How to Advertise on LinkedIn?

Reaching a specific professional audience is often a challenge for advertisers, whether for B2B offers and products or for training offers. If there is a platform that allows you to target these audiences in many sectors of activity, it is LinkedIn Ads.

The world’s leading professional network , LinkedIn brings together 900 million members, including more than 26 million in France (Source: LinkedIn January 2023). A boon for advertisers! A simple way to create and distribute LinkedIn Ads ( advertisements on LinkedIn ) is to use the LinkedIn Ads Campaign Manager, a self-service advertising platform. Discover step by step all the advertising possibilities of this platform!

1. How to advertise on LinkedIn?

The easiest way to advertise on LinkedIn is through the self-service advertising interface: the LinkedIn Campaign Manager .

linkedin campaign manager
It is also possible to contact the LinkedIn team which helps large accounts to grow or to buy advertising spaces via programmatic platforms.

2. What advertising objectives can be pursued?

This is the first step in creating a LinkedIn Ads campaign, and surely the most important. Indeed, your advertising objective will guide the LinkedIn algorithm in the distribution of your ads and from it will come the performance indicators to follow. Whether you want to generate leads, obtain candidates for a job offer or promote an event, the objective of your campaign will not be the same! Make no mistake, the choice of objective can make or break a campaign.

linkedin ads campaign goals
Possible campaign objectives are divided into three broad categories (Awareness – Consideration – Conversions):

Brand Awareness : Getting people to know your business, product or event
Website Visits : Drive traffic to your website or LinkedIn event page
Engagement : Generate interactions with your ad, event or increase the number of subscribers to your business page
Video Views : Generate views of your video
Lead Generation : Collect Leads on LinkedIn via Lead Generation Forms
Potential Candidates (LinkedIn Recruiter only): Drive potential candidates to your job postings on your site and receive contact information from candidates who have expressed interest in following them
Website Conversions : Generate conversions on your website (leads, purchases, registrations, etc.)
Candidates : Promote your job offers on LinkedIn

3. What ad formats and placements are available on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn Ads allows you to create and distribute different advertising formats to your target audience :

In short: most common advertising format, ensures good visibility in the news feed and helps achieve many objectives

Campaign Objectives: Brand Awareness, Website Visits, Engagement, Lead Generation, Website Conversions, Candidates

Location: In members’ news feed or on the LinkedIn Audience Network

Image format: JPG, PNG or GIF; 5 MB max

Aspect ratio: 1.91:1 (horizontal, desktop and mobile); 1:1 (square, desktop and mobile); 1:1.91 (vertical, mobile only)

Link: Destination URL or lead generation form

single image ad linkedin ads
Carousel image ad

In short: advertising format that allows you to highlight several aspects of a product/service, to tell a story in several parts, etc.

Campaign Objectives: Brand Awareness, Website Visits, Engagement, Lead Generation, Website Conversions

Location: In members’ news feed or on the LinkedIn Audience Network

Image format: JPG or PNG; 10 MB max per image; at least 1080 x 1080 pixels; between 2 and 10 images

Message ads have been removed as of May 22, 2023. Conversation ads, already available previously, allow you to replace these campaigns and contact Internet users directly in their inbox on LinkedIn.
Since January 2022, Message Ads and Conversation Ads are no longer available within the European Union.
In short: Engage in an automated conversation with your target audience (you can tailor the conversation and calls-to-action to users’ responses to make your ad more engaging)

 

You can create lead generation forms – or lead gen forms – in the Resources > Lead Gen Forms menu, then link them to many of the ad formats listed above.

Sponsored Content with Lead Generation Form
With the Lead Gen form, you can collect up to 12 different data on your prospects among the following:

The form is automatically pre-filled with the member’s profile data (except for gender). This therefore allows you to obtain quality prospect data.

NB: If you use this format, don’t forget to regularly retrieve prospect data from LinkedIn Campaign Manager to contact them quickly!

LinkedIn Audience Network

The LinkedIn Audience Network is a network of premium advertising partners that you can advertise to via LinkedIn Ads. If you choose to advertise to the audience network, you can exclude content categories (e.g. automotive, education, etc.) or a list of sites. I typically prefer not to enable this option and focus on placements within LinkedIn.

4. What are the targeting possibilities for LinkedIn ads?
The structure of LinkedIn Ads campaigns is very simple: a campaign corresponds to a target, an audience. Campaign groups allow you to group several campaigns, for example by theme, objective, audience type, etc.

Targeting by audience characteristics

On LinkedIn Ads, you can target marketing professionals in France with more than 3 years of experience, decision-makers (Manager, VP, Director, CXO, Owner, Partner) of companies with more than 200 employees in the consumer goods industry or business leaders with less than 10 people. This is the great asset of this advertising platform: its incomparable professional targeting.

You just need to know how to set up your campaigns and choose relevant audiences. Here are the many available targets, which you can combine for more precision.

Location (required field): place of residence or most recent location of the Internet user

Language (required): language of the user’s profile; note that English can be the default language to reach all users in a region (this is the case in France)Age : Age is also an estimate based on member profile information.

Gender : Members’ gender is inferred from their profile information.

Education

Schools : the school in which the member completed a course (school, university, institute, etc.)
Fields of study : The field of study corresponds to the specialization of a member’s degree
Diplomas : the diploma awarded by an educational institution (recognized standard diplomas).
Professional experience
Position : The position that the member has entered on their LinkedIn profile, with positions also being grouped and ranked by the LinkedIn algorithm
Function : The function is based on standardized job categories (accounting, administrative, business development, education, consulting, engineering, finance, etc.)
Hierarchical levels : seniority according to the level and influence of a member’s current role in his company
Years of experience : Years of experience are the number of years of professional experience accumulated over the course of a member’s career. Gaps are excluded and overlapping positions are counted only once.
Skills : Skills inferred based on relevant keywords found on a member’s profile and especially in the skills section.

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Interests and characteristics

Groups : Allows you to target Internet users who are part of specific LinkedIn groups
Interests : allows you to target Internet users according to their professional interests
Characteristics : characteristics defined by LinkedIn based on the user’s profile and behavior (e.g. frequent traveler, PC user, etc.)
To be able to run ads on LinkedIn, your audience must be at least 1,000 people.

NB: By combining several criteria, the audience size is quickly reduced. In addition, some criteria are not always adapted to the French market.

Lists
You want to target a list of email contacts (prospects for example) or employees of a list of companies. This is possible thanks to lists.

Similar audiences
Similar audiences allow you to target people with similar characteristics to your custom audiences. They are also called “marketing twins.” For example, if you create a similar audience for your website visitors, LinkedIn will analyze the characteristics of your website visitors (based on data from the Insight Tag on your site) and then create a new audience of other LinkedIn users with similar characteristics based on a proprietary algorithm.

The size of the lookalike audience can be up to 15 times Best headphones for sleeping larger than the original audience. The original audience is automatically excluded from the lookalike audience.

Enable Audience Expansion Option

The “Enable audience expansion” option allows LinkedIn to show your ads to members who have characteristics close to those of the audience you are targeting. So it’s a bit vague and doesn’t give you control over the audience you show your ads to. I recommend aero leads unchecking this option, especially if your audience is already large enough.

NB: This option is not available if you are targeting a similar audience.

Audience size
If your audience size is too small, you risk having problems broadcasting your ads. You also risk reaching very few Internet users and boring your audience by repeating the same message (high repetition rate).

So don’t forget to check the size of the audience you want to target using the right panel when creating a campaign. You will see an estimate of the size of your audience as well as estimated results (to be taken with a grain of salt).

linkedin ads forecast results

5. How to track conversions on your site?

Tracking conversions on your site couldn’t be easier! First, you need to place the Insight Tag on all pages of the site. You’ll find this tag in the Analyze > Insight Tag menu. It’s used for both conversion tracking and audience creation.

insight tag linkedin
To set up conversion tracking, go to the Analyze > Conversion Tracking menu. You can track online conversions (via the Insight tag) or offline (via the import of these conversions). Conversions can be set up by conversion URL (e.g. purchase confirmation page, form, etc.) or by setting a tag specific to an event, for example when clicking on a button.

NB: It is possible to set the LinkedIn Insight Tag very easily via Google Tag Manager. Since the tag is pre-configured on Google Tag Manager (Insight Tag), you just need to enter your partner ID or your conversion IDs for tracking.

Also, don’t forget to indicate your attribution model (post-click and post-view) when setting up each conversion.

To go further: How to optimize your campaigns and analyze your site’s audience using the LinkedIn Insight Tag?

6. How to manage your spending and bids on LinkedIn Campaign Manager?

Advertising on LinkedIn can be extremely expensive because:

LinkedIn Ads minimum budgets per campaign are higher than on other platforms (€10 minimum per day)
LinkedIn Ads bids are also high
But that’s not so shocking for accessing a quality B2B audience.

The cost per click (CPC), cost per thousand impressions (CPM) or cost per send (CPE) of your campaign will then depend on:

Your manual bid
Competition for the audience and location you are targeting
The quality of your ads (LinkedIn values ​​the user experience on its platform and therefore wants to show relevant ads to its members; the quality of ads is measured according to user engagement with them)
It is also possible to not indicate a maximum bid to LinkedIn to maximize the distribution of your ads within the limits of your budget ( maximum distribution ).

Manage your campaigns with manual bidding to better control your costs; otherwise, LinkedIn can quickly make you spend crazy amounts of money for a single click on your ad, especially when you are starting out and do not yet have a history on your campaigns. Start with a low bid and gradually increase it if you see that you are not able to spend your daily budget.

Finally, it may be worth testing different bidding strategies if your campaign is long-term. For example, using CPM bidding may be more profitable than CPC bidding if you have a good click-through rate.

7. What are the reporting and analysis possibilities for LinkedIn Ads campaigns?

Different performance indicators are available on LinkedIn Campaign Manager, depending on the analyses you want to perform: expenses, impressions, clicks, average CTR, average CPC, conversions, cost per conversion, etc.

Statistics are available at the campaign group, campaign or ad level. Customize your reporting columns and save them to have direct access to the indicators that interest you and save time!

Additionally, it is possible to segment your data by conversion name, device type, network, location, and carousel cards.

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