LinkedIn Ads from behind the scenes – when and how to use this channel?

LinkedIn is a business social media that allows for very precise targeting of ads to its users by education and career, and also benefits from a strongly business context. It is therefore an ideal media channel when you want to reach out with a B2B offer, or one of a professional nature, requiring your audience to work in or be interested in a specific industry.

As someone who works in a digital agency, including with Google and Facebook Ads, I find it hard to avoid some comparisons between these systems, some in favor, some against, and sometimes just to find a different way of doing what I already know. However, there’s no denying that LinkedIn Ads has evolved a lot in recent years, which is probably due in part to the consistently collected feedback after each campaign setup. And „what does it come with?”

LinkedIn Ads Account Structure

The breakdown and naming in a LinkedIn Ads account differs significantly from Facebook’s structure at first glance. For example, the broadest unit is not a campaign, but a group of campaigns.

Grouping LinkedIn Ads campaigns is a functionality that allows us to better organize ourselves the structure of the entire account and sort campaigns by a specific criterion. We can give them a start date, an end date, and assign a budget that will include all subordinate campaigns with their own budgets.

The grouping of campaigns is a feature that allows you to better organize your entire account.

One of the advantages of grouping is the cumulative reporting of individual groups – by dividing the account structure by goal or campaign type, we can get a bird’s eye view of which segments have had what effect. This is especially worth taking advantage of if we know that the structure of activities will require us to have multiple campaigns – because we want to use different audience segments, different ads – in the case of LinkedIn Ads sets or ad groups do not apply. Each ad campaign is targeted to a specific audience and has its own separate ad set. Besides, the assignment of campaigns to particular groups is a matter that can be modified at any time as long as the campaign is active.

What LinkedIn Ads campaign to create?

This is where our similarities with other systems begin – after selecting a campaign group, LinkedIn Ads asks for the purpose of the advertising efforts. There are 3 categories separated here – Awareness, Interest and Conversions.

Awareness includes only one objective – Brand Awareness, where the metrics of success are selectable reach or displays. Definitely the best option when it is brand awareness building that is our priority.

Interest for this already includes 3 possible subcategories:

• Site visits, when our goal is to get traffic to the site
• interactions, where our priority is to get engagement directly with ads/posts or increase the number of followers
• video views – ideal when we want to achieve our goal by presenting video footage.

When an effective performance campaign is our intention, however, the third section – Conversions – should get the most attention. This is where campaign types such as:

• generating leads through created forms without leaving LinkedIn
• conversions on the site that require the implementation of an Insight Tag in the landing page – that is, code that collects data directly for LinkedIn and configures conversions
• candidates – a campaign that allows promoting job listings, with additional available ad formats typically used for this purpose, i.e. single or multiple job ads

In addition to these, there is another target available only to Premium users with Recruiter access – but it, too, is linked primarily to job listings.

The audience segment is the one that we can use to target our users. Attributes for this are based on the information that LinkedIn users themselves provide – this is where we can define what criteria we want our potential audience to meet, what education or work experience we expect them to have, and what they are interested in in a business context. One of the easier criteria to use is levels in the hierarchy, which can narrow down every other criterion for us based on whether we are dealing with a person just starting their career, a specialist, a manager or perhaps someone placed even higher? With many of the other categories, it’s better to start with a search engine, which will suggest criteria from various categories related to the phrase we typed in and show us additional suggestions. When we have already selected our target group, LinkedIn Ads requires us to declare the advertising format. We have a choice of single-photo ad creatives, carousel ads or video ads – since regulations have been updated in the European Union, the use of in-message or conversational ad formats is no longer possible for audiences in the EU. The ad format can be used for a single-photo ad. This choice affects not only the ad template on LinkedIn that will show up later on creation, but also what existing posts on the site we already have on the list for possible promotion, so it’s worth checking the nature of the post we’re promoting before setting up the campaign. In addition to the fact that we already have to choose at this stage what kind of graphic material will be used for advertising, they are strongly similar to Facebook posts, having the sender of the message in the form of a company profile, the content proper as the text of the ad over the graphic material and the graphic material itself + any additional captions under the graphic/video. The requirements for the materials themselves are also similar. For some purposes and formats, we can still extend the ad broadcast beyond LinkedIn, to partner sites. At the very end of the setup in the LinkedIn campaign manager, all we have left are the basics – the start and end of the campaign, the total or daily budget, the rate automatically or imposed in advance with our limit, the possible measurement of conversions from the site. This allows you to control the cost of the campaign. LinkedIn Ads is quite strict about daily spending, if we have a small budget pool for this channel, it may turn out that the campaign will not be able to last a full month and only a part. The ads themselves can be created only after the setup is complete, on the next screen, after setting them up, we can still review the summary and our campaign is ready to be published.

A few words about types of administrators

LinkedInternet administrators are quite a nut to crack, there are quite a few types of them and the official Polish translation can sometimes give you a chuckle (or cause a salvo of laughter).

First of all, we have two categories of administrators – corporate site administrators and paid media administrators. If we’re not interested in influencing organic content, company page administrators can be ignored altogether – their role is:

They’re the ones who are not interested in influencing organic content.

• Superadministrator – managing the admin structure and all lower administrative access
• Content administrator – publishing updates, events and jobs
• Curator – reviewing and publishing recommended content such as promotions in the company structure
• Analyst – monitoring the effectiveness of the site

When we talk about administration in the context of advertising activity, the most important accesses to give to a person managing a LinkedIn Ads campaign are:

• Publisher of sponsored content – such an administrator is not limited to posts already existing on the site, he can create his own content on behalf of the company page
• Customer lead generation form manager – a role needed to be able to retrieve campaign-acquired completed forms at all, if such are used

Tips and tricks

To conclude, here are a few tricks that will allow advanced Facebook Ads users – and others – to better navigate the LinkedIn Ads system.

First of all – let’s not be afraid of draft versions. Admittedly, once we set up a campaign and go to ad configuration, our options get severely limited – neither the target nor the ad format can then be changed (which, by the way, the ad system will warn about before we go there). However, when we change our minds, such a working campaign can be removed at any time. In this respect, LinkedIn has become very friendly over time, and it is almost impossible to launch a campaign by accident – we only have such an option at the very end of the configuration and it is carefully marked.

When we want to save some work and duplicate another campaign for further editing, LinkedIn offers only two screens in this process. Analogous to the above – let’s not be afraid of this process. Admittedly, at the beginning we can only choose the name of the duplicate, the target account, the campaign group and on the second screen which ads from the original we want in our duplicate, but once we’re done, our duplicate draft will open, where we can still change the target or ad format and then create new ads.

It’s also worth remembering that while Facebook is emoji-liked, LinkedIn Ads will not let ads with more than 4 special stamps through. The easiest way to fall victim to this is when you want to embellish something – but it’s not worth it. If you try to promote such a post and publish a campaign, it blocks the post for editing, making the whole situation almost unsolvable. In my experience, the only way to save then is to delete the rejected ads so that the post can be corrected.

Another unexpected problem turned out to be LinkedIn forms with more of them. Accustomed to the fact that on Facebook such duplication can be done directly next to an ad, I had the unpleasant surprise that now I can only either create a new form or select one of the ones already done.

Luckily, I found a solution. The hint? Duplicating a form can be done in the Account Assets, the same place from where we download already acquired contacts. I will say more – if you select several forms at once to download contacts and for all of them together select the download option, LinkedIn will automatically generate one file for each of them, which is convenient when we have many different campaigns at once.

That’s it from me! I hope that „not such a scary wolf as they paint it” and the presentation of LinkedIn from the inside will motivate you to use it more often in your portfolio of activities!

I hope that you will be able to use it more often.