Introduction to the LinkedIn Campaign Manager 2024

1. What is the LinkedIn Campaign Manager and who needs it?
2. Setting up the LinkedIn Campaign Manager in three steps
3. What is a LinkedIn Audience Network and what is an Audience Expansion?
4. LinkedIn Campaign Manager – Determination of Budget and Schedule
5. Creating the ad draft in the LinkedIn Campaign Manager
6. How do you evaluate the campaign and optimize it if necessary?
7. With these tools, you can organize, manage and optimize your LinkedIn campaigns
8. Five tips for placing ads
9. LinkedIn Campaign Manager – why you should build on it

Do you want to increase your brand awareness in the world's most famous business network, reach new customers or expand your network? There is no way around LinkedIn advertising. The social network provides the so-called campaign manager for placing ads. How this is structured, how you set up your campaigns and what to consider, our guest author Nicole Fiebig explains in the following article.

What is the LinkedIn Campaign Manager and who needs it?

The LinkedIn Campaign Manager is a tool where you can create and manage ads. The LinkedIn advertising account is used to precisely determine the target group and whether the use is useful for the company. Over 18 million people use LinkedIn in Germany. Worldwide, the social network even has 830 million users. A large audience is available to companies to market their products or services. They can specifically address them by industry, education and skills.

With the use of LinkedIn Campaign Manager, you are provided with a powerful targeting tool that should not be left unused.

The chronological development of advertising on LinkedIn at a glance:

• 2005 Release of the first ad
• 2016 Sponsored InMail
• 2016 Conversion Tracking
• 2017 Lead General Ads
• 2018 Video ads
• 2019 Campaign manager
• 2022 Business Manager

Setting up the LinkedIn Campaign Manager in three steps

Placing an ad on LinkedIn is not difficult. You will be guided step by step through the tool until the ad is placed. It is important that you think in advance about what goal you want to achieve with the campaign.

Setting up a LinkedIn account

⁠If you don't have an account yet, you need to set up an account in the first step, specify your company page and assign a name for your advertising account. How you create a LinkedIn company page, you can find out in our contenthub.

Make a selection of your target group

⁠Who is your target group? Before you have thought about it, it makes little sense to place a ad.
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⁠The target group analysis includes:

• Demographic characteristics: Age, sex, marital status, place of residence.
• ⁠Socioeconomic characteristics: Graduation, profession, level of education, further education, income.
• ⁠Sociological characteristics: Hobbies, opinions, values, motivations, fears.

⁠Once the target group is defined by these characteristics, it is very important to analyze the buying behavior. Where, when and what does my target group buy? Only if you know which factors influence your target group's purchasing decisions does your campaign have a chance of success.
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⁠By the way: In the best case you have created personas in advance, based on which you align your campaign. Personas are fictitious, prototypical customers of a product or service, which serve as the basis for your further marketing strategy. While a target group is about a uniform determination of characteristics, a persona gets a concrete face and should represent ideal customers for you.
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Selection of the ad format

⁠Once you have determined your target group, you can select the ad format next. The LinkedIn campaign manager offers several possibilities. You will be informed about the exact specifications of each ad option in the campaign manager.

• ⁠Text ads: Classic text ads are perfect for getting started in the LinkedIn campaign market. This type of ad consists of a text (headline max. 25 characters, description max. 75 characters), a small image (100x100 pixels) and the target URL.
  
  This format is displayed at the top or on the right side. As the click rate is low, text ads are generally only used for reach generation purposes. They are particularly suitable for a blog post with a link to your own website.
• ⁠Image ads – Single Image Ads: This is an image ad that appears directly in the LinkedIn newsfeed. Due to the prominent placement, the image ad generates a high click and interaction rate. Image posts are particularly suitable for infographics or product photos. The prescribed image format is 1,200x627 pixels or 1,920x1,080 pixels.
• Video ads: As with other platforms, videos on LinkedIn are a big trend. With explanatory videos, tutorials or image videos, you can offer users added value and draw attention to yourself. It is crucial that you place your most important message at the beginning. The introductory text must not exceed 600 characters and the headline is limited to a maximum of 200 characters. The maximum file size is 5 GB, the minimum size is 75 KB.
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  ⁠You should pay attention to the following when it comes to video duration: When uploading a video from the desktop, the video duration can be 15 minutes. Mobile with the LinkedIn app, only 10 minutes are allowed. The videos must not be less than 2 seconds.
  ⁠Once you have created and uploaded a video, the video starts automatically. However, it is muted.
• Job ad: LinkedIn is primarily a social network for recruiting. Therefore, the campaign manager offers a special ad format for job ads. Job Ads Ads allow companies to specifically draw attention to job ads. In the ad headline, you are shown a list of pre-defined options. Furthermore, the company name (max. 25 characters), ad image or logo (100x100 pixels) and a CTA must be included.
  
  Besides job ads, companies can also Employer Branding on LinkedIn use.
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• Carousel ads: Those who don't want to create a video, but are looking for a static solution, a carousel ad is suitable. This is a nice ad format because it allows you to create interactive stories. It is used, for example, to illustrate processes and the user can slide through the individual elements.
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  ⁠A prescribed introductory text with max. 255 characters, 2–10 elements for images, a description and a target URL are given. Images must be at least 1,080x1,080 pixels.
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• Follower Ads: With this ad format, you can encourage followers to follow your company page. Follower ads are dynamic, i.e. there is an automatic personalization by displaying the profile data of the users. For the ad description, you can choose from predefined options or a defined text, with a maximum of 70 characters (including spaces). The headings are identical, only here a maximum text length of 50 characters is allowed. The company name, which can be up to 25 characters long, is displayed when a user clicks on the logo with the mouse. A JPG/PNG image of 100x100 pixels is recommended for the ad image. With a suitable CTA button, the ad is complete.
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• Spotlight Ads: Spotlight Ads are part of the dynamic ads. Companies can publish personalized campaigns for the presentation of products or services with this format. A complete Spotlight ad consists of an ad headline, ad description, a company image, a CTA and a target URL. The insertion of the profile picture of the users can be deactivated, but this is not recommended, as this is the decisive factor that makes the ad form.
• Message Ads (formerly Sponsored InMail): Another campaign option is Message Ads. With this format, companies can directly address users in their mailbox. Since with this type of ad, you are literally barging in, it is very important that all contents are exactly tailored to the target group. If this is the case, this campaign type can definitely be successful, because the opening rates are very high. The creation of the campaigns includes the sender*, the subject, a message text and the footer. You can also enter a CTA with individual text, a target URL and an image for the banner (300x250 pixels).
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• LeadGen Forms – a special feature
  ⁠Do you want to include a form? Although forms are not considered a separate ad format, they can be created as part of sponsored content ads and Message Ads. Forms consist of an ad title with max. 60 characters, offer details with max. 160 characters, privacy policies, form fields, a confirmation message and a CTA.

What is a LinkedIn Audience Network and what is an Audience Expansion?

The campaign manager offers another function with which you can push your ads. In addition to the platform, you can publish your campaigns in the LinkedIn Audience publisher network. The advantage is that your performance is significantly higher than if you only publish on the platform itself.

You need to note that this function "LinkedIn Audience Network" is currently only available for campaigns with the ad formats "Single Image Ad", "Carousel Ad" and "Video Ad".

It is recommended to activate the Audience Expansion function. This feature looks for potential customers, which is similar to your target group.

LinkedIn Campaign Manager – Determination of Budget and Schedule

As with Facebook and other platforms, LinkedIn ad costs are based on your individual project. That is, your budget depends on your company and goals. You can choose between a daily or lifetime budget. In the case of a lifetime budget, your ad will run until your budget is exhausted.

For longer campaigns, a daily budget is recommended. The ad is then displayed until the daily budget is reached. The ad then starts again the next day.

Once you have decided on a budget, depending on your objective, you define a bid type. This can be either Pay-per-Click (cost-per-click) or Cost-per-Impression (cost-per-impression). If it's a Message Ad campaign, go for Cost-per-Send (cost-per-send).

Are you unsure of what budget you should invest to achieve the best possible result? Then choose the functions "enhanced CPC bid" and you can see what other companies are budgeting.

Please note that the minimum budget for LinkedIn Ads is $ 10 (total and daily budget).

Creating the ad draft in the LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Before your ad is published, a draft is created and LinkedIn checks your campaign. As a rule, the check is done within 24 hours. You can check the status in the campaign manager.

How do you evaluate the campaign and optimize it if necessary?

Once your campaign has started, you can use the performance chart in the campaign manager to measure the success of your campaigns and make adjustments if necessary. However, this only makes sense after about seven days, because before that there is too little data for an optimal assessment.

It is advisable to test different formats or have LinkedIn test them. For that, you have to check the box "improve performance" and then do good monitoring.

An overview of the tools that could help you analyze your campaigns can be found in our Social Media Suites.

With these tools, you can organize, manage and optimize your LinkedIn campaigns

Beyond the performance feature within the campaign manager, there are a number of other tools that can help you with the organization, management and optimization of the ads.

Especially if you are active on several platforms, the use of a social media tool is worthwhile. With many of these tools, you can automate tasks, for example, controlling posts. Monitoring, to measure data cross-platform, is also possible with most tools.

Helpful software can be found in the category Social Media Planning or specifically for monitoring in the Social Media Monitoring category. The tools you can use include: 

• Hootsuite: With over 10 million users, Hootsuite is one of the most popular tools for planning and publishing content on social media platforms.       
• Swat.io: The tool offers social media management, content planning, monitoring and statistics. The focus is on community management. 
• brandwatch: The tool is particularly suitable for large companies that have many mentions and interactions.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: With the Sales Navigator, you can find qualified companies and contacts, build customer relationships and maintain them long-term.
• Canva Pro: Canva is not a social media management tool in the classic sense. However, as visual content (even with ad ads) plays an increasingly important role, you should definitely take a look at the tool. You will find there a huge selection of photos, videos, audios and graphics and can use these without any special design knowledge.
• Trello: For many smaller companies, these social media tools are too extensive and too expensive. Here, Trello is a good alternative for planning social media activities. Several employees can access the editorial plan and organize and maintain the content.

Five tips for placing ads

There are a few tips on how you can improve your campaigns:

1. Content Marketing: LinkedIn advertising and content marketing must go hand in hand. It is important that you consider your activities on LinkedIn in your content strategy and integrate it into your process. This also includes the involvement of other stakeholders in your company. It is also important that you consider the topic of search engine optimization. On OMR Reviews, you can find a comparison of various content marketing tools.
2. Landing page: For each campaign, you should create a specific landing page to generate more leads. For this, you need to design your site so that the users feel well informed about the offer. At the same time, you should keep the landing page simple and clear. There are some tips for creating a landing page, you can retrieve.
3. Content: Choose a short, snappy headline, from which your offer is evident. If you want to stand out from the competition, your ad texts need to be professional and creative.
4. Testing: It cannot be predicted 100% whether your campaign will be successful. Therefore the tip, test several ad formats, to then see which one the customers like best.
5. Organic posts: You are not sure whether you want to invest in LinkedIn advertising? Then test your offer first with an organic post. From this you can derive, with which content you generate more leads.

LinkedIn Campaign Manager – why you should build on it

Build Brand Awareness, generate more leads or increase engagement with your target audience – regardless of which goal you pursue, there is no way around LinkedIn ads. Since the campaign manager guides you step by step through the process, it is very easy for beginners to publish an ad. It is important that you think in advance about your target group and your campaign goal.

Currently, the platform is testing another free tool with which you can manage company pages and ad accounts on one dashboard. This is intended to simplify marketing and reach more potential buyers.