Planning spend with Media Planning
Media Planning lets you enter a budget, objective, and targeting criteria to get a LinkedIn-backed forecast for reach, impressions, and leads before committing to a campaign.
Media Planning is a forecasting tool that uses live LinkedIn forecast data to estimate what your budget will buy. Use it before launching a new campaign to set realistic expectations and align stakeholders on projected outcomes.
Creating a media plan
Open Media Planning from the sidebar and click New Plan. Give the plan a descriptive name, then choose your campaign objective from the visual objective cards grouped by Awareness, Consideration, and Conversions. Set your daily or total budget and campaign dates, then build your targeting criteria using the facet builder — the same one available in Audience Explorer. A real-time audience size indicator updates as you adjust targeting so you can see the reach impact of each change before fetching a full forecast.
- Geographic targeting is required — the LinkedIn forecast API does not return results without at least one location.
- The minimum budget for a LinkedIn forecast is 100 USD or local currency equivalent.
- Campaign date ranges for forecast purposes cannot exceed 90 days.
- You can duplicate a saved plan and adjust one variable at a time to run scenario comparisons.
- Forecast results are cached for five days so repeated queries with the same criteria return instantly.
Reading the forecast
Revenue Proven fetches three forecast types from LinkedIn: projected reach (unique members who will see your ads), projected impressions, and projected leads (for lead generation objectives only). Each is presented as a range rather than a single number, reflecting LinkedIn's own confidence intervals. Use the midpoint of the range when presenting projections to stakeholders and note that actual results will vary based on auction dynamics and creative performance.
Comparing plans side by side
Switch to the Compare tab to place two or more saved plans side by side. This is useful when evaluating budget allocation decisions — for example, comparing a brand awareness plan against a lead generation plan with the same overall spend, or testing how audience size changes when you expand from three countries to ten.