LinkedIn ads are a great way of expanding your business reach by targeting the right audience base for your product or service. There are various types of LinkedIn advertising options available, namely Boosted Posts, Sponsored Posts, and Video Posts. All these have their own unique benefits which makes LinkedIn an interesting yet beneficial source of generating leads! Not only can LinkedIn advertising help you drive targeted views to your company’s LinkedIn profile, but you can also share your brand through LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, and increase leads with Lead Gens.
Let’s dive into how to get the most out of LinkedIn ads—how to create effective campaigns that will increase your return on investment (ROI) and improve your brand.
We will review a step-by-step introduction to LinkedIn Ads, covering:
- Setting Up Your Account
- Creating an Ad
- Targeting Your Audience
- Measuring the Success of Your LinkedIn Ads
Setting Up Your LinkedIn Account
LinkedIn’s advertising platform has some guidelines that are pretty standard for social media ads, including Facebook and Google. Here are the requirements to set up your LinkedIn advertising account:
- A company page with a profile photo and at least 10 followers
- A business email address linked to the account
To create an ad, first head over to LinkedIn.com/advertising. You can also use this link to access more options on LinkedIn Ads Manager, which is where you’ll be doing most of your reporting once your campaigns are running.
LinkedIn Advertising Campaigns can be managed either through LinkedIn ads manager or LinkedIn ads editor. You’ll likely want to use LinkedIn ads manager since it provides more data and reporting options.
Creating an Ad
Now that you have your account set up, it’s time to create your first ad. To do this, go to the LinkedIn Ads home page and click “Create an Ad.”
You’ll be asked to provide some basic information about your ad, including its name, headline, and description.
You’ll also need to choose a target audience for your ad. LinkedIn gives you several options for targeting your audience, including:
- Job Titles
- Company Size
- Company Industry
- Seniority Level
- Function or Job Role
- Geography
You also have the option to target people who share your company’s page on LinkedIn. Note that all of these targeting options are preselected, but you can unselect any of them if you’d like. LinkedIn also gives advertisers the option to target people who have visited certain pages on LinkedIn.
Next, you’ll need to pick a campaign objective for your ad. Your choices are:
- Increase brand awareness
- Reach the right audience
- Drive website traffic
- Generate leads from jobs
- Promote your company page
- Increase engagement on your company page
Once you’ve selected an objective, you’ll need to choose a budget for your ad. You can choose to set a daily or total budget for your ad.
LinkedIn also allows you to target specific devices and platforms for your ad. You can choose to target people who are on desktop, mobile, or both. You can also choose to target specific operating systems (such as iOS or Android) and browsers (such as Chrome or Safari).
Measuring the Success of Your LinkedIn Ads
Once your ad is running, LinkedIn provides a number of metrics that you can use to measure its success.
- The first metric is “impressions,” which is the number of times your ad has been seen.
- The second metric is “clicks,” which is the number of people who have clicked on your ad.
- The third metric is “unique click rate,” which is the number of unique clicks your ad gets divided by the number of impressions.
- The fourth metric is “engaged views,” which are any views that resulted in a click on your LinkedIn profile or an email capture. You can adjust these metrics based on how you set up your campaign objective, as different objectives will have different definitions of success.
LinkedIn also provides a number of other metrics, such as “cost per click” (the average amount you’re paying per click) and “cost per engagement” (the average amount you’re paying for each engaged view).
For example, you might decide that if your unique click rate is lower than you want it to be, you’ll increase your budget. Or if your cost per click is too high, you might decrease your audience.
Creating Your First Ad
For the purpose of this article, we will be creating an ad to generate leads.
The LinkedIn workflow for ads creation and management goes as follows:
1. Select “Create an Ad” in the upper right corner, select ad type (we are picking Lead Generation), pick your budget plan, set your campaign name and description, specify bidding/pricing model (“Maximize clicks”, CPA target spend or CPC bid).
2. When setting Your Bidding/Pricing Model, remember that LinkedIn advertising is pay-per-click (PPC). LinkedIn recommends that you use their bidding/pricing model which allows advertisers to set a maximum daily budget and let LinkedIn optimize your campaign for the best results. There are three different bidding models available:
a. Maximize Clicks – LinkedIn will deliver as many clicks as possible within the budget limit, sometimes at the cost of impressions
b. Maximize Impressions – LinkedIn delivers as many impressions as possible within the budget limit , possibly at the cost of clicks since LinkedIn may be tempted to show your ad more than necessary just to meet your daily quota
c. Optimize Budget – LinkedIn uses an algorithm to optimize spend and delivery across devices and networks. This option tends to get the most conversions
Targeting Your Audience in LinkedIn Ads Manager gives you a variety of demographics and interests, as well as company size and job titles to choose from. LinkedIn also offers detailed targeting options for certain countries.
3. LinkedIn Ads Manager’s default is broad targeting which will show your ad to all LinkedIn members. If you want to get more specific with your targeting, you can use the Detailed Targeting feature.
LinkedIn describes Detailed Targeting as “a way to laser-focus your advertising on the people you want to reach.”
a. You can access detailed targeting by clicking on the “More Options” link in the upper right corner of the LinkedIn Ads Manager page.
b. Once you’ve clicked on “More Options”, you will see a list of targeting fields that you can select from. LinkedIn has pre-populated some of these fields for you, but you can also add your own criteria by clicking on the “Add targeting criterion” button.
c. For our lead generation ad, we’ll be targeting people who work in marketing or sales. We’ll also target people who are interested in technology, social media, or business news.
4. The Ad section of the LinkedIn campaign allows you to upload your creative assets – photos, videos, and text. Each type of ad will have different recommendations in text length. Make sure that you are noting how many characters you are using as you could hide some of your text behind a “read more”. LinkedIn recommends that your photo has a resolution of 1200×628 pixels.
5. Once you feel that you have finished your ads (aim for 4 different ads), hit the “Create Campaign” button, LinkedIn Ads Manager will then create our campaign and take us back to the ads dashboard.
6. From this page, we can see some basic information about our campaigns such as its name, objective, start and end dates, budget, and daily spending cap. We can also see how our campaign is performing by looking at the number of views, clicks, and likes as well as LinkedIn’s benchmark performance data. LinkedIn allows you to review your LinkedIn ad creative assets by clicking on the “Reports” tab and choosing “Creative Assets”. We can also edit our LinkedIn ads campaign information (such as location and language) by clicking on the 3 dots beside the name of our campaign.
Uncommon Marketing Works Can Help You Stay On Top of Optimization
The most important thing to remember when optimizing your ads is that you need to know who your customer is. You can’t be successful with LinkedIn advertising without understanding what information resonates with the people in your audience, and how they make decisions, so take time before designing an ad campaign on this platform and do some research into their values, interests, habits, etc. Once you have a solid idea of who will respond best to each type of ad content, it’s just a matter of tweaking these variables until you find that perfect recipe for success! Let Uncommon Marketing Works help you get the best results by tailoring our digital marketing strategies to what works best for your company. We offer affordable prices and personalized attention from start to finish.
FAQs:
If you detect that your CTR is underperforming, what can you do to improve it?
You could try to improve your images and text so that they attract more people.
Which tactics would you use in order to get leads via LinkedIn Marketing Solutions?
Conversion tracking and lead gen forms.
What is the purpose of a brand awareness campaign?
They are impression-based campaigns to maximize your reach of relevant target audiences at the top of the funnel.
