How to Create LinkedIn Ads [5 Best Practices]

When it comes to advertising, there’s one place marketers often overlook: LinkedIn.

With over 260 million monthly users, LinkedIn ads have the potential to reach a significant portion of the global population. Moreover, LinkedIn’s user base is active and engaged, with 40% of users logging in daily. By running ads on LinkedIn, brands have an opportunity to engage and market potential customers around the world.

Who says Google and Facebook get to have all the fun? Read on to learn more about LinkedIn ads, how to get started, and pro tips from our advertising experts at Your Marketing People.

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Different Types of LinkedIn Ads

What types of ads can you run on LinkedIn? There are four main types of LinkedIn ads:

1. Sponsored Content Ads are native ads designed to blend in with the rest of the content on the LinkedIn feed. They can feature a single image, a carousel of images, or a video.

2. Message Ads allow you to send personalized messages directly to member inboxes on LinkedIn.

3. Text Ads look the most like traditional PPC ads, and include a headline, description, and image. They can run in the right rail and throughout the LinkedIn desktop experience.

4. Dynamic Ads could more accurately be called Personalized Ads, since these ads can be personalized with a LinkedIn member’s photo, name, job title, and company. Dynamic Ads can be used to build followers, drive traffic to a landing page, or download PDF content.

As you can see, LinkedIn’s ad types are highly personalized and fairly unique to the LinkedIn platform, especially their Dynamic and Message ads.

How to Run Ads on LinkedIn in 5 Steps

Ready to reach your audience on LinkedIn? Follow these steps to build your LinkedIn ad campaign:

Create your free Campaign Manager account. This will be your homebase for managing all aspects of your LinkedIn ad campaigns. In Campaign Manager, you’ll be able to create and edit campaigns, and view reporting to see how your ads are performing overall.
Choose a goal for your ad campaign. You can choose from brand awareness, website visits, engagement, video views, lead generation, website conversions, and job applicants.
Choose your targeting criteria. Who do you want to see your ad? LinkedIn offers over 200 targeting criteria that range from basic demographic criteria to more professional-focused criteria like a user’s job skills, schools they’ve attended, and LinkedIn groups they’ve joined.
Select your LinkedIn ad format. You can choose to only use one of the ad types we mentioned above, or you can use a mix of them in your campaign.
Set a budget and schedule for your campaign. Finally, you’ll choose a start and end date for your campaign, along with a daily and total ad budget. You’ll also choose from one of three bid types: CPS, CPC, or CPM. Here’s how they work:
- With Cost per send (CPS), you’ll pay for every message that’s delivered to a LinkedIn member. This bid type is used for Message Ads campaigns.
- With a cost per click (CPC) campaign, you’ll pay when a LinkedIn user clicks on your ad. It’s best for generating traffic, leads, or event registrations.
- With cost per impression (CPM) campaigns, you pay when your ad is shown to people. This bid type is a good choice if you’re running a brand awareness campaign.

That’s it! Once your campaign is running, you can review your reporting at any time to make edits and optimize your campaigns for your goals.

LinkedIn Ads: 5 Best Practices

To help you on the path towards success, we asked our LinkedIn advertising experts at Your Marketing People to share their best insider tips. Here’s what they recommend:

If your goal is lead generation or engagement, stick with single image ads vs. carousel ads. They tend to perform better.
In our experience, webinars, training videos, or recorded video content all have a higher conversion rate than whitepapers.
Don’t target just by job or occupation. Use skill sets and interests to get better results.
Don’t start with the recommended bids. They are way too high! Start as low as you can go, and gradually increase to get better performance.
Use lead generation forms to get more leads. You can send them into your CRM system automatically with a tool like Zapier.