How To Set Up LinkedIn Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide

LinkedIn is not only a social network that is most often used for business dating and recruiting but also a marketing tool. With its help, you can create advertisements and target a relevant audience. In this article, we have prepared a guide to using LinkedIn as a marketing tool. Read on to learn how to set up advertising on this social network.

The principle of promotion on LinkedIn is similar to Facebook. It can be divided into two global stages: creating advertising campaigns and the ads themselves. Below, we describe the entire process in detail, including choosing goals, audiences, ad formats, and budgets.

First steps

To place paid content on LinkedIn, open the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions platform and click “Create Ad”:

A window will then open, as in the screenshot below, where you will need to create a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account. To do this, enter the account name, currency, and, optionally, a link to the company’s LinkedIn page.

After creating an account, the Campaign Manager itself opens, where all further settings will take place. Pay attention to the vertical structure in the sections of the site. First, set up campaign groups, then the campaigns themselves, and finally, ads:

Creating a Campaign Group

Campaign groups help organize the account structure. Advertisers can allocate separate groups, for example, for different target audiences, marketing goals, or programs. Thus, campaigns and ads dedicated to the New Year’s promotion will not get lost among similar ones but for a promotional campaign for new clients. 

On LinkedIn, you can use the default campaign group or create a new one by clicking on “Create Campaign Group.” But please note that one group cannot contain more than 1,000 campaigns.

Once you have decided on the groups, you can start creating campaigns. To do this, go to the Campaigns tab and click the “Create Campaign” button:

In the new window that opens, you need to confirm the selected campaign group again and then click “Next”:

Setting up campaigns

Goals

The second stage of setting up advertising campaigns begins with choosing a goal. These correspond to the three levels of the marketing funnel: brand awareness, consideration, and conversion. There are seven marketing goals available on LinkedIn: 

• Brand awareness: advertising based on the number of impressions helps tell more people about a product, service or company;
• website visits: “increasing the number of website visits” – advertising campaigns will be displayed to people who are most likely to click on the ad, and at the same time, allow you to interact with the target audience;
• engagement: “engagement” — campaigns allow you to increase the number of actions with the company’s content: likes, comments, subscriptions to the page, etc.;
• video views: “video views” – advertising campaigns aimed at watching a video also help to better interact with the target audience;
• lead generation: when choosing this goal, clients will be taken to a lead generation form that is automatically filled in with data from their LinkedIn profiles;
• website conversions: “web conversions” – campaigns attract leads to the company’s website and motivate them to perform target actions;
• job applicants: ads are shown to people who are most likely to click on a job posting.

Choose the goal that best suits your company and move on to the next step – setting up audiences. 

Audience

It is worth approaching the settings of the target audience parameters especially carefully – this will affect the effectiveness of the campaign and will allow you not to waste your budget on “junk” leads. LinkedIn allows you to create new audiences or use default ones: 

Let’s look at how to create a new audience. 

• You need to choose where your target customers might be. For example, we have specified Ukraine, but you can also select a more specific setting, such as Ukraine or the city of Lviv.  In addition, you can add a location to the exception. For example, if your store is located in Lviv and you do not want the ad to be displayed to users from Kiev.

• Next, select the language that is specified in the LinkedIn profile settings of your target audience. The screenshot below shows a list of available languages.  Please note that the size of your audience will depend on the language you select. English can also be selected as the default language even in regions where the local language is available. This will allow you to reach all users in the desired country.

• Another step is the ability to narrow your target audience or exclude a certain type of people. For example, your goal is to only show ads to marketers with more than five years of experience and a master’s degree.

To do this, click on “Narrow” — “Audience attributes”, in the “Education” — “Degrees” section, select “Master of…”, and in “Job experience” — “Years of experience” — “starting from 5 years”. In addition, in the “Interests and Traits” — “Member interests” section, you can specify Marketing and Advertising among your interests. 

Exceptions work on the same principle. Let’s say you don’t want job candidates with less than three years of experience to see your ad. You can also set up such parameters in the exceptions section.

• By checking the box in the last item “Enable audience expansion”, you confirm that you do not mind if the ad is shown to an audience that is similar to your target audience

Tracking the effectiveness of advertising campaigns

Creating an advertising campaign following a detailed guide is not difficult. But it is also important to track its effectiveness in order to notice in time which advertising brought the desired result and which did not. And turn off the latter in order to redistribute the budget in favor of the former. 

End-to-end analytics will help you understand the benefits of an advertising campaign. It is a tool that will allow you to see how investments in each advertising channel pay off. Without it, you have to focus on intermediate metrics: calls, clicks, and conversions on the site. However, they do not necessarily lead to closing a deal, unlike sales data. In other words, you understand how much profit a particular channel brought in, broken down by campaign.

Formats

Once you have set up your ad campaign, you need to decide what the ad itself will look like. In other words, will it be a picture and text or several images in a carousel with a button or, for example, a video and a short preview of it. 

In this case, everything depends on your goals. That is why the standard set of advertising formats differs for the selected goal. Since we initially selected the “Brand Awareness” goal, the available formats look like the screenshot below.

For example, in the article we select the “Text Ad” format. Text ads consist of a title, short text and an image. Such ads can be placed at the top of the page or on the right on the following pages: 

• home;
• profile;
• searching results;
• group;
• incoming;
• people you may know;
• who viewed my profile.

Accommodation

Placement is the ability to display your ads in the LinkedIn audience network to increase your campaign reach. Please note that this option is not available for all ad types. For example, for the Brand Awareness objective and the text ad format we selected earlier, this option is not available:

If the posting works, you can also exclude or block specific categories, apps, and sites on LinkedIn if you want. It looks like this: 

Budget and schedule

The last step is setting the budget. Here, everything is individual and directly depends on the amount of money you have. But still, before investing large amounts of money in one campaign, we recommend testing and evaluating the effectiveness of each campaign and ad options. This will save you from wasting your budget in vain.

Schedule is the start date of your campaign. You can also set the end date of the display, or not do it, and then the ad will be shown for a long time, i.e. within the budget. Budget and schedule settings look like this: 

Feel free to click “Next” and save the campaign. After that, the ad settings window will open, which depends on the selected format. For example, for text ads it looks like this:

Once you’ve created your ad, all that’s left to do is review the settings and save them. Congratulations! You’ve just launched your first LinkedIn ad.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is a popular marketing tool. To run ads on this platform, follow these instructions:

1. Open the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions platform and create an account in LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

2. Decide on a campaign group — create a new one or use the default one. Campaign groups help organize your account structure. Advertisers can create separate groups, for example, for different target audiences, marketing goals, or programs.

3. Select a goal for your future campaign. They support three levels of the marketing funnel: brand awareness, consideration, and conversions. There are seven marketing goals available on LinkedIn:

• brand awareness;
• increase in the number of site visits;
• involvement;
• video views;
• lead generation;
• web conversions;
• applications for vacancies

4. Customize your target audience settings. LinkedIn allows you to create new audiences or use pre-defined ones.

5. Once you have set up your ad campaign, you need to decide what the ad itself will look like. In other words, it will be a picture and text or several images in a carousel with a button, a video and a short preview of it. You can read more about all the advertising formats in LinkedIn Help .

6. Placement is the ability to display your ads on LinkedIn’s audience network to increase your campaign’s reach. Please note that this option is not available for all ad types. 

7. Set the schedule, that is, the start date of your campaign. You can also set the end date of the display, or not do this and then the ad will be shown continuously.

8. The budget for a campaign directly depends on your marketing budget. However, before investing large amounts of money in one campaign, we recommend testing and evaluating the effectiveness of each campaign and ad options.

9. End-to-end analytics will help you understand the benefits of an advertising campaign — a tool that will allow you to see how investments in each advertising channel pay off. Without it, you have to focus on intermediate metrics: calls, clicks, conversions on the site. But they do not necessarily lead to closing a deal, unlike sales data. In other words, you understand how much profit a particular channel brought in, broken down into campaigns.

For best results, consider engaging top social media marketing services that can enhance your LinkedIn advertising strategy and overall social media presence.