LinkedIn Ads Tutorial for Beginners - Step-by-Step Guide with Expert Tips and Best Practices

Key Takeaways

in this video I'm going to show you how to set up your LinkedIn ads account navigate the different sections of your account and then create your first campaign from your LinkedIn home page you're going to want to go up here to advertise if you don't see that you're going to go to business and then it'll be here but because I use it a lot I have it right here in order to set up a new account you're going to go to create on the top left and go to create account here is really where you'll be able to create an account and give it a name so I'm going to call this Tyler's test ad account like that we're going to switch this to Canadian Dollars and then we're going to link an existing company page so if you don't have a LinkedIn company page you can create one using this button here and if you do you can just start typing the name to search for it here we have the PPC marketing toolbox so I'm going to select this one and then I'm going to go to save so when you create your account you're going to land in the campaign group section so LinkedIn ads is based on campaign groups campaigns and ads at the campaign level is where you're going to create your audiences so each campaign Can Only Hold one audience and then you're going to actually add ads to the campaign so what a campaign is essentially a grouping of an audience and a collection of ads groups are a higher level structure of your account where you can actually group campaigns based on different objectives so this really depends on the strategy and the account structure that you're trying to achieve so the main benefit of actually using groups and giving this some forethought is that when you have campaign groups set up you can actually analyze the metrics of your different groups so if you're grouping campaigns based on stage of the funnel you could have a group for your cold audiences your warm audiences and your hot audiences so cold would be the first time someone you're advertising to them one would be if they engage with your ads in the past and hot could be if somebody for example already downloaded a resource you might want to show them different messaging or book a demo ads or those type of uh different assets so giving some thought to your structure initially will actually help you manage your account down the line to better optimize it with more clear data having us that segmented data so here we have the default group to start I'm going to put this on pause for now and I'm going to give it a name so I'm going to call this group cold top of the funnel and then I will call it single image and then I'm gonna keep this off run continuously from start date and then I'm going to go save so that's the cold single image now I'll create another one for warm and then you could say remarketing or retargeting whatever language you prefer I'm going to turn off group objectives so typically I like to set the objective at the campaign level and not the group level so I'm going to turn this off then I'm going to set this uh leave this as is and just go to create one thing you'll note is that I've I say single image and the reason is I'd like to separate my different ad formats into different groups so I will typically put video in a different group and the reason is that video click-through rates uh video frequency everything is different and so you just want to analyze it differently to not really Clump your data together so because those ads behave very differently I find it's best to separate them just to look at that data separately so here we have cold and warm and that's a good start for a group structure so before I dig into creating campaign audiences and ads I want to navigate here and show you how to navigate your account so in this left section this left column is where you'll be able to navigate the different elements of your account so here in the plan for example we have the audiences in brand safety so this is where you'll be able to create your audiences in terms of brand safety that is where you can select which websites you want to show on The Audience Network but typically I don't use the Audience Network so you won't often need to go here the most important places that you'll be going is the advertise so this is where you'll create your campaign groups and your campaigns and your ads the second most important place where you'll be going is in the analyze section here is where you'll be managing your Insight tag your conversion tracking and your in your website demographics so after you have your Insight tag correctly installed on your website LinkedIn can actually tell you who's coming to your website and you can see that in this data here next you can look in the asset section so this is where you can create lead generation forms that's where LinkedIn lets you have pop-up forms that people can fill out that are automatically filled out based on their profile information so people can actually become leads without ever even coming to your website so that's a really powerful functionality as well here we have the account settings so here in the manage access is where you'll be able to add people to your account give them different permissions as a as an account manager or just a content manager for example here in the billing section is where you'll be able to create your billing account so you can set up your credit card and add in your tax information and then here in the edit account you can just basically change your the name of your account um so to start you know we've just created this new account the first thing you're going to want to do is go into analyze go into inside tag and create the Insight tag so this is essentially the LinkedIn ads pixel and that's going to let you set a remarketing list and it's going to let you set up conversion tracking as well so these are two very important parts of your account and the first thing to do is to set up your Insight tag so you're going to go agree and create and you're going to use Tag manager so what you're going to do is copy this ID you're going to have to have tag manager correctly installed on your website and then you're going to have this Insight tag fire on every page on your website so I already have this set up and the way I have that set up if I go into here it's the LinkedIn Insight tag 2.0 and I have my partner ID as a variable but this is actually my number so in your case you could simply put a number or you can create a variable like I did and then you that would just simply allow you to reuse that variable quickly when you create a conversion when you create conversion tracking down the line but it's not required so basically you just want your your partner ID to be here you want to fire all on all pages and I'm just going to discard that and the way I have my variable set up we can see that here it's just the value so it's essentially the same thing the one thing to note is that I'm using the Insight 2.0 and I have another video about this topic on the channel so it's important that you select a 2.0 tag it's simply an upgraded more recent tag released by LinkedIn that should be more reliable in tracking so the way you would find this in the tag section you would go to new and rather than actually type so you won't actually see the LinkedIn Insight that you would probably actually see LinkedIn Insight that's the wrong one so you're going to want to go to discover more tag types and then from here you'll be able to find the 2.0 tag and then you'll be able to select it here you should then just accept all of the permissions that it requires and you'll be good to go so that's how you set up your Insight tag after that's set up you can go into conversion tracking and it's actually really easy to set up thank you page conversion tracking without even needing any code at all so if you simply have form submissions on your website and you want to track those you can go to create a conversion create an online action and then you can call it whatever thank you page you want [Music] for example like this you can give it a value as well and also a category so you're going to want to give this the category that's most relevant in most cases it'll be lead request quote or schedule an appointment so we'll click select lead in this case I would suggest also to give it a value that'll help you down the line when you have multiple actions set up just to try to optimize more for the better ones or the more valuable ones it just helps you create a more fair representation of your conversions then we have our different click and view windows so this means if someone clicks on an ad and then converts how long should it look back so this is 30 days for clicks seven days for views and I will typically leave that as the default this is where it gets a little more abstract and this can vary based on account managers and also the accounts so there's multiple ways to set up your conversion tracking and unfortunately LinkedIn does not have the best conversion tracking attribution system so what I mean by that for example is with Google ads you can actually have fractional conversions so if somebody clicks an ad and then a week later they see a remarketing ad and then they fill out a form Google can give you know 40 to the first ad 60 to the second so it can give a fractional of 0.4 and 0.6 to each touch point or maybe 0.5 or 0.5 but the benefit of that is that when you're looking your overall numbers that one form submission is one conversion and it's split across two campaigns LinkedIn ads unfortunately does not do fractional conversions so we see this last touch each last touch last if you select last touch each it'll give a full conversion to each campaign that has touched the user before they converted so if somebody clicks on an ad and then a week later they click on a remarketing ad and then they book a demo you'll have two conversions in your account each campaign will have a full conversion so the benefit of this is that you have a better Clarity on the user journey in the user path but you're over accounting conversions when you're looking at your cost per conversion metrics however when you click last campaign last touch it's the opposite where only the last campaign gets that conversion so in this case you're losing that Clarity on the customer Journey but you're not over counting conversions so it's kind of just a thing you have to consider and but when you select which path to go in a lot of cases I choose last touch last it's not perfect but to me um I find the last touch each often can be hard to report on and and clients may you may overestimate so I tend to go for last touch last and I do recognize that I am losing some of that attribution there in terms of multiple touch points so then I would go to next here if you have campaigns set up you can select which campaigns you want to apply this conversion to so you're going to select them and then go next here's how you can choose how to set up your conversion so the easiest way is actually using page load and this would be the thank you page of your form submission you can also actually do event specific and that'll take some more work within tag manager where you can set up custom triggers to track button clicks or clicks on an email link or video view plays anything that's kind of required that's a little more custom you can set up using tag manager using event specific but for a thank you page the best way to set it up and the most robust way is actually just using a simple page load and keeping it simple that way so if this is a thank you page I'm going to select page load go matcha Earl that contains and then I'm going to put a part of the path as though as to what the thank you page is so typically it would be like thank you sometimes it would be maybe thank you webinar if that's your webinar maybe it would be thank you download whatever it is and and you can do it as specific as you'd like so if you have all say all of your thank you if you just want a general catch-all campaigns thank you and all your forums have a thank you within it that could work but you can also create multiple conversions and create them as segmented as you'd like as long as your oral structure uh can accommodate it so say you had thank you quote you could then create this conversion you could then go back and create a new conversion and go thank you service and maybe that's somebody that's looking for a service um you know agreement or something so whatever your Forum structure is you can use thank you Pages like this and that's the easiest way and actually the most Fail-Safe way to do it um because everything is super clear within the account so then afterwards we would then go to create here and now we have a conversion created now if we go into the plan section then go to audiences now that we have our Insight tag installed you're going to want to set up a remarketing list and you want to set this up as soon as you can because remarketing if it's based on website visitors will only start collecting after it's been set up so we're going to want to go to here create audience go to website and give this a name here so I'm going to call this all website visitors and I'm going to name it in terms of how many days so one thing to keep in mind is with LinkedIn your audience size has to be more than 300 people before you can Target it so depending on how much traffic your website gets you may need to keep this as a long duration like 180 days but if your website gets a lot of traffic you might want to have for example multiple lists you can have a list of 180 days which you target with a small budget and then you can have a list of 30 days where you target with it of a bigger budget so people who have been to your website more recently you can actually allocate them more budget and more ad spend and that that typically works well so in this case I'm just going to create one audience so I'm going to create this one here at 180 days and we want this to be a general remarketing list so all website visitors so I would typically just go contains slash and that'll capture everybody who visits your website because typically your Earl will contain slash or you could put your brand so whatever your brand Earl is you can just do that I would just caution not to put a full long Earl here with all the https and all the slashes and all the.com um you just want to avoid any chance of your tag not firing so we like to do a catch all contains brand to really make sure that you're just not missing any traffic there so then we're going to go to create agree and create and that's that so this is not no signal yet but typically after you set it up you should see that you're getting a signal within a couple of hours so now we've done most of the hard work of setting up an account we can see here we set up our Insight tag we've set up our conversion tracking we've set up our remarketing list in the audience section so now we can dig in to create our first audience and campaign so in the advertise section here we're going to go into our cold group and we're going to create a campaign within our cold group so we're going to go campaign we're going to go next and here we can give it a name so for now I'm just going to call it cold and I'll show you how after I like to name things in a way that you can see here that's a descriptor of what's inside the the campaign so that'll just help you down the line when you're analyzing your account you can see which audiences you're referring to when you're looking at the the data when you're looking at the numbers for now I'm just going to keep it as cold and I'll just touch briefly on the campaign objective so here is where you're going to select your objective and then afterwards the ad format so one thing to note is that a campaign can only have one objective and one type of AD so you have to choose this carefully they do all work in certain cases I do have a strong preference for website visits engagement and lead generation so I tend to use these three the most however the other ones have their purpose as well so just uh the reason for this is actually because each campaign has chargeable clicks based on different actions so for brand awareness this is good if you want to reach a bunch of unique people so new people and to make your budget stretch farther in terms of just trying to reach new people but the downside is you're forced to use maximized delivery so because of that you're paying for by impression so when you're actually comparing the performance of a brand awareness campaign versus a website visit it's the cost per website visit can actually be much higher in a brand awareness campaign so I tend to avoid this in most cases however I do use it sometimes when the goal is really to just try to get new eyes on your ads for website visits for example you only pay when someone clicks towards the website so that's great if you just want a simple cost per click you know it's a click to the website engagement on the other hand you pay for engagement click so this includes likes comments follows but the benefit is that you're actually your ad actually gets a follow button so that can be really useful there lead generation you're paying based on uh if they open the form or um yeah essentially if they click on the image or the button to open the form so you'll you'll pay for that and so these clicks tend to be a little bit more expensive than website visits but this is a really powerful ad format that lets the user actually fill out a pre-filled form submit their information get their resource that you the marketing resource that you're giving them like a case study or a download or an asset right away with two clicks so it's it's really functionally gray so we do tend to see lead generation convert at a lower cost in website visits it's not impossible that your landing page outperforms a form but in most cases the form is going to outperform the landing page because it's just so easy you have to have a really well structured landing page with really compelling ad copy with really strong call to action and ux experience to outperform lead gen um but they both have their purposes so if it's you know website visits for example you can actually include a lot more messaging on the landing page so you might get higher quality leads as well so there's always some give and take with the different campaign formats but I do tend to hover around these three the most so in the top of the funnel I'll tend to use website visits and engagement and then I'll tend to use lead generation more in remarketing to get those resource downloads so for this one I'm going to select website visits and we see here our audience size is 23 million people so what I'm going to do is actually work through building an audience so I'm going to add United States I'm going to select permanent location and we're going to close this so typically I would select per minute so we're just targeting people who are permanently in that location um actually before I dig into building the audience I'm going to talk about three golden rules about setting up your LinkedIn ads campaign and if you do these three things you're well ahead of the curve in getting good performance out of your campaigns or at least much better than you would if you didn't do these things so let me show you this so there's three things one of them is uh enable audience expansion so we haven't defined our audience yet in terms of demographics here but what this is saying is if LinkedIn thinks it can do well by targeting people outside of that should you let it and we're going to tell it no because we want to Target the audience that we're going to build in a minute so we want to respect our targeting so we're going to turn this off and not let it go outside of our targeting the next thing we're going to do is turn off the Audience Network this is a basically a collection of third-party websites where LinkedIn users can be found so this is much like the Google ads Display Network where you're not showing on Google search in the example of Google but here you're actually not showing your ads on LinkedIn you're showing them on a bunch of third-party websites there's some quality websites within that list of of third-party Publishers but the majority are not that well known and there's a lot of skepticism in terms of the the quality of the traffic that comes from the Audience Network so typically I would suggest to turn this off and the problem with this is that it eats your budget if you've turned it on you're going to find that 95 of your budget is spent on the Audience Network your ads won't even show on LinkedIn so we're advertising on LinkedIn we want to Target people on LinkedIn so turn this off as well now we're going to set our daily budget whatever that is you can set your budget here and the last thing I'll do is definitely I'll recommend starting with manual bidding um this is going to give you much more control in your ad spend and it's going to help you get lower cost per clicks and get more clicks out of your budget so typically I will start with manual bidding I would turn this off and I will actually go well below the recommended bids so I would set this at around ten dollars to start and we're going to see if we spend our full Daily budget and if we do well we just got better performance than LinkedIn would have because it's almost guaranteed that if you use maximize delivery you're going to have higher cost per clicks and get less clicks out of your budget so you're typically going to try to get better performance out of your campaigns if you set your bids manually and then adjust your bids based on the performance so we're going to set that as manual and that's really the top three things to do um to to really just start to lay the foundation for Success manual bidding no Audience Network no audience expansion so now we can actually Define who do we want to Target so that's going to depend on the business you know who's your ideal candidate or who's your target market and um you know that's going to decide how you're going to build your audience so I'm going to walk through the functionality and we can use an example like for myself I'm a marketing consultant so if I wanted to sell my services to business owners um we could we can build an audience around that so my target market is small and medium-sized businesses so I'm going to start with narrow you're going to go to audience attributes go to company here we have different company fields that we can choose so my target market is just 11 to 50. I want to Target companies that have a marketing team but maybe they don't have a LinkedIn ad specialist so I'm going to do 11 to 50. go close so now I have a company here uh size we can go to company Industries say I'm really Niche I want to Target people in the financial services we can do that that's great so the one thing to note is that the way this works is we have end logic going on so every time we add a new layer our audience should get smaller so that's what we're looking for here if you put something you can actually put something in the same box and it will become or logic so if I put in here if I say I put here company um category or category sure Fortune 500 it could be anything we see it says or language so what this is saying is company size between 11 and 50 or if they're a Fortune 500 company we still want to Target them so what we can see here is actually if you go to company size now the majority of our companies are actually larger so you just want to be careful when you're building your audience to understand as you're using end logic which are in separate grayed out boxes or if you're using or logic so just be careful of that so every time you're adding a layer where you're trying to make your audience smaller and more Niche and more targeted you're going to want to just keep an eye on this to make sure this doesn't automatically it doesn't balloon out into something bigger so here we're targeting you know Financial Services industry small and medium-sized companies um and I want to Target the owners of those companies so let's go into job experience we're going to go to seniority we're going to go to owners close and I'll be honest Financial Services is not my target market it's a support example but just to show you the functionality we're layering on different aspects here you can continue to narrow on as much as you'd like um some little tricks I like to do I like to add job experience to add years of experience and this will allow you to filter out people um more Junior let's go here so now we've we've dropped it here out of years of experience you can exclude one thing to note as well is that users can actually belong to multiple targeting as well so if somebody if somebody works for a company that's 11 to 50 and they also have a side hustle of a company that they're a startup they'll actually work for essentially two companies so they'll be in this category and they'll be in the startup category so because I don't want to Target for example startups I might want to exclude that so then I could go into exclude we're going to close this we're going to go into exclude you can actually layer on targeting with exclusions so that's what we'll do here so we're going to go into company company size I want to exclude this and see we've just dropped it again so this is like the fundamentals of how you can build your audience typically as a go-to it really depends on every business as a go-to I really do like job seniority combined with job function um I feel like that's a good combination alternatively so if you go into job experience I like to combine seniority with function or you could go titles titles is a little more specific and it has its use cases um but you're not able to layer on seniority with that so you just have to keep that in mind and typically you know you want to have an audience size it depends on your budget but typically I would like an audience size to be between thirty thousand and a hundred and if you have large budgets it can get larger and if you have smaller budgets it could be smaller um but that's kind of a ballpark and it is a big ballpark but um just keep in mind that you don't want your audience size to be like 3 000 people or five thousand people that's too small for a top of funnel campaign and you're going to exhaust it very quickly so um essentially you want to just find the balance between your budget and and the audience size and then you're going to want to Define your target market using this end targeting you can also after you've created your audience you can then kind of get an idea as to what's inside of it and you can use that as a guide to actually add exclusions um if you start to say oh no these these aren't really relevant for me you can go and add these as exclusions there um Industries we can see here so that's kind of how that works there so that's how you set up your audience it's really you're using end logic you're using exclude logic some tips I would say is to exclude your competitors exclude your current company that you're advertising for you don't want to pay for those clicks so those will typically be you might get those clicks it might help your click through rate but it's just going to be for the most part wasted ad spend so within your exclusions you can then go to um company and just add your company name so this could be your company so you would just type your company name here your company maybe that's that and then you would add your competitors you would exclude that as well so after you've created your audience you're going to name it so I'm gonna give this a name so that when I come back to it I can know what it is so I would say um cool company size 11. 250 I'll say Financial industry and then essentially I would go owners and I would just give it a number a rough number 52k that's how many people are in this audience so we made this audience pretty quickly but you should certainly play around with this look into each of these see what's most relevant for your business and then try to create an audience that reflects who you want to Target then we're gonna keep it a single image set a daily budget manual bidding we're going to add the conversion to the campaign and we're going to go save and exit or next to launch in this case I'm just going to go save and exit um and click save and exit so the last step before launching your campaigns is to create an ad so from this section here you'll actually see that I added a WV here and that's because down the line when you build out multiple campaigns you might be targeting the same audience but with different campaign formats so this will just be helpful to help you interpret the data because each campaign is going to behave a little bit differently so that'll just be helpful if you have that in your naming convention here so to go in to create an ad you can click here on the campaign then go to create and create an ad so here we'll see that we have two options we can create a new ad or we can browse existing content so if you already have ads created within the account and you want to reuse them you can go here but if you want to create a new ad you can go here so here we'll get to actually build our ad out so typically you'll want to give this a name so I could call this ad1 you'll want to describe it a little bit so this will be a general brand ad and then depending on on your on your naming convention you could do what type of call to action um this will just be helpful down the line so when you have multiple ads and you're analyzing performance if you do do a bit of a description it'll just help you know what performance is attributed to what ad so here we're going to add our introductory text that's the text on the top for now I'll just put test so we can just kind of see this a bit quicker then we have the destination Earl so that's where you're going to send people after they click on your ad so say I want to send people to my home website here I'll go copy this then you can use a tool like this campaign Earl Builder if you Google campaign Builder by Google you'll be able to find this link pretty easily and what it allows you to do is easily add on UTM tags to the end of your Earl so essentially what I could do is I paste my link here I say campaign Source LinkedIn campaign medium paid social and then you can go here and grab this Earl here if you wanted to you can even get more specific if if that fits your use case you can add the campaign name or content as well so here I'm going to go copy this I'm going to come back and bring it here to the destination Earl and then I'm going to click scrape just because to pull in an image okay so pulled in an image here unfortunately it's not in the pre uh the preview so I can add one another one so I'm going to add something that I just I took a snapshot from my website this is not a real ad that I would run but I just want to show it for the example so here we have our image and then we have our headline here which pulled in from the website scrape before and then we have a description so one thing to note is that the description does not actually show on LinkedIn this will only show when when it's on the Audience Network but because we're not really using the Audience Network in most cases this is not that relevant you can still fill it out but it's not going to be seen so the two most important parts of your ad are the introduction at the top that's this text here at the top and then it's the headline so my you know my advice on this is to test long format and to test short format um and also keep in mind the different campaign that you're using so if you're using a website visits campaign it's okay to test longer content in the top because if somebody clicks the see more button that's not a chargeable click in a website visits campaign however if you're using an engagement Campaign which has the follow button that's the benefit of an engagement campaign if someone clicks on the see more button that'll be a chargeable click so you're going to want to keep your content a bit shorter in an engagement campaign and if you want to test longer form content in a website visits that's totally fine so basically you're going to write some good ad copy here in the intro text write a good headline here whether it's if it's brand awareness you could leave it like something like this but if you want to stimulate a call to action you could you could put in anything you uh you want here like um you know get the free guide say this was a resource download you could do like the name of your resource download then get the free guide and then you do choose the call to action here so in this case I would just do learn more you could also use request demo there's a lot of options here so that's how you build an ad it's as simple as that and then you go Save ad and it'll add it to your campaign after you've added your campaign uh your ad sorry you just go next and you'll be able to launch your campaign afterwards so I don't have billing in this account because this is a demo account but essentially what you would do you would go to this page here you could then verify all of your targeting setup ensure that your targeting is good ensure that your campaign settings are good ensure that your ads are good and of course then you would go here to agree and launch campaign so you just set up your first LinkedIn ads campaign if you follow the steps along this video I do think that you'll be well along your way in creating a successful foundation for a campaign if you did like this content please do like and subscribe or drop a comment below there's a lot more to come foreign [Music]