LinkedIn Ads Campaign Objectives

Key Takeaways

if you follow this channel with any regularity you know that we love linkedin ads there are a number of different targeting options and campaign objectives designed to help you meet your marketing goals we already have another video that runs through all of the different targeting options available on linkedin so today we wanted to follow that up with a campaign objectives video there are seven different campaign objectives for linkedin ads so we're going to run through what each one of them does how they can help you optimize towards your goals and run through a few best practices to make sure you get the most out of each campaign objective hopping into the linkedin interface i did a couple of steps without you i clicked the create campaign button and i chose which campaign group i wanted my new campaign to be put in so if you're trying to figure out how i got to this screen that's how i got there but this saves us a little bit of time even though i just rehashed it anyway and now we're right here focusing on the campaign objectives that we want to talk about in this video as you can see here linkedin has started to break these down a little bit for us we have awareness consideration and conversions and just like from the facebook campaign objectives video which you can check out on the top of the screen there are different campaign objectives broken down into these individual buyer stages and with this linkedin is trying to give us campaign objectives that will focus on certain optimization efforts to help us reach the goals that we want based on the buyer stage and the specific outcomes that we're looking for as we go through each of these different objectives there are going to be a couple of things that i focus on specifically you can see down here at the bottom there are a number of different sections that we're going to go through the first is audience audience across all of these different campaign objectives is going to be the same so i won't talk about audience ad format will be different each of the different campaign objectives will only let you use certain ad formats so we'll make sure to call that out as we go into each of the different campaign objectives placement or where your ad will be shown around the linkedin network or just on linkedin will vary a little bit based on which objective you choose so we'll have a check in on that mostly just to call out any of those campaign objectives that will not let you use the linkedin network budget and schedule is another section where we'll spend a decent amount of time because although our budget and schedule specifically are pretty flexible across all of these different campaign objectives this is the section where we're going to set our different bids and action optimizations to try and have linkedin focus on the goals that we want and these vary quite a bit based on the different objective that we're going to be using so we'll spend a decent amount of time here and then conversion tracking is going to be very similar to the audience section we'll have all the same capabilities across all the different campaign objectives to track all the conversions we want so we really won't spend a ton of time here now with all that out of the way let's start to jump into each of these individual campaign objectives to talk about how each of them works show you the different ad formats and the different bidding strategies you can use and then we'll talk about some of the best use cases and some of the downfalls for each of these different campaign objectives so first starting all the way over to the left is awareness and the only campaign type that we have for awareness is brand awareness this is where we want people to learn more about our business you can choose this objective to tell more people about your product services company or linkedin event which in a lot of ways is really what we want to do for all of these different campaign objectives so this is a little bit broad but we do have some areas where we can focus on just making sure we get the word out so let's go ahead and click brand awareness and you can see here that in this first box one of the most helpful things linkedin is going to do is tell you right up at the top if it's going to optimize specifically within your audience and try and help you focus on the right people you can see right here it says your campaign will be shown to people most likely to view your ads so linkedin is going to try to show basically to people who have a profile and they actively use it there are lots of people who just don't log in they don't check things so they're not really going to see your ad so linkedin is going to try to focus on people who will view your ad so we're really only optimizing for impressions here as we talked about the audience section and your targeting is going to be all the same we do have a video that covers all of the different targeting options on linkedin if you want to check that out but for right now we're going to skip that in all of these different campaign objectives and go right to the ad format section with a brand awareness campaign we have access to the vast majority of ad formats aside from a couple others that are reserved for the job applicant campaign objective we can use single image ad carousel image ad video ad text ad spotlight ad follower ad and conversation ad there are a lot of different ad units that you can use here i don't really have time to go through each of these but just know that the ad format that you can use for a brand awareness campaign is very flexible there's a lot of ways you can customize this to make sure that you're getting the message out to your users in the way that best suits you jumping down a little bit here we want to talk about placement next and this is where we can see that brand awareness campaigns allow you to use the linkedin audience network like i mentioned at the top there will be some campaign objectives that don't let you use this network but brand awareness is not one of those so if you want to try and reach up to 25 more of your target audience by running on partner apps and websites keep this box checked and you can reach all of them through the expanded linkedin audience network placement now let's scroll down into the budget and schedule section i'm going to come down mostly to the end of the page here you can see that you can still set a daily budget or you can set a lifetime budget or a daily and lifetime budget so that pretty much gives you all the controls that you would need you can then set up that budget and the schedule just like you would for any other linkedin campaign you've run in the past you can set a start and end date if you want to or you can run your campaign continuously the biggest section that i want to focus on here is this bidding section and as you can see linkedin calls this new because there is a decent amount of adjustments going on right now and how linkedin's bidding strategies can help you reach your goal this is where we're going to see what linkedin will optimize your bids for and what the campaign objective is trying to do and this kind of reiterates what we saw up at the top where it says that linkedin is going to try and focus on the users who are most likely to see your ad this optimization goal here is just impressions deliver ads to members for the most impressions possible as you can tell here this is a static answer we cannot change the optimization goal when it comes to brand awareness campaigns things that we can change are the bidding strategy you'll be automatically opted into maximum delivery or the automated option and that says get the most results possible with your full budget what this means is linkedin is going to try to get you the most impressions because that's what they're classifying as a result here since it's the optimization goal they're going to try and get you the most impressions for the budget that you have they're going to try and spend your full budget that's what that with your full budget at the end of that sentence means there are some additional options you can have here if you want to set some sort of a target cost you can change the target cpm that you use on your campaigns as you can see here i have the target cpm set above my daily budget that's all that warning is so don't worry about that but this way you can start to set target costs if you want to get your brand out there using brand awareness but you still want to make sure that your cpms are within a specific range you can set a target cost of 1000 impressions to reach and as you can see here after you launch your campaign any changes that you make will take effect the next day in your linkedin campaign the cost is most consistent after about 50 results on your campaign so after about 50 impressions in this instance is where you would see the best results that's not a ton to be quite honest just know that after you make a change don't expect your cpms to go down until the next day there is an option hidden down here a little bit and this is where you can start to see the manual bidding option this is where you can control your bids so let's take a look at this with manual bidding options this means that this is the maximum cost per impression that you want to spend linkedin does not do a good job of talking about the difference between manual and target cost but effectively what manual bidding is supposed to do is be the maximum cost per thousand impressions that you want to spend within your campaign whereas target cost that's the goal cost per thousand impressions you want to spend meaning that sometimes linkedin will spend more sometimes it'll spend less but the goal is to kind of get it to that target cost so think of it basically as target or goal cost per thousand impressions and maximum thousand impressions on your campaigns depending on which one of these makes the most sense for you you can choose which bidding strategy is in place we do have another video on bidding strategies that i encourage you to check out especially since linkedin does have some of those higher cost per clicks across the social advertising network maybe you take a look at that video come back here and think one or the other options might make more sense for you based on your budget your goals and your target costs per the results that you're trying to see the last section here is going to be around conversion tracking like i said this is going to be pretty flexible across all of the different campaign types any of the conversions that you want to track on this campaign you can add those here but the campaign will still optimize only for impressions if you want something to optimize for those conversion actions we'll need to choose a different campaign objective but adding the conversions here will be useful because you can still optimize for impressions but you'll be able to track and see any of the view through or click through conversions that are being generated from your campaigns regardless of whether or not the bidding and optimization goals are focusing on those conversion actions before we jump into the next campaign type let's talk about a couple of best case scenarios and a couple of downfalls with the brand awareness campaign objective with brand awareness campaigns it's clear that the only thing you're really trying to do is get impressions so if that's the only thing that you want to do in your ads maybe you have a very specific audience that you just want to remind them that you exist and the only thing you're trying to do is get in front of them and kind of stay top of mind a brand awareness campaign can be great for that if you're not trying to optimize for anything further down that said that's also kind of the downfall of a brand awareness campaign it's not really optimizing for anything specific it's not trying to get more engagement it's not trying to get conversion actions it's not trying to get even landing page clicks it's really just focusing on impressions if you're wanting even as a secondary optimization action to focus on engagement landing page clicks website conversions this probably isn't the campaign type for you so that closes out the awareness portion of this buyer funnel these three separate categories linkedin has so now we're going to move into the consideration phase the first one we're going to use is website visits when you hover over the website visits campaign objective it says i want more people to visit a website destination site on or off linkedin so mostly off linkedin basically you want to drive users to your website marketing landing page or a linkedin event and it will be shown to people most likely to click on your ads so let's choose this campaign type and you can see here that linkedin reiterates that it's going to show your ads to people most likely to click on your ads now don't forget linkedin has some of the highest cpcs across the entire digital advertising landscape we want to make the most of the clicks that we're generating because this campaign type focuses on users who are most likely to click on your ads whether or not you get a good result from that all of the audience targeting is going to be the same here so let's skip all the way down to add format just like with the brand awareness campaigns we have all of the different ad formats available here single image carousel video text spotlight message and conversation ad all of these are going to be available through this campaign objective so there's a lot that you can do here same with the placements we're going to be able to use the linkedin audience network to extend the reach to 25 more of the target audience by using the linkedin audience network so keep that box checked if that sounds like something that's appealing to you so now let's hop down into the budget and schedule section and talk about how we can optimize our bidding just like with a brand awareness campaign you have all the same type of budget and schedule options that are here so i'm going to go ahead and skip past that and focus just on this bidding section for the remainder of this campaign type the first thing you'll see here is the optimization goal with a website visit campaign linkedin is going to try and optimize by default to landing page clicks and this is important because a landing page click and visit is different from just an ad engagement click on linkedin so this is going to try and help you drive users to your website not just click to expand hidden text or click to your company page something like that this is going to optimize to users who actually will make their way to your website unlike the brand awareness campaign you can see that there is an option to change the optimization goal here so let's click that open and now from this drop down we can choose the recommended landing page clicks or impressions and that just reverts you back to deliver as many impressions as possible odds are you're probably not going to want to use impressions unless you see that your click-through rate starts to get really high then a little bit more of an advanced strategy is you might want to switch back to a cpm based bidding model but that's for a different video so right now we're just going to leave it as landing page clicks and have that be our optimization action looking at the bidding strategy these are going to look familiar to the brand awareness section maximum delivery is effectively automated bidding where linkedin is going to automate your bid to try and get the most results possible for your budget aka trying to get the most landing page clicks for your full budget on linkedin so again this is basically going to be the way where you put all the bidding strategy in linkedin's hands and let them automate your bid for you you can also set a target cost and focus on a certain cost per landing page click or a cpc based model to try and get users to your website for a certain cost per click over time so this is going to try and average out to get a 15.96 cost per click some will cost more others will cost less but this is what linkedin is going to try and optimize for and lastly linkedin always loves to hide the manual bidding option so you come down into show additional options and now we can see our manual bidding is here and this is where we can set our max cost per click that we want to have in place for the campaign this looks a little bit different than the brand awareness campaign does because there is an option to enable a bid adjustment for high value clicks it's going to try and optimize for certain users so when we click on this question mark this means that linkedin will automatically adjust a bid 35 percent higher so that you're more likely to get clicks that lead to valuable actions like filling out a form downloading content once they're on your website you can uncheck that if you don't want to use that but effectively what this is is think about it in terms of the enhanced cpc versus manual cpc model in search if linkedin thinks there is a higher opportunity for you to track one of the conversion actions that you have on your campaigns here this bidding strategy is going to let you bid up to 35 percent higher for that user automatically to try and get that conversion action to come through so this is a good instance where if you have a number of different conversion actions and you are really trying to drive landing page clicks but it would be great if you could get those additional conversion actions this might be a good option for you to check if you don't have conversion tracking on your website or you're really just trying to get as many people to come to your site as possible regardless of whether they convert maybe you're trying to build an audience to retarget to later this might be an option that you want to uncheck to make sure that you're really only going to pay that specific max cpc that you put in place because it's not as beneficial to you to bid up to 35 percent higher so think about what your specific goals are with this campaign and either keep that box check or uncheck it based on what you're trying to get out of the campaigns lastly conversion tracking for website visits obviously talking about the bidding strategy this conversion tracking section can be pretty influential based on how you're trying to bid and what your optimization goal is going to be but you'll have the opportunity to add all the different conversion actions that you would like to be tracked whether or not you're optimizing for them just like you could with the brand awareness campaign so with that let's close out with a couple of best use cases and downfalls for website visits one of the things i like to use website visit campaign objectives for is to build a retargeting audience as we've discussed linkedin has very high cost per click because of how specific the targeting options are so it's kind of a great way to have a first touch get a user to come to your website and then remarket to them across all of the other platforms where the cost per click is lower to get back in front of them conversion actions can be harder to come by on linkedin especially if you don't have conversion tracking setup or you only have a hard sell available you don't have something that's kind of a mid-funnel content offer or something along those lines so utilizing a website visits campaign that will optimize for users who are most likely to click on your ads and come to your website can be a great way to make sure that you're reaching the right target audience paying a high cost per click once to get them in that audience and then reaching them again across google facebook instagram microsoft for those lower cost per clicks that the remarketing audiences can get across those different platforms the biggest downfall here is somewhat similar to what it was for the brand awareness campaign it optimizes users who are most likely to click and since the cost per click is high it doesn't necessarily always focus on the people who are going to take a specific action item after that unless you're very confident with your audience or you're enabling that kind of enhanced bidding model it's going to be harder to drive some of those secondary actions through website visit campaigns the second campaign objective in the considerations stage on linkedin is an engagement campaign where we want more people to engage with your content posts you're trying to use this objective to increase social engagement on your content or linkedin event or increase followers to your company page so let's go ahead and click on this and you can see that your ads will be shown to people most likely to like share comment view or click your ads or follow your company and your ads will include a follow button so if you're trying to generate more followers for your company page this can be a great opportunity to do that using an engagement campaign but outside of that this is where you're really trying to focus on people taking action on linkedin making your post have a lot more of that social proof by having more likes shares comments all of that sort of thing as opposed to sending somebody to a landing page or getting them to complete a form on linkedin although they hide it a little bit in the text view here also means that you're trying to get people to view your video ad if that's the ad unit you try and use here keep in mind that it's everything from like share comment but also view on a video which is a little lighter touch than some of the other engagement actions so keep that in mind when it comes to which engagement ad format we're going to use and with that let's actually go ahead and jump down to the add format section and see what we can use here engagement campaigns will let you use a number of different ad formats but you can see that a couple of them are missing we can only use single image carousel video follower and conversation ad we don't have message ads and we don't have text ads available in this engagement campaign type so if that's the type of ad unit you're going to want you need to use a different campaign objective on linkedin to use those overall there's still a decent amount of ad formats you can use here to customize how you want users to engage whether or not it's more focused on liking sharing commenting like it would be with maybe a single image or a carousel ad or doing a video view which might be better for a video ad or following your company page like a follower ad conversation ads obviously there's a decent amount of engagement there to try and open up a message and starting to have a conversation but each of these lends itself to different types of engagement so depending on what you're looking for choose the ad format that best reaches the goals that you want just like with the other campaign objectives we talked about placement you can utilize the linkedin audience network for engagement campaigns so let's hop down into the budget and schedule and most specifically the bidding section budget and schedule is going to be the same customizable levers that we've talked about for the other campaign objectives bidding is where we want to focus here and you can see that the optimization goal is going to be on engagement clicks anybody who's clicking to engage on your ads on linkedin and we can change this but the only other option if we choose the drop down we can choose impressions as the only other action so it really makes the most sense if you're trying to get engagement from this engagement campaign objective to keep the engagement clicks as the recommended piece but here you'll get a little bit more insight into what it's going to optimize for with engagement clicks as the optimization goal it's going to deliver your ads to members most likely to engage with your ads whether it's social actions linkedin page page follows but you'll also see that landing page clicks are in there as well so keep in mind that it's not always going to focus only on the on-site engagement the on linkedin engagement it will keep the landing page clicks where people go to your website included in that optimization goal just like with the other two campaign objectives we talked about you do have the option to set either the automated bid strategy and keep that as the default it'll try and get you the most social actions company follows landing page clicks whatever it possibly can for your full budget you can set the target cost in the same way that we have for the other two where we want to set a specific target cost at the end of the day that we want the average cost per action to be 5.96 or we can set the maximum bid that we want for those actions by utilizing the manual bidding option down here below just like we saw for the website visits campaign objectives there is the ability to enable a bid adjustment for high value clicks and this will again enable linkedin to bid up to 35 higher for users that it thinks are most likely to take additional actions on your site outside of just those engagement actions so again if that secondary conversion action whether it's a form fill downloading content is important to you and you want to bid a little bit higher to get that action out of somebody who also engages keep this box checked but if you're really only focusing on the engagement portion and you don't care if somebody takes that secondary action might make more sense to uncheck it and just leave your manual bidding max cpc in this case of 5.96 in place and not let linkedin bid over that level again just like all the other campaign objectives conversion tracking although still optional is available for the engagement campaign objective so now let's hop back into powerpoint and talk a little bit about some best use cases and downfalls for engagement campaigns whether we like it or not seeing an ad that has a number of people that we follow that have liked it or engaged with it or have commented on it does play a role in whether or not we see that company as valuable or something of higher status so using these engagement campaigns to try and drive social proof or increase your company followers can be really valuable to kind of help build that social proof case across the linkedin platform and make sure that your company looks legit looks like it gets engaged with has a lot of positive followers and kind of helps drive that overall engagement portion of your site one of the bigger downfalls here is that the cost per click is just as high for engagement clicks as it is if they come to your website if you even have somebody who clicks and expand more on some of your truncated text at the beginning of a linkedin ad you get charged for that click when they engaged on your ad and unlike facebook where there's lots of different engagement audiences that you can build based on how people have engaged with your ad linkedin is really only getting there step by step and they only have engagement audiences based on lead gen forms and video views so if somebody shared or commented or liked any of your posts on linkedin you don't have the option currently to create an audience based on that so yes it does drive social proof if you find that that is high value for your campaigns for your business then this might be the campaign type for you if you're trying to make sure that you're reaching those people again or driving high value actions at a lower cost per click engagement campaigns might be a little hit or miss for you since you can't create an audience off of it but they still cost you just as much to get that engagement action to close out the consideration section we're going to talk about video views campaign objectives this is where go figure you want more people to watch your videos and with this campaign objective linkedin is going to show your ads to people most likely to view your videos so let's see what this campaign objective looks like again there's really no further description up in the top and audience is going to be the same so let's hop down into the ad formats here you'll see that this is going to be the most restricted one we've seen so far but with good reason we can only use video ads to drive video views it's pretty logical right doesn't make sense that a carousel ad with images is going to drive video views so here we're going to be limited to only using a single video ad creative type again like most of the other campaigns that we've gone through placements allow you to target the linkedin audience network if you want to and budget and schedule are going to be about the same the next section that we want to talk about is bidding where we're trying to actually focus with a video views campaign linkedin's optimization goal is going to be video views since that's what we're trying to do you can see that we can change this just like we can with some of the other ones and choosing from the drop down the only other option we're going to get is impressions but just like with the engagement campaign this is actually a useful thing to look at because it tells you what exactly linkedin is going to focus on and what they classify as a video view you can see here that choosing this optimization goal linkedin is going to deliver ads to members most likely to view your video ad for two continuous seconds or more two seconds isn't very long i just took far more than two seconds to tell you that two seconds is not a long time but this is the only option that we have to optimize for video views on the platform if that's what we really want this is going to be the only option the good news is that linkedin now has new retargeting audiences where we can create engagement audiences off of users who've watched certain amounts of videos and you can check that out up in the top of your screen so this could have some good audience building components to it if that's what you're trying to do so for now i'm going to leave this as video views and as we've discussed on the other campaign objectives we start off with the linkedin automated bid to try and get the most two-second continuous video views that it can for the budget that you've set you can also set a target cost to try and get a certain cost per video view within your budget just like all the other ones linkedin will give you a range of a suggestion of what you can use but i encourage you to test out something that's maybe a little bit lower and then slowly scale up so that you start to see what you want but over time linkedin is going to try and average to get this 22 cent cost per video view for your campaigns if you want to set a max cost per video view you can click the show additional options button then choose manual bidding and then control your bids in the auction by setting a manual cost per click unlike some of the other campaign objectives we've just discussed video views does not have the ability to have an enhanced maximum cpc to try and get any of the conversion actions that you have set down here at the bottom this is only going to focus on video views and it's only going to use your maximum bid as the ceiling there's no ability to bid a little bit higher that additional 35 for more engaged users you can see down here that linkedin is trying to scare you a little bit by saying that by disabling their maximum bidding option or the automated version you're gonna miss out on an estimated i don't know 700 percent video views and your cost per video view is going to be 88 higher than it would have been okay maybe that's true but i would encourage you to start off more conservative and then scale up rather than just letting linkedin take the reins from the beginning because as we've discussed many times on this channel linkedin is notorious for their high cpcs don't let them just bid as high as they need to to try and get video views maybe start off conservative and scale up over time let's talk about a couple of best use cases and downfalls for video views campaigns before we jump into the final set of conversion focused campaigns in linkedin videos are a great way to get your business in front of your target audience because it allows you to introduce your brand or reintroduce your brand and explain something on your own terms you don't really have to rely on them to read text to click through to a website or click on a product demo to see something in action you can really do it all in a video and i do think videos are great creative options for you to reach your target audience and with linkedin now you can build audiences based on the users who have watched certain percentages of your video so a video views campaign can help you build that audience awareness even if somebody doesn't click and go all the way through to your website so there's a lot of good benefits there but just like with some of the other campaigns you're only charged for the video view rather than the click so whether or not they're actively paying attention they don't even have to engage imagine somebody on their phone at work during a lunch break they're scrolling on their linkedin feed they stop because somebody's talking to them and it just so happens to be on your video and they watch 50 of your video while having a conversation with somebody else not even paying attention you've been charged for that video view and now there's a little bit of a murkiness when it comes to did they actually see it are they gonna be in your audience you created all that kind of stuff so although i really like using video as a way to introduce your message to people i don't always love a video views campaign as the objective since it only really focuses on that two second continuous video view whether or not any other valuable action was taken now we've shifted into the last buyer stage here and that's focused on conversions there are three different campaign objectives we can use on linkedin for that and each one of them has a very different user experience so it really depends on what you're trying to get here the first is going to be lead generation and this along with website conversion are probably my favorite campaign objectives on linkedin because i find them to be the ones that i use most often based on my campaign strategies with lead generation campaigns you can capture leads directly on linkedin and you can use a form that will be pre-filled with people's linkedin profile data to help kind of ease the conversion process just a little bit and capture users information without them ever having to visit a landing page so let's go through the different options we have here starting in this top box linkedin is honestly a little bit cagey with what they're trying to say the objective is lead generation campaigns are where you want to get more quality leads on linkedin and it says that clicking on your ads will lead customers to a lead generation form pre-filled with linkedin profile data that's great that's a good description of what lead generation campaigns do but unlike some of the others it doesn't actually tell you what it's going to optimize for that will have to save down for the bidding strategy section just like with all the other campaign types as we've talked about audience section is going to be the same ad format is where we get to see things a little bit different so here we have some of the ad formats come back a little bit since we now can use something a little bit more than video we have single image carousel video message and conversation ads we don't have either the follower or text ad formats of this campaign so again if that's the type of ad you want to use this is not the right campaign objective for you but also if you want to generate leads directly on the linkedin platform you might need to shift your thinking into one of these different ad formats away from the others that you were trying to focus on lead generation is also going to be the first campaign type where we see that placement is going to be blurred out we cannot use the linkedin audience network for lead generation campaigns these are ad formats that are only going to be available on the linkedin platform there's not going to be any additional reach in place just like all the others budget and schedule are going to be the same so now let's hop down into bidding and see what our optimization options are here as i called out of the top the optimization option is not clear until we get into this bidding strategy section and you'll see here that linkedin is going to default optimize for leads which is what you would want them to do in a lead generation campaign you do have the option to change this by just clicking the change button and then from the drop down you'll see that we have the most options we've had so far we can start off with the recommended focus on leads you can also focus on clicks and delivering your ads to people most likely to click on your ad or revert back to the cpm model and deliver as many impressions as possible for the most part if you're using a lead generation campaign you're probably going to want to focus on leads so i would encourage you to leave the optimization goal as leads to deliver ads to the members most likely to submit a linkedin lead gen form now looking at the bidding strategy this looks a little bit different so we have the automated bid in place and that's the only one that populates without having clicked show additional options if i open that up you'll see here that the only other option is manual bidding if we click on this you might notice that it says manual bidding enhanced and some of the other ones have not said enhanced so by default linkedin is going to automatically adjust your bid up to 35 percent higher with people who are most likely to get you leads on linkedin there is no option to use a manual bid option without enhanced on lead gen ads they are always going to opt you into this 35 flex rule if you're going to use this campaign type and if you want to have any control on your bids this is still going to be your best option because as you can see the only other one is automated so the lead generation campaign type is probably the least flexible when it comes to bidding strategy insofar as linkedin is always going to have some sort of machine learning layered on top of it but from my experience it still ends up performing pretty well i don't see that the enhanced option for manual bidding ends up running up costs a lot higher than it should be although it might seem a little less controlled by the advertiser point of view it actually ends up usually performing pretty well similar to all the other campaign types we've talked about you can still add conversion tracking on this campaign type linkedin is still going to only optimize for people who are going to be most likely to fill out the lead form on linkedin but if you then send somebody to your landing page let's say in your lead generation form you're trying to give somebody a content download but then the thank you portion of that sends the user to your website they can eventually download a brochure or request a demo or make a phone call this is where you might want to add additional conversion tracking options down below to track those secondary potentially further down funnel conversion actions to see how your lead generation campaigns are impacting those secondary conversions even if that's not what linkedin is optimizing for so with that let's talk about a couple of best use cases and downfalls for lead generation campaigns lead generation campaigns work best if you match your call to action with the specific buyer and where they are in the buying process if you're reaching out to a cold audience somebody who's never engaged with you before make sure you have a pretty low stakes or low cost lead and when i say cost i don't mean monetary value i mean their time attention and their information make sure that it is a low cost item for them to get and it'll probably have a good match if you have a warmer audience somebody who's engaged with you before maybe a retargeting audience maybe you're reaching out in an account based list or a crm list of people who have already filled out a form with you before you can ask for a higher stakes lead action maybe a demo or set up a phone call because they've engaged with you before so these always work best when you make sure that whatever you're asking for in the form is going to match really well with where that user is in the buyer process the bigger downfalls here are that you don't get any website engagement because the person usually doesn't come to your website unless they click on the thank you button at the end of the lead generation form the good news is that now you can create remarketing audiences based on how users engage with your lead generation ads whether they opened it or whether they opened it and submitted it so you can re-engage with them a bit on linkedin but you can't do it on the other platforms like i talked about in one of the prior sections where you can start to retarget people based on what they've done on your website on lower cost platforms like google and facebook that sort of thing there are also some limitations within the forms compared to what you can do on a landing page there are custom questions there are custom check boxes you can use which is great and a lot of the form fields will be automatically pre-populated with linkedin profile information which definitely helps increase conversion rate but depending on what you're trying to ask that can be kind of cumbersome if it's only in a lead gen form and not on a landing page there's a little bit of give and take there's not really a best verse worse scenario lead gen versus landing pages have their own benefits and drawbacks but that is a little bit of a limitation with lead generation forms is what all you can actually ask in the form itself the second campaign objective we can use in the conversion section is website conversions and my guess is that this is one that a lot of you end up using and for good reason you're probably advertising on linkedin to get some sort of additional conversion action out of it and this has the most control over what you can use similar to how other platforms let you optimize toward different conversion goals website conversion campaign objectives say that you want more purchases registrations or downloads and you would use this objective if you want to capture leads on your website or drive actions that are valuable to your business even if it's not actually a lead now we can see that linkedin is going to tell us what it's going to focus on and that's going to be showing your ad to people most likely to take the valuable action you define on your website that portion of it is very important and that's why they made that text bold you get to choose what the valuable action is on your website so although it's saying conversions it doesn't actually have to be a conversion it can be something that is maybe a high value content view or maybe a specific time on site or watching a video on your website whatever you can set up a conversion action as on linkedin that can be your conversion focus for a website conversion campaign objective you'll also notice the secondary piece down here that says conversion tracking must be enabled for this objective and that's relatively common sense linkedin can't optimize for a website conversion that it doesn't know what it is so you have to have conversion tracking enabled to use a website conversion campaign but hopefully as i alluded to earlier in this video you have conversion tracking set up no matter what even if that's not what you're focusing on and we're good to go hopefully there's nobody here who doesn't have conversion tracking set up just like with the other campaign objectives we're gonna skip past the audience section let's look at ad format because this is where we start to see our ad formats coming back a little bit we now have all of the same options that we had to start off with with the brand awareness and website visit campaigns and this is the largest set of options that we have available we have single image carousel video text ad spotlight message and conversation ad this is a very highly customizable campaign objective and you can use just about every single ad format at your disposal to reach your target audience on the linkedin platform and as you can see down here you can actually reach them beyond the linkedin platform because website conversion campaign objectives let you utilize the linkedin audience network again so we can reach that 25 percent higher target audience that's off of the linkedin platform itself just like with all the other campaigns the budget and schedule section is pretty standard so let's skip down to bidding options and this is where we see the optimization goal just as we read up at the top is going to be the website conversion that you choose for your campaign if you want to change that you do have the option to come over here and change it and from the drop down you can choose landing page clicks or impressions as well these really only would come into place if you start to see very high click-through rates and you want to start to be a little bit more efficient with your bidding but again that's a little bit more of an advanced strategy i'd highly recommend that you probably just keep website conversions as the optimization goal that you want to have in place here just like with lead generation campaigns we only see automated bids as the default option then under show additional options we can choose the manual bidding but again you'll see that it's that enhanced option to where linkedin will automatically bid 35 percent higher for users that it thinks are more likely to give you that conversion action that you're trying to focus on if this is a very big sticking point for you and you don't want to bid up to 35 higher you really want this 15.96 to be the maximum cost per click that you'll pay i would encourage you to use a website visits campaign objective utilize the manual bidding option and then add the conversion actions that you want in the conversion tracking section at the bottom and you can just leave the enhanced cost per click out of the mix that'll effectively be doing the same thing where linkedin will try to optimize toward the people who are going to click on your ads but it's not going to keep in mind the people who might eventually take that action that's kind of the difference between website visits and website conversions actually back in the day when we did not have a conversion focused campaign to do that type of optimization focus you did just set up a website visits campaign and choose the enhanced bidding so this is basically just a broken out conversion focused objective that already has that setting in place overall i see this conversion objective do a lot of really good things for the accounts that i use and it allows me to optimize toward whatever action i want to take down here you can see conversion tracking section it's not optional this time like we talked about your campaign does need to have at least one conversion action in place to run but you can add a number of different conversions that you want on here and whatever you add here linkedin is going to try and get you as many of those conversion goals as it can through its bidding strategy and by trying to serve the right members of the target audience that you've set so let's talk about a couple of best use cases for website conversion campaigns and a couple of downfalls to get you on your way website conversions are still some of the most customizable campaign type and if you have a number of different on-site actions that you're trying to drive this is the best case scenario for getting those to be completed through linkedin because linkedin will try and optimize toward those actions for you and each time you get a new one it learns a little bit more about who your target audience is so this is the best case is if you have high value actions on your website and you want to have a little bit of machine learning to help you out with that linkedin can definitely do it but just like with lead generation ads if you have a mismatch of your call to action and your audience funnel position it can be a bit of a challenge to see the results that you want additionally linkedin is just not one of those platforms where a new audience some sort of cold or prospecting audience is going to take an action that's really far down the funnel for whatever reason on other platforms you might be able to get people to do this like the first time they conduct a google search maybe the first time or the first couple of times they see a facebook ad they're ready to request a demo on linkedin that is just flat out not gonna be the case if you do see good performance that way congratulations you're in like the one percent of people who see that so make sure that whatever actions you're focusing on are not only those really deep down the funnel conversion actions make sure there's something a little bit more in the middle like a content download or signing up for a webinar something along those lines that will have more conversion actions for linkedin to learn from and optimize down along the path okay we've done it we've gone through six of the seven now we're at the last campaign objective on linkedin and this is a very specific one and most of you probably will not need this campaign objective but i do still want to talk about it job applicants is a very specific campaign objective to where you want to promote job opportunities at your company this lets you tell people about relevant job opportunities and drive more applicants for those opportunities on linkedin and the campaign objective will focus on showing your ads to people most likely to view or click your job ads so it's kind of focusing on the people who are actively looking for jobs on linkedin so this is what it's going to focus on if you don't have job openings at your company this is not useful to you but if you do have job openings on a regular basis whether you're at a large company or if you're somebody who is running job applicant ads all the time maybe you're a recruiter or maybe you work in hr this can be a great campaign objective for you to try and find the right folks on linkedin just like with the other campaign objectives the audience on a job applicant's campaign is still just as customizable but you want to try and think about it in terms of people who are looking for a job not people who are looking for information for a video view something along those lines but overall the audience section is still highly customizable so let's go ahead and down and shift into the add format section here we'll see that the ad formats are quite a bit different here we have two new ad formats the regular ones single image and spotlight are still here but we also have single job ad and jobs ad where you can list multiple different jobs that are available at your company and as you can see here this will promote your jobs throughout the desktop users so this is only going to show up on desktop the single job ad that we have over here is going to create ads using a single linkedin job that will show up in the news feed this does not specify device so that tells us that it's going to show up on desktop and mobile so depending on how you want to reach your audience and how many jobs you have available choose the right jobs ad that makes the most sense for you just like with a lead generation campaign since this is a highly customized type of campaign objective the linkedin audience network is not an available placement on here so you're only going to be able to target users while they are on linkedin but just like the other campaigns the budget and schedule is going to be exactly the same as it could be but we'll hop down into the bidding section here and the optimization goal as you can see is going to be focused on the landing page clicks just trying to get people to the site this is changeable if you come over here you can drop down and as you guessed it impressions are the other available option so with this campaign objective it's very similar to how we would use for something like a website visits campaign the biggest difference with job applicants is that you get those additional ad formats the single job ad and the jobs ad or multiple ad that's how you're going to differentiate this job applicant's campaign objective from the website visits campaign objective additionally this has a little bit less control when it comes to bidding just like some of the other ones that we've talked about recently you only have the maximum delivery or the automated ability here or you have manual bidding but you'll see that this bidding is not enhanced this is going to be just the max cost per click that you have in place but there's also no option to have the enhanced 35 potential increase in bid available here make sure that you're setting your manual bid fair so that linkedin has a fair chance to perform just knowing that it's not going to have any option for that additional machine learning unless you choose the fully automated bidding strategy here lastly you do still have the ability to use a conversion tracking for this type of campaign i would encourage you to only select the conversion goals that are focused on job applicants maybe there's kind of a last confirmation page if somebody applies for a job or if they request a call something along those lines but i encourage you to keep these conversion actions very focused only on recruiting or finding job applicants as opposed to any of the other actions on your site otherwise you might have a bit of a false positive about how these campaigns are performing compared to your other campaigns so this is going to be a relatively simple one but let's close out this video by looking at a couple of best use cases for job applicants campaign objectives and a couple of downfalls as i mentioned this one's probably pretty self-explanatory if you're trying to find somebody to hire to fill either one or multiple job openings a job applicant's campaign objective is going to be the right option for you and it gives you a couple of additional ad formats to work with that are now familiar to people on linkedin and it's something that if you're looking for a job it's easier to tell where those jobs are because of the ad format they look a little bit different than some of the other ones so making sure you use those either single or multiple jobs ad formats will help you stand out to people who are actively looking or at least open to making a job jump the bigger downfall here even though they are limited ad variants they do at least give you those new kinds that are just focused on job applicants but if you did want to use some of the other ad formats you can't do that within this specific campaign objective so for whatever reason you have a different ad format that you want to use but still advertise a job you can totally do that linkedin doesn't dictate what your call to action is what your message is in the ad what the actual creative says whether it's a video or a single image format any of those you can run recruiting campaigns in any of the other campaign objectives but if you want to use those specific ad formats of single or multiple jobs this is going to be the campaign objective for you thanks for watching our video if you thought it was useful give us a thumbs up below we release 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