How to Run a LinkedIn Ad Campaign

Key terms:

• Click – every time someone clicks on your ad.
• Impression – every time your ad is shown on site
• CTR (click through rate) is the amount of times your ad is clicked divided by impressions of the ad, multiplied by 100 (Clicks/Impressions*100)
• Bid – how much you’re willing to spend to have your ad placed on site (minimum bid for video ads is $5)

Note – A one time activation of $5 is  required when starting an ad campaign for the first time.

How it Works

LinkedIn have made their advertising system simple to use we’ve broken it down into 5 steps below:

Step 1: Choose the type of your ad

Step 2: Create your video advertisement by uploading your video ad from your YouTube account, add a text description and title, a point to note here is there are character limitations on the title (25 characters) and description of ads (75 characters) so choose words wisely and make them as relevant as possible.

Step 3: Choose either pay per click campaign or Impression campaign. When running an ad campaign you can only choose either a Pay Per Click campaign or Impression campaign.

Pay Per Click campaign – does exactly what it says on the tin, each time your ad is clicked you pay the amount you bid (you set this at step 3).

Impressions campaign – The LinkedIn Ad system serves impressions based on two main things:

Your bid for the Ad spot and an Ad’s CTR, so technically speaking if your bid is high enough and your CTR is 0.025% (site average) your Ad will be shown and clicked (if your targeting is accurate).

Step 4: Wait for approval, as per terms of service, all LinkedIn Ads are approved before they can be used as part of a campaign.

Step 5: Once approval is given, launch your ad.

3 T’s for managing your campaign 

Targeting – everything in a LinkedIn campaign, the filter for targeting is quite refined the following are criteria for targeting, most common targeting span is 60,000- 400,000:

1. Location
2. Company
3. Job title or Job function and/or seniority
4. School
5. Skills
6. Group
7. Gender
8. Age

Testing – To test which of your targets are going to be best to focus on, split your campaigns and targeting, see examples below

Campaign#1 Job Function, Seniority, & Location

Campaign#2 Job Title & Location

Campaign#3 Groups & Location
Campaign#4 Skills & Location

Also, do some variations within the campaigns, write different copy on the test description of your ad, make a different video, to test which is most effective.

Tracking – LinkedIn gives a tremendous break down in its ad campaign reports, track your video ad’s progress daily and adjust if necessary. This will also allow you to see which of your ad variations is most effective.