If you already know how advertising works on other social platforms, it won’t be difficult for you to understand how to advertise on LinkedIn Ads and make effective and profitable ads.

You can choose between two pricing options to run LinkedIn ads:

✅ CPC (Cost per click): Choose the maximum bid that you are willing to pay per click. This is the most popular option if your objective is to drive traffic to your website.

✅ CPM (Cost per one thousand impressions):This means how much you are willing to pay each time your ad is seen 1,000 times independently of the number of clicks received. If your target is to get brand recognition or awareness, this is the best option.

You will also have to decide the daily budget that you are willing to pay. For example, let’s say that you decide to invest 10 dollars daily, when this amount is reached, LinkedIn will stop publishing your ad.

With LinkedIn business manager you can control all your ads.

Advantages and disadvantages of LinkedIn Ads

As with everything in life, LinkedIn ads also have their pros and cons:

✅  LinkedIn segments the audience very strategically and directs your ads only to people that are truly interested.

✅ With LinkedIn, you can monitor the evolution and success of your ads.

✅ You can take advantage of the popularity of LinkedIn worldwide and reach thousands of professionals with your ads.

❌ El CTR (Click through rate) is very low on LinkedIn.  The average CTR on LinkedIn is under 0.05%. This means that out of every 10,000 users who see your ad, only an average of 5 will click on it. Low, right?

❌ CPC is very high.  

Types of LinkedIn ads

Depending on what your goals are, you can run different types of ads:

Text Ads

This ad format consists of a headline and a description. These texts are usually brief and use around 100 characters.

Tips: Marketing on LinkedIn

You can know more about how to do Marketing on LinkedIn here

These ads are normally displayed on the right side of your screen, and therefore, they are more often unnoticed compared to other ad formats.

Dynamic Ads

If you have ever used the tool to create ads on Google, this type of ads will be familiar to you. When you run a LinkedIn ad campaign you must segment your ads, the same way you do it on Google Ads.

Dynamic ads are more personalized, and they are used to increase the number of followers on your business pages.

Next, you can see an example of this type of ad, that are displayed on the right of your screen.

LinkedIn Display Ads

These ads are banners with videos or photos that you can buy through an auction. Videos play as soon as the whole page is loaded. You can also add a CTA (call to action) to capture the attention of your customers.

Since this type of ad is more visual, it is more effective in attracting customers.

Sponsored content

Sponsored updates that are shown in the homepage feed of LinkedIn members. It will clearly indicate that the publication is sponsored.

This is the only ad format that can be seen on mobile devices.

This type of advertising is the most popular. If it’s done properly and you avoid spamming your followers, it will be very effective as it has the same format as a standard publication.

LinkedIn Sponsored InMail

A sponsored InMail consists of a private message that can be sent directly to a user’s inbox. They are similar to standard messages but will be marked as sponsored, normally including a CTA.

How to create successful LinkedIn Ads

Now that you are up to date with all the different types of ads available on LinkedIn, it’s time to learn how to create them.

Before we get started, you must have a business page on LinkedIn beforehand, if that’s not the case.

Step 1: Start a Campaign Manager account

In order to create a LinkedIn ad, first you must set up your own campaign manager.

Campaign manager…

is the tool that allows you to create accounts and run LinkedIn ad campaigns. It also lets you manage campaigns and gather reports with information about the performance of your campaigns, amongst other actions.

Access Campaign Manager by clicking the Work Icon on the top–right corner and tap on advertise.

If you haven’t created your Campaign Manager yet, LinkedIn will prompt you to set one up.

Step 2: Choose the type of ad you want to create

Once you have set up an account for your LinkedIn ads, it’s time to select the type of ad that you want to run.

In the previous section, you will find all the different ad formats that you can create on LinkedIn, so you can decide which one best adapts to your needs.

Step 3: Create your ad

Depending on what type of promotion you want to create, you can find out how to do it here:

Sponsored content

When you choose this type of ad, you must introduce the name that you want to give to your campaign and the language used to publish.

You can choose between:

• Standard ads: Used to drive users to your site.
• Lead Ads: Users will have to fill out a form on LinkedIn.

Standard ads are most common, since the second one is normally used to increase the database.

After choosing the type of sponsored content, simply follow LinkedIn instructions.

Sponsored InMail

Select the name for your ad and the sender. This is very important because the name and photo of the sender will appear on the user’s inbox.

Then, write the message and include a URL or image.

Text Ad 

Add a headline up to 25 characters, a brief description and an image (optional).

Step 4: Select your target audience

You can choose amongst different options to target your audience. You can reach different types of professionals by segmenting your audience.

Step 5: Set your budget

As we have explained at the beginning of this post, you can choose between two pricing methods:

• CPC
• CPM

Then, you must set the amount you are willing to pay for the ads.

LinkedIn will provide you with the information of how much other users pay for similar ads and suggest a minimum bid.

Then you must choose

✅ Daily budget

✅ Date to start the ad campaign

Step 6: Measure conversions and add the LinkedIn tag to your website

Return to your campaign manager, select an account and start tracking conversions. This is crucial to value the success of your ad campaign and understand how many leads you are getting from your ads.

Go to account assets and select Insight Tag. Once you have added the tag to your website, create your first conversion: Select the name, conversion type, value for your conversion, conversion windows for your clicks and views, ads where you want to apply the conversion, conversion method and finally, enter the URL where you want to track conversions

➡ Don’t forget to install Insight Tag on every page of your site to track conversions.

Paso 7: Optimize your LinkedIn ad campaigns

Now that your ad campaign is ready, you will start receiving information that you can use to optimize your campaigns.

So this is it!

You can now become an expert at creating successful ad campaigns on LinkedIn

Tell us about your experience in the comment section!

Isabel Romero , 02 January 2022