LinkedIn Ad Formats

Key Takeaways

linkedin is best known for its b2b targeting options and if you've been on the platform you've probably seen a lot of different ads in that same realm the only problem is a lot of them can be really boring to be honest but they don't have to be today i want to walk through all the different ad formats that linkedin ads offer so you can start to create more engaging and useful ad experiences for your target audience on the linkedin platform there are seven different ad formats that we can utilize and i'm going to go through each one of these today in this video if you create a website visits campaign and scroll down to the ad format section you'll be able to see all seven this is one of the campaign objectives that lets us see every one of the ad formats and this is the order we're gonna go in today single image carousel video text spotlight ad which i'm going to refer to as dynamic because there are actually three different types of ads in here spotlight is just one of them message ad and then conversation ad so let's start off with the most common one that you've probably seen more often than not a single image ad each time you create a campaign in linkedin you have to choose one ad format per campaign so in this instance i'm going to leave the single image ad chosen scroll all the way down to the bottom i'm not going to do any of the other adjustments to the campaign for the sake of this video but if you're interested in for example linkedin bidding strategies we have a video for that that you can check out on the top portion of your screen but for now i'm just going to click next so we can get started with our single image ad creation each time you apply an ad to a campaign in linkedin you have two different options of how you can do that in this top portion of the box here you can either browse existing content which are the ads you've used in other campaigns in the past or even from the organic linkedin page or you can create a completely new ad from scratch and today that's all we're going to do so let's go ahead and create a new ad from scratch now that we're in the ad builder you can see all of the different variables that we're going to need to fill out for the single image ad everything is right here on the screen the first thing we can do is name the ad this is optional but i'm going to put something in here just as a placeholder if you noticed over in the right hand portion of this text block there's now 240 listed if i copy and take this text out of here you can see that it now goes back to 255. that's going to be the character count of how many characters you can use to name your ad you probably won't need to get up next to 255 depending on your naming convention but if you do just keep in mind that that's going to be the limit there the next section is going to be the introductory text and this is going to be the text that shows up above the image that you're using for your single image ad so if you're familiar with facebook think about this the same way when you're scrolling through the news feed you see a single image ad and there's some text up above it this is going to be the same thing here couple things to keep in mind as you can see here there is a 600 character count in this introductory text section over on the right but if you come up to this little question mark here and you click on it linkedin suggests that you keep this section under 150 characters to avoid truncation across most devices so what that means is if you go over 150 characters linkedin is going to shorten it and put an ellipses at the end of it so that people have to click view more or read more whichever the text actually is to expand it and see the different text up at the top now in most instances that wouldn't matter except on linkedin even a click on that expansion of your introductory text costs you the same cost per click it would to send somebody to your landing page so we already know that linkedin has very high cpcs compared to other platforms so if you're paying just for people to expand your introductory text you're not making the most of your linkedin dollars so i highly suggest you stick with this 150 character count so that things are not truncated and users aren't clicking on your ad just to read more the last piece you can see here for introductory text is that urls in this field will automatically be shortened so along with the introductory text you can paste your landing page url into this field and linkedin will shorten it into a linked dot i n url that will basically hide the landing page and any tracking information that you want in there but when users click on it it'll expand and send them right to the landing page that you want them to go to before i put any introductory text in here though i'm actually going to put in the destination url to try and prevent linkedin from showing too many errors as i go through this example so down in the destination url field this is where you would put the landing page that you want to send users to as well as any tracking information for any utms or any custom variables that you need on the end of your url there is no separate parameters field in the same way that there is in google and facebook so we need to have all of that looped in here so i'm going to go ahead and put an example url in place despite my best efforts we're still seeing lots of different errors that we have in place here so i'm going to go ahead and add in an introductory text and try and get rid of at least one of them okay so now that i've added introductory text you can see where that shows up above the image and now you can see that linkedin has gone ahead and scraped the paid media pros website found some of our hero images that we had there and gone ahead and created an image for us to use as the single image for our ads quite frankly if we're really just trying to promote the youtube channel this probably isn't bad but it's also not really the best use case of this image we'll get to that in just a second but you can also see that right below the image is where the paid mediapros.com site shows up so linkedin will populate the domain name that you enter into the destination url as part of the single image ad that users see okay now let's remedy this other error that we're seeing here hopping all the way down to headline this text is going to show up a little bit bigger and it's going to show up under the image of joe and i's faces really large in the news feed so i'm going to go ahead and put in a placeholder here maybe not the most attention-grabbing headline but you get it it took the place headlines allow you to have up to 200 characters but in the same way the introductory text will be truncated after 150 headline text will be truncated as well the best practice here is to keep your headline under 70 characters to make sure that it does not get truncated and your users can see the entire headline that you have written out next we can add a description under the headline again this will show up just under that paid mediapros.com url so if we wanted to add something else here we can put that in place we have up to 300 characters to utilize here and if you click on this little question mark you'll see that linkedin almost discourages you from using this your ad description provides more info to people who see your ad the ad description will not be visible in most scenarios and will only appear for a small portion of linkedin members such as those viewing it on the linkedin audience network if enabled this is going to be a relatively low impact section but if you do have something else of value to say maybe try and put it into your introductory text or work it into your headline otherwise you can put it in this description and just know that the majority of folks probably won't see it so for this i'm just going to add some really quick text just to get it put in place as you can see the preview on the right didn't even change didn't show up at all so again this section here is probably not going to be very consequential for your ads before we go back up to image the last piece i want to talk about and the last text option we can adjust in a single image at is going to be this call to action come down here and click select option and you can see there are about 10 options of a call to action that you can use to accompany your single image ad apply download view quote register request a demo choose whichever one makes sense to you let's just use subscribe for right now since it's not going to show up in my description clearly and now we can see in the preview on the right there's a little subscribe button over in the bottom portion of the single image ad and this is what users will likely click on this will give them some idea of what you're trying to get them to do with this ad and it'll help them engage a little bit more okay the last thing we want to talk about is the image ad itself as you can see here there's a little bit of information about the specs that we need to have it can be a jpeg png and it can be up to five megabytes in size we'll talk about the specific dimensions here in just a minute but it's going to be pretty similar to facebook as we talked about earlier the way linkedin got the image that's showing right now is it went to the destination url i provided and it scraped the content and found the image that it wanted to use to fit into this single image format if you want to continue doing that you can change different destination urls and prompt linkedin to go scrape that page and choose an image for you so that is a very easy way to get images added to your page but if you have something that was custom designed and you want to use that specific ad in linkedin need to come down here to upload choose your file and you're all set just like a lot of the other videos on this channel i'm not making a very pretty ad that's not what this example is for i just want to show you what the functionality looks like so here i chose my own image now it's populated on the right and you can see that it fits in the space really nice because it follows the right dimensions here and with that those are all of the different pieces that we can customize to a single image ad if i scroll down a little bit here i only have a couple of options i can either cancel what i just did if i decide that i don't like it or i don't want to i can either check or uncheck this add to campaign box which if you're trying to add creatives into the specific campaign that you're creating you want to leave this checked so it will apply there if you're just trying to build up your library of existing content you can uncheck this to make sure that it still gets built and then you can leverage it later on or if you're ready to go and you want to apply everything to your campaign you just click create and you're all set the best use cases for single image ads are if you can have a singular focus on a specific call to action whether you're trying to do some sort of engagement post to get people to your website offering some piece of content or if you're just really going for those bottom funnel calls to action around free trial or demo request make sure that you're trying to focus on just a singular point and highlighting the benefits you have to the user that you're showing tie your message and your imagery together to make sure that you are creating a cohesive message and strangely enough unlike this image that is from linkedin i literally stole this screenshot from linkedin on the right i would suggest that you have a relatively basic image showing in your single image ad at this point there's three people they're doing lots of different things and unless you're conveying something about being outside maybe and being around other people it's not totally clear what this image would be about and the name of the game in a news feed placement is to get somebody to stop scrolling so the more concise you can make your image and how quickly you can correlate that to the text that's around it the better off you're going to be and unlike the image you see off to the right you can have text overlays within the custom creative that you upload so as long as you're sticking within that 1200 by 627 pixel size you can have text in the image itself along with any of the background imagery whether it's real life or designed in a program something along those lines again intro text needs to be 150 characters not to be truncated and the headline text needs to be 70 characters to make sure that it shows up in all the right spots carousel ads are another very popular type of linkedin ad format they're very similar to single image ads but they allow us to customize things a little bit further we can tell a little bit more of a story as we go through each of the different cards so i've gone back to create a placeholder campaign chosen carousel image ad as my ad format and now let's head into the ad builder as you can see here this account doesn't have any existing carousel ads so the browse existing content option is not clickable so we're going to create a new ad the ad builder for carousel ads looks very similar to the one for single image ads the benefit here is that linkedin is actually getting ahead of me and you're going to be able to see all the different specs that you need to have for a carousel ad before we even jump into the powerpoint so once we get to the powerpoint i'm probably not going to talk about each of these as much because this information has been on the screen the whole time in the same way that we could for a single image ad we can name the ad that we want to so i'll go ahead and put in a placeholder the same strategies for introductory text apply here as they do for the single image ad you can utilize up to 255 characters rather than 600 but they still recommend only utilizing 150 characters to make sure that nobody needs to expand the text because it's been truncated i'm going to go ahead and put a placeholder example in here and then just like single image the next option is for the destination url but this is going to be slightly different than what we had for the last one i'm going to go ahead and put in the paid media pros website just as the placeholder again again you'd want to apply any utm tags or anything like that to the end of that destination url that you need for tracking but since this is an example i'm just going to leave it off so that leads us into the cards builder down here below each one of these cards is going to be the image and headline combination that you see as a user on the linkedin user side so each time you go to a carousel ad you can see that there are multiple images each of them have their own dedicated text below and by default if you click on any of those individual cards you can go to the destination url associated with that card specifically so let's say for sake of example i wanted each of these different cards to be a different video that we have on the paid media pros youtube channel i'm going to go ahead and fill out these first two cards just to show you what that could look like okay so i've created a card for facebook bidding strategies and a second one for google automated rules and each of these has its own image headline and then the specific video url for that content each of the images that i've uploaded here do not follow the 1080x1080 suggested dimensions that linkedin tells you in number three of the specs off to the right but the nice thing is i uploaded the same 1200 by 627 images that i had and now it's allowing me to crop the image so i can come over here click crop it opens up this little builder so all i need to do is figure out where i want to put the image drag it all the way over here i can either zoom in or zoom out depending on what makes the most sense i can also straighten something if for whatever reason the image you upload is twisted to the right or the left you can move it around to make sure that it fits just right and then once you're finished with that you can click crop and again this is not meant to be the prettiest ad just showing you the functionality but now you can see that it fits the right dimensions of the 1080x1080 square the facebook logo is much bigger easier to see and it still applies to the specific card information that we have there in most scenarios the way that you would use a carousel ad is to kind of tell a story from one card to the next whether it's actually something that's chronological you're highlighting lots of benefits you're trying to show off your software whatever it is you probably have these all tied together in some way shape or form it's usually really beneficial especially in the example i have here to have different urls for each of the cards because you're sending somebody to the page that reflects the information that you're showing in the image and showing in the headline it wouldn't necessarily make sense if i were utilizing a facebook bidding strategies headline the facebook logo in the image and then i sent somebody to a web page that didn't have anything to do with facebook or it was kind of hard to find information about facebook so in this example i want to keep this so all of the cards have their own destination urls you can use the same destination url for all different cards so in the instance where maybe you don't have dedicated landing pages or you feel like there's one page that kind of does a good overview of everything you put in the cards and your dedicated page just doesn't do a good enough job you can check this box and have all the cards go to the same url if you want to and then you won't have to fill it out for each of the cards for right now i'm going to leave it unchecked because that wouldn't make sense in this example since i do have exactly the url built that i need for each of these videos as you can see down here you can add another card i have used two out of the ten that i'm eligible to use so you can use up to 10 cards for a carousel ad on linkedin i'm not going to add another card because the process is going to be exactly the same but the last piece of functionality we can use here is to switch which order our cards are in let's say i got these two videos in place the facebook bidding strategies google ads automated rules and i decided that i didn't want facebook to go first let's say i wanted the google ads video to be first you can come over here to these different lines on the side as you can see when i hovered over it it gave me the four-way arrows so i can click and drag this up and now that google ads video is in the first position and facebook is in the position below it so if you ever want to reorder those you can come in here and switch which order the carousel cards are in one last piece you can see over here in bullet point number four in the specs that linkedin has carousel cards can be directed to different landing pages but if the legion form option is selected the cta will link to the same legion form for all the carousel cards so you can use carousel ads in a lead generation campaign objective if you do that you won't have the ability to update each of the different cards for a different form or a different landing page because they're all going to go to the same lead generation form when you're finished we have the same options down at the bottom to cancel add to campaign or create carousel ads work best when you're telling a cohesive story like i said earlier in the image off to the right you can see that this looks like just the story of a singular room we've got people sitting on a couch that in the second card you can see the arm of the couch and the coffee table and lamp and then a lady sitting at a table and then on the other card you can see that table continue and somebody's sitting on the other side so this is how everything is kind of continuous from card to card but you don't have to make a realistic shot of one specific room you could make each of these a specific benefit that somebody could get out of your product or service you could make these each individual customer testimonials there's lots of different ways that you can customize these but i suggest that you make sure that you're keeping a singular theme within your entire carousel ad you then have the same intro text of 255 characters if you're utilizing the website visits or conversion focused campaigns your headlines for each card can be 45 characters but if you're utilizing the lead generation forms the headline can only be 35 characters images all need to be that 1080 by 1080 and you've got up to 10 cards to utilize in a carousel ad the next ad format we have is one that i think is getting a little bit more use as time goes on but it doesn't have nearly as much the presence in the linkedin news feed as single image or carousel ads do and that's a video ad in the video ad builder you'll notice a lot of this looks very similar to what we've seen in the last two options we've got a name introductory text headline destination url and call to action the only thing that's different here is that instead of customizing carousel cards or choosing your image whether you upload it or scrape it from your site is that this time we're going to use a video file so think of this effectively as a single image ad but it's going to be a single video ad instead so i'm going to upload all the different placeholder information following all of the character counts and aspect ratios that we need to in the same way we've done for the other examples up until now the last thing i need to do is upload a video file you can see here that the allowed aspect ratio is between nine by sixteen and sixteen by nine or a one to one so if you're in any of those ranges you can upload your video into linkedin and it should be good to go so the 9x16 is going to be the upright mobile version 16x9 is going to be the wide more landscape and one to one is going to be the square just for fun i went ahead and chose a video that i knew wasn't going to fit the aspect ratio just so you can see the alerts that would pop up here again it reiterates that the aspect ratio needs to be 9 by 16 through 16 by nine it doesn't reiterate the one to one piece the width needs to be 360 to 1920 pixels and the height needs to be 360 to 1920 pixels so make sure that your video fits those specific parameters even if it's got the right aspect ratio those pixels on the width and the height will make a difference now the video is uploaded you can see that the preview on the right is showing you what it's going to look like i've got it paused in a place so that you can't tell who this is because you don't need to know who this video is from the last little bits of customization here are going to only populate once you have a video file uploaded the first is that you can add captions to the video if you want to if you check the box you can see that only an srt format is allowed and you need to upload your own file i don't have one of those so i'm not going to show you what that looks like but if you do need to add captions to your video which i would highly suggest you do because most videos are watched without sound it's going to be very important to have that in place depending on how your video is laid out as you can see in the one that we have in the example there are words in the video and there's only really background music there aren't people talking so this video doesn't require captions but if you have somebody who's talking doing some sort of a voiceover or if it's a conversation i highly encourage you to utilize captions because most users watch videos in their news feed without the sound on at least the first time around so this would be a great way to make sure that you're capturing attention even if somebody doesn't have the sound on for your video the last thing we can do is choose a custom thumbnail and come down here you can see that jpeg and png files only the file size can only be 200 megabytes or smaller if you hover over and click on this question mark here you'll see that the video thumbnail is displayed before your video loads so when somebody is scrolling that split second before your video starts to load is when they're going to see the video thumbnail so make sure it is representative of your video as linkedin would like it to be but also something that is easily eye-catching and kind of follows some of the same practices for a single image ad that it's very simple focused on a certain thing to make sure that people will kind of stop scrolling wait for the video to load and pay attention once you've customized your video ad to your heart's content you can come down here you've got the same options of cancel add to campaign or create videos on linkedin don't get quite the same engagement that we do on facebook users aren't necessarily just to kind of kill time so to get the most out of your video make sure that you're grabbing their attention early within the first three seconds to keep them compelled to keep watching the video linkedin says that videos that are 15 seconds or shorter usually do best and if you're just optimizing for a full video view maybe that is what does best but if you're trying to get users to engage with your brand come to your website something like that you might find that a longer video does better because you're able to put forth a longer story tell more of the benefits and kind of lay out why they should engage with you again don't forget to upload captions if you have some sort of voice over to make sure that everybody is actually engaging and understanding what the video is about and then you can have up to 150 characters for the non-truncated intro text and 70 for the headline the next ad format we're going to talk about are text ads and these have been around the longest on linkedin they were the first ad format that they had available and i think they get under utilized now there are some ways that you can use them they're going to have very different performance benchmarks than a lot of the other ads but i still really like them for some specific strategies you'll see here that when i've chosen text ad that your linkedin audience network setting has been disabled as it is not available for the ad format you selected so text ads are only going to show when somebody is on the linkedin platform and not around the rest of the network the builder for text ads is much smaller than the other ones because there's a lot less that we can customize for this ad format the first piece we can add is an image and these are going to be relatively small the required size is 100 by 100 pixels and you can use a jpeg or png again that needs to be two megabytes or smaller the biggest piece is you can see on the right here in this preview that it's kind of hard to get something too complex in that space the best use of this small image space is probably going to be something like a logo or something very very simple try not to over complicate this specific space because it's going to show up only on the right hand side in a very small image and people don't want to be confused what the image is i'm going to go ahead and upload a placeholder image that we have here just to show you what it would look like i went ahead and uploaded one of our video cards without any editing done to it now you can tell that yes you can kind of make out the google ads logo but in no way can you read that text unless you zoom on it and let's be honest it's going to be on the right hand side of a linkedin news feed nobody's going to zoom in on this to see what it's about so this is just an example to show you you really need to make sure that whatever image you use is very clear and easy to see at a glance in the same way that those linkedin logos are in the other two examples that are there the two text options you have available are a headline and an ad description and these are going to be much shorter than the others and there's no option for potentially truncating the text here you get 25 characters for the headline and 75 characters for the description and that's it so make sure whatever information you put in this text is going to be very short to the point while still telling the user what benefit they're going to get out of clicking on this ad my placeholder text got in just under the wire for the character limits but now you can see that the headline and the description kind of set the table that we're trying to offer some paid media videos over on youtube so come over and subscribe the last option we have for text ad campaigns is to decide where we want to send the user you can send them to a specific destination url on your website which follows all of the best practices of making sure it's the right page and contains all the tracking like we talked about in the other ad formats or you can send somebody to your company page on linkedin if you want them to engage with your company more and maybe follow it engage with your content what have you so you can customize this to whichever experience you want the user to have you can then click create and it'll apply to your campaign i mentioned earlier that i have my own favorite strategies for text ads and this is pretty much the only way i remarket to somebody on linkedin these have the lowest cost per click compared to any of the other ad formats there's going to be lots of impressions very few clicks but usually the incremental leads you get out of a remarketing audience are going to be highly valuable coming from this placement that's where i find the best use case for this but the biggest thing that you need to make sure of is to use a clear image so that people can recognize it quickly correlate it to the headline and the text that you see below so that they're not spending a lot of time squinting and trying to figure out what it is because quite frankly they just won't do that they'll stop paying attention remember you have strict character limits in that linkedin will not truncate any of this you only have 25 characters for the headline and 75 for the description and your image can only be 100 by 100 pixels wide the next ad format is going to be a dynamic ad but in website visits it's called spotlight there are going to be three different options we have here so the first thing i want to do is hop into powerpoint and show you the three ways you can use a dynamic ad one of them being spotlight before we hop into the builder dynamic ads can be used for either the job objective the spotlight which we're talking about now in the example we'll go through shortly or a follower ad each of these you can see has the option to pull in the user's image that you're advertising to along with a company that's next to it so in the first one for jobs you can see that golden phase is the company in the second one it's flexus and in the third it's fixdex but there are also the user profiles alongside and that's the biggest benefit of these dynamic ads is that it makes them feel more personalized because you're pulling in the user's image into the ad itself and just in the same way we're always trying to grab attention either with a clear image on a text ad or having something that is captivating so that will stop scrolling on a news feed either for a single image or a video ad having the user's profile photo show up in the right hand portion of the screen where it doesn't normally exist is something that creates that tie of recognition and might get them to look up over there because they recognize themselves and they're trying to figure out why their image shows up over there most of the customizations among these different types of ads within the dynamic ad format are going to be relatively similar so we're just going to stick with the spotlight ad for the sake of this video so now that we've covered that let's build a spotlight ad knowing that this is going to be mostly the same process as if we were going to build a jobs or a follower ad the first way we can customize our spotlight ads is to add a background image but if we do that there is a trade-off if you hover over this question mark the add background image is optional if you include a background image there will be no add description and the member's profile photo will not be pulled into the ad so i'm going to go ahead and just put an image in here that'll show you what it looks like when the person's image goes away again this is a super ugly example don't make ads that look like this but now you can see that my background image that video card is showing up in the entire space behind the text and the profile logo that we've provided in this instance it looks like we're advertising on behalf of google ads which sorry they probably won't get too mad about that but this just shows you that it takes away some of that personalization that a regular spotlight ad would have but if this background image is important to you and you find this to be the most compelling way to advertise your offering here then make sure that you upload the right dimensions which are 300 by 250 pixels and it can be a jpeg or a png format for now i'm going to remove this because i want all the other options to come back the next section we get is the add headline this is going to be only 50 characters long and linkedin tells us this is going to be the biggest portion of the ad that users are going to pay attention to aside from the images make sure it's a compelling headline to get the user's attention and make them want to click through next you can customize your company name if you want it to show up different than what it's going to from the ad account that you're in as you can see here the company name is the text that will appear when a linkedin member hovers over your company image because right now in the preview off to the right you'll see that this company name is not showing up anywhere so that's where this will come into place linkedin does specify that you can use other custom text here so even though it says company name you can utilize this to kind of be whatever you want within reason just make sure you're sticking within a 25 character max for this field the company image down here is something that will pre-populate based on the page and ad account that you're advertising from but you probably will see that whatever ad account you're in it'll automatically pull in the linkedin profile image of either the person or the company that you're working with the next piece of customization is around the user's profile image the box is automatically checked and it's showing you in the preview on the right that it's going to populate the user's image this is one of the important pieces of trying to tie the personalization of a dynamic ad to the user who is seeing it you can remove the user's profile image if you don't want it to show up if for some reason either you or your company feels like it's a little bit creepy or it's just not performing as well you can remove this but linkedin warns against that because it does create greater engagement when that profile shows up because it's eye-catching because you recognize yourself and you're curious why your image is showing in a spot that it isn't normally but if you want to get rid of it you can just check this box and now you'll see that it's only going to highlight the company logo that we've provided but all the text is going to still be there and everything else will still be the same you'll just lose a little bit of that personalization i'm going to go ahead and add it back in for the example and then the last piece we have is the add description as you can see with the text limits it's a 70 character space and linkedin suggests that you use this to further describe the benefit that you're trying to call out in the ad headline itself lastly we utilize a call to action and unlike the other ad formats linkedin doesn't give us a drop down of calls to action we can actually just type in freeform what we want our call-to-action to be down here the preview text has been saying join now the whole time but in reality that was only populating for the example you have to actually type that in and this call to action only has 18 characters available you can see here that i've actually typed in join now and it has a character count of 10 because that's what i have left but just to show you if i remove that text it now says 18 the preview has gone back to normal but as soon as i click out of this field linkedin gets mad and tells me that it can't be blank just remember that you have to write something in here this join now does not automatically populate for you you need to place it back in here yourself and then lastly you can customize your destination url with the right page and tracking that you want to have in place as i mentioned earlier one of the biggest benefits of the dynamic ad is that you're using that personalization and pulling in that user's image to grab their attention and either get them to engage with your offer look at your potential job openings or end up following your company page the specs around this we talked about them a little bit as we were going through it intro text can be up to 50 characters call to action is customizable at 18 and your company logo needs to be 100 by 100 the same dimensions that we would use for a text ad next we're going to talk about message ads which previously were sponsored in mail ads they're going to be very similar to a conversation ad which we'll talk about in a little bit but these mostly resemble an email just showing up in the user's linkedin inbox when we get into the ad builder it's going to look a lot different than the other ones because we're effectively writing an email like i said earlier rather than putting an ad in somebody's news feed to be quite honest i'm going to go through this format relatively quickly because we already have a video that goes through more in-depth information about message ads formerly in mail that you can check out in the top portion of your screen right now for the moment we're just going to give this a placeholder name and the first thing you need to choose for a message ad is who is going to be the sender since i said this is like an email somebody has to have sent that email you can utilize either a person in the way that i have it here it defaults to me or you can have it be a company that sends this message linkedin has found that users are far more likely to open an inmail and engage with it if it's sent from an individual user as opposed to sending it from a company the biggest thing you need to make sure of is that whoever your sender is makes sense to the user depending on what the offer is what their job function is how you fit into their work life make sure your message ad is coming from somebody in a place of authority rather than just some random person within a company that their job doesn't really line up with your user's job you can get more information about choosing your sender in that other video i referred to so now let's jump into the message portion itself just like with a regular email you're going to be given places for a subject and a message to make sure that you're reaching the user and conveying the benefit of whatever call to action you're providing here your subject line can be up to 60 characters and just in the way you would for an email you want this to be relatively short concise and be eye-catching and appealing to somebody so that they'll open up the message that you're sending them down below the message text is the equivalent to the body of an email and on linkedin you have up to 1500 characters to customize your message here there are lots of different formatting options you can see here just in the same way you would in microsoft word or in your email provider whether it's customizing the text through different formats if you're trying to use bullets or numbers you can also add links and you can insert custom fields which you'll see here over in the pro tips section talks about how to dynamically insert somebody's first name last name company name their job title and or their industry into the message this is why when you go into linkedin some people who are sending out clearly mass emails can start off something saying hi michelle because they're dynamically pulling in my name for my linkedin profile into the body of this message ad once you've customized the message the way you want it to be you can add custom terms and conditions through a custom footer linkedin says that it will apply its own terms into the footer of a sponsored message but if you need to also have something in place here for your business to be covered legally this is where you could add that in you just come over here add the check box and now you have a new text field where you can add the custom terms and conditions for your company you have a lot of the same text edit options that you do in the message itself so you can customize this to your heart's content just like the other ad formats we've talked about you can put in a custom call to action and the landing page url for that call to action with any additional tracking information that you need in place the last piece that you can customize here is the banner creative which is optional but it allows you to upload a 300 by 250 either jpeg or png that will accompany your message ad and show up just to the right of the body copy once somebody has opened up your message again if you want more details and best practices on that check out the message ad video that i referred to earlier the best use case for message ads is to utilize it as something that is an exclusive offer to a small group of users this is not something they can find on your website it's not your free trial that you're advertising to everybody and it's probably not your industry report that you're also utilizing in your single image ad campaigns this offer needs to be something that justifies showing up in somebody's linkedin inbox as opposed to just being a part of the regular news feed the more exclusive the bigger benefit the bigger discount you can offer here the better off you're going to be your sender needs to have 30 characters in the name the subject line can only be 60. message is huge up to 1500 characters with those customizable fields and adding in a call to action button and then your accompanying banner can be 300x250 the last ad format we're going to talk about are conversation ads and these are very similar to message ads but they have a lot more engagement with them and they resemble the messenger ads that we can have on facebook so before we get into the builder i'm going to hop into powerpoint and show you a gif of how users can engage with a conversation ad on linkedin just to set the table so you know what the user will see when we're talking about each of the individual aspects of the ad from the user perspective a conversation ad is kind of like a choose your own adventure as you can see here somebody showed up in the inbox she then clicked on the engagement she clicked tell me more and now she can go to sign up for a demo fill out a lead generation form she can go back to the conversation click visit the website and end up going someplace else there's a lot of different ways that people can engage with it and again it all comes back to they're going to see it in their inbox open it up and start the conversation from there it's almost going to be like you have a bot following that person engaging with them and making sure that they're able to take the next step in the user journey that makes sense for them engaging with your company the conversation ad builder starts off looking similar to messenger ads but you can tell that there's already going to be a different process here because we've got these steps one two three up here at the top so i'm going to go ahead and put in a placeholder name for this just like with message ads you can then choose your sender and banner creative and custom footer for terms and conditions if you need to for now i'm going to leave all that alone and we're just going to go to the next step to continue customizing our conversation ad the second step allows us to choose from templates this helps you so that you don't have to start something completely from scratch if you're not exactly sure what to do with a conversation ad the first option is going to be to drive event or webinar registrations which is pre-selected you can see in the preview off to the right that there is a bit of text here which is customized a bit that also has some specific call to action buttons down below this is going to effectively be the template that linkedin is offering you and there are templates for all different types of engagement this one is around events and webinars but there are different templates for trials and demos enrollment for programs website visits asset downloads professional services a survey or a poll of your audience there's even more if you hover over here and scroll down you can see promote a podcast recruit new hires get donations and volunteers or if you really just want to go for it you can start something completely from scratch and start with a blank conversation ad if you're more advanced and you know exactly what you want to do you can customize something from scratch and just start with a blank template it'll look like this you literally get to start from scratch but for now i'm going to start with drive asset downloads because that tends to be the call to action that i see work best on linkedin rather than trials and demos that sort of thing and i want to walk through what it looks like with the specific template in place now we can start to customize this template for what makes the most sense for us we've got the intro message here you can see that 319 characters are still left you have up to 500 characters to put in this field so make sure you're using them wisely but obviously you can put in the dynamic fields as you can see here with the first name that has the percent symbols around them but you do need to make sure that you customize any text that is in the brackets and then also has all caps this will not be dynamically added in here so you need to change the name title company type of asset and value prop from this template to actually reflect what you're offering so this is where you need to customize things the first name section will apply and will dynamically populate but you need to customize the rest of the text you can see that linkedin is also yelling at you about this down here that's what this warning is reminding you to replace that text for now i'm just going to leave it as it is the next piece is we can add an image if we want to we can check this box you can see here that the size must be 250 by 250 and it needs to be a jpeg or png up to five megabytes so again i'm just going to put in a placeholder and the interesting part here is that although my image does not follow the 250 by 250 dimensions that we put here linkedin also didn't crop it so depending on what image you have and what you want to use here try uploading an image in the exact format that you want and just see if it takes it because it's not forcing me to crop this to be a one-to-one ratio it's letting me stick with the 1200 by 627 dimensions that i have here so just keep that in mind but you can see where that populates just below the intro text and right up above those calls to action that we have in this conversation ad so that if you're offering a piece of content for example it would be great if i actually had an image that related to the content that i was offering so let's say in my intro message i customize it to say that i'm offering insights into facebook bidding strategies this would be the right image that we would accompany with that if we scroll down a little bit we can start to customize the call to action buttons that are listed over on the right first thing i want to call out is that down here we can have up to five calls to action at this initial stage so depending on what steps you want the user to take make sure that you have everything mapped out the way that it needs to be for now i'm going to stick with the two messages that are here and just say yes i'm interested and show me more you then get to choose the action that you want to happen to the user when they click on your cta button so here it says show next message but you can choose from the drop down that says send to website so if i wanted to just send somebody to a website i can then add in the destination url i might want to change the button text that says yes i want to download it so that it they know they're going to the website but you'll also notice that when i clicked send to website the button preview over here changed and now it has this little box with an arrow pointing out of it which at this point is the international symbol for i'm taking you to a different website so this should also give the user some insight that they're going to be leaving the page that they're on if they click that call to action all the best practices apply for this destination url make sure it has all the tracking and everything like that that you want in place but for now i'm going to shift this back into a show next message just so linkedin won't throw errors at me each time someone engages with any of these calls to action there needs to be some sort of response from you on the conversation ad front even if somebody goes to a different website url you want to make sure that there is a continued conversation going on here for each of these different call to action buttons you have you get to have a separate response for each of them and you can adjust what you want that to look like by clicking edit response now that i've done that and scrolled back up you can see there's a new message at the top it says great we think you'll really love it and if you look over in the preview here you'll see you clicked yes i'm interested this is exactly how it will look to the user on the other end it's reiterating to them you clicked the yes i'm interested button and now here is the next message you can see that great we think you'll really love it message down here now we have two additional call to action buttons that has the download now and what else do you have call to action buttons that you can see over here on the left the functionality of building the conversation is going to be the same as you go through each of these different stages you can always edit the response and make sure you're sending somebody either to the next stage of the conversation or to a different relevant page on your website just like we had up above you can go to add an image so we could customize the second message if we wanted to and if we wanted to return back to where we were and continue editing the message we see up here you can just click previous message and now we're back to the beginning of the conversation and we can adjust any of the things for the show me more button we can add another button any of those pieces lastly one cool little trick that linkedin lets us see is the flowchart for this template so that's going to be up here over above the preview in this blue text so i'm going to click on that and now we've shifted so that we're no longer seeing the preview we're seeing the flow chart and you can see that you can switch right back to the preview if you want to by clicking the view preview button but now you can see how this entire template for download assets is laid out we've got the message with the two buttons we talked about we then have the response to the yes i'm interested button and then what will happen there and then we've got the response to a download now to what else do you have and it's all the way mapped out down to all these additional steps so you can see what this template looks like if at any point you decide you want to edit a specific piece and you don't want to click through all the stages in the builder to the left you can easily come over here click into this field and now the section to the left is going to populate that portion of the conversation ad template builder so you can customize it to your heart's content once you're finished setting up your conversation ad and you feel really good about it you can do the same thing and just click create and it will apply to your campaigns like all the other ad formats like i mentioned earlier utilizing short concise language is going to be best for conversation ads make sure that you're not taking too much time to get to the point and you're also utilizing simple words don't go too overboard on trying to make sure that people know that you have a great vocabulary make it easy for them to digest and engage with and then make sure that you're asking questions it's important to utilize the different calls to action that you have in here and send the user either to a different website or engage them on a secondary step within the conversation itself but it doesn't need to be just a one-sided conversation of you telling them what to do it might make sense to ask at the beginning whether they are a small or large company or if they are a buyer or if they're somebody who just influences the decision within their company and then you can send them to the relevant information so that they can make a better decision and either get the software or tier within your service that fits their company size or you can provide them with what the financial information would entail if they're the buyer or you can give them the information and the resources to build a case to the buyer within their company if they're only the influencer of that decision you're allowed up to five different call to action buttons and each of those can have 25 characters the messages themselves can have 500 characters and the image that can accompany that is optional but it can be 300 by 250 pixels as you can see linkedin has done a really good job of providing lots of different ad formats so that your b2b ads don't have to be boring you can create a compelling single image ad or turn it into a story type format with a carousel you can utilize a video so that all they have to do is watch or you can even get to a point where you have a conversation with them back and forth and let them choose their own adventure of how they engage with you in a conversation ad so don't settle for stale b2b ad copy make sure that you're giving the user some sort of an enjoyable experience while you're trying to get them to know your company thanks for watching our video if you thought it was useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to get notified and when a new one comes out be sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel you