LinkedIn Ads are one of the most effective channels for reaching highly targeted groups of B2B buyers. Unfortunately, their interface is anything but intuitive, and it’s easy to make small mistakes that can cost big money. Here’s a set of basic tasks, best practices, and advanced tips that can help you optimize your results and ROI from advertising on LinkedIn.
As noted here previously, LinkedIn is the Tom Brady of social media platforms for B2B marketing; there is no close #2 (though Twitter may yet hold on). The platform has more than 900 million users worldwide. Nearly 200 million are in the U.S. alone (including company accounts), and of those, 137 million log in daily.
It offers B2B marketers targeting capabilities unmatched by other platforms, including region, industry (more than 550 categories), job title, seniority, and company size (revenue or employee ranges), as well as matched lists and retargeting (more about these options below).
While Microsoft has made some improvements (such as more granular targeting) to LinkedIn since acquiring the platform in 2017, it hasn’t updated the advertising interface, which can seem counterintuitive and confusing to new users. Even those experienced in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising have to be careful to get all of the settings just right.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to best practices and advanced tips that will help you get the most from LinkedIn advertising.
NOTE: This post presumes you have already set up an advertising account and payment method on LinkedIn, and that you or your webmaster has installed the LinkedIn Insights tracking tag.
What’s in this post:
- How to Set Up Conversion Tracking
- Campaigns and Campaign Groups
- Setting Up Campaigns and Objectives
- Creating a Target Audience
- Selecting Your Ad Format
- Selecting Your Ad Placements
- Setting a Budget and Schedule
- Setting Your Bidding Strategy
- Creating Your Ads
- Tracking Your Results
- Conclusion
How to Set Up Conversion Tracking
Pablo Cruise sang (in a painfully cheesy video) “It’s hard to see the end when you’re beginning.” But that’s one of the counterintuitive tasks LinkedIn Ads forces you to do: set up conversions before you’re created ads, set campaign objectives, or target and audience.
To start a campaign where you have a clear call to action with a landing page form paired to a post-submit thank you page (e.g., an ebook download campaign), click Account Assets > Conversion Tracking, then Create Conversion > Online Conversion:
Give your conversion a name, select the appropriate type of conversion to track from the drop-down menu, then click Next step:
Choose how to track conversions, copy and paste the post-submit thank-you page URL, then click Create.
You can find a complete guide to creating conversions for LinkedIn Ads here.
Campaigns and Campaign Groups
Campaigns and Campaign Groups can be Active, Paused, Archived, or Deleted.
All of these will be visible in LinkedIn Campaign Manager unless you delete them.
Campaigns are generally paused once they are finished running but not ready to be archived or deleted yet. The ability to delete old campaigns is very helpful for keeping your overall account manageable. Just be careful, because once a campaign is deleted, it’s completely gone.
For ease of management, try to keep to 6-10 Active groups and campaigns.
Use dates (e.g., month and year) in names to help keep track.
Setting Up Campaigns and Objectives
To set up a new campaign, navigate to the campaign group you’d like to use, then click the blue Create button near the top-left of the screen and select Campaign from the drop-down menu.
On the next screen, click the blue Next button to confirm your choice.
Click the pencil icon near the top-left of the screen next to “Untitled Campaign” to give your campaign a unique name.
When naming your campaign, use descriptive names with dates, e.g., “2022-06 Automotive Market Ebook Download with LI Lead Gen.”
You have up to 200 characters (for both Campaign Group and Campaign names), but only about 70 characters are visible for display (the example above is 57 characters).
Next, you’ll select your campaign objective.
LinkedIn provides eight different options here, though we’re focusing on conversion goals in this post. If your goal is brand awareness (e.g, to showcase thought leadership), you’d actually be more likely to use Website Visits or Video Views as your objective.
Among the most commonly used marketing objectives are:
- Website visits (for news announcements and blog posts)
- Lead generation
- Website conversions
LinkedIn Lead Gen forms work well for eBook downloads. You can go crazy with these if you like. LinkedIn allows you to include up to 12 fields PLUS three custom questions PLUS five check box questions.
But the best practice is to keep it simple. The fewer the fields, the higher the response rate. LinkedIn will auto-fill name, company, title (if selected), and country. It will not auto-fill email address or phone number.
LinkedIn Lead Gen forms generally convert at a higher rate than website landing pages, for several reasons:
- The prospect never leaves LinkedIn.
- They don’t have to wait for your landing page to load.
- As noted, LinkedIn pre-fills basic information.
This video explains more about using LinkedIn Lead Gen forms:
However, that means your ad has to do all of the work of converting. Sending prospects to a landing page on your site gives you more real estate to tell your story and “sell” prospects on your CTA.
Website conversion works great when you have something more complex (e.g., a webinar registration) or a really strong landing page.
You may want to A/B test LI lead gen forms against landing pages. Here’s how.
Creating a Target Audience
This section details the process of selecting or creating the target audience for your ads; enabling or not enabling audience expansion; and optionally saving this audience.
Using a Saved Audience
If you’ve already created and saved a well-targeted audience, just click the “Saved Audiences” drop-down and select it. Otherwise, start building a new audience.
Help! My saved audience isn’t in the drop-down list!
Don’t panic; if you don’t see the name of your saved audience in the drop-down, select a region then click “Narrow audience further.” Search for the name of your target audience, then select that.
Select the locations (the country / countries, region, or city you are targeting).
Creating a Matched Audience
Your next option is to create a matched audience or build an audience based on attributes. If you’re creating a matched audience, you’ve got three options: list upload, lookalike, or retargeting.
List upload: you can either upload a contact list (minimum 10,000 names) or a company list (minimum 300 companies; 1,000 recommended). Be sure to use LinkedIn’s upload list templates.
Lookalike: If you have any matched audiences upload, you can use this feature to have LinkedIn create and audience with similar characteristics to your matched audience.
Note that LinkedIn won’t let you download or view this list, so it’s a good idea to use the “Exclude” to make sure your ads aren’t being seen by the wrong kinds of companies (e.g., based on size or industry); the wrong people (e.g., interns and junior employees); or the wrong companies (by name, such as competitors, current customers, etc.).
Retargeting: Use this to target ads to people who have visited the website or particular sections of the site, such as anyone who’s visited the Blog or Resources section of your site.
Retargeting is good for “middle of the funnel” CTAs such as downloading a new ebook or report; registering for a webinar; using an online ROI calculator or similar tool; or reading a case study.
Creating a Target Audience Based on Attributes
You can target on a number of characteristics such as company size (by employees or revenue) and industry. You can target individuals at those companies based on EITHER title OR a combination of function (e.g., sales, operations, finance) and job seniority.
Setting up parallel campaigns with one targeted at titles and the other at function+seniority is another interesting A/B test.
Finally, you can choose to enable or not LinkedIn’s “Audience Expansion.” This will show your ads to people LinkedIn classifies as similar (based on attributes like skills or title) to the audience you’ve created.
Though it is generally best to leave this turned off, you may want to use this when your objective is to maximize visibility of your ad, or if you notice once the campaign is running that your impressions seem low. It’s definitely best to turn this off when running a lead gen ad to avoid getting (and paying for) low-quality or irrelevant leads.
You can optionally save this audience. If you’ve created a new audience and want to use it for multiple campaigns, this is a great time-saver.
Selecting Your Ad Format
Single image ads are the most commonly used format, but video ads also work well for promoting blog posts, ebooks, and white papers.
A key best practice is to include 4-5 pieces of creative per ad. An individual LinkedIn member will only be shown one unique creative from an advertiser (determined at the company page level) within each 12 hour period.
However, a member can see five unique creatives from that advertiser (determined at the company page level) within the same timeframe. Using multiple ad variations will maximize delivery and optimize your CTR. While having multiple images or videos is best practice, simply changing up the introductory text or link headline can make a difference.
Make sure your CTA is clear so the LinkedIn member knows exactly what they are getting (e.g., download an ebook) in exchange for their contact details. Include a clear, quantifiable value proposition for the content whenever possible, e.g., “Find out how you can reduce inventory cost by 20-30% while increasing service levels.”
LinkedIn Video Ad Best Practices
You’ll need the actual video file to upload; you can’t use links from YouTube, Wistia, Vimeo, or other video sites.
It’s best to keep videos short—one minute or less. Since many people won’t watch more than the first 10-15 seconds, be sure to put the most important information up front. The fact you have to upload the actual video file is another good reason to keep videos short.
Also, most people are likely to watch the ad with their sound turned off, so it’s really important to have subtitles in your video.
Check out more video ad best practices from LinkedIn.
Selecting Your Ad Placements
You may or may not see an option to show ads on the “LinkedIn Audience Network.” Note that this option is not available for Lead Gen ads, or in countries other than:
- United States
- Canada
- UK
- Australia
- New Zealand
The bottom line is if you are running a Website Conversion ad in one (or more) of those countries, check this box. Otherwise, don’t.
Setting a Budget and Schedule
If you don’t have definite start and end dates in mind—you just want to let an ad run for a while and see how it does—then set a daily budget (e.g., if your budget is $3,000 for the month, then set this to $100 per day and monitor your results over the next 30 days).
If you do have a definite start and end date, it’s easiest to enter those dates along with a lifetime budget for the campaign.
It’s best not to ever pause campaigns and restart them (e.g., over weekends or holidays), as this impacts relevancy score, which will increase the cost-per-click when the ad resumes. It ends up costing more than just leaving the ad running.
Setting Your Bidding Strategy
Opinions are mixed on this, but the general consensus is that it’s usually best to leave this set to “Maximum delivery”—but really keep an eye on the cost per click.
If that starts going above your target CPC (e.g., $15 per click), switch to manual bidding. You’ll get fewer impressions but will maximize clicks within your budget.
For example, with a daily budget of $40/day to promote an ebook, you might set your manual bid per click at $9 to make sure you get at least four clicks per day. The downside is that your ad won’t be as competitive, so again, you’ll get fewer impressions.
Next, select conversion tracking. While this isn’t strictly necessary for campaigns that are just driving website traffic (e.g., to a news announcement or blog post), it’s vital to have this set up and turned on to capture any type of on-site conversion, such as an ebook or report download.
Creating Your Ads
Here’s the process for creating a single-image ad. Start by naming your ad consistent with your campaign name, then appending for ad variants. For example: 2022-06 Automotive Market Ebook Ad 1, 2022-06 Automotive Market Ebook Ad2, etc..
You’ve got up to 255 characters for the ad name, but only the first roughly 80 characters are viewable without scrolling.
Create each of your ad elements:
- Introductory text: you’ve got up to 600 characters allowed, but only the first ~145 characters are visible without clicking “see more.”
- Destination URL: For driving on-site conversions, this is your landing page. For Lead Gen ads, this should be your post-submit thank-you page. You may want to customize the URL with UTM parameters for tracking purposes.
- Image: 1200×627 is the ideal size, though anything from 1,000×500 to 2,000 pix square can work; LinkedIn is more forgiving about ad image sizes than for organic posts.
- Headline: up to 200 characters are allowed, but again only ~80 are visible.
- Description: You have up to 300 characters for this, but keep in mind this is only visible on the LinkedIn Audience Network (website conversion ads on Anglosphere websites).
- Form details (LI Lead Gen ads only): LinkedIn will pre-fill name, country, and company name. Keep your form as short as possible (ask for email address, but not phone number unless truly needed).
Review your ad(s) and launch!
Tracking Your Results
Here are five of the most critical metrics to watch:
- Amount Spent: LinkedIn should stay within your budget automatically, but keep an eye on this.
- Impressions: These can vary greatly, but if your impressions seems low, targeting may be too tight; look at ways to expand your audience.
- Cost per click: This can also vary greatly across campaigns. Generally speaking, <$10 is good, >$20 is high.
- Average CTR: LinkedIn report that their average is 0.45%. Anything above this is a win.
- Average CPL: Typically varies widely, anywhere $100-$500. Above that, closely examine all campaign elements.
Conclusion
LinkedIn Advertising provides B2B marketers with one of the most effective channels to reach targeted audiences. But its interface is not entirely intuitive, and it’s easy to make mistakes that can waste precious budget dollars. Follow the tips and best practices above to optimize your results from LinkedIn Advertising, particularly for lead generation.