+

How to Run
Successful
LinkedIn Ads
Table of Contents
Introduction Chapter 4
Creating Effective LinkedIn Ads
Chapter 1: • LinkedIn’s ad formats (+ best practices for

Establishing Your Brand community on each)

LinkedIn • LinkedIn Ad visuals and messaging

• How to set up a powerful LinkedIn Page • Create your first campaign

• Content suggestions for LinkedIn

Chapter 5
Chapter 2 Testing and Optimizing LinkedIn Ads
Identifying a Target Audience & Building • Implement conversion tracking

Your Organic Following • Conversion strategies

• Finding your buyer persona and ideal

audience Conclusion
• Creating an editorial calendar with content
tailored to your audience

Chapter 3
Preparing for Your LinkedIn Ad Campaign
• Create a Campaign Manager account
• Determine a campaign objective
• Develop a targeting strategy
• Budgeting and bidding strategies for
Introduction
LinkedIn is the #1 B2B social media platform for content distribution, making it invaluable
as a B2B ad platform. Social media ads are the most effective when they target a given
audience where they already live online. For over 660 million professionals, that’s LinkedIn.

Whether you’ve dabbled in LinkedIn Ads before or not, it’s easy to see the value of
boosting your own content and creating targeted promotions to reach a specific audience
of LinkedIn members. This guide will help you develop a strategy to master LinkedIn’s ad
formats, allowing you to reach the right members, at the right time, with the right content.

We’ll take you through the steps to develop a fine-tuned ad strategy for Linkedin. You’ll
learn how to effectively engage users, build relationships, and drive higher quality leads
from Linkedin. We’ll also explore how to optimize your visual content and ad strategy to
drive high-quality conversions. Ready to dive in? Let’s get started with the basics.

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 Chapter 1

Establishing Your
Brand community on
LinkedIn
Chapter 1

Establishing Your Brand

community on LinkedIn

Before you start creating ads, you need to establish your brand presence on LinkedIn. Your
brand incorporates any representation of your company on LinkedIn from an informative
and enticing company page to employee activity and profiles (employee advocacy),
branded content (both organic and paid), and how you are presented on your career page
and in job postings. By maintaining an updated profile and posting organic content (more
on that later), you’ll drive sales, grow brand awareness, and attract quality candidates.

How to set up a powerful LinkedIn Page

Make sure your company’s LinkedIn Page is well optimized and includes relevant and up-
to-date information. Because Google ranks LinkedIn pages in search engines, optimizing
your LinkedIn Page (like the most followed pages on LinkedIn) should be a key piece of
your marketing strategy both for developing a paid strategy and for your overall marketing
efforts. According to LinkedIn, pages with complete information receive 30% more views
than those that are incomplete.

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 Source: LinkedIn

1. Company logo
Your company logo is the first visual representation a user sees of your brand. Make
sure you’re using a recognizable brand image (like your logo) so followers can easily
recognize your brand when you post content and when they’re viewing your Company
Page. The optimal size for a LinkedIn Page logo is 300x300 pixels.

2. Company overview
The company overview is your chance to tell the world who your brand is, what you do and
care about, and how you can help them. Make sure to provide links to your website, blog,
etc. to keep moving people through your content ecosystem. Keep this section up-to-date
with relevant information and use pertinent terms and phrases related to your company
and industry.

3. Cover image
Your cover image shows up right beneath your company logo on your company LinkedIn
Page, which gives you a prime visual spot to showcase your brand or promote a special
event happening at your company. Because your company profile is meant to showcase
your brand both as a product or service and for job searchers, make sure you’re tailoring
your cover image for both audiences—people looking to work from you and potential
leads/customers. The optimal header cover image should be 1536x768 pixels.

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4. Organization info
Be sure to fill in the organization information for your company for job seekers and page
visitors like your website URL, industry, location, and company size.

5. Recent page updates

Your recent updates section is the timeline where all of your company content updates
live. Make sure you’re regularly posting content (at least weekly, to see 2x better
engagement, according to LinkedIn) to drive traffic to your blog posts, promotions, offers,
and job opportunities.

6. Showcase Pages
Showcase Pages are subsets of your main page and can feature brand initiatives, other
brands under your company’s name, or business units. These pages function like LinkedIn
Pages and have analytics and the ability to post updates but aren’t linked to specific
employees. As an example, LinkedIn uses Showcase Pages like the Linkedin Marketing
Solutions page to focus on relevant content for marketers, by marketers.

7. Company photos
Add photos of your employees, company culture, or office space. Choose photos that are
900x600 pixels as an optimal size.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Maecenas eu libero sagittis, finibus neque id, accumsan massa. Quisque sed egestas dui,
sed sodales erat. Sed risus tellus, blandit vel viverra nec, posuere vitae risus. Nullam at leo
quam. Phasellus et tortor sodales arcu finibus aliquet et ut ex. Nunc ut fringilla odio. Sed
eu tempor felis.

Source: LinkedIn

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For more information on setting up the best possible page for your company on LinkedIn,
review LinkedIn’s best practices for LinkedIn Pages and get inspired by other businesses
with fantastic company pages.

Don’t forget! Having a LinkedIn Page is required if you want to set up ad campaigns. Make
sure yours is well-optimized before you create your first ad.

Content suggestions for LinkedIn

B2B marketers turn to LinkedIn to share company updates, industry news and best
practices, and helpful thoughts on trends and innovations. When creating content for
your brand, first know your audience. Make sure you’ve identified metrics and goals for
your content creation and track them closely. Are you hoping for conversations in the
comments section of your updates? Are page followers your most important metric?
Finally, when creating content, vary the formats. LinkedIn suggests user generated content,
featuring third party content (which helps you if they interact with or share your post), and
trying lots of different types of media like infographics, copy, video, and more.

Let’s learn how to create a target audience and get to making and sharing stellar content.

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 Chapter 2

Identifying a Target
Audience & Building
Your Organic Following
Chapter 2

Identifying a Target Audience &

Building Your Organic Following

When it comes to generating leads from your LinkedIn Ads and developing a LinkedIn
strategy overall, it helps to have an idea of who your target audience is.

It’s a firm content marketing best practice to have an idea of who your buyer persona is—
fictionalized, generalized representations of your ideal customer. Who are you creating
content for and what do they need help with?

But when it comes to your LinkedIn Ads and Sponsored Content strategy, you may want
to segment your content toward an even more specific target audience, based on their
qualifications, interests, geographic, region, etc.

Finding your buyer persona and ideal audience

So, how do you identify a target audience? Try and answer the overarching question, “Who
are you trying to reach?”

Answer these types of questions for each LinkedIn Ad campaign you produce:
• What is their job function or title?
• Where are they located?
• What industry do they work in?
• What is their seniority?
• What are they interested in?
• What kinds of content do they like?
• What kinds of questions do they have?

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• What are their pain points?

Honing in on your target audience helps you tailor your content strategy towards the right
people using LinkedIn’s targeting features.

While organic content shows up in your LinkedIn Page followers’ feeds, Sponsored
Content and other ad formats target beyond your LinkedIn Page followers based on how
you set up, target, and pay for advertising.

This enables you to take that awesome piece of content that’s already performing well
organically and get in front of new prospects that are now interacting with your brand on
LinkedIn.

Creating an editorial calendar with content tailored to your

audience

In order to effectively get users to engage and be interested in your content on LinkedIn,
you have to provide users with new, relevant, helpful content, and change up the formats
which means adding variety to the content that’s being promoted.

The best way to ensure variety in your organic and paid strategies is to build an editorial
calendar that tracks and organizes the types of content you’re posting.

Luckily, HubSpot created this free social media content calendar to help you get started.

What factors should you consider when customizing your own content calendar?
• What days of the week see the highest engagements for your audience
• How often you should be posting new content
• Vary the type of content you’re posting (how-to posts, list posts, templates, kits, etc.)
• Vary the format of content (ebooks, interactive sitepages, webinars, live events, etc.)
• Vary the goal of the content (brand awareness vs. lead generation vs. thought
leadership)
• Quality vs. quantity of posts - try an experiment like the HubSpot blog editor did

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Remember to always test and optimize your content strategy over time based on what’s
working and what’s not.

Growing and developing your organic following

Before you start creating LinkedIn Ad campaigns, it’s important to grow your organic
following to build credibility and find out what type of content resonates with your
followers.

Building a following doesn’t happen overnight. If you’re just starting out on Linkedin,
consider holding off on ads like Sponsored Content until you’re completed and satisfied
with your company page. Once your posts resonate with your audience, you can leverage
your best performing organic content for paid ads. If your LinkedIn Page or Showcase
Page doesn’t have much content or followers, and a member visits your page after seeing
one of your ads, they’re less likely to trust your brand.

Tips for creating quality content for Linkedin

1. Build brand love

Associate your brand with feel-good content and humanizing stories about your
employees and customers. Employee advocacy on LinkedIn is encouraging your
employees to share content for your brand—thus increasing your brand awareness, trust,
and organic following. Since employees typically have 10x more reach than their company,
they are a great source of sharing content, widening the audience you have available.

LinkedIn recommends that when utilizing employee advocacy, marketers should support
and enable employees to:
• Share job postings and company updates
• Use LinkedIn for social selling
• Announce product updates and promotions
• Post different types of content and tag your company’s LinkedIn Page

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“[Executives are] trendsetters.
They can make statements about
what they stand for, and in many
cases, develop a strong following
in relatively short order”
Justin Shriber, VP of Marketing at LinkedIn

2. Showcase innovation
Build thought leadership by highlighting your brand’s technology.
Justin Shriber, VP of Marketing at LinkedIn, believes that executives have the power to
shape a brand and urges companies to encourage an executive presence as thought
leaders on LinkedIn.
Recent research from LinkedIn and Edelman, The 2020 B2B Thought Leadership Impact
Study, showed that 88% of decision makers believe that thought leadership improves their
perception of a company and 86% felt that leadership affected how much they trust an
organization.

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3. Enhance talent brand
Attract top talent by showing off your culture and values. Prospective job candidates
want to see what it’s like to work at your company, and partners and other business
opportunities are affected by your brand’s mission as well.

How to grow your organic LinkedIn following

1. Post updates regularly

The easiest way to grow your audience organically is to post regular updates that your
followers can like, share, and comment on. When they do so, their followers will see
you updates, too! The highest-performing companies on LinkedIn post several pieces
of content each week, and some even post daily. They will often publish and repurpose
images, infographics, posts from their company blog, or links to events, webinars, ebooks,
and other content. Want to see examples of brands with top-performing content? Click
here.

2. Use social media

Add social sharing icons and links to your LinkedIn Page on your website and other social
media outlets. Adding social sharing buttons on all of your blog posts and website content
allows users to quickly share content as updates.

3. Leverage employee networks

Encourage your employees to add your company to their Linkedin Profiles and follow
your company LinkedIn Page, essentially turning employees into brand advocates. Your
employee networks will help you grow your following quickly.

4. Update your career pages frequently with job postings

People looking for jobs will find your career page in search features or through connection
suggestions.

5. Keep your company LinkedIn Page updated

Updates will get shared on followers feeds, allowing them to share it to their own

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networks.

6. Share rich media

Videos, graphics, and visuals capture users’ attention. Research by LinkedIn has shown that
adding rich media to your LinkedIn Ads can increase CTRs by as much as 38%.

7. Engage with your network

Respond to comments, like and share other posts, and engage in relevant groups for your
industry.

8. Use employee advocacy and ask employees to share original content

Have your executives and employees publish short-form and long-form posts or create
and share videos. Encourage likes, comments, and shares.

9. Follow other businesses and influencers in your industry

Engage with top LinkedIn influencers and influential LinkedIn users within your industry
and leverage their reach to grow your following.

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 Chapter 3

Preparing for
Your LinkedIn Ad
Campaign
Chapter 3

Preparing for Your LinkedIn Ad

Campaign

Before we start creating ads, it’s important to think carefully about who you’re advertising
to and how you can maximize the budget that you have. When you do create your first ad,
you’ll have to set up your target audience and bid, so it’s good to have a handle on what
those are and what to choose.

Create or log in to your Campaign Manager account

When creating LinkedIn Ads, you’ll use the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions platform, which
is separate from the LinkedIn account you use day-to-day. If it’s your first time using the ad
platform, you’ll need to create a Campaign Manager account.

Using Campaign Manager, you can:

• Set up ad accounts
• Manage and run campaigns
• Control your ad budget
• Monitor your ad performance

Source: LinkedIn

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Determine a campaign objective
LinkedIn updated its ad strategy for users in 2019, adding objective-based campaigns in
an effort to help marketers to meet more complex business goals using LinkedIn Ads. The
three main objectives are Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Since rolling out the
new update, one user reported that his new objective-based campaigns generated 300%
more conversions than standard bidding. These objective-based campaigns only bill you
based on the desired objective. For example, if you are running a conversion campaign,
you’ll only be charged for clicks, not impressions.

Source: LinkedIn

Awareness: brand awareness

These campaigns charge by impressions (cost per thousand, or CPM). These are ideal for
high-level brand building and prospecting.

Consideration: website visits, engagement, video views

These campaigns are straightforward and will be priced based on desired action. These
are helpful for clicks to your website, engagement with content, social sharing, getting
more company followers, or getting folks to watch a promotional video.

Conversion: lead generation, website conversions, job applicants

The conversion objective takes it one step further and optimizes for an action on your
website. These campaigns are ideal for generating leads (and offer lead gen forms),
getting downloads of content like whitepapers or templates on your website, or driving
applicants to a job posting.

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LinkedIn Success Story
Adobe used LinkedIn Sponsored Content and targeting strategies to drive brand
awareness in a campaign targeting US-based marketing decision makers. They found
that using LinkedIn’s targeting features and rich content like infographics, marketing
decision makers were 50% more likely to agree that “Adobe is shaping the future of digital
marketing.”

Source: LinkedIn

Develop a targeting strategy

LinkedIn is incredibly valuable for lead generation mostly because it’s a professional
network, making it easy for B2B marketers to leverage professional targeting to their
advantage. That’s why 80% of B2B leads generated from social media come from LinkedIn.
Since LinkedIn is designed to help people network, there’s a lot of information and data
already built into the tool. This helps you target a specific niche, saving you money on ads
by only sending them to the right people.

Identifying a target audience for LinkedIn Ads

When you first sit down to create a target audience for your ads, think first of your buyer
persona. Who is your ideal customer and where do they live online? What types of content
do they read? LinkedIn allows you to create your own specific audience, use an audience
template for groups like doctors, event planners, or college graduates, or use LinkedIn’s
Audience Expansion, lookalike audiences, or Matched Audience tools to expand your
audience based on your own list.

When creating your own LinkedIn Ad audience, you can choose from these targeting
options:
1. Location

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This field is required by LinkedIn. You can choose a city or metro area, a state, or a country.
This data is based on what’s in a user’s profile or their IP address.

2. Company information
This includes company connections, company followers, company industry, company
name, and company size.

3. Demographics
LinkedIn demographics include age and gender.

4. Education
Target based on degree, fields of study, and schools.

5.Job experience
This includes job function, job seniority, job title, member skills, and years of experience.

6. Interests
Target those who belong to certain LinkedIn groups or based on member interests.

Hone in on an audience by combining targeting features. To effectively target your

content, steer clear of promoting content to every marketer (or other job function)
worldwide. Instead, make sure you’re combining targeting features (such as geographic
region, company size, and seniority level or geography, industry, and job title) to maximize
the results.

Audience templates
For those of you who are new to LinkedIn or need some guidance on setting up targeting,
try LinkedIn’s pre made audience templates. These templates help with quick setup and
include audiences like doctors, recent college grads, millennials, and more.

Audience Expansion
Audience Expansion helps you to expand beyond your target audience by taking
attributes from your target audience and automatically finding LinkedIn members with

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adjacent or similar attributes and adding them to your target group. This can be based
on skills, companies, or groups. To enable Audience Expansion, scroll to the end of the
Audience section when setting up your campaign and check the box next to Enable
Audience Expansion.

Source: AdStage

Matched Audiences
LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences takes your first-party data (like website visitors or email lists)
and matches it with a list of LinkedIn members. This is a good way to target your existing
audience in a new location and run account based marketing (ABM) campaigns or retarget
your email lists and website visitors with content offers.

Lookalike audiences
Lookalike audiences take your Matched Audiences and further widen the net by
expanding the list to similar LinkedIn members using LinkedIn’s rich member and
company data. This can help you find new professional audiences to grow your followers,
get new visitors to your website, or find new prospects. Lookalike audiences require a
Matched Audience of at least ww and can grow to up to 15x their size.

LinkedIn targeting best practices

When it comes to targeting options for LinkedIn Ads, more isn’t always better. LinkedIn
advises marketers using the audience expansion and targeting tools to beware of adding
too many characteristics (hypertargeting) or limiting the audience too much. Use the
strategies below to get the most bang for your buck on LinkedIn Ads and find the perfect
audience for your campaigns.

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Monitor and analyze every targeting test you run
Using LinkedIn Ads to generate leads is both a short-term and long-term game. In the
short term, using ads helps you cast a wide net and get your content in front of new
eyes. But in the long term, it takes testing, analysis, and new content to figure out how to
consistently reach new audiences and generate leads. Make sure you’re always monitoring
and analyzing every piece of content or test you run to continue improving your LinkedIn
Ads strategy in the future.

Avoid hypertargeting
If you’re using LinkedIn demographic targeting, try keeping your campaign target
audience over 50,000 for Sponsored Content and Text Ads, and over 15,000 for Message
Ads. Campaign Manager will show the estimated reach and a suggested range while
you’re building your audience. Another rule of thumb: your targeting audience should be
based on a geo or location, plus no more than one or two demographic facets on top of
that. While combining your targeting features to really optimize the audience you’re trying
to reach is a must, be mindful of hypertargeting. It’s tempting to try and get your content in
EXACTLY the right eyes by using every targeting feature possible, however, remember the
goal with LinkedIn Ads is to cast a wide net to expand your audience.

LinkedIn Success Story

CBRE, a commercial real estate services and investment firm, wanted to gain more entries
for their Urban Photographer of the Year contest. By using LinkedIn’s demographic and
interest-based targeting and Message Ads product, they were able to achieve a 54% open
rate, 28% CTR, and a 41% increase in contest entries from previous years.

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 Source: LinkedIn

Budgeting and bidding strategies for LinkedIn

Before we dive in to creating LinkedIn Ads, let’s review how budgeting and bidding on
LinkedIn work and how to make the most out of your LinkedIn Ads budget.

The ways you can pay for LinkedIn Ads are:

Cost-per-click (CPC): pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Cost-per-1,000-impressions (CPM): pay when your target audience sees your ad.
Cost-per-send (CPS): pay when Message Ads are delivered successfully.

LinkedIn Sponsored Content Ads work on a second-price auction system. This means that
when you set up a campaign, you set a bid for how much you’re willing to pay to show
an ad to users. LinkedIn decides whose ad to place based on the highest bid and past
campaign performance (meaning if you’ve advertised with LinkedIn before, it takes your
campaign performance into account).

Once LinkedIn decides who wins the bid, you only pay the amount needed to beat the
second highest bidder.

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Specific target audiences cost more or less depending on the popularity of the criteria
you’ve selected, so optimizing your bidding strategy is key.

Luckily, LinkedIn has some tips for creating a stellar budgeting strategy that gets the results
you need:
• Limit your targeting feature to the ones you need. If you have a lower budget, zero in on
your targeting criteria to get a smaller pool of users.
• Set a competitive bid: bid ambitiously at the high end of the suggested range in your
ads interface to improve your chances of winning at auction and delivering your budget.
• Don’t set your budget caps too low. When you set a bid, you also set how much budget
you’re willing to pay for the ads. Set a generous daily budget to start—doing so will help
you reach more of your audience.
• Ditch the daily budget: If you’re having trouble delivering impressions, avoid capping
your budget at a certain dollar amount each day, try setting a total budget that gets spent
over time. This will maximize the reach of your ads.

Want help deciding how much to spend on your ads? Check out this free ad calculator.

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 Chapter 4

Creating Effective
LinkedIn Ads
Chapter 4

Creating Effective LinkedIn Ads

Now that you have an idea of who your ideal audience is and have the tools to build your
organic following and establish your brand on LinkedIn, it’s time to get to the nitty gritty of
creating powerful LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn offers several different ad formats for any type of
campaign you may want to run.

LinkedIn’s ad formats (+ best practices for each)

After you’ve chosen your campaign objective and audience, it’s time to choose which
type of LinkedIn Ad will be the most effective. LinkedIn offers several different types of ad
formats— Sponsored Content, which includes single image ads, Video Ads, and Carousel
Ads, Message Ads (formerly Sponsored InMail), and Dynamic Ads.

Remember, no matter what format you choose, always be testing!

Sponsored Content Single Image Ad

Source: LinkedIn

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Sponsored Content appears natively in the LinkedIn feed of your target audience. This
includes single image ads, Carousel Ads, and Video Ads.

Best practices for Sponsored Content:

• Provide a new angle or analysis on industry news, rather than just sharing popular
headlines.
• Share helpful, relevant content.
• Use rich media in your posts and incorporate formats like YouTube videos, SlideShares,
or Vimeo videos which engage your followers.
• Include 2-4 ads in each campaign; campaigns with more ads reach more folks in your
target audience.
• Try lead gen forms to help generate more qualified leads for your sales team. These
forms automatically populate a member’s data from their profile, making it easy for them
to fill out while giving you helpful data.

Sponsored Content Carousel Ad

Source: LinkedIn
Carousel Ads, a type of Sponsored Content, hold up to 10 images to show a story,
showcase a product, or drive registrations for events.

Best practices for Carousel Ads:

• Share stories of customer success.
• Post about thought leadership or share your executives’ opinions.
• Show several products or services.
• Do a deep-dive into a particular product or service.

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• Share a series of job opportunities, upcoming events, or speakers for a single event.
• Create captivating images and visual stories.
• Highlight people, illustrations, graphics, and typography.
• Use an overarching theme or style, or share a large piece of content broken down into
individual cards.
• Optimize the order of the cards based on performance. Try A/B testing the order.
• Use clear messaging and CTAs.
• Save your main CTA for the end to optimize for engagement through the end.

Sponsored Content Video Ad

Source: LinkedIn
Video ads can drive leads, build brand awareness, or promote a new product and offer
video metrics and data on the types of professionals interacting with your ad.

Best practices for Video Ads:

Showcase executives as thought leaders.
Preview events or webinars.
Give a better, more detailed view of products or software.
Show the most important message within the first ten seconds.
Use visual storytelling, graphics, and text to increase engagement.
Consider using subtitles; 85% of social media videos are played without sound.
For brand awareness goals, keep videos under 30 seconds. A LinkedIn study found that
shorter videos have 200% better view completion rates.

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For lead generation, try longer videos.

Message Ads

Source: LinkedIn
Message Ads (formerly Sponsored InMail) are a direct line to your network and with a
more than 50% open rate, are more effective than email. Try Message Ads for recruiting,
event registration, and lead generation.

Best practices for Message Ads:

Include a clear CTA using one to three words. The best performing CTAs are “Try,” “Free,”
“Today,” “Click,” and “Apply,” and feature low-pressure terminology.
Run Message Ads for an entire week. The highest open rates are on Tuesdays, but the most
clicks happen on weekends.
Use the LinkedIn Insight Tag to track conversions from these campaigns.
Try combining Sponsored Content with Message Ads and running both campaigns at
once. Marketers see 37% better CTRs when targeting via both Sponsored Content and
Message Ads.

Text Ads

Source: LinkedIn

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Text Ads are a self-service, pay-per-click (or per impression) option from LinkedIn similar
to Google AdWords. You can advertise for lead gen offers, job opportunities, or groups to
the audience of your choosing.

Best practices for Text Ads:

• Including an image drives more engagement.
• Choose a compelling CTA.
• Use attention-grabbing headlines directed at the LinkedIn member.
• Link to a mobile-optimized landing page that aligns with the messaging from your ad.
• Create 3-4 variations of each ad to reach more people in your target audience.
• Make sure you have the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website so you can track
conversions and learn more about website visitors.

Dynamic Ads

Source: LinkedIn
Target on a personalized level with Dynamic Ads. These ads are effective for brand
awareness, like the example ad shown, job seekers, and retargeting.

Best practices for Dynamic Ads:

• Use the LinkedIn member’s profile photo in the ad, it improves engagement.
• Write clear CTAs and one primary action for the member to take.
• Exclude existing followers from follower ads so you get net new prospects.
• Test out custom background images in spotlight ads.

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Sponsored Content specs
Single image ad specs
• Headline: 70 characters max
• Description: 100 characters max
• CTA: optional, you can choose from available CTA copy
• Image: 1200x627 px, 1.91:1 ratio, JPG/JPEG/PNG/GIF (non-animated)
Carousel ad specs
• Introductory text: 150 characters max
• Cards (images): minimum 2, maximum 10
• Images: 1080x1080 px, 1:1 ratio, JPG/PNG/GIF (non-animated)
Video ad specs
• Ad name: 255 characters max
• Intro text: 600 characters max
• Length: 3 seconds to 30 minutes (LinkedIn points out that the most successful videos are
less than 15 seconds)
• Layout: horizontal
• Pixel and aspect ratio: 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p
• Audio format: AAC, MPEG4

Message Ad specs
• Subject line: 60 characters max
• Message text: 1,500 characters max
• Links: up to 3 clickable links
• Hyperlinked text in message: 70 characters max
• CTA button copy: 20 characters max (LinkedIn recommends between one and three
words for a 13% higher click-through-rate)
• Image (banner): 300x250 px, JPG, PNG, GIF (non-animated)

Text Ad specs
• Headline: 25 characters max
• Description: 75 characters max
• Image: 50x50 px

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Dynamic Ad specs
Follower ads
• Ad description (above images): 70 characters max
• Ad headline (below images): 50 characters max
• Company name: 25 characters max
• Ad image: 100x100 px, JPG, PNG
• CTA: members who don’t follow you will see “Follow,” those who do follow you will see
your selected CTA
Spotlight ads
• Ad description (above images): 70 characters max
• Ad headline (below images): 50 characters max
• Company name: 25 characters max
• Ad image/company logo: 100x100 px, JPG, PNG
• CTA: 18 characters max
• Link: can link to third-party landing page
• Background image: 300x250 px
Job ads
• Company name: 25 characters max
• Company logo: 100x100 px, JPG, PNG
• Ad headline: choose a pre-made headline or write a custom headline up to 70
characters
• CTA: choose a pre-made CTA or create a custom CTA up to 44 characters
• Read more about different types of job ads here.
Content ads
• Company name: 25 characters max
• Company logo (optional): 100x100 px, JPG, PNG
• Document name: 50 characters max
• Downloadable file: PDF, 10 MB max
• Document preview (optional): up to five 81 x 104 px preview images
• Primary CTA: choose a pre-made CTA or create a custom CTA up to 75 characters

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LinkedIn Ad visuals and messaging

There are limitless ways to create amazing visual ads that stand out to your audience, it just
takes a little creativity, a lot of testing, and the right tools to make it successful. Whether
you’re using a graphic or video, make sure you’re designing and finding images that set
context for your content, capture users’ attention, and align with your brand.

Source: HubSpot
This ad from Adobe is both visually pleasing and has a strong message for Women’s
History Month.

Visual design tips:

• Make sure you’re using rich media.
• Use Canva to create unique, branded social media images.
• Vary your image types—try using icons, GIFs, stock photos, graphics, etc.
• Use colors that stand out from the page—stay away from lighter backgrounds like white
or gray.
• Create graphics that are designed for conversions.
• Include CTAs to encourage clicking.

Messaging tips:

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• Write catchy, actionable headlines focused on setting context and making the user
interested in the content.
• Include compelling statistics or quotes lifted out of a larger piece of content.
• Keep it short and sweet.
• Include shortened URLs to clean up the copy.
• Include a CTA. Check out these best practices.

Check out this infographic on copywriting for conversions.

Video tips:
• Make sure the video thumbnail is compelling enough to make the user click “play.”
• Use your video platform of choice to test different types of video—like animated, human-
centered, word-focused, etc.—to see what your audience responds best to.
• Add text to your videos so people can watch the video silently and still tell what the
audience is saying.
• Want more video tips? Check out this blog post.

Source: LinkedIn

Don’t just select one asset or messaging technique for each campaign, run A/B tests so
that you can tailor your strategy to what works over time. Check out these 10 content types
to test out in your next LinkedIn campaign.

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Create your first LinkedIn Ad campaign

It’s finally time. It’s time to create round one of your LinkedIn Ads. Don’t feel pressured.
We like to think of the first campaign as a first draft. Over time, you’ll edit and revise as you
learn from each test and report, and by the end you’ll have an optimized, lead-generation,
recruitment, or brand awareness machine.

Here’s how to create your first LinkedIn Ad campaign.

1. Sign in to Campaign Manager.

2. Select an objective for your campaign. Remember, these are under the general
umbrellas of Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion and range from brand awareness
to job applicants. Think of your goal for this campaign and choose the objective that aligns
most closely.
3. Choose your target audience and use whichever of LinkedIn’s audience targeting
tools is right for you. You can use Matched Audiences, lookalike audiences, or Audience
Expansion, or create a completely custom audience using LinkedIn’s data.
4. Pick an ad format. Like we outlined earlier, LinkedIn offers Sponsored Content ads in
the LinkedIn feed, Message Ads, Text Ads in the sidebar, and Dynamic Ads featuring the
members themselves.
Tip: Experiment with a few different ad formats like Message Ads and Sponsored Content
for the same audience.
5. Decide on a bid and budget. This is where you’ll decide on the campaign schedule and
budget. LinkedIn recommends starting out by investing in a campaign with at least $100/
day to set a foundation for your long-term marketing goals.
6. Create and preview ad creative. Review our best practices and visual design/video tips
mentioned earlier. Make at least 2-4 ads in each campaign to maximize your audience.
7. Set up payment information and launch!

Want to see how your LinkedIn Ads impact your bottom line and which leads are your
most valuable prospects? Set up the HubSpot and LinkedIn Ads integration.

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 Chapter 5

Optimizing LinkedIn
Ads
Chapter 5

Optimizing LinkedIn Ads

Implement Conversion Tracking

Using LinkedIn Ads is a great way to generate leads and drive brand awareness, but in
order to see the full value of your Sponsored Content, Text Ads, or Message Ads, it’s
important to actually see the data about who’s converting on what content.

LinkedIn’s Insight Tag allows you to track conversions and see which audiences are
converting best for any content in your ads. This helps you see how see how many leads
you’re getting from each of your campaigns, ads, and even target audiences, understand
the return on investment from campaigns, and optimize future campaigns for better
results.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can also use tracking URLs to see where your leads are
coming from in the Reporting tool.

Want to learn how to how to download and install the Linkedin’s Insight Tag to start
tracking conversions? Check out these instructions.

How to Implement Conversion Tracking for LinkedIn

1. Log in to Campaign Manager using your email address associated with your LinkedIn
Page (make sure you use the business email associated with your LinkedIn profile and
LinkedIn Page. It’s easy to add a business email address to your LinkedIn Page).
2. Choose where you want to track conversions.
3. Add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website. If you use the HubSpot CMS, this process

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can be done automatically through the setup process.
4. Create a conversion action.
5. Add your conversion action to a campaign.
6. Measure your performance with analytics.

Want more best practices from the LinkedIn team? Check out this spotlight on campaign
best practices.

Conversion and optimization strategies

When it comes to advertising on LinkedIn, the whole point of setting up your campaigns
for success -- and the whole reason you’re reading this guide -- is to get as much return on
your investment (ROI) as possible.

What’s the point of optimizing your LinkedIn Ads if you’re not sure what results you’re
getting? That’s why monitoring your campaign, understanding what’s working and
what’s not, and optimizing your future campaigns based on the data you’ve uncovered is
essential.

When it comes to monitoring the success of your campaigns, keep track of the same
metrics for all of your campaigns so you can compare metrics.

Metrics to track for LinkedIn Ads

• Website traffic
• Conversions
• Cost per conversion
• Conversion rate
• Form submissions
• Net new leads/contacts
• Engagements
• Cost per click
• New followers (brand awareness)
• Engagements

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• Impressions
• A/B test results

Remember that not all companies use the same metrics in the same way, so use what
makes the most sense for your brand. Make sure you’re tracking the same information for
all of your campaigns so you have data to compare.
Whether you’re reporting your campaign performance to the owner of your company
or team manager, it’s important to be able to analyze and report the success of your
campaigns based on these metrics.

Use the metrics discussed above to determine the:

1. Lead quality: How good of a fit are the leads generated for your product or service?
2. The ROI for your campaigns: How is the money spent on these campaigns benefiting
the company?
3. CPC over time: How much do the leads (or any metric) cost over time?
4. A/B Test Results & Experiments: What are you learning from the A/B tests you’re
running?

Optimizing your LinkedIn Ad strategy

Monitoring and reporting on the success of your campaigns is useful for proving the value
of the work you’re doing for your company, but it’s also valuable for continuing to improve
your campaigns. Was a campaign a success or a failure? What made it so? There’s no silver
bullet to running perfect ads; keep testing multiple topics and formats for your audience
and optimizing your bidding strategy. Use this information to tailor your posting strategy
both organically and through LinkedIn Ads in the future.

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Connecting the dots with HubSpot and LinkedIn

Ads are an essential piece of your marketing strategy. So why wouldn’t you manage ads
in the same place you manage the rest of your marketing campaigns? With HubSpot’s
Ads Tool integrated with LinkedIn, you can do just that. You can create highly targeted
audiences, automatically sync leads from LinkedIn directly to HubSpot, and understand
which ads are influencing your bottom line. Connecting LinkedIn to HubSpot will help
you find a consistent narrative across all of your marketing efforts and tap into better
optimization opportunities.

Learn about HubSpot’s Ads tool and the LinkedIn Ads integration.

Source: HubSpot

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 “When it comes to being
above average as an advertiser
on LinkedIn, you want to think
about two things: relevance and
consistency.”
Gaurav Nihalani, Digital Marketing Manager at LinkedIn

Check out Digital Advertising Strategies by HubSpot and LinkedIn

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Conclusion

LinkedIn Ads are constantly updating and changing to better suit marketers’ needs. By
changing to an objective-based ad strategy, it forces marketers to think about their goals
at the start of every campaign. Using the tips throughout this guide, you can reach new
audiences at over 30 million companies on . We’ll leave you with a few key points—test
everything, collect data over time, use LinkedIn’s audience targeting tools, and connect
your LinkedIn Ads account to HubSpot for the best ads performance.

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