SEO

Five Tips to Help Your LinkedIn Ad Campaigns

By Rebecca Flynn Aug. 15, 2022

Our Media Buyer, Rebecca Flynn, covers five tips on how to help your LinkedIn ad campaigns.

LinkedIn’s platform of over 690+ million members offers an impressive landscape to ensure your brand’s message is heard by the right audience. While it might not fit in the marketing strategy for every business, you can assure that if your audience is on LinkedIn, you will be capable of getting in front of those influential decision makers that matter most. We incorporate LinkedIn paid ads into many of our clients marketing strategies, and throughout our time spent on the platform, here are some things we have learned–

1. Retarget Single Image

In April of 2022, LinkedIn released the ability to retarget users who engage with single image ads. This new targeting option joins video viewers and lead gen form opens to round out the retargeting options, which comes at an optimal time considering that pixel based retargeting audiences are continuously becoming less reliable due to new restrictions as we’ve seen with the Apple iOS 14 update. Retargeting using single image will provide media buyers and advertisers with an imperative missing key in their bottom of funnel approaches and expand opportunities for in platform retargeting. You can choose to retarget anyone who has interacted with your ad (reactions, comments, shares and clicks) or limit to any user who has performed chargeable clicks (the action your campaign was built for, like opening a lead form). You can also retarget using 30, 60, 90, 180, and 365 day time frames. This new option is a huge game changer for LinkedIn, especially considering that advertisers on other platforms have had this available for some time now.

2. Choose the Right Ad Format

LinkedIn offers a wide array of ad formats, many of which are vastly different than the options on other social media platforms. For this conversation, we will discuss our experience with 3 of the main ad formats that are a standard for advertisers– single image, carousel, and video ads. While audience targeting and objective also come into play when determining ad format (and should), we have a/b tested media types on LinkedIn in many different scenarios, and here is what we have noticed–

Single image ads ARE the safe bet. No matter audience, campaign objective, or goal, single image ads have achieved the lowest CPMs every time when compared against video and carousel ads. They have also been the most competitive when analyzing other metrics such as CTR, CPC, engagement rate and conversion rate. Video and Carousel ads have notoriously had CPM’s that have been as much as 10x higher than our static ads when all other metrics (copy, CTA, audience targeting, etc. were held consistent). This is imperative to take into consideration when determining ad strategy and campaign objectives. Advertising on LinkedIn is already a bit pricier compared to other platforms, so don’t overpay for impressions when you can generate a competitive CTR, CPC and conversion rate for less! And if you’re working at the top of the funnel, this especially holds true.

3. Utilize Bright Colors

This one might sound mundane, but it’s a tip we’ve been telling clients from the get go. Utilize bright colors, or better yet just stay away from the basics! And this holds true for most social media platforms, at least for static/carousel ads. One thing that LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and many others all have in common is a white feed with a blue logo. While that is the logical choice for tech companies who want to position themselves as credible and trustworthy, it is not the best choice for advertisers wanting their content to stand out. We’ve a/b tested static ads based on color, and noticed that almost every time, the ads with the brighter background have performed better than the ads with the white or neutral color background. To expand– we have tested this with clients across different industries, on different platforms, and with every other ad factor held consistent (copy, CTA, audience targeting, campaign objective, budget, etc.). Generally, we have achieved an improved CTR, CPC, engagement rate, and conversion rate in these tests with the ads that have stood out color wise.

4. Try Lead Gen Ads Instead of Conversion

As many advertisers and media buyers know, most things require testing. Luckily for you, we have spent budget and time performing tests so that you don’t have to! One of the most intriguing was the Lead Gen campaign vs. Conversion campaign test– one that we performed with both B2B and B2C clients needing to generate leads. What we noticed is that we were capable of generating more leads every time utilizing the on platform lead gen objective on LinkedIn. Every time! The main difference between these two campaign types is that with the conversion objective, users are prompted with a strong CTA to click over to a landing page to convert. With the Lead Gen feature on LinkedIn, the pre-populated lead form shows up immediately after the user clicks the CTA, therefore converting without ever needing to leave LinkedIn. We have a/b tested these campaign types utilizing the same copy, content, CTA, landing page, and audience targeting and have been successful in generating more leads with Lead Gen campaigns every time.

5. Target Decision Makers

Sounds obvious, right? We’ve already discussed how pricey it can be to advertise on LinkedIn, so wasting money on low quality impressions is not ideal. Utilizing LinkedIn’s on platform targeting options to curate the perfect size of decision makers can be tricky, but well worth it if done properly. LinkedIn recommends an audience size of at least 50,000 people if it is your first campaign (and not a retargeting campaign). This does not apply for custom audience lists. After selecting your preferred geographic region, we like to target job titles + company industries. IF you are certain on company size and revenue, you can further define your target audience. The most important factor here, though, is ensuring your selected job titles match up with what your real life customers already have in their LinkedIn profiles. Spend time researching your customers on LinkedIn and matching up the data in their profiles to what your targeting parameters are in your prospecting campaigns.

Written By

Rebecca Flynn

SEO

Five Tips to Help Your LinkedIn Ad Campaigns

Written By

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