The advertising platform Linkedin Ads has undergone significant changes since it was established in 2005. After more than 20 years of development, changes, and the addition of other social networks to the arena, it remains an essential advertising source for marketers and advertisers, especially those selling B2B. With more than a billion members, it provides a unique opportunity to reach audiences based on their job role in a company, industry, company size, company name, job seniority, and more. This positions LinkedIn Ads as a recommended advertising platform for marketing to business owners or decision-makers across various companies.
At the same time, in terms of advanced features in advertising platforms, Facebook has had a certain edge over LinkedIn Ads. Features like objective-based campaigns, Lookalike audiences, and Custom Audiences were introduced to Facebook Ads long before reaching LinkedIn ads. Recent improvements in Linkedin Ads make it a sophisticated advertising system that is on par with Facebook’s quality, with enhanced audience-building features, new ad types, and improved optimizations that have prompted many platform users to invest a bit more than they have up to now. I’m going to summarize some of these features in this article.
Things you must know before starting to advertise on LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads is considered a more professional advertising platform due to the natural tendency of advertisers to target business owners or job seekers, focusing on the B2B side rather than direct-to-consumer. Here are six important things to know about LinkedIn Ads:
1. Working Through Campaign Manager
Working directly through Campaign Manager, you can manage and optimize your LinkedIn advertising. It helps you view most of the data you need on the desired timeline matching your searches and filter settings. This gives you a detailed breakdown of the actions your sponsored ads generate. You can view various metrics from your campaigns, including social metrics like clicks, likes, and shares. Your LinkedIn Campaign Manager has several features to help you meet your advertising goals.
2. LinkedIn Ad Formats
In LinkedIn Ads, you can choose from several ad formats. Each format represents a different action, suits a different target audience, comes with different CTAs, and more. Here are recommended ad formats on LinkedIn:
- Sponsored Content – Sponsored content format allows you to publish native ads in the LinkedIn feed on desktop or mobile devices. You can create sponsored content ads directly from the Company Page or in Campaign Manager within LinkedIn Ads.
- Sponsored InMail – The Sponsored InMail ad format is designed to send personalized messages to your target audience through the LinkedIn inbox.
- Text Ads – LinkedIn Text Ads.
- Dynamic Ads – Dynamic ads are personalized ads tailored to the target audience based on data from their LinkedIn profile, such as profile picture, company name, or job title.
- Video Ads – LinkedIn Video Ads.
- Job Ads – LinkedIn Job Ads is a dynamic format that allows you to tailor ads to job seekers on the platform and encourage relevant candidates to apply to your company.
3. Budget Pacing Types (Daily Budget and Lifetime Budget)
LinkedIn Ads has 2 budget pacing options – daily and lifetime. You can also choose a bid type depending on your ad format – Cost Per Click (CPC), Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM), and Cost Per Send when using InMail ads (CPS). You can start with a minimum budget of $10.
4. Engagement Retargeting
Following recent changes to LinkedIn audiences, you can create video engagement audiences based on view percentage. Options are 25%, 50%, 75%, and 97% for up to 365 days. Now, you can run conversion campaigns targeted at warmer audiences, such as those who view the videos you post. Another example is the use of lead form engagement audiences, allowing advertisers to create audiences based on form opens and form submissions. Your audiences must have a minimum of 300 people to be used in a campaign. Another way to expand your audience using Engagement Retargeting is the ability to take audiences that engaged and expand them with Lookalikes.
5. Conversation Ads
Similar to Facebook Messenger Ads and LinkedIn InMail ads, Conversation Ads will help us interact in a more sophisticated way than showing an image or video ad and hoping for conversions. Instead, we can initiate a conversation with the user, explain the purpose of outreach, and tell a story by sending a personalized series of tailored messages. This new format is available under Lead Generation and Website Visits campaign objectives and can be integrated with conversion tracking or lead generation forms. You can design the conversation flow using a large selection of templates or build something from scratch, mapping each user response to a specific CTA.
6. Ad Analytics Improvements
On the list of recent improvements in Linkedin Ads, we must discuss the enhancements to the Campaign Manager interface and the analytics and reporting derived from campaigns and ads. You can find new metrics in the advertising system, such as reach and average frequency, allowing greater control over ads—whereas previously, the only way to get an estimate of reach and frequency was via access to a LinkedIn representative, who was often hard to reach. Additionally, you can build custom reports in the LinkedIn Ads dashboard by combining metrics that you find relevant to the campaign analysis and optimization process.
In Summary
If you haven’t run a sponsored campaign on LinkedIn yet, you’re missing out on access to a large part of the business market. If you are looking for B2B leads, LinkedIn is the platform for you, and it currently serves as a tool for recruiting, brand promotion, business networking, and more.
LinkedIn Ads has come a long way since its inception to help platform users achieve as many campaign objectives as possible. Linkedin Ads has made significant improvements in everything related to audience-building features, quantity and quality of ad types, and monitoring and reporting. I’m sure many users of LinkedIn’s advertising platform feel there are still a few things missing that they’d love to see added, but the platform continues to improve and upgrade, and I’m confident that over time it will align to reach the same level as Facebook and Google.
About the Author
Dvir Naaman, 26, an entrepreneur at heart, loves e-commerce websites and specializes in SEO.
