"LinkedIn is expensive. It's much better to run campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok" or "LinkedIn isn't for me. We can't afford to advertise there"- I hear it all the time, and you probably expect me to be the devil's advocate and fight hard for LinkedIn's cause, but I won't. LinkedIn is, in fact, expensive and definitely not for everyone, but you're here looking to learn how to run LinkedIn ads, so let's go there step by step.
Let's assume that you already have a LinkedIn page and an ad account connected to your credit card. If that's not the case, you can find instructions on setting up an ad account here.
Like any other PPC platform, LinkedIn offers an array of goals and objectives to be accomplished with ads.
Awareness. If you follow our blog, you are probably already aware of my thoughts on brand awareness. But apart from that, if you wish your audience to see your message frequently and generating traffic, conversions, or leads isn't your primary goal, then this objective is for you.
Disclaimer: LinkedIn claims that it will display your ads to relevant people who are likely to interact with your message the way you'd like them to.
And as far as I agree with this promise when it comes to recruitment-related campaign types, with the Lead generation or website conversions, you still have to make sure that your audience is interested in what you offer. As much as possible, LinkedIn will show your ads to users who have converted historically or are similar to those who have. Still, it's not a magic wand that'll make you money on its own.
One of the most common mistakes people make on LinkedIn is taking general advice from the platform regarding the minimum target audience size. LinkedIn suggests the group should include at least 50 000 people.
And I agree — it doesn't make sense to start with a too precise audience. Keep in mind that you most probably won't reach all these people in the "Forecasted Results" window because:
But I never recommend following the 50,000 people rule before I carefully analyze the product we'd like to sell.
Your audience size should be based on how many people there are who are your potential customers rather than based on an arbitrary number proposed by LinkedIn.
Let's assume that we run a website conversion campaign for Digiffic. We know our persona precisely: a C-level executive or Marketing Manager in a small to medium-sized company, preferably in the new technology industry (software development, startups, and so on). Just for the heck of it, let's say that, we'd like to acquire some clients from New York.
When setting up this campaign, I won't be trying to get the audience size to 50,000 people. I'd try to include only people that fit the profile:
As you can see, my target audience includes people who live in (or have recently been to) New York, whose profile language is set to English, and whose job title is Manager, Partner, CXO (CEO, CFO, CMO, CTO, etc.), Director, or Owner. If I were to end here, I'd have 1.5 million people in my target audience — too many for our budget. So we narrowed the search to people who are responsible for either business development, entrepreneurship, marketing, or sales (since some decision makers, especially in smaller organizations, are directly responsible for sales, and they're the ones who need more leads). But then we'd still have too many people, so I focused on those who meet the above criteria but only work in the IT industry. In the last step, I now exclude corporations and smaller companies. Now we have 35,000 people.
Too many? Too few? No, it's perfect. It's as precise as I wanted. Why? The average CTR for sponsored content on LinkedIn is 0.44%, with an average conversion rate of around 6% in the US.
With an average CPC of 10 dollars (remember that we're talking about decision-makers in tech companies in New York), we can easily estimate what results we should expect.
With each 1,000 USD spend on ads, we should get 100 clicks. To generate 1 click, we need to get at least 225 impressions (0.44% CTR). With an average impressions-to-reach ratio of 4-6, I'd like to maintain that these 225 impressions should equal a total reach of 37.5-56.25 people. Just to generate 1 click.
We already know our benchmark for the conversion rate, which is 6%, so every 16.66 clicks, we should expect a conversion.
37.5×16.66 is 624.75 people; 56.25×16.66 is 937.12 people.
Let's assume that we'll reach 20,000 out of 35,000 people in our target audience; we can expect to have between 21 and 32 conversions with an estimated conversion cost of 166 USD and total investment ranging from $3,486 to $5,312.
Is that more than you're willing to invest? That's fine. Let's narrow it down further to companies with a growth rate of at least 10%. If they're scaling up, they could use some support from a performance marketing agency to get more leads.
We went from 35,000 to 20,000 people. And I can't stress that enough: your audience size shouldn't be too small or too big. It should reflect the number of people who may be interested in buying your product, knowing that not all potential customers will have a purchase intent for your product when they see your ads; the more, the better, but never more than we need.
Disclaimer: The company Growth Rate metric on LinkedIn is determined by the number of LinkedIn profiles associated with a company as employees in a 1-year period. If last year 40 people on their LI profiles stated that they work in a company X, and 12 months later that number grew to 48 associated profiles, then the growth rate would be 20%.
If you're familiar with other PPC platforms, you know that Facebook or Google allows advertisers to target people based on the content they consume or their online behavior. LinkedIn takes advantage of a similar approach, but several significant differences exist.
Knowing all this, we can discuss in more detail what options are available on LinkedIn Ads.
There are 2 main categories:
Disclaimer: Don't overlook exclusion options. It allows you to ensure that people who don't fit your persona profile won't see your ads, and as a result, you won't burn the money you invested in LinkedIn Ads.
You may wonder whether it's worth enabling Audience Expansion (most likely it was enabled by default). There's no simple answer to that. If your targeting strategy takes advantage of general profiling, i.e., it doesn't require a particular background or specific job role, then it's worth a try.
Audience Expansion is a way to reach people beyond your target audience, but it is still similar to it. If there are chances that other people whom you selected may also be interested in buying your product, then it's not a bad idea to test this feature.
While we are writing this guide, LinkedIn offers 7 different formats you can choose for your ads. Most of them are pretty obvious, such as the "single image ad" or the "carousel image ad," where you select either one or more images. Then you add copy, description, and a headline to make your ad look like a regular LinkedIn post. However, some formats require additional explanation.
Text ads. A placement designed only for LinkedIn on desktop devices. Did you notice this small box on the right next to your feed? This is a text ad. Relatively non-aggressive format for people who don't expect high CTRs. You can expect a slightly lower CPC for text ads compared to CPC from feed ads.
Spotlight ads. Personalization is everything. LinkedIn feels the same way about it. This is why they introduced an ad format that allows you to use the user's name and profile picture to provide a personalized experience and drive engagement from the ad itself. It's an interesting way of attracting potential employees to apply for a job or drive traffic to your website. Keep in mind that it utilizes the exact same placement as text ads, so the right side of the screen on desktops, next to your feed.
Message ads. It's pretty self-explanatory — you draft a message, and it appears in your audience inboxes. You can include a call-to-action button that drives the traffic to your website or landing page, but what's noteworthy about this format is that you pay for each delivered message (Cost per send, CPS). It's crucial because message ads don't appear in your inbox like regular messages — they appear there as sponsored messages and are often used in recruitment campaigns or ground for personalized sales pitches. Users can't reply to message ads.
Conversation ads. A much more complex solution compared to message ads. Your conversation ads may include more call-to-action messages (i.e., links), and they allow recipients to respond to your messages so that you can engage in conversation with potential customers.
Now, we have already decided what our campaign objective should be, and we've taken care of the target audience and ad format. It's finally time to work on setting budgets and bidding strategies. It's pretty straightforward, so it doesn't require additional explanation. Still, the only tip I can share is that, in the beginning, I'd recommend going with lower brackets recommended by LinkedIn bidding amount.
Why? It's because these PPC companies are in the business of making money, and their goal is to be effective, to make you keep spending money with them, but they also care deeply about how much you're spending with them now. Often bidding lower than recommended still allows you to achieve good results. If it's not the case in your situation, you can always increase the max cost-per-click, cost-per-conversion, or cost-per-send. But it's worth the shot.
The next step is measuring conversions. If you'd like to analyze how many form submits or thank you page visits were generated from your ad traffic, you need to configure Insight Tag (available in your ad account) and follow the instructions step by step.
Then you'll be able to set conversion tracking and learn how many valuable actions were a result of your campaign.
Now, all that's left is to create your ads on the next screen, review the configuration one last time and see how your traffic performs.
Is that it? Not a chance. It's already been almost 3,000 words, but now the real fun begins.
After your campaign is live, it's time for optimization. Analyze metrics, determining how well the audience is receiving your ads. Then measure the conversion rate, conversions volume, and overall cost of your campaigns to either modify existing ad sets or ads, replace them with alternatives or turn off those that didn't deliver the expected results.
The default campaign overview provides insight into the most important metrics, but remember that you can always modify columns in the dashboard.
There could be many reasons behind lower than expected performance of your LinkedIn campaigns. Please remember that LinkedIn requires a higher initial investment than other platforms. Most sources suggest starting with at least 2,000 USD, while others state that 5,000 USD is a good starting point.
Most advertisers aren't willing to pay so much to experiment with a new platform. Unfortunately, lead generation on LinkedIn will rarely be effective with an investment of several hundred dollars. Sure, it all depends on who your customer is and what's industry or country you're running your campaign in, but you should never expect the traffic costs you experience on Facebook or Twitter.
The good practice to follow when designing a campaign on Twitter is to utilize the basic sales funnel, where the first campaign is broader and lets you identify people with some purchase intent. The other one (remarketing) is focused on grabbing the warmer audience's attention and pushing toward conversion.
The best approach is to measure the performance of various targeting approaches and regular A/B testing of copy and visual assets to determine what's most appealing to the audience. Based on the data, optimize your campaign.
Remember that all your actions should be data-driven. People may behave differently from what you expect them to, but numbers never lie.
Still, if your product or service is not expensive, think twice about advertising on a platform with one of the most expensive traffic among all major PPC platforms. In this case, the organic activity would be more profitable.