The Campainless Blog
Have you ever felt like your LinkedIn Campaign Manager is managing you rather than the other way around? Need help controlling your spending, ensuring your ads show to the right people, or simply getting the desired results? You’re not alone. Many seasoned marketers need help to get high-quality leads from LinkedIn at the scale and cost they want. And to feel confident in LinkedIn campaign management.
Luckily, our newest LinkedIn campaign management guide contains tips, tricks, and insights to put you back in the driver’s seat and ensure you get the most out of the platform. We’ll start our journey with campaign objectives and audience tips and then guide you through nailing your bids, crafting compelling creative, analyzing your data like a pro, and optimizing effectively. We ask that you keep your eyes peeled and ready to absorb our LinkedIn campaign management wizardry.
We’ll cover everything from using campaign groups and selecting the best ad formats to optimizing your bidding strategy, managing ad accounts, conversion tracking, and crafting compelling ad creatives. The ad account is crucial as it sits at the top of the campaign hierarchy, allowing you to manage campaigns, select objectives, and interface effectively with API functionalities.
By the end, you’ll know how to run LinkedIn campaigns that attract your ideal target audience, generate leads, and drive ROI. We’ll cover everything from using campaign groups and selecting the best ad formats to optimizing your bidding strategy, managing ad accounts, conversion tracking, and crafting compelling ad creatives. The ad account is crucial as it sits at the top of the campaign hierarchy, allowing you to manage campaigns, select objectives, and interface effectively with API functionalities.
By the end, you’ll know how to run LinkedIn campaigns that attract your ideal target audience, generate leads, and drive ROI.
LinkedIn Ads are a premier choice among social media channels for businesses aiming to reach professionals. These dynamic ads offer a wide range of ad formats—including sponsored content, dynamic ads, and follower ads—to suit different campaign objectives. Whether promoting your LinkedIn company page or driving website visits, LinkedIn advertising lets you zero in on your ideal audience using advanced targeting criteria like job titles, industry, and company size.
LinkedIn advertising platforms allow businesses to create campaigns that engage a professional audience through tailored ad creatives. Each ad account exists at the top of the campaign hierarchy and is foundational in setting up and managing LinkedIn campaigns. You can reach the right audience efficiently by leveraging the advertising platform’s targeting capabilities, such as job titles, skills, and interests. With options like message ads and event ads, LinkedIn helps build brand awareness, boost website conversions, and generate quality leads.
Awareness campaigns build brand recognition by showcasing your company across multiple related campaigns. Use formats like carousel ads or single-image ads to engage viewers. A daily or lifetime budget for follower ads ensures you control ad spending while reaching a broad target audience.
Consideration ads take things a step further by encouraging users to consider your products or services. They are typically used to drive traffic to your website, generate leads, or promote valuable content.
By targeting specific demographics and interests, consideration ads can help you reach users more likely to engage with your brand. Metrics such as clicks, conversions, and lead generation are crucial for measuring the effectiveness of consideration ads. By tracking these metrics, you can determine how well your ads drive user action and move prospects down the funnel. The ad account is central to monitoring and managing these metrics effectively.
By understanding and leveraging these different ad objectives, you can create a more effective LinkedIn ad campaign that aligns with your business goals and maximizes your return on investment.
Embarking on your LinkedIn campaign management journey starts with a few foundational steps. First, you need to create a campaign group, which acts as a container for multiple campaigns. This structure allows you to efficiently manage the status, budget, and performance of several related campaigns. Think of it as your campaign’s command center, where you can oversee all activities in one place.
Next, defining your target audience is crucial. LinkedIn’s advanced targeting options let you specify criteria such as job titles, industries, and company sizes to ensure your ads reach the right people. Leveraging LinkedIn’s collection of APIs can further enhance your audience discovery process, making it easier to pinpoint your ideal prospects.
Finally, the last step is creating your campaign. You can set up your campaign precisely using the Campaign Management APIs, ensuring all elements align with your marketing goals. With these steps, you’re well on your way to mastering LinkedIn campaign management.
Navigating LinkedIn’s advertising tools requires understanding OAuth 2.0 and permission scopes. OAuth 2.0 is an authorization framework that allows applications to access LinkedIn resources on behalf of a user. This means you can manage your campaigns without compromising security.
Permission scopes define the level of access an application has to LinkedIn resources. For instance, the rw_ads scope is essential for marketing APIs, enabling you to create and manage ads.
Other APIs may require additional permission scopes, so it’s vital to understand which ones you need for your specific tasks. Mastering OAuth 2.0 and permission scopes ensure you have the necessary access to optimize your LinkedIn campaigns effectively.
While creating a campaign group is optional, it’s highly recommended for efficient campaign management. A campaign group allows you to manage multiple related campaigns’ status, budget, and performance from a single dashboard. This centralized approach simplifies oversight and ensures consistency across your campaigns.
You can use LinkedIn’s Campaign Management APIs to create a campaign group. This process involves defining the group’s parameters, such as its name, budget, and objectives. Organizing your campaigns into groups can streamline management and improve overall performance.
What’s the main thing B2B marketers rave about regarding LinkedIn Ads? Yes, you’re right – it’s insane targeting capabilities.
Using these and nailing your LinkedIn targeting is essential to campaign success. After all, you can spend ages crafting the right message and communicating it at the right time and in the right way, but you need to be in front of the right audience to make an impact.
We’ve been creating perfectly curated LinkedIn audiences for years and have many helpful tips to share with you.
Let’s dig in.
The first step in creating an effective audience is ensuring it’s an ideal size for your ad campaigns. You’re probably asking yourself: where is this magical sweet spot? Obviously, this depends on several factors (your campaign’s objective, budget, and target audience).
However, we recommend landing somewhere between 40,000 and 400,000. The higher end is typically more suited to awareness campaigns, while the lower end is suited to remarketing or particularly niche acquisition segments. Within this range, you can get targeted enough without restricting your reach and hampering your results.
Like your winter wardrobe, the key to a perfectly curated audience is layering. Depending on your audience, we typically look to layer filters like location (city, country, or continent), seniority, job function, and company size. Obviously, there are variations based on your specific circumstances, but it is important that you make the granularity of LinkedIn targeting work FOR you.
For example, say your target audience consists of marketing professionals in Australia.
Rather than targeting every Joe Blow with a marketing job title – set up your audience so that you capture the most impactful group of people. For example, people with a marketing job function in the key suburbs (Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne) at a company size above 11 people and with a decision-making seniority.
You could also layer in skills, interests, or groups. For example, if digital marketers are a higher-value prospect, consider adding relevant platform skills like LinkedIn Ads and Facebook ads and groups like Digital Marketers Australia.
The more fleshed-out your personas are, the easier this process will be and the more effective your audience will be.
If you have multiple personas, regions, and demographic groups you’d like to target, or your current audience after layering is too broad (300,000 and above), never be afraid to segment. In fact, we strongly recommend audience segmentation and campaign groups to manage the status, budget, and performance of multiple related campaigns.
Not only does this enable you to stay within the ideal audience size (two audiences of 250,000 rather than one of 500,000), but it also gives you the opportunity to tailor your campaign (offer, creative, sponsored content, bids) to specific groups, which can improve results.
One reason segmentation is so important is the common variance in cost per click between different segments. For example, if you are targeting India and Australia in the same default campaign group, the CPCs can vary greatly (for example, the average cost per click for India could be $2 vs. $12 for Aus).
On the surface, this may not sound like a big deal, but if you keep them in the same campaign group and bid somewhere in the middle (say $7), you’re likely to drastically overbid in India and underbid in Australia, which has a noticeable impact on results. Remember this tip for stellar LinkedIn campaign management: segment to slay!
While layered demographic audiences are highly valuable (and definitely our go-to), we suggest you experiment with lists if you have them. Whether it’s a customer list, a competitor’s customer list, or a prospect list from intelligence databases like Zoom.info OR Builtwith, uploading these high-intent lists to the platform and testing them can take your LinkedIn activity to the next level.
It’s also crucial to start using retargeting lists. By generating leads, form opens and completions, company page views, event RSVPs, video watches, and website visits as soon as they become available, you are maximizing your opportunity to move prospects down the funnel.
Plus, you can double the value of a good list by using it as a lookalike—select this list, select Create Lookalike, and find thousands of people with attributes similar to your target audience.
While we advocate for accessibility, other advertising platforms have in many other realms – for list-based, lookalike, or demographic audiences, excluding irrelevant people is a must.
At the outset of a campaign build, if you have a clear idea of the types of people who may be interested in your ads but whom you wouldn’t want to be shown to them, e.g., interns or students, you should manually exclude them.
Why spend money on a bunch of nice but low-value prospects? Perhaps even more crucial is adding additional exclusions based on sales feedback and demographic data—you can never have too many exclusions (and they can always be reversed!).
Leading on from the need for exclusion, a great LinkedIn audience is never static. If you’re not continually breaking your back to update or refine your audience based on data insights and sales feedback, your audience will never be as effective as it could be.
If your sales team tells you the quality of your leads is sub-par or that you’re getting too many Marketing Assistants as opposed to Marketing Managers, you need to update your audience based on these observations. If your sales team is telling you nothing, it’s your responsibility to check in!
Beyond nailing your audience, bossing your bids is another crucial ingredient of any A-class LinkedIn campaign. If you don’t know how to approach your bids strategically, you could be throwing away buckets of money and failing to meet performance targets.
One of the most important LinkedIn best practices regarding bidding is to avoid the maximum delivery strategy. It’s like a slimy real estate agent pretending to be your friend and claiming to get you the best deal but really helping themselves pay for a more expensive car 🐍.
Manual bidding is your trusted ally, and unless you are having serious problems spending your budget, we recommend you stick with it consistently. Also, do not, under any circumstances, check the checkbox for “enhanced.” Why would you spend all this time determining the lowest bid just to let LinkedIn increase it whenever they like?
For example, for a $ 100-a-day budget, at $20, you’ll only get 5 clicks per day, while at $10 per click, you’ll get 10. So, by opting for the lowest bid possible, you’re doubling your clicks and potential for leads without spending an extra cent.
Trust us. You can always increase the bids later if you are not spending your budget.
The golden tip of bidding is to adjust your bids based on the data you see coming through. Head to your “Performance” chart section in Campaign Manager. If you see 3 days or more of underspending your budget in a row, it’s a good sign to increase your bids [see below; the budget was $50, but we were consistently spending less, so we increased bids]
If you notice the reverse, you’re overspending or hitting your budget for three days in a row—try reducing your bids to maximize clicks.
For example, if the bid is $10 and you aren’t spending your $30 budget, it’s worth increasing your bid by a couple of dollars first (say to $12) and then giving it a day or two to see if this makes an impact before increasing further. Please add this tip to your LinkedIn campaign management notes section!
While advanced LinkedIn savants claim creatives play a far less important role in campaign success than audience and bidding decisions, prospects are unlikely to convert without compelling, strategically chosen creatives. It’s basic human psychology.
At the end of the day, we’re all human, and we like attractive things. Without eye-catching creative, why is someone going to stop scrolling? So, with that in mind – how do you make sure your creatives stand out from the crowd, catch the attention of your target audience, and generate high CTRs?
With the plethora of different ad formats and types available to LinkedIn marketers, selecting just one can be difficult. Carousel ads are a versatile ad format that can feature multiple offerings or narrate a sequential story to enhance user engagement. Video ads are also effective for capturing audience attention and enhancing brand storytelling.
You might be stuck thinking, which way do I go? Again, it comes down to a number of factors, but as a blanket rule, we suggest starting with a single image for lead generation/conversion campaigns, video/carousel for awareness/website visits, and all types for remarketing. We’ve compiled some examples of the best LinkedIn ads to provide inspiration.
If you have the budget to test multiple (more than $100 per day), we’d suggest branching out to some of the more adventurous choices—animation, GIFs, conversation ads, and text ads—and see how these perform against your default choice.
Perform an A/B test with the same budget and audience. What works best?
When creating ad copy to accompany your creative, you must keep it simple, concise, and within character counts (155 intro text and 70 headlines).
If you go over these limits, particularly in the intro text, your copy will be truncated, and if someone clicks “see more,” you will pay for the click without them going through to the page/lead gen form attached to create an ad.
PS: Don’t worry about the description. It only shows on desktops on specific devices and isn’t worth spending time on.
Arguably, the MOST essential component of your creative is the messaging you choose to highlight. This includes the messaging on the banners, the introductory text, and the headline.
Spotlight ads are a form of dynamic advertising that personalizes engagement by featuring the user’s name and picture. With event ads, except brand awareness ads, the key is honing in on your audience, their pain points, their stage in the funnel, and, in some cases, linking them to your solution.
While you want to highlight your business’s benefits and tell the world how great it is, your ad is about them, not you. Remember: write for your audience!
Example: A digital marketing agency owner specializing in SaaS clients is scrolling through LinkedIn. They see a piece about boosting marketing leads. They might stop or hesitate but are more likely to keep scrolling. However, if they see an eBook titled “Digital Marketing Agency Owner’s Guide to Boosting SaaS Leads,” the chances of them being interested are far greater. Go specific, and you shall thrive.
While appealing to your target audience and choosing compelling visuals in the right ad format is important, LinkedIn Creative’s number one rule is consistency.
Selecting appropriate ad formats based on campaign objectives is crucial for optimizing effectiveness at different customer journey stages. Your prospects should be able to follow their eyes from the banner to the intro text, headline, CTA, form/landing page copy, and email follow-up/nurture, and everything should fit together perfectly like a well-made story.
They should be able to tell you what the offer is, why you need it, and how to get it. The smallest inconsistency in this narrative causes friction, which leads to fewer leads. Check out this great example of alignment across the journey from lead gen ads to forms.
Compelling ad creatives are vital for attracting attention and driving engagement. LinkedIn offers diverse ad formats to suit any campaign objective, from carousel ads to video ads to sponsored messaging.
Choosing the correct LinkedIn ad format is essential for campaign success. Video ads or spotlight message ads are ideal for awareness campaigns, while single-image ads or conversation ads benefit lead-generation campaigns.
Setting up a LinkedIn ad campaign involves several key steps to ensure success. First, you need to define your target audience. LinkedIn’s robust targeting options allow you to specify criteria such as job titles, industries, and company sizes, ensuring your ads reach the right people.
Next, selecting the appropriate ad format is crucial. LinkedIn offers a variety of ad formats, including single image, video, and carousel ads, each suited to different campaign objectives. Choosing the correct format can significantly impact your campaign’s effectiveness.
Finally, setting your campaign budget and schedule is essential. You can set these parameters at both the campaign and campaign group levels.
Dynamic Group Budget optimizes the budget for a campaign group, allowing for more flexible and efficient budget management. By carefully planning your budget and schedule, you can align your campaign with your marketing goals and maximize ROI.
Setting your first campaign, budget, and schedule is a pivotal step in launching a successful LinkedIn ad campaign. You can set a budget and schedule at either the campaign or campaign group level.
Utilizing a Dynamic Group Budget can optimize the budget across a campaign group rather than just an individual campaign, providing a more strategic allocation of resources.
When setting your budget, consider your overall marketing strategy, goals, and objectives. A well-planned budget ensures you can sustain your campaign over its intended duration without overspending. Similarly, scheduling your campaign to run at optimal times can enhance its effectiveness, ensuring your ads are seen by your target audience when they are most active.
By carefully setting your budget and schedule, you can ensure your LinkedIn ad campaign runs smoothly and achieves its desired outcomes.
While the setup process is a critical part of LinkedIn campaign management, even more critical to the overall success is what comes after it is live. Particularly when things have taken a wrong turn in the results department.
You have all this data at your fingertips, just sitting and chilling in your Campaign Manager, waiting to be leveraged. But how do you use it? Every LinkedIn expert needs to be able to generate actionable insights from their campaign data and act on it to improve outcomes. But how do you do that? Let’s begin.
Key metrics: Everyone running LinkedIn ads knows performance data is important. But they also know there is a lot of it, and depending on the number of campaigns you are running, the sheer volume of LinkedIn data can be overwhelming.
So, as a starting point, where exactly should you be looking? When it comes to lead generation or conversion objective campaigns, you should hone in on lead/conversion numbers, cost per lead/cost per conversion, conversion/lead gen form completion rate, CTR, and frequency.
The ad account is crucial for tracking and analyzing these performance metrics, providing a centralized platform for managing and evaluating campaigns.
Alternatively, suppose your campaign objective is awareness or website visits. In that case, we’d suggest focusing on impressions, reach, CTR, and engagement rate. If you’re using videos for any of these, you need to look for video views, video view rates, and video completion rates. For conversation/messaging ads, you need to be alert to open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
For the latter, it’s also worth downloading the “Conversation Ads CTA Performance” report for more targeted insights. Regardless of the campaign objective, you can customize your dashboard so that the specific metrics you want to track are immediately findable and grouped together.
It’s important to consider your chosen metrics in the context of time (we’d usually suggest week by week and/or month by month). This can be done easily through the performance charts section in Campaign Manager.
We’d also recommend you compare what you find to industry/platform benchmarks. By doing your analysis this way, you’ll have a much more holistic understanding of what you’re seeing, what’s doing well, and where you can improve. This is key to effective LinkedIn campaign management and evaluating the performance of your LinkedIn ad campaigns.
So you’ve had a look at your key metrics and how they measure up historically and in the context of your industry, but where do you go from here? First, you need to isolate the specific metrics that are underperforming. Is your CTR lower than 0.35%, or has it dropped drastically compared to last month? Is your CPL over $200 or much higher than last week? Is your daily spending lower than your daily budget? You need to know where the dip/s are and how big they are before you can act on them. It’s only once you’ve detected the problem/s and the extent of it that you can move on to addressing it. This is the same for if you are wildly outperforming them; you need to be aware of this so you can tweak your campaign choices accordingly.
You’ve noticed that your ad frequency has climbed above the recommended range (around 3-5). What next? We’d suggest a creative refresh. Work on some new creatives that take learnings from the best variant but incorporate something entirely new – that way, you can re-engage your audience with the appearance of added value. Alternatively, you could expand your audience so your pool of people is bigger, and people who haven’t seen your ads will already see them.
There’s never a straightforward answer to analyzing and acting on data, but it’s more of a process of elimination to see what works. The key to helpful analysis and effective optimization is close monitoring, quick troubleshooting, and decisive, planned action.
Important: Once you’ve made a change, give it at least 2-4 weeks to accumulate data before you make any further changes.
While performance metrics are the go-to for most marketers, especially when they have a background in other platforms like Google Ads regarding LinkedIn Campaign management – analyzing your demographic data is equally important. Just as often as you slide into your Campaign Manager’s “Performance” chart section, you should be jumping into the “Demographics” chart too. Be alert for 2 types of anomalies – those you should exclude if not contextually relevant and those you should hone in more if they align with your campaign goals.
For example, is one demographic group, e.g., the business development function, generating disproportionate impressions, clicking on your ads, and spending your money, but isn’t it a key audience? Are there irrelevant job titles, e.g., students, who are seeing your ads? Are your key demographics clicking on your ads but not converting? Is one country having a higher cost per lead than the other, or isn’t spending at the same rate?
These types of observations can be harnessed to improve your LinkedIn Campaign management. For example, if you see irrelevant people clicking on your ads, exclude them from your targeting. If you see one country performing very differently from another (i.e., having a much better CTR and lead volume), consider breaking it out into its own campaign and tailoring the messaging specifically to it to maximize this potential. The possibilities when it comes to demographic data & optimization are truly endless. If you miss out on this vital vehicle of analysis – you’ll regret it!
Beyond analyzing your performance and demographic data (both important), you must ensure you consistently check in with your sales team for feedback. After all, what is the point of putting all your time, energy, and money into generating thousands of leads at a decent cost if none of these leads are progressing with your sales reps?
While it may look positive on the platform side, what the sales team sees on their end ultimately matters. Set up frequent meetings with your team (for example, monthly) and use them to improve lead quality. Understand their general perception of the leads you are passing through and their overall conversion rate. Making decisions based on these insights is the most impactful action to ensure successful LinkedIn Campaign management.
Voila! After a long journey through LinkedIn Campaign Manager — objectives, audiences, bids, creative, analysis, and optimization— we’ve finally reached the finish line. Congratulations! You’re now a LinkedIn Campaign management expert. With these handy insights, tips, and tricks in your toolbox, you can smash your targets through this channel, prove your worth to the wider business, and ensure maximum ROI in 2025.
