience is more ready for your message.
While LinkedIn doesn’t offer a native ad campaign scheduling tool, it’s possible to go into Campaign Manager to pause and restart your campaigns. The only problem is that you need alarms going off all day to remind you when to go in and what alterations to make. It takes a lot of time and it’s a massive hassle.
That’s where Linklo comes in.
How Linklo Optimizes Your Ad Scheduling
Linklo is an ad management platform for LinkedIn designed to give advertisers the granular control they need over their ad schedules. It makes it easy to schedule your ads at the exact times your audience is most active, optimizing your ad delivery.
The time zone problem we’ve talked about throughout this article? Linklo solves that.
Linklo enables you to schedule your ads by daypart and region, no matter what time of day LinkedIn resets your budget. With Linklo, our example headhunter can focus ad spend where it is most effective.
- Australia – You can hit the early morning hours of 7-9am, ensuring your budget is allocated before the reset at 10am
- Japan – You can target the early morning rush before the reset at 9am, then adjust for afternoon engagement afterward
If you’re running campaigns across multiple regions, Linklo allows you to set each region’s ad schedule separately, so you can optimize for local engagement patterns. You don’t have to try and craft a one-size-fits-all campaign that wastes budget in regions where the reset time doesn’t align with peak engagement.
By delivering precise control over your ad schedule, Linklo helps you make the most of your advertising budget. Instead of relying on LinkedIn’s default pacing (which likes to spend your money as soon after the reset as possible), you can tailor your campaigns to match your audience’s behavior patterns, ensuring better results and a higher return on investment.
Many advertisers have already started using Linklo to solve the 00:00 UTC budget reset problem. By shifting their ad spend to align with peak times and moving out of low-engagement dayparts, they’ve seen significant improvements in campaign performance.
Take back control of your LinkedIn ad spend
The LinkedIn budget reset at 00:00 UTC can create challenges for advertisers targeting audiences across time zones. However, by understanding these time zone differences and leveraging tools like Linklo to optimize your ad schedules and ensure you spend your budget in the most effective way possible.
If you want to take control of your LinkedIn ad spend and optimize your campaigns for local engagement, now’s the time to explore what Linklo can do for you. Whether you’re targeting one region or running globe-spanning campaigns, Linklo can help you maximize your ad performance.
To find out more, book your demo with Linklo today. https://linklo.io/book-a-demo/
