LinkedIn Video Ads Tutorial

Key Takeaways

linkedin video ads can be a really effective way to engage the user on the linkedin platform and there are two main ways that you can add video creative to your linkedin ads we're going to cover those two ways and we're also going to go over the subtle differences of why you might want to use one way versus the other now after your video ads are running we're going to cover all the metrics that you can do and the views within linkedin to really see if your video ads are performing as well as you want them to be once we're getting the data and how those videos are actually performing we're going to uncover how we can use video audiences within linkedin to really create next step remarketing campaigns from our initial video ads views now before we get into the video ad setup on linkedin it's probably important that we go over what types of videos you can add to the linkedin platform because if your video doesn't meet the right pixel and ratio requirements you're not going to be able to upload a video to linkedin anyway so there are three kinds of videos we can upload to linkedin to use for our campaigns the first is landscape and odds are this is the ratio that you're most familiar with all the videos that you see on the paid media bros channel follow the maximum landscape pixel ratio and that's 1920 by 1080. the second video ratio is going to be square so this is a one-to-one ratio the minimum pixel requirements are 360 by 360 and for the maximum we get to match the same width as a landscape video but we have squares we took grade school math equal size so the height is also going to be 1920. and the last option is a vertical aspect ratio we get the minimum width of 360 just like we do with the square but the minimum height has to be 640 pixels and then for the maximum we're taking the landscape maximum and just flipping those numbers around so it's a 1080 by 1920. vertical aspect ratio videos can only be served on mobile devices hence why i put that little emoji right there so if you're recording all your videos on your phone and you want to just upload them to linkedin understand that those videos whether you're doing it organically or as part of a video ad will only show up on mobile devices so now that we got the video ratio aspects out of the way let's hop into the linkedin ads platform and we can go over the few ways that we can add video ads to our campaign manager i am on one example of a company page on linkedin and we can see under the update section there is a post already out there for this company page that has a video attached to it now you can see in this highlighted section right now i can choose to sponsor this post which contains a video directly from my company page and that'll send me to the campaign manager where i can set up another campaign and use this existing post as my ad creative now before we go further i want to talk about the level of permissions for a linkedin page let's say for whatever reason you're hiring someone to get the post ready on your company page but also promote them with ads if that's the case you need to make sure that that user has the proper permissions to be able to boost these posts or even add the video post to your company page so if we go under admin tools and manage admins right now i am the only designated admin if you have other linkedin users added to sponsored content posters they're not going to have full permission to add video content to your company page so let me show you right now the linkedin page permissions depending on what roles you have assigned to users here are the details for how the linkedin page permission settings work in your company account if your client assigned you the role of a designated admin you pretty much have full rain not only can you post videos organically to a linkedin page you can then sponsor those videos in a variety of ways now if your client or other team member just assigned you the sponsored content poster you're limited in how you can promote those videos via the linkedin page and you can see the two marked boxes for sponsored content posters are only related to certain things that you can do within campaign manager and we will get to the exact campaign manager permissions later on but now you know what type of access you need if you want to promote videos from the linkedin page so let's hop back into linkedin ads and we'll continue with the campaign setup we're back on our company page in linkedin and i'm also assuming you are a designated admin on this company page so now let's go to the post and sponsor now if you have an existing campaign you will be able to add this post to a current campaign but since this is a dummy account i will have to go into campaign manager and create a new campaign like any campaign creation in linkedin ads we have to choose a campaign objective to use video ads in linkedin you can select any of the objectives except for job applicants i'm a video guide so i'm going to choose video views for my objective next you can choose what targeting options you want to select for this campaign i'm not going to go over all the targeting options because michelle already made a great video listing out the targeting options that you have and you can check that out on the screen right now but after you've selected your target audience we can scroll down and then you'll want to choose your ad format i selected the video views format so there is only one ad format for me to choose in other campaign objectives you will see other ad formats like image ads like carousel ads but you came to this video to learn about linkedin video ads so of course that's going to be the ad format you want to select the rest of the campaign setup is pretty straightforward in terms of your placements your budgets your schedules make sure you add your conversion tracking again this is kind of a dummy account that i use so i don't have anything set up make sure to add your conversion tracking and then we can move on to the next step now we already talked about the organic post that we have on our company page so if that is the post that you want to use for your video ad you can click on browse existing content and since that is the only option i have it's easy enough for me to just click this option and make sure i want to use it to sponsor if you have a lot of former posts you can search for keywords that's going to relate to the content that you used in that organic post and that will help you find the one that you actually want to use for your video ad but once you have your selection you can click on sponsor you do have the option to add additional posts to this campaign even if they are sponsoring existing content in case you want to test those two posts against each other and possibly see which one engages users the most or depending on your campaign objective which video ad may lead to more conversions but for now i'm just going to stick with this one so we can click next we have the option to review and if all looks good i can launch the campaign now let's say we're not happy with any of our organic posts they really don't fit the type of ad message i would want to put in front of my target audience so the second option would be to create a new video ad within the platform so i'll go back and create another campaign and start creating some video ads from scratch we're back in the main campaign view within linkedin campaign manager and if you're working just within campaign manager to get new video creative uploaded and ready to use within an ad campaign there are different roles and permissions for campaign manager than there is for the linkedin page so now let's quickly go over the campaign manager permissions and this one is pretty straightforward no matter what admin type you have within campaign manager you will be able to set up your video ads in every possible way i just wanted to call out if you're any of these three admin types within campaign manager you will not have any access to the video content from the linkedin page everything that you can do can only be done via campaign manager so for whatever reason if you need to start managing some of the video content from the linkedin page you will have to reach out to the designated admin and have your roles and permissions updated let's create another campaign starting from scratch this time i'm going to choose a website visits campaign so again choose all your target audiences now we see the differences in ad formats that i didn't show you before you can only choose one ad format per campaign and you cannot change that later on so if you really want to run a video ad make sure you select that ad format option i think we've all been there where we accidentally forget to change it you go through all the steps and then you're stuck and then you have to go back and recreate it and that's not fun so please remember that ad format again placement budget we have conversion tracking let's move on again to the next step so now let's focus on creating a new ad and we can see already the format of this ad is going to differ than an organic post and i'm going to jump around a little bit i'm not going to go straight down in order and i think we can agree that the most important part of a video ad is the video creative so let's upload our video first now not too long ago michelle released a video breaking down all the campaign objectives in facebook that video is about 70 minutes long and i just tried to upload it and we could see it falls outside the acceptable range i will not be able to promote that unless i break it up into chunks so from a file size perspective it needs being between 75 kilobytes and 200 megabytes the only file format we can upload from our video ad is an mp4 now i'm going to try to upload a different video file all right so now i change the video to one of our other ones about linkedin retargeting options and there's a little foreshadowing there alright we're going to talk about retargeting pretty soon but there's something important i want to call out about this video option and we'll do that while this video is loading this video file is just over 10 minutes and if i try to upload this video file it actually gets rejected from an organic post that is because organically your video can only be up to 10 minutes long with a video ad the length of your video can be anywhere from 3 seconds to as long as 30 minutes that is another big difference between sponsoring an existing post with a video in it versus creating your own video ad now in a variety of the linkedin marketing solutions pages that you may be reviewing about video ads you will see linkedin recommend using a lot of shorter 15 to 30 second type ads depending on what the campaign objective is they consider any video at least a minute long to be a long form video and for the most part i would agree with that however if you know you have a video that is long form but it's perfect for a certain demographic that you know you could target exactly on linkedin it is definitely worth trying to get that user to engage with the video for a long time one that keeps them honed in on your brand it's going to send you certain metric signals which we're going to be talking about pretty soon and last if that user is engaging with your longer video content we'll be able to use that in certain audience creation aspects which again we will get to soon now what we see within the video itself is the opening frame of this mp4 and while i may disagree showing my face with a mohawk unshaven with a nightmare before christmas shirt might not be the most appealing visual for linkedin so if i don't want to scare people away with what we see right now we do have the option to upload a thumbnail now that i have a thumbnail image updated they're going to see more information letting them know what the video is about instead of my face in front of a microphone scaring people away no hard feelings i just know how it works next i just added some text just to fill in the gap your introductory text can really set a tone but it's not a mandatory field the next field that is mandatory is your headline and that you have up to 70 characters next you can add in your url in my case i'm sending them to youtube but if you are sending them to your website make sure that you're manually tagging your urls with all the parameters that you need for tracking and that url will be tied into your call to action so you can see i cannot scroll anymore these are the options that you have so depending on how aggressive you want to get with your call to action or potentially the objective that you selected you do have a few options for whichever cta you want to use and of course it's already checked i want to add this video ad to my campaign and we can click create just like if you're sponsoring an existing post i can choose from existing content or create another ad if i want to do some ad testing which i highly recommend you should but for the sake of this video i want to just keep moving again one more chance to review everything before you launch it but if everything looks good let's get the campaign live okay you have your campaign created you've created multiple ads that you want to test maybe looking at different video creative maybe looking at different headlines and messages that you're testing within your video ads now let's look at the metrics we can use to assess the performance of our video ads in linkedin and to do that i'm going to hop into another account that has been running some video ads for a while i am in the campaign view for this particular account and by default linkedin is using the performance options for the columns that we see on the screen right now initially this view looks kind of bad you know we spent a decent amount of money on it but we see no conversions and no leads well that wasn't the goal the client wanted brand awareness this was strictly a video views campaign so i don't really want to look at a lot of these columns i want to look how this video was engaging with the target audience that we had agreed upon so to look at video view columns we do have the option to change it from performance to the video columns and now we see a majority of our columns have updated so you saw in the video ad that i created there was the option to click on the call to action extension and still drive traffic to our website so impressions clicks and click the rate are still applicable for your video ads but if i slide over a little bit we're gonna see some other metrics and i'm just gonna go through these one by one the first is views so a view can be counted in two different ways the first way is if your video has at least two seconds of continuous playback and that video has to be at least fifty percent on the screen okay that's the first way but also a view is going to be counted if someone clicks on your call to action button so views aren't always just viewing the video and you aren't going to be double counted it is going to be whichever action happens first so again a continuous view of two seconds or more or click on your call to action button next is view rate and this is simple math pretty much the exact same thing of how we calculate view rate for our youtube ads it's looking at your total number of views divided by the impressions and then times 100. the next column we see is ecpv so this is estimated cost per view and this stack can be important because other users on linkedin can see your video ad and share it with their connections all those additional metrics are free views they're going to take all of the views that you've gotten whether you've paid for it directly or the organic reach combine those together and really calculate what the entire cost per view is to really get a better understanding of the reach and the value you see from your video ads the next four columns are pretty straightforward you can get an understanding of how long users are watching your ad at the different milestones of the video from 25 50 75 and completions would be watching the video from 97 to 100 so completions aren't that full 100 but it's really really close it's also important for me to note that if a user skips past any of these milestones it will register as a video view up to that point so if they start a video and automatically skip to past halfway it'll count as a view for both the 25 and the 50 another thing to consider when you're evaluating how long people are watching these videos next to completions we have completion rate so it's your total number of completions again if the video was watched from 97 to 100 divided by the total number of views and then last is an interesting one i like this one it's full screen plays so how many times did users click to expand the video into full screen mode i love this step because it's showing users are engaged with the video if they're expanding it to full screen mode they're engaged with it they want to hone in on whatever video you're putting in front of them so this is one of my favorite engagement stats that linkedin offers again this is just what was important to us in this particular campaign because we did choose the video views objective but like we talked about in the beginning of the video there are a variety of other campaign objectives you can select that will also allow video ads so if you were focused on conversions or you selected a lead generation campaign and you used video ads for your lead gen ads you can view the variety of those options as well or you can customize your columns i can scroll down and select my conversions and my leads but then i can also select my video columns options as well if you want to view a combination of metrics that are important to you it could be different by every account but you do have the option to select whatever combination of columns that you want and if you name that view you can update it so then whenever you go back into campaign manager and you're looking at the specific view you can see that now my custom column setting is saved i'm not going to give any recommendations on my favorite column just look at what your campaign objective is what was the goal of the initial video ad campaign and then review the metrics that are important to you and the goals of that campaign so you can see if it really was a success or not and the last thing i want to talk about for this video is looking at how we can use our video ads to start building some new audiences we can test for retargeting in linkedin i told you when i was creating that video ad there was a little foreshadowing there so we do have a video already going over all the linkedin retargeting options but there is a fairly new option that we can use that just targets people who have viewed your videos on linkedin so that's why looking at how many people viewed 25 50 75 or almost the entire video can be very important the longer i can get these users to watch a video it's going to give me some new options to retarget to users who may have a higher intent or maybe more likely to buy from my brand than someone who just visits a page on my website and that is why i'm okay testing out some longer video and seeing if i can get that user to keep interacting with my brand so to start creating these video view audiences we need to head up to account assets and then click on matched audiences we can then click on create audience and you see we have the option to retarget by video i just named my audience really quick but the first step is really choosing how did the user engage with your video and here's where some of those columns that we talked about can really play in we can create audiences based off of anyone who viewed 25 50 75 and at least 97 of that video so the main views at and completions column can really help you decide your audience size on how you may want to retarget someone who watched at least 97 of the video is gonna be much more engaged especially if that video is long form i know it's not best practice but we have tested out videos around five to ten minutes long for clients and get a good amount of people to watch the entire thing someone watching a 10 minute video to me is going to be much more engaged than someone who just watched a 30 second video i'm going to open the screen again because it's also important to know that we're only collecting an audience off of users who viewed the video as an ad so any of your organic views and those audiences or people who viewed your organic videos will not be included in these audiences now it may help to understand what video that user possibly watched you can choose the date range so you can go as short as 30 days up to the past year this will be harder if you're running a ton of different videos and video ads but if you're really only testing out one or two at a time you can have a basic understanding of what video that user was watching next you can then select which video campaigns you want to create your audiences from i had these blurred out but i can select the all campaigns option in this case it's just two of them but in this particular case these two campaigns were targeting two very different audiences and the videos themselves were different so now i know if i'm targeting this one campaign i know exactly which video i was using we created different variations but all we did was update our call to action and headlines in our text to really test out that message and now i'm confident knowing that i know exactly which video users watched as an ad within the past 30 days because it came from this particular campaign again could be harder if you have a lot of different campaigns with a lot of different video creative variations but at least you get some idea and some filtering to try to make that audience as specific as possible so by creating video audiences it'll allow you to use your linkedin video ads to really focus on a top funnel approach if you want to do so someone who's completely unfamiliar with your brand or what you're trying to promote may not be ready to fill out the lead form right away or go to your website and sign up for the demo if you're testing the waters a little bit and seeing who's engaging with your video creative you can then create an audience from these engaged users and then create another campaign for those users further down the funnel where you can be a little bit more aggressive with your ad message and then possibly feel more comfortable to ask for that harder call to action another option that's going to be different depending on what your account goals are your sales cycle and a variety of other factors but it's great that we finally have this option from linkedin to do better remarketing from people who engage with our videos so good luck setting up your linkedin video ads campaigns you now know you have a variety of options to upload video to linkedin and use those video assets to get in front of your desired target audience and i'm curious to know how linkedin video ads have worked for you so let us know in the comments how you've used video ads and what type of performance you've seen so far thanks for watching our video if you found it useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to see more from the paid media pros channel be sure to subscribe you