LinkedIn founded in 2003 is now 17 years old and has over 500 million users worldwide. This makes it a no brainer when it comes to the opportunity to advertise on it. With running its first display ads in 2005, advertising is now LinkedIn’s chief earner, helping businesses to generate more leads and sell more.
There’s a lot to say about running ads on LinkedIn, this article focuses on 10 things we like about it and think you will too.
Number 1 – you can target specific companies on LinkedIn.
There’s a number of great targeting options on LinkedIn and this is the first we’ll cover here. Rather than blanket-bombing everyone with your ad you can target employees at specific companies of interest to your business. To do this all you need to do is upload a csv file of the company names and domains (website addresses) and LinkedIn will only target employees working for those companies. This list can be simply an extract straight from your CRM system of a list of researched company targets.
Whilst there are other company targeting options available such as company industry, size, location etc, being able to target specific companies gives you complete control. In other words you can advertise directly to companies you think have a need of your product or solution. Furthermore, combined with job title / role filters, you can aim at just the decision-makers at those companies for example.
Number 2 – intelligent job title targeting
You’d think targeting individuals by job title would be impossible given the number of different variations of a single job title there are. LinkedIn gets round this by proactively suggesting similar job titles for everything you search for, meaning you can capture multiple job titles at once. See the example below, searching for “Director” in the job title selector, LinkedIn suggests a number of other options which you can add to your list individually or all in one go.
Number 3 – you can set up multiple ad variations for the same LinkedIn campaign
Stuck on what ad image or video to use or which ad copy or call-to-action works best? Don’t worry, just try them all!
Actually you would expect a level of split testing capability in the platform wouldn’t you but oddly we think having the capability to run multiple ads simultaneously for the same campaign actually saves you time rather than being more work. Rather than having tedious rounds of amends with your stakeholders, you can just run the ads together and then stick with the one which is getting the most engagement or generating the most leads.
Number 4 – LinkedIn provides a forecast of the results you’ll get
Confidence comes in being able to see the likely results you’ll get in advance of setting your campaign live. This allows you to try out a few tweaks with your audience configuration and budget to maximise the possible return on engagement.
The LinkedIn forecasted results will show you:
- your total approximate audience size
- your spend over the period selected
- an estimate of the number of impressions your ad will get
- the CTR (the number of chargeable clicks on your ad, divided by the number of impressions serve)
- the approximate range of clicks your ad will receive
These forecasted results are purely based on the audience selected and budget and not the ad itself. So once live, checking the progress of the ad regularly will mean you can evaluate whether your ad is on track with expectations or requires some additional tweaking to the visual, to the call-to-action or to the copy.
Number 5 – you won’t exceed your LinkedIn budget
If the total budget for your campaign is £2000, LinkedIn won’t exceed this, it will stop dead instead. This is useful particularly for agencies running campaigns with tight budgets. You don’t have to keep going back in to check where the spend is, you can literally take your hands off the wheel in the safe knowledge that the total spend you originally entered will be the total spend when the campaign ends.
Number 6 – you can share the LinkedIn campaign with others
To save yourself from being constantly bothered on how the campaign is doing, instead you can provide viewer-only access to other stakeholders so they can check the results themselves whenever they like.
Number 7 – you can measure LinkedIn campaign conversions
Ultimately the goal of your LinkedIn campaign is to generate enquiries, downloads, purchases, signups or website traffic. And so the ultimate metric is the completion of your call-to-action. Whilst impressions and clicks are measured by the ad itself, LinkedIn requires a bit more information to ascertain whether the target has completed the target action or not.
This is done through the set up and use of a Conversion. There are a number of parameters to establish to defer what your conversion is. The conversion is then either tracked via LinkedIn’s website Insight Tag (some LinkedIn code placed on your website) or via an event-specific pixel (where there is no unique URL to be tracked).
Knowing the number of conversions you are getting and indeed your conversion rate % (conversions divided by clicks) means you can assess the attractiveness of your calls to action. As well as being the key metric your sales team are interested in too!
Number 8 – LinkedIn Lead Gen forms
Don’t have a landing page, don’t panic! Using LinkedIn Lead Gen forms means you can generate leads from LinkedIn without the user even leaving the platform. What’s better is that the form is prepopulated with the users’ LinkedIn profile data so all they need to press is submit!
Even with a landing page, if your conversion rate isn’t very good, you can try reducing the number of steps the user takes to convert by introducing a LinkedIn Lead Gen form instead and give your conversion rate a welcome boost.
The only downside to LinkedIn Lead Gen forms is that, because the form data is pre-populated from LinkedIn, you’ll usually get the email address the user signs in to LinkedIn with (i.e. gmail, hotmail etc) instead of their business email address.
Number 9 – you can manage multiple accounts under a single campaign manager
If you are managing multiple company pages on LinkedIn it would be a pain in the backside to have to logout and login in to different accounts in LinkedIn Campaign Manager and run campaigns in different places. Instead, you can manage all your or your client accounts in one place using a single login.
Number 10 – Carousel Ads!
Carousel ads on LinkedIn allow you to tell an interactive story to inspire your target audience to take the desired action. Carousels feature a swipeable series of cards in a single ad to tell a deeper story, showcase multiple offerings, or provide insights for your audience. They basically mean you can do a lot more within the ad space and, unlike a video, the user interacts with the ad to swipe left or right to see the next image.
That’s it, that’s our top 10 things we like about LinkedIn Advertising. 🙂
