A step-by-step guide on how to create LinkedIn ads.

Things to have beforehand

• Permissions: You must be an admin on your LinkedIn ad account and your company page to create the type of ads we’ll be running — Direct Sponsored Content. This is content that does not need to be published to the public company page.
• Creatives (JPGs of the ads you want to put up). You made these in an earlier module.
• Ad Copy
• LinkedIn conversion tracking installed

Phase 1: Initial setup

Head to https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/ads, then click “Create Ad.”

Do any initial account setup you need to, then you should eventually end up at a screen that says “Campaign Manager” on it. Make an ad account for your company if you haven’t already.

Then, if you have the option, make a campaign group called “Default Campaign Group”. Don’t set a budget, start it today, set the status as “Paused”, and let it run indefinitely.

Once you’ve created it, click on the name to open it up.

Phase 2: Audience generation

Click “Create Campaign.” Fill out as below (your default campaign group should say “Paused” and not active - you'll see this if you click on the pencil icon in "Default Campaign Group").

For "Objective", choose “Website conversions.”

You should now be in the Audience section.

Add in the locations you can target and the profile language.

Brainstorm audiences

We’re going to end up with a doc that looks like this. Skim it to get a sense of how it’s organized.

Now open up the template and make a copy of it.

You’re going to come up with as many possible audiences as possible, as long as they have over 50,000 people in them — anything less than that, and your audiences tend to fatigue too quickly, and you’ll have too many people who don’t click on ads. You can check this on the right with the “estimated target audience” section.

A few notes on this:

• Job Titles make up only ~40% of your audience.
  • Also, everyone targets by job title on LinkedIn. That’s LinkedIn’s strength. But that makes targeting by job title more expensive.
  • So if you can figure out another way to target — for example, by job function and seniority — you can often cut your costs because you can target people that other advertisers aren’t going after.
• Job Function & Seniority - very broad, really high volume, and the cheapest. Job function should the department someone sits in. You can target Partners and Owners here.
• Skills & Seniority - broad, high volume, expensive.
  • You’ll catch people who get cute with their job titles: for example, CMOs who go by "Chief Trash Can Officer". This happens more often than you’d think.
  • Steal skills from someone in your target market who you’re already connected with.
• Groups and Seniority - very precise, but low volume and $$.
• Make separate ad sets per seniority level, at minimum; break down by VP vs. Director vs. Manager vs. C-Level, etc.

For Job Titles, if you’re targeting a title like “Marketing Director,” think up as many permutations of it as possible. You can also pull from the job titles in the Multi-channel ads proposal.

For example: “Marketing Director” is as good as “Director of Marketing”, “Head of Marketing”, “VP of Marketing”, etc.

Add every permutation you can think of without overextending your audience.

For example: If you’re targeting senior engineers, don’t target “engineer” because that would include civil and mechanical engineers, among others.

If you look beside the job title box, you can quickly click suggested job titles to add them.

Add as many as you can until you’ve run out of ideas. The goal is to grow the “estimated target audience” number on the right.

The above is just a start. You could have 20 times as many job titles.

Save your audience so you don’t have to re-input these job titles if you later target them in a new campaign (trust us, it’s a pain). You can do so with this link at the bottom:

Name it accurately (e.g., “Industry: Fashion + Job Title: Marketing”). Save it.

Phase 3: Campaign creation

Make one campaign per audience segment. For example, if you’re selling videoconferencing software, “Industry + Job Title: Tech + HR Director” would be a different campaign from “Job Title: School Administrator”.

To create a campaign, click the button.

3a: Initial setup

Name the campaign name something like “Industry: Fashion + Job Title: Marketer,” or whatever targeting criteria (Company Size, Industry, Job Title, etc.) makes sense.

Chose only one specific combination of criteria per campaign. For example, you don’t target “Industries: Fashion + Technology + Job Title: Marketer.”

Select “Website visits.” Select your audience that you created in Phase 2.

Exclusion

Exclude all people who have visited your site in the past 90 days. Make that audience list if it doesn’t already exist.

To do so:

1. Click "Exclude more":

2. Click "Matched audiences" -> "Add matched audience" -> "Create website audiences":

3. Set it up this way:

4. Also exclude your own company and any current customers.

5. If you're targeting skills or groups, exclude using job function for anything that’s a poor fit.

6. Next, disable Audience Expansion and LinkedIn Audience Network:

Checking these boxes allows LinkedIn to show our ads to people outside of the target markets that we specified, making it harder to control our experiments and know what works (it’s possible that we could have overlapping audiences).

Unless we’re really not reaching many people, leave the boxes unchecked.

3b: Ad format

Select Single image ad, Carousel image ad, or Video ad (depending on which you want to start with) for the Ad Format. These are all Sponsored Content formats. Note: you'll need to make one campaign for each type of ad (i.e. one for video ads, one for single image ads, etc.).

3c: Set budget and schedule

Select "Set both a daily and total budget."

Because you’ll be experimenting with ads to start, base your daily budget on the following formula:

• Take your acceptable CAC
• Multiply it by 3 (giving us room to optimize)
• Divide by 7 (so we can run ads for a week, in case people convert worse on a Tuesday as opposed to a Sunday)

If you’re just starting to test this ad group, set the total budget as 3x your acceptable CAC.

Why set a total budget? Do it in case you make a typo somewhere or forget to turn off ads. This prevents runaway spend.

Select "Automated Bid" for bid type.

3d: Create tracking URL

Follow the UTM guidelines from our tracking template and use the URL builder linked inside.

On LinkedIn, paste the URL into where it says "Enter in your landing page URL."

Then immediately delete it once the UI changes. (You’ll see some extra fields pop up.) The link will still be there when a user clicks the ad, but we need to have real copy there instead of a URL.

Yes. The UI can improve.

Phase 4: Create sponsored content

4a: Name it

Click "Create new ad."

Name your ad “#{Target Audience} — #{Creative Name} — #{Optional Criteria}”.

Example: “NYC — Event Space #1 — Rent Gorgeous NYC event space w/Bullets”

4d: Ad copy

Then, use that space to write the copy for the text that appears above the ad. Pull this from the social ad copy you made.

For example:

Rent gorgeous NYC event space:• Launch a product or throw an event• Access coveted local real estate

Fill out the Ad Headline section, then duplicate the headline into the “Ad Description” section (very few LinkedIn users see the Ad Description).

4a: Add image

Click the pencil icon and upload your image.Add a call to action. (Use "Learn More" for prospecting ads.)

Your final product should look something like this:

Uncheck "add to campaign."

Hit "Create."

4f: Make all your ads for the campaign at once

If you try to make one ad at a time, you’ll sometimes run into an error message. Make sure you create all your sponsored content, then click "Browse existing content" and select all of the ads, and hit “Sponsor” for the smoothest experience.

Note that you’ll end up making new ads for multiple campaigns even if the copy and creative (the JPG) are the same — the tracking URL needs to be different.

Once you’ve created the ads, check all the ads you want to include in the campaign, then click "Sponsor."

Side Note -- The convoluted Linkedin-esque way to delete an ad:

To delete a sponsored content, the campaign and ad first has to be active. Then, from the dashboard, navigate to the Ads tab of the campaign, and locate the ad you want to delete. Click on it so you get its preview. From the newsfeed, click the 3 dots for more options and there it is: the obscure way to delete the ad.

Phase 5: Make your other ad sets

Your other audiences need loving too.

Then, if your product can only be used on desktop, you can experiment with LinkedIn Text Ads — an ad type that only shows up on LinkedIn’s desktop version. Go through phases 1-4, but when you make a new campaign, for the ad format select “Text Ads” instead of image/carousel/video.

Phase 6: Self Review

Run through the LinkedIn Checklist to make sure you didn’t miss anything.

Save the campaign as a draft.

Phase 7: Launch

Set every campaign as “Active”.

Phase 8: Optimize

Set a calendar event to review ad performance (see Ad Optimization > Project: How to Read Ad Results and Optimize Ads) in 1, 4, and 7 days.

Go forth and optimize, young marketer.