LinkedIn Ads: Complete Guide for 2024

If you want to get started with LinkedIn Ads or if you already started and need some LinkedIn Advertising strategies, we have you covered below. Our LinkedIn ads tutorial is detailed and we cover all the basics you need to get started. You will learn how to do everything including LinkedIn ad formats, setting up LinkedIn ad campaigns, and setting up LinkedIn Ads conversion tracking.

LinkedIn advertising presents a tremendous opportunity to reach over 850 million professionals worldwide. This comprehensive guide will teach you how to create effective LinkedIn ad campaigns to grow your business.

What is LinkedIn Ads?

Linked Ads is the platform where advertisers can manage LinkedIn Advertising Campaigns through LinkedIn Campaign Manager. LinkedIn allows businesses and advertisers to create and display targeted advertisements to LinkedIn users. If you use LinkedIn as a professional, you will likely see ads in your feed as well as several other ad formats. Advertisers can utilize LinkedIn Ads to drive sales, drive traffic to their website, promote documents, promote events, promote job listings, and for lead generation.

LinkedIn Ads Video Tutorial

You can watch our LinkedIn Advertising tutorial below. It is completely up to date and it will teach you the step-by-step process for LinkedIn Ads campaign management.

What Is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is one of the largest social media channels in the world. It is one of the top resources and networks for professionals. Whether you want to meet other professionals in your industry, find jobs, or learn about your industry, LinkedIn has plenty of content and opportunities.

What makes LinkedIn advertising unique is the general audience. On the platform itself, LinkedIn reported that the following use it:

Over 850 Business Professionals
10 million C-level executives
63 million decision-makers
180 million senior-level influencers

As a result, LinkedIn is a much more business-orientated social media. Therefore, for those with this type of target audience, it’s an excellent platform to start using.

How Does LinkedIn Advertising Work?

LinkedIn Ads work by allowing advertisers to create campaigns, choose objectives, choose ad formats, and target specific audiences. Advertisers can target based on job title, company size, industry, location, languages, interests, and more. The ads are displayed on the LinkedIn feed, messaging inbox, or other sections of LinkedIn. As a result, you can choose to target different audiences and you are likely to pay more or less based on competition.

For instance, if you’re targeting C-level executives in finance living in New York, you’ll pay more because it’s a competitive audience. If advertisers are willing to pay more for an audience, that generally means they are seeing value from that audience. On LinkedIn, advertisers will pay more to ensure they can reach their target audience.

Lastly, LinkedIn Ads allow you to set up conversion tracking for your Key Performance Indicators. Therefore, you can create relevant ads utilizing the different ad formats available. You can show ads to your target market and drive traffic to your landing pages to drive sales and revenue.

How to Create LinkedIn Ads Campaigns

If you don’t have a LinkedIn Business Page already then you want to make one first and foremost. Your company page is where you provide information about your business, publish content, and engage with your followers. Next, you want to install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website so you can track conversions through LinkedIn. Lastly, you just need to sign in to LinkedIn campaign manager and set up billing.

Following the 13 steps below will set you up for LinkedIn ad success. Continually test different campaign types, ad formats, and targeting. Then, continually optimize over time to get the best results and reach your goals.

Here is a step-by-step guide to creating a successful LinkedIn ad campaign:

1. Create a LinkedIn Company Page

First, you need to create a LinkedIn company page where you will run ads from. Company pages are completely free, so you will need one if you want to create LinkedIn Ads campaigns.

2. Create a LinkedIn Campaign Manager Account

Next, you will need to create a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account. All of your LinkedIn Advertising campaigns will be managed through LinkedIn Campaign Manager, which is your LinkedIn Ads account.

3. Set Up Conversion Tracking

If you plan to use the website conversions objective, which I would recommend testing, you need to set up LinkedIn Ads conversion tracking. Start by installing the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website or by using Google Tag Manager. Then, configure Page Load or Event-Specific conversion tracking to monitor your campaign performance.

4. Create or Choose Your Campaign Group

LinkedIn Ads allows you to create Campaign Groups where you can launch multiple campaigns. You can actually set a campaign group budget and schedule to ensure you don’t overspend.

5. Set Your Campaign Objective

First, decide what you want to accomplish with your ad campaign. Common objectives include website visits, lead generation, and content engagement.

6. Set Your LinkedIn Audience Targeting

Use LinkedIn’s detailed targeting options to narrow your focus to your ideal customers based on demographics, interests, and company details. You should first focus on location and language targeting. From there, you can build different audiences using retargeting, lookalike audiences, member interests, member groups, member traits, job titles, companies, industries, years of experience, and more.

7. Choose Your LinkedIn Ad Format

Next, choose the type of ad format you will use for your campaign. Certain LinkedIn Ads objectives will only allow specific ad formats. You can only choose 1 ad format for each campaign you create.

8. Choose Your LinkedIn Ad Placements

Determine where your ads will be displayed, such as the LinkedIn feed and/or the LinkedIn audience network.

9. Set Your Budget, Schedule, and Bidding Strategy

Define your campaign budget and when you want your campaign to run. For limited promotions, you can choose to schedule a campaign and schedule when a campaign should end. As far as LinkedIn Ads bidding, you can opt to use Maximum delivery, which will focus on your objective. Otherwise, you can set manual bids for your campaign.

10. Set The Focus Conversions For Your Campaign

If you have one conversion in your account, then that is the conversion you will optimize your campaigns for. Otherwise, choose a conversion from the list for your campaign.

11. Create Your LinkedIn Advertisements

Next, you will create your ads based on the ad format you chose in the previous step. You can create brand-new ads or browse existing content to find images or videos you have used in the past. Put together compelling creative assets for your campaign, including images, videos, headlines, and ad text tailored to your audience. In addition, create a minimum of 5 advertisements per campaign. You can also implement your lead forms at this step.

12. Review and Launch Your Campaign

Double-check all of your campaign settings including your conversion tracking, audience targeting, ads, objective, budget, schedule, and bidding strategy. Once you confirm your settings are correct, launch your campaign. You should see your ads running within several hours at the most unless something was disapproved.

13. Monitor LinkedIn Ads Campaigns and Optimize Performance

Check campaign analytics regularly to monitor the performance of your ads. Try A/B testing ads, adjusting bids, and refining your targeting to improve results.

LinkedIn Ads Conversion Tracking

To maximize the impact of your LinkedIn ads, you need to properly track and measure conversions. LinkedIn’s conversion tracking capability allows you to do this.

Conversion tracking records when a viewer of your LinkedIn ad clicks through and takes a valuable action on your website, such as:

Completing a lead gen form
Making a purchase
Downloading content
Registering for a webinar

To implement conversion tracking, add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website. You can then connect your ad accounts and define conversion events.

Conversion tracking is essential for understanding your LinkedIn ad ROI and optimizing campaigns for better results.

The LinkedIn Insight Tag

The LinkedIn Insight Tag is a lightweight JavaScript code that you add to your website to enable conversion tracking.

It allows LinkedIn to record user actions on your site and tie them back to ad clicks. Some benefits include:

Track conversions from your LinkedIn ads
Retarget site visitors through LinkedIn ads
Create matched audiences to expand your reach

Place the Insight Tag across all pages of your website. Inserting it on your contact, thank you, order confirmation, pricing, and checkout pages is especially important.

Configuring the Insight Tag is the first step to using conversion tracking.

LinkedIn Ads Conversion Tracking Video

We have a LinkedIn Ads conversion tracking tutorial below so you can monitor and analyze conversions on your website, which you can tie back to specific LinkedIn Ads campaigns.

LinkedIn Ad Formats

LinkedIn offers a variety of ad formats, giving you the flexibility to choose options that support your campaign goals and audience preferences.

Text Ads

Text ads contain a short headline, text, and image that appear at the top and right side of LinkedIn pages. They resemble Google text ads.

Dynamic Ads

Dynamic ads appear in the right side column and are customized for each viewer based on their LinkedIn profile data. Personalization makes them highly relevant.

LinkedIn Ad Objectives

LinkedIn uses an objective-based advertising model. When creating a campaign, you first select an objective for your campaign. You should align the objective you choose for your campaign with your advertising goal. I generally prefer Lead Generation campaigns or Website Conversion campaigns so I can capture my potential customers’ information.

When you choose an objective for your campaign, your bids will be geared toward completing that goal. For example, you can run the video ad format with website conversion campaigns. Your campaign will be focused on driving conversions instead of video views because that’s your objective.

LinkedIn supports objectives including:

Brand awareness

Get your brand and content seen by more people. Raise awareness of your brand, your products, and your services.

Website visits

Send visitors directly to your website. You can choose a landing page where you want potential customers to go so you can teach them about your business.

Engagement

Drive likes, shares, comments, and clicks on your posts. If you want to increase engagement on some of your top content, this can be a good objective for you.

Video views

Increase views for your videos. If you have a commercial for your company or a specific product, you can target people with the goal of showing your video.

Lead generation

Gather high-quality leads with LinkedIn forms. You can use LinkedIn Lead Generation ads with different ad formats to encourage people to submit their information to you.

Website Conversions

Set up conversion tracking and drive traffic to your website with the goal of driving conversions. You should use the Website Conversions objective with LinkedIn Ads campaigns if you want to drive leads or sales from your website. This is my preferred objective for new campaigns.

Job applicants

Promote open job listings at your company. You can drive additional applicants to a job opening.

LinkedIn Campaign Types

There are two campaign types available in LinkedIn Campaign Manager:

Campaigns

Campaigns allow you to set specific audiences, placements, budgets, creatives, and schedules. Use campaigns for precise targeting and robust reporting.

Boosted Content

Boosted posts quickly turn existing posts into ads for instant promotion. You don’t need creatives. Just choose your audience, budget, and duration to amplify engagement.

8 Benefits of LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn advertising offers some unique features that sets it apart from the competition. Depending on your business and marketing objectives, it might be the perfect channel to help your company acquire new customers. It is great for B2B companies and B2B SaaS companies too.

The following are the primary advantages of using LinkedIn ads:

1. Targeted Professional Audience

LinkedIn allows advertisers to target users based on professional details like job title, company, industry, skills, seniority level, and more. This level of granular targeting enables you to engage your ideal B2B customers and accounts to maximize campaign relevancy. For example, a software company can target tech decision-makers at small businesses in the accounting industry.

2. Variety of Ad Formats

LinkedIn provides a variety of compelling ad formats to match different campaign objectives and audience preferences. Options like video and carousel ads enable impactful storytelling, while sponsored messaging facilitates more personalized outreach. Leveraging different ad formats allows you to showcase your brand and content in diverse ways.

3. Objective-Based Optimization to Reach Your Goals

When creating a LinkedIn campaign, you define a goal like brand awareness, website visits, or lead generation. LinkedIn then optimizes your ad delivery towards that specific objective. This ensures your ads are shown to audiences more likely to convert based on your desired outcome. Objective-based optimization improves campaign performance.

4. Detailed Analytics and Reporting

LinkedIn Campaign Manager provides in-depth reporting on ad metrics like impressions, clicks, conversions, video views, engagement rate, cost-per-click, and more. These insights allow you to closely monitor campaign progress, drill into performance by audience segment or ad creative, identify optimization opportunities, and ultimately gain full control over your LinkedIn advertising.

5. Target Users on Mobile and Desktop Devices

You can target both desktop and mobile users with LinkedIn ads. This approach enables you to engage professionals seamlessly as they browse LinkedIn throughout the day across devices. Mobile optimization is crucial, as 62% of LinkedIn usage occurs on mobile.

6. Coordinate Ads to Maximize Organic LinkedIn Posts

LinkedIn makes it easy to amplify existing organic posts through Boosted Post ads. This builds synergy between your organic and paid strategies. You can boost your best-performing organic content to widen its reach.

7. Helpful Lead Generation Capabilities

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms allow you to collect lead information seamlessly without leaving the platform. Pre-filled forms leverage LinkedIn profile data to reduce friction. Lead-gen ads are highly effective for capturing inbound sales leads from your target audience.

8. Cost Efficiency

LinkedIn offers automated bid strategies that optimize your cost per click based on target conversion rates. This efficient approach means you only pay what you need to drive your desired objectives. Advanced campaign targeting also lets you focus your budget on high-value audiences.

How LinkedIn Advertising Costs Work

The best thing about LinkedIn is you have complete control over your budgeting and bids. First, you can set campaign group total budgets, campaign total budgets, and daily budgets. In addition, you can schedule when your advertisements are running. Second, you can choose between Maximum delivery bidding or Manual bidding. Manual bidding gives you more control over your costs, but limiting bids can limit your volume. Maximum delivery bidding is recommended because it focuses on your campaign objective. Third, you choose the audience that you target. The more competitive it is to target your audience, the more it will cost you.

In Summary

If you are trying to get started, our LinkedIn Advertising tutorial will help you without a doubt. We go through everything from LinkedIn Ads strategies, best practices, marketing tips, and more to grow your business using LinkedIn. If you want to reach business professionals, LinkedIn is one of the best social media networks to do it.

If you have any questions about the LinkedIn Advertising platform, please leave a comment below. We want to make sure you feel confident when you are setting up ads. There are a lot of targeting options to consider as well as types of ads.

Corey Frankosky

My name is Corey Frankosky and I am the founder and owner of Surfside PPC. I created my first website in 2008 at the age of 18 and I have been doing online Marketing for the last 15 years. I started by learning website development, SEO, and Email Marketing. Then, my first professional Marketing job was focused on Paid Advertising campaigns on channels like Google Ads, Microsoft/Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Pinterest Ads. I have been working on PPC Advertising campaigns and working directly with clients on Paid Advertising campaigns for the last 8+ years. I completed my undergraduate degree at Coastal Carolina University and completed my MBA at Coastal Carolina University.