LinkedIn Ads are a great way to target your ideal audience and get more traffic to your website. But there are a few things to keep in mind before you start.
First, you’ll need to choose your ad objectives. These will help you decide which ad format to use for each campaign.
Advertising on LinkedIn
LinkedIn offers a variety of ad formats and bidding options to help you reach your target audience. These include sponsored content, text ads and boosted posts. The platform also has a network of third-party sites that you can use to expand your ad reach.
To advertise on LinkedIn, you need to set up a campaign through the LinkedIn Campaign Manager. This self-service platform allows you to create, run and optimize your campaigns quickly and easily.
Once you’ve set up your campaign, you can adjust your budget, bids, and campaign schedules to meet your business objectives. You can also test different ad formats to see which work best for your company.
The type of ad you choose has a big impact on your LinkedIn advertising costs. For example, a single image ad may be more expensive than a video ad.
LinkedIn advertising is an excellent way to grow your brand’s visibility, improve engagement, and generate leads. It also helps you build brand loyalty and strengthen your relationship with current customers.
You can target your audience on a global scale by selecting attributes, including location, industry, company size, education, job function and skills. You can also exclude audiences with certain attributes that aren’t relevant to your business.
Ad relevance score: A high ad relevance score can lower your LinkedIn ad costs. This is because the platform wants to serve you highly relevant, engaging ads.
The amount you spend on LinkedIn advertising depends on a number of factors, including your objective, your target audience, and the bidding strategy you use. The platform will determine the final cost of your ad by using a combination of your audience size and the price you bid on that audience.
Ad Formats
LinkedIn offers a range of ad formats to promote your business. Each serves different objectives, and knowing what you want to achieve with your ads will help you select the right format.
Ad formats on LinkedIn include sponsored content, message ads, dynamic ads, text ads, and a mix of all four. The ad type you choose depends on the purpose of your campaign and how much you have to spend.
Sponsored content is a popular ad format that allows marketers to promote a piece of content on their LinkedIn company page to external users. This ad can come in the form of a single image, video, or carousel, with each offering a variety of headlines and CTAs.
For example, a carousel ad can showcase between 2 and 10 cards with each card containing a headline and CTA button. Each card can have a maximum file size of 10MB and must be cropped to a square format.
Alternatively, you can create a conversation ad that lets you start conversations with prospects. This ad type is a great way to get more exposure for your event and prompt people to register.
Finally, a lead gen form is an ad format that makes it easy for members to convert leads by pre-filling form fields with their profile information. This feature is highly convenient and saves your target audience time by reducing the amount of work they have to do.
Before launching your ad campaign, it is important to set a budget. This will give you a range to work within and helps you keep track of the performance of each ad. You will also need to decide whether you want the campaign to run continuously or on a fixed start and end date.
Ad Budgets
Ad budgets are a critical part of any marketing plan. Without a well-defined and monitored plan, your business won’t be able to see any return on its investments.
The first step in setting your ad budget is to decide what kind of ads you want to run. There are eight different ad types to choose from on LinkedIn:
Pay-per-click (PPC) — This is based on a bidding model, where you’re expected to bid for the highest clicks or impressions. This means you’ll be competing against other advertisers targeting the same audience.
Cost-per-impression (CPM) — This is a pay-per-view model, where you’re paying for every 1,000 views of your ad. This model is more flexible than PPC and gives you more control over your budget.
Maximum cost bid — This is a more sophisticated option, allowing you to define your maximum amount you’re willing to spend per click, per 1000 impressions or per video view. LinkedIn will then show you a recommended bid, as well as the range of prices other advertisers targeting similar audiences are currently bidding for.
Your ad budget can be set as a total for the entire month or as a daily budget, which is better for slow and steady advertising. A daily budget is also a good way to be reactive and increase or decrease spending as your campaigns unfold.
Before you commit thousands of dollars to a particular campaign, be sure to test several ad variations and measure their performance. Then, do yourself a favor and pause the ones that aren’t working as well. This will allow you to make changes and improvements for future campaigns.
Ad Exclusions
Exclusions are a great way to control who is seeing your ad impressions. They can also help prevent ad impressions from showing to people who meet your targeting criteria but don’t necessarily have a relevant relationship with your business.
LinkedIn has a few different ad exclusions available for advertisers to use. They include company size, company names, industry, job title, job function, job seniority, education, gender, age, member groups, interests, and more.
To exclude a specific company, go to your campaigns view and click the checkbox next to Set Exclusions for Company Name / Industry / Size. You can expand this option to “Exclude companies by name.”
This is a good option if you are retargeting website visitors or customers with your ads. You can also use it to exclude competitors who aren’t relevant to your business.
In addition to excluding certain members, you can also exclude the employer of a LinkedIn member. This can be helpful for alumni associations, school enrollment ads, and course promotions.
The ad exclusions can also be used to exclude followers of your company page from seeing your ads. This is a useful tool to use if you have a lot of employees or friends who are following your company page on Linkedin.
Using these ad exclusions can save you time and effort in the future. You can even apply them to duplicated campaigns, saving you hours of ad creation. AdStage makes it easy to do this with its bulk editor feature.
Campaign Management
Linkedin Ads is one of the best marketing platforms available today for lead generation and brand awareness. However, it can be difficult to get started if you’re not familiar with the platform or its ad policies.
LinkedIn offers a wide variety of ad types, which you can use to target the right audiences for your business goals. For example, you can promote content through single image and video ads, as well as carousel ads.
While you may be tempted to try all of these options, the best strategy is to prioritize ad campaigns that meet your key objectives. For example, awareness campaigns will be able to drive impressions and website traffic, but they’ll have less of an impact on your overall ROI than other ad types.
When you select an ad type, you’ll also be offered several options to optimize your budget, bids, targeting and start/end dates. The Forecasted Results box will change based on these criteria, which can help you make the most of your ad budget.
In addition, LinkedIn has a built-in performance tracking feature, which allows you to measure key metrics like clicks, impressions and expenditures. You can also run A/B tests on your ad creatives, ad copy and CTAs to discover what resonates with your audience.
With the new Lead Gen Forms, you can capture even more quality leads from your ads on LinkedIn. These forms are pre-filled with member data, letting members send you their professional information with just a few clicks.
LinkedIn also provides robust reporting features, which allow you to track ad campaign performance based on different demographics and job functions. These reports include metrics like clicks, impressions, cost per click, click-through rate and conversions. You can even integrate your ad performance with your preferred marketing automation or CRM tool.
