LinkedIn Advertising Tutorial - LinkedIn Ads Tutorial From Beginner to Advanced

Key Takeaways

all right what's up everyone welcome to the Surfside PPC youtube channel today we're gonna be going over LinkedIn advertising campaigns I already have a LinkedIn advertising tutorial on my channel very geared towards beginners if you're looking for something more basic something about what the different campaigns are and how to set them up that's a very good video to get started this can this video is going to be geared toward from beginner to advanced so exactly how you're gonna go into LinkedIn set up everything from your conversion tracking pixel to different audiences to different campaigns and how you can test things against each other so to get started the first thing I want to do first thing you want to do is make sure you're in your LinkedIn ad account so if you come and appear to linkedin.com slash ad slash accounts you should have your LinkedIn ad account there what you need is a personal LinkedIn page so you could see my face over here I have my personal LinkedIn page connected to my company page Surfside PPC and then I have my ad account set up with the building setup pretty simple I mean just like setting up an account you just have to connect things there's plenty of tutorials online too to show you how to do that especially right on LinkedIn's website they make the process pretty simple so once you're here in the LinkedIn add accounts page it's going to kind of show all of your details for your campaigns we're not really running much right now so I'm just kind of using this for tutorials but what we first want to do is um I'm gonna go over how to set up conversion tracking on LinkedIn so I have a wordpress website see I have it open here I have my theme open it's an it's the theme is called Astrid and what we're gonna do is come over here to our LinkedIn ads account page and come up here to account at assets and conversion tracking so it's gonna say which website you want to track conversion for so whatever your website is just enter that they're they have get started in three easy three easy steps its enter the domain install the LinkedIn insight tag across your website pretty simple and then measure return on investment so they also have a quick video here for how to do it okay so once you click continue it's going to give you the insight tag here and what it's telling us is to put in our sites HTML right above the body tag so you take it once you click on it it copies I'm going to copy it just in case you can send it to your email that you have on file here so I have my emails is my gmail account and what we're gonna do is copy it and click Next so what now what we want to do is go over to our website and come over to if you're using the WordPress website you kind of want to use a child theme otherwise you always want to make sure when you update your theme that your conversion tracking pixel is here right above the body tag so it's a good thing to kind of keep in mind so here's our closing body tag you'll find it in the footer dot PHP file of your WordPress website if you're running a different website you should have a global footer file where your body tag is held here so wherever your final body tag is your global your global file here is where you want to place it so we're gonna come in right here right above the final body tag add it and click update file now once we do that our conversion tracking pixel is all set up through LinkedIn so now you're good to do whatever you want to set up conversions it's going to be across our website and you can set up different pages as conversions think of it as installing Google Analytics so LinkedIn is going to be recording all of the different traffic we have on our website across every page so once we click Save there so now we're good come back over to LinkedIn they have you can start setting up conversions so for example my contact form after you fill it out people go to the Thank You page so what I can do is create a conversion name contact form fills whatever you want to name it you know however you want to set it up there's conversion type so if you have an e-commerce website you could do Add to Cart if you have a product like an e-book you could do download so mine is gonna be key page view or lead I like to use a lead but it's really not any different so you could set a value if you want to but we're not going to I have some campaigns here so one of the things you can do is say like okay I want to take this campaign and apply this conversion to that campaign and it'll start optimizing for it a little better but so website surf side PPC perfect so we have our site wide in site tag that we just installed on the website so if we go to URL what you want to do is you can either do contains or exact I like to just do exact and what you want to do is just double check your pay here so if I come into Surfside PPC I just want to make sure that so I like to just take it here's our Thank You page so after someone fills out our contact form they get redirected right to this page we have it set up through the contact form 7 plugin on WordPress and all you have to do is URL exact and add it just like that and you could actually take away the HTTP and just do surf side PPC comm slash thank you we have exact and finish so now we have a conversion setup here contact form fills excuse me it's gonna say unverified until we have start have conversions coming in but all I know and I know I'm good because if I go to my footer file I can see I have my LinkedIn code here my Thank You page have it exactly set up contact form fills as a conversion so that's how to set of conversion tracking on LinkedIn you could also start setting up audiences once this starts collecting data thanks for joining us today and hopefully this was a helpful video ok now that we have conversion tracking setup I want to go over each of the different campaign types exactly how to run them this is going to be more advanced than our last tutorial here so let's come in here to campaign performance it'll start showing the different campaigns we have created these are the examples I'm going to use is dental so I'm gonna show you here is what we're gonna do first is come up to create campaign so you have three different options here you have sponsored content text ads and sponsored in mail I'm gonna go through each of them so we're gonna start with sponsored content here and click select okay so the first thing we want to do is name our campaign so if we come up here to campaign URL I already have a couple campaigns ready citizen says text ads but I'm going to change it so I've linked in so I already have a campaign called us call this so I'm just gonna change this to dentists just so there's no overlap so our target audience language is going to be English and what I want to do is send people to my website or content and I want to increase followers for my company page by adding a follow button I'm gonna have a follow up tutorial about LinkedIn lead-gen forms but I just want to send people to my website or content right now so we're gonna do is click Next and it's going to pull up content that you have on your website you could sponsor so if you select this you can sponsor selected content you can create new sponsored content here but what I'm gonna do is come over to my LinkedIn page so I don't use this to off and I'm probably shoulda be posting more content here but what I want to do is start sharing a couple articles that I can test against each other in a sponsored content so I'm kind of gonna fast-forward through this a little bit to kind of show you how how to do it a little faster um I don't want this video to be two hours long so I'm gonna create a couple sponsored content ads here that I can promote okay so I'm gonna show you kind of how I'm doing this I just posted one here and what I have here is an article about dental pay per click strategies so I kind of go through all the different things as far as growing your dentistry I'm sorta doin LinkedIn as target dentists and try to get more dentists clients to my PPC advertising agency so I posted one here what I have is discover the best dental pay per click advertising strategies to get more phone calls leads patients in revenue and I have a link here I built this link with using the Google URL campaign builder and the way the link looks so if I show full URL is I'm sending people to this page if you're looking for this page by the way you can either just go to google.com and type in Google Analytics URL builder or just come to this page here it's google analytics development tools appspot.com campaign URL builder here's the home page home up here they have a lot of different stuff but what we're doing in I'll show you how this all kind of works is we're sending people to this page are dental paper click advertising strategies and then we want to track everything into Google Analytics so we can see when people fill out our contact form we can also track that on LinkedIn but we want to track it into analytics as well so we could you know see which ads are performing best things like that so we're gonna do is our website URLs here campaign source is gonna be LinkedIn campaign medium is CPC cost per click so we get charged every time someone clicks on our ad campaign name is gonna be called our LinkedIn sponsored content campaign and we have - dental campaign term so term is who you're targeting or paid keywords so we're going to be targeting dentists and our campaign content so for our first ad here on our page is right here what we did is we have dentist ad 1 now what's going to happen is we took this URL we converted it to a short link there's a short link there we'll show full URL we have this link here so when someone clicks on that it's gonna have all of that tracking the creator next ad what we're gonna do is come into the campaign URL builder and do dentist ad - and you can name content however you want the only thing you really want to keep really consistent or your source and medium oh and I'll show you why so for our second ad we have dentists ad - we're gonna convert URL to short link copy it here so I'm up here creating my ad and what I have is does your dentistry any more patients we're gonna try different ad copy and a couple different ad you know ads here so this is just the picture I have on the article it pulls in right away it's a little bit easier a little bit cleaner here what we're gonna do is put our link so it's gonna pull up this preview we're gonna close out of it and I'm gonna add an image okay so I upload an image here like an empty dentist's chair so I'm putting does your dentistry any more patients you know empty chair contact sort of site PPC or for a full custom dental marketing solution Nell driving more leads phone calls and patients so now once we click post now we have two posts here it's gonna say post successful now we have two posts here so what I want to do is promote both of these within the same same campaign and target them basically let LinkedIn optimize them automatically and what I would usually do is use three two or three updates or I would create sponsored content here as well and try to try to test different things against each other because you don't know how things are gonna perform once you put it out on LinkedIn there's certain things that click with people and you'll find that you'll find that certain ads just works or ads don't work so the more you kind of put out there the better chance you have of having a successful advertisement so okay so I reloaded this page so now what we're gonna do is first click on our first ad here and do actually will click both so do sponsored selected content and now what we can do is target them both with the same audience you can use matched audiences to reach your website visitors on tax targets accounts so if I click select I can start creating audiences since I just put the conversion tracking the pixel on my website or the LinkedIn insight tag they call it or you could target a list of contacts we're not going to do that here the matched audiences but just know you can do that I want to create a separate tutorial about matched audiences it's pretty you know that could be a pretty long video in itself so I'm gonna do is use the targeting that LinkedIn has given to me so let's just say I want to target the United States so I want to serve any dentistry that's in the United States so let's start with that and now what you want to do is I want to target dentists so what you want to do is look at these different targeting criteria here and and try to find the right the right targeting to find you know to reach dentists so I'm going to do is come in to job title and let's go dentist so okay perfect so now it's saying we have 71,000 LinkedIn members united states that have dentists as their so now let's think about it this way if I reach a dentist that isn't in control of a dental agency but they want more clients and they see this on LinkedIn maybe they go to the manager who's responsible for advertising and say hey I see this company they have basically a case study showing how they help dentists trees maybe give them a call see if they can help us get more clients it's worth just at least you know giving them a call or something like that so that's kind of how you go with job titles you can keep adding more job titles you can also just okay so now let's see what else we can target I don't want to target company name or size you can target fields of study maybe you target someone who is studying dentistry but I don't want to do that right now same with degrees yeah let's go into company industry okay so they don't have that that comes up it's good to just know what comes up sometimes they type it differently so this probably gonna be in medical but we're not gonna do that so what I want to do is just target all dentists just keep just keep my targeting as is you could try some different things here maybe I go years of experience and say let me only target dentists that I have at least four years of experience so it narrows it down a little bit maybe I'm reaching dentists that have been doing it a little bit longer that feel more comfortable going to a hiring manager or a marketing manager or even the owner of the dentistry to say hey uh you know I've been working here for this long you know let's let's do this I'm not going to do that so I'll get rid of both these so we're just targeting dentists United States with our advertisement so I like to enable a LinkedIn audience network it helps your campaign reach more people it's just some your ad will run a little bit off of you know it says reach an audience on a premium network of publishers beyond the length and feed just gives you more volume more ways to reach people so I say yes so if there are certain categories you want to exclude I usually don't really do that block list so if there's certain apps or sites you don't like to be on that's always good to know I like to enable audience expansion LinkedIn will target audiences that they think are similar so maybe they expand this from 71 plus thousand to 80,000 and they find people that work at dentistry's but aren't actually dentists that kind of you know fall in line with the targeting that we selected so this is good for now I'm targeting dentists what you want to do is find the best targeting for you you could try to you know try different types of targeting as well so here's what we're gonna do what do we want to optimize our campaign for website conversions so we just selected our conversion here contact form fills it's active so click apply so now it's going to start optimizing for people to fill out my contact form so I want what I want people to do is come into this link you know read a little bit about this come over here and click contact us if the contact perform hit the thank-you page and that will count as a conversion for our LinkedIn campaign so budgets and bids daily budget is whatever you can afford whatever is best for you you kind of want to set your daily budget so you get to a point where it's optimal if I could spend $200 a day and drive enough leads that I can keep closing and making money I would just keep putting my budget up until it's not profitable so let's just say for example I want a twenty five dollar budget that's fine bids it'll show you what other advertisers are bidding between it'll recommend a bid somewhere in between that so minimum bid here this is the lowest you're able to bid if you do the minimum bid well the way I'd like to think about it is if you're bidding here eleven dollars and fifty eight cents you have a chance to reach your entire audience but you're gonna be spending a lot to reach them per click if you bid down here you have a chance to reach a small portion of your audience but you're gonna be you know bidding a small and you're gonna be bidding a small amount smaller amount per click but you're just reaching a smaller portion so what I like to do is try to find somewhere in between these numbers what I would bid and again this bids are something you really just have to test you really have to collect data and then see how many people you're reaching what your cost-per-click is what you're able to afford whether or not you're able to drive leads so what I would do here is I would set it at $6 this is exactly how I would do it and I would just monitor my campaign and see how optimal it is so with $6 I can get about hopefully four to five clicks a day which isn't a lot I get it but if you have a dentist clicking on your campaign here and you use a remarketing strategy on the Google Display Network as well we have a video tutorial for that if you're using Facebook ads if you're using different things you're able to kind of keep keep people engaged and hopefully get them to finally convert and again if you spend $200 for a new dentist client for pay-per-click it's probably worth it I mean they have their budgets are probably pretty large so campaigns start date this is really up to you let's say I want to schedule start for tomorrow so today's the October 17th on a schedule for the 18th and let's run it for until the end of the month you can run indefinitely if you want you can set a total budget so let's just say I don't want to spend anywhere over 500 bucks so it's just good to do a total budget in case you don't want to like kind of lose track of your spending so add rotation so now this is why we created multiple ads and again I would create two or three at least you could even create four or five depending on how big your budget is don't create too many ads if you have a small budget because they're not gonna be able to rotate them enough so two to three ads but this budget would be perfect if my budget was about triple or quadruple I'd probably go four to five ads we want to keep optimizing for conversions so it'll put out it'll take each ad put it out to like ten people let's say for example if one of them converts it'll put charts showing that add more so things like that so once we click launch campaign so now we're all good to go it says campaign status active we're running two sponsored content ads two dentists all across LinkedIn in the United States bidding six dollars per click daily budget $25 total budget 500 running October I think tomorrow we start October 17 or two October 18th until the 31st so it'll keep running as long as until it's done it'll spend as much of the budget as possible and we're gonna start it'll show likes and comments here and we're gonna start hopefully start driving some clicks to our to our link here once people start clicking on it this is why we want to track things using the Google URL builder so once people start clicking on it if you're in Google Analytics so we have here so today October 17th I just clicked on all these links this is how tracking works so I have them all set up you'll see as I create the next two campaigns but for LinkedIn sponsored content campaign here dental so I come in I click on it let's see how many clicks I've had so far so it's showing just one click for this campaign so far here's the source and medium so looked up here campaign source LinkedIn medium CPC our campaign name so now we want to look up term and content so term is a little weird because when you come in here you type in term it's gonna say there's no data for this view so what you really need to do is come up here instead of doing a search term you want to do keyword so advertising keyword for some reason those words don't match so now we're seeing our keyword is dentists up here you'll see its campaign term identify the paid keywords I don't know why they don't just call it camp paid keyword but campaign term dentists we come down here we could see dentists and then the other one is campaign content so if you come up to secondary dimension content so it's gonna be add content so we see dentist's add one but now I could just show you kind of how this all works so if you go to LinkedIn text ads campaign dental and now we want to see which ads are driving the most conversions so if I go to add content so you're able to see dentist's add one down here has driven our session here for our text ad so just the way to kind of look at it for tracking and everything so we'll get come back here get rid of that but if we come back up to LinkedIn so I have my sponsored content campaign with dentists here active course I'm a couple drafts over here but don't worry about those what we're gonna do next is show the text ads so let's go to create campaign again so now we're gonna do text ad drive traffic from the desktop with easy to create ads so sponsored content is pretty self-explanatory your ad runs in like a newsfeed similar to what happens on Facebook but it's a LinkedIn newsfeed and also other publishers text ads you're only running on desktop and your ads are alongside content over here might have see if I have any now I don't have any over here but you've probably seen them before if you use LinkedIn then the ads that always show up alongside your feed so kind of small here but you can see they have like the feed in the center and then along the right-hand side again somewhere to right column ads on Facebook but it's LinkedIn so just click select though naming your campaign again I want to come back here into my campaigns and I want to make sure that everything matches so I've already named this so I'm just gonna copy it down here and there we go text ads campaign dental target audience is English you can adjust that if you need so where should numbers go when they click on your ad again we're going to use our tracking URL so let's make sure it all matches so we have LinkedIn we want to do text ads you always want to make sure this campaign name matches whatever you have in here because if it doesn't it's going to come in as a completely brand new campaign so you want to make sure those match so right now it's LinkedIn text ads campaign space - space dental so I just want to double check LinkedIn text ads campaigns okay so now we're good dentist add one I want to start with so we're sending people to this page campaign towards me LinkedIn its CPC it's gonna be cost per click same as the other one so now I like to convert it to a short link for ads you could also just copy the entire URL if you're just using a banner ad and nobody sees this dad's you don't have to convert it to short link we'll just keep it we'll show the full URL and keep it that's fine coming to your website you could keep the full URL for that so now what we're gonna do is create a couple suffer okay create several ads like we did in the last step what you need here is headline image and copy what the promotion is describe why someone should click on your ad and for the size here for the ad Alec to you Square images you could also use images that are a little bit taller but I prefer square images now you should just upload something that's like 300 by 300 something along those lines so okay so what I'm gonna do now is create a couple ads and I'll show them to you but I want to kind of go through this a little bit quicker so I'm not gonna show each step-by-step thing as I'm type okay so now I'm building my second ad here so what you can do is click your preview I have my find more patients now so we have a little micro or magnifying glass with a tooth contact Surfside PPC to find more patients for your local dentistry you could look at how it kind of looks on different devices if you want to adjust it at all you can adjust this image as you wish what we want to do with our website is just make sure we come into the URL builder and make sure we change dentists add one to two copy URL and enter that now so once we click Save so now it's going to show I have this ad here which is a little bit different than you could also duplicate out so this is what it looks like here I want to click cancel but this is what my other ad looks like and then I have dentists add one so let's cancel that so now we have two ads running you can create another one again two to three for the budget and bids that I'm kind of showing you they have a question here should I create multiple ad versions so they even say it's a good idea because it'll help with campaign performance so let's click Next so we're going to use the same audience we used last time what you would usually do is save that audience I should have saved it in the last step but let's just do it again so we kind of go through how to do this so first start with location always if you want to use a matched audio you can and we're gonna do again is use job title and go dentist okay so now we have seventy one thousand plus LinkedIn members again if you want to narrow this down at all you can I like to enable audience expansion and here's how you save audiences templates so let's save as new you can enter a description if you want dentists is enough for me so I'm gonna click Save template go to next now same thing again what we're gonna do is conversion tracking for contact form fills it's gonna be optional so this doesn't optimize as well for conversions as the sponsored content does it's why I prefer sponsored content CPM or CPC Alex you CPC gives you more control you so when you're paying for clicks CPM is you can bid for impressions so this is good if you have really engaging ads you want to bid for impressions it's also good if you want to do a little bit of branding so if I'm saying okay I want everyone to know what Surfside PPC is who has a dentistry that's exactly what I want to focus on I could do CPM bid and click on it and you know my minimum bid is two dollars maybe I just bid two dollars and then I get as many impressions as possible more and more people can know about surface ID PPC let's go with cost per click though and again here I'll show you how I'm gonna set my bid so again I'll choose somewhere between what they recommend kinda and what the minimum is I'd probably go a little bit lower than my six dollars I did earlier so let's do five dollars and again the cool thing about this is I can test and I could look at my campaign screen here and let's just say I'm getting more sessions than that I can see okay my text ads campaign has driven a contact form fill but my sponsored content campaign hasn't and my in mail campaign which I'm creating in the next step has it so then you can kind of see okay maybe I go to text ads and I increase this bit a little bit so once you start collecting data that's why you want to track everything so much campaign start date I'll just do what I did in the last step it's probably how I would want to run these campaigns against each other see what performs the best so for this one you optimize for clicks rather than conversions so it's gonna show the ads that people click on the most that's why you want to track your ads separately in Google Analytics so you can see you know which is it ad one that's driving conversions is it ad two which one are people actually engaging with the most okay so now we have our text ads campaign all set up congrats and we're gonna create one more campaign or sponsored in mail campaign so select that okay so again you want to name your campaign what we named it over here this it doesn't matter if it's exactly the same on LinkedIn but it's good for identifying obviously when you come into LinkedIn you can see and if you have different advertisers working on your account they can see it easier so if the campaign name matches here and also matches here you know it makes more sense okay so it's gonna show the sender's so I just want to do me the owner at surf side PPC so it's more personalized I like to use that and you want to enter your in mail ad name so again I'm gonna use kind of what I did up here so I could just do dentist to add one ok we'll click Next now we have our message so I'm gonna type out this real quick I'm not gonna okay so I have my first one typed out here and what you want to do is you can add your URL in here so if I come into my campaign URL builder I want to send them to this page LinkedIn CPC let's make sure this matches so it's sponsored in mail campaign again even it's it's even case sensitive unless you have that set up in your analytics but this isn't exactly right it'll come up as a new campaign so I just want to make sure it's right make sure I've dentists add one and what we're gonna do is convert the URL to a short link so we'll take this come back up to our campaign contact us today okay so you do want to add a custom footer for terms and conditions because it'll save you from some lawsuits and stuff like that in terms of email so I would click yes here but this is just something you're gonna want to set up on your own link to your disclaimer page on your website link to your privacy policy link to your terms and conditions whatever you need to do and then there's some different things you need to do it in different countries so it's just good to know all those different things here so one of the cool things you can do in the message text is we have you could do percentage first name percentage and you can see over here it'll take their first name on LinkedIn and have it there so you could do first name last name I like to do first name a lot because sometimes you do first name last name and it seems a little uh like huh but first name sometimes it seems personalized so my name is Cory so if someone says Cory does your dentistry get enough leads phone calls patients do you have open chairs to be filled contact us today we look forward to hearing from you and we'll click Next so it's gonna have a landing page well I like to include it in my email message but let's take it anyway and so we'll show full URL copy it so call-to-action button whatever your goal is is what your call-to-action button should be so they have a button preview over here so I like to do is contact us so whatever you're trying to get if you're trying to drive sales you know whatever it is so a clear call to action gets clicks and conversions try like this so upload banner creative this is optional but it's 300 by 250 so I'm gonna upload something here real quick okay so I just have a basic banner creative here I'd probably do something more personalized for dent for dental but this is good PPC ads and I'm on PPC ad company so people can kind of see what we do and we'll click Next so now we have our first ad here so I'm gonna create when we're add real quick and I'm gonna skip this part in the video but I'll just show you when I'm done with it okay so now we have a couple different ads here and what you can do and you can see I have different subject lines so get more patience does your dentistry have open chairs once we click Next we can start targeting the audiences so alright so let's fix this again so job title okay now we can update that dentist template what what you would do is target by and use a previously saved template what I did is I went down here and I just saved the template before I added it so do it at the top enable audience expansion again so now we're good United States dentists click Next so the way that again we want to do our conversions but the way that in mail works is you pay for every email sent to someone's inbox so it's a little bit lower with the bids because you're paying every time it gets sent there's no you know there's no guarantee that anybody's clicking on anything so let's say you send out a thousand and only two people click it you get your paying kind of where it makes sense down here you want to optimize for clicks because you're paying per send so the more clicks you can get the more times people are going to visit your website so we'll keep this again this bit is pretty low so 43 cents all you should just go down to 40 keep it a little bit lower than what they recommend I always think advertising platforms want to keep their bids as high as possible helps their money so we'll schedule start like we did the other ones will end on the 31st total budget will just say 500 like the others optimize for clicks and launch campaign okay so now what we've done over in this video is how to set up your ad account or at least get started with it you come in here how to set up conversion tracking audiences you could see some different things here if we come in to match audiences we could start creating different things with our LinkedIn insight tag I don't want to go over that actually right now so come over to campaign performance we can see we have three campaigns ready here sponsored concert campaign I have it dentists because I have a draft that's dental text ads and sponsored in mail if we come over to campaigns here in analytics we can see that we're tracking everything properly you want to keep you want to have a landing page open you can test multiple landing pages you always want to run multiple ads at least two ads I would probably create three for every ad group but I don't want to sit here and create a three-hour tutorial video for you I could just tell you to make sure you're creating three just test things test different creative tests different ad copy test different landing pages test different messages adjust your bids within your campaign so it's just you need to learn as you're starting to build your campaign if you're here and you're watching this video you're probably ready to start advertising a LinkedIn or you are advertising on LinkedIn and you're struggling the key is testing and tracking so I track everything in here there's times where I've ran campaigns for clients that I just can't make profitable so it's no real seeker you just kind of tell them okay but LinkedIn isn't profitable for you so you know don't overthink it you can always adjust these things as you go you can always adjust your bids down you can just go down to minimum bids see like what you know what you can get from it but you know it's it's definitely something you want to keep playing around with so that's our LinkedIn advertising tutorial kind of from beginner to advanced we went over all the different advertising campaigns you have my favorite to use a sponsored content but I also like to test these other things so hopefully that's helpful this is a Surfside PPC YouTube channel make sure you subscribe if you enjoy our content feel free to share the best way to absolutely help us to just share our content if you have one person you know who would like it if you have a Twitter account where it might be useful please just share content we always appreciate that so thanks for joining us today and if you have any questions make sure you leave them in the comments