LinkedIn can be seen as a bit of a strange channel to advertise on, given the professional nature of the platform. However, more and more businesses are choosing to spend their media budgets on LinkedIn Ads to benefit from the wide range and in depth targeting options that are available to use.
There are more than 600 million LinkedIn users worldwide, who fill in personal details such as job role, industry, seniority and company name. This is a B2B advertiser’s dream as it allows us to target the most relevant users, whilst they are in a professional business setting.
In this blog, we’ll give you our top tips to consider when building campaigns on LinkedIn Ads.
1) Make the most of the seniority/job title targeting
The seniority and job title targeting option allows us to refine our targeting to ensure we are reaching the right people within the industries or companies that we select. For example, we may be promoting marketing services which only the founder or CEO will make a decision about. Conversely, we might be promoting a training course, aimed specifically at entry level job roles. Utilising these targeting options means that the correct users will see our ads, which in turn will result in better performance with budget being spent on the correct people.
2) Structure campaign groups effectively
The way that any paid media campaigns are structured is very important and has a big impact on the way the account performs. LinkedIn Ads is no exception. We should always group our campaigns in a logical structure. For instance, if we are targeting different countries and languages in the same account, these should be split at a campaign group level so it’s easy to distinguish between them. We may also choose to segment campaign groups by what it is we are promoting. For example, a company selling business telecoms may have separate campaigns for ‘Business Broadband’ and ‘Business Mobile’ so that it is easy to distinguish between then and allocate budget.
On LinkedIn Ads, we have to create new campaigns for different ad formats, therefore each campaign group is likely to have multiple campaigns within it. To prevent the account from getting messy and unmanageable, it is important to have a solid campaign group structure with clear and logical naming conventions. Trust us, it will make your life much easier!
3) Upload the LinkedIn Insight Tag
The LinkedIn Insight Tag works in a similar way to the Facebook Pixel in that it allows us to gain insights into our users and create conversion goals and remarketing audiences. It is very important that we add this to the website before advertising so that we can benefit from these features.
By adding the tag and creating conversion goals, we will be able to see the goals driven by our LinkedIn Ads activity. For example, a goal can be set up for users that fill in a form, which will allow us to track how many form fills were completed as a result of our activity. This provides better insight into which campaigns are performing well and would benefit from more budget.
The Insight Tag also provides us with in depth demographic analysis of the users who visit our page. We will be able to see the locations, industries and job roles of the users who visit our page. This gives us a good idea of who is engaging with our content and therefore will influence who we target through our LinkedIn Ads campaigns.
Another benefit of adding the tag is that we can retarget users who have already visited and engaged with our website. The tag will identify that the user has previously visited your website and will be served a remarketing ad (if you have this campaign set up). If a user hasn’t completed the desired action on your website (signed up, downloaded a guide) remarketing is a great way of getting them back to your website to complete the action.
4) Be sure to choose the most relevant campaign objective to your goals
When setting up a campaign we are prompted to choose the campaign objective. These can be categorised into Awareness, Consideration and Conversion objectives. It is important that we choose the one that is most similar to the goal that we are trying to achieve from the activity. This allows the LinkedIn Ads algorithm to deliver and optimise our campaigns to the right people based on the likelihood that they will complete the campaign objective.
If we select awareness as the objective, the LinkedIn algorithm will help us to reach more people within our target audience, spreading awareness of our brand. The consideration objective is more likely to show our ads to users that are more likely to click on our ad, engage with the post/page or watch our videos (if using video ads). Finally, the conversion objective optimises towards a user completing a conversion. This can be in the form of a lead generation, job application (if advertising jobs) or a website conversion such as a guide download. For this to work effectively, we must have a conversion set up by adding the Insight Tag (previous point).
5) Test different ad formats and messages
The most common ad format on LinkedIn ads is the image ad. These ads have an image, headline, intro text usually stating what the ad is promoting and link directly to the chosen landing page on the website. Whilst we definitely recommend using these ads and testing different variations of them, we also recommend testing different ad formats to see what yields the best results. This is, of course, dependent on your campaign objective, decided in the previous point.
Text ads appear in the right hand column of LinkedIn only and are not available to use across the LinkedIn audience network. As the name suggests, they only use text elements and do not show an image. We have seen these ads benefit from cheaper costs, so they should be tested as part of your strategy. If they don’t work well, then they should be paused, but only after testing.
Message ads are the adverts you see in your LinkedIn mail inbox. These ads carry a more personal touch, as they can be sent from your LinkedIn profile or that of a LinkedIn contact. They can also be tailored to your audience, which is one of our recommendations. In order, to get the best results from message ads, you should add dynamic elements to make the ad more relevant to the user. For example, you can tailor the message to say ‘Hello {name]’ and drop in the industry or company that they work for (e.g. ‘we have a great guide specifically for employees in the {industry}’. This is a good way to optimise the ad to improve CTR and engagement rates.
If your campaign objective is lead generation, then you must use Lead Generation Ads. These ads open a form in the LinkedIn platform, so the user doesn’t need to visit your website, which eliminates one step in the journey. Our ad will state what we are offering, but we will also have space to add this in the headline and description section of the lead. From there, we choose which questions to ask that need to be filled in. A good feature of this ad format is that it prepopulates some fields based on what LinkedIn knows (name, company etc). It’s important that we keep the form brief and only ask the key bits of information. A long form is likely to become boring and result in the user bouncing before completion. If getting sign ups is your goal, then these ads should definitely be used.
Other ad formats to test include Carousel Ads; which display more than one image and can link to different landing pages; and Video Ads which, as the name suggests, plays a video with accompanying text. These ads offer an alternative to the standard image ad and should be tested to compare how they perform.
We hope that these tips help you to get the most out of your LinkedIn Ads, but if you need some help in setting up or managing them, don’t hesitate to contact the team at Koozai.
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