How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Advertising Campaigns

linkedin advertising

LinkedIn – the number one B2B social media platform for content distribution ─ with over 600 million professionals, is invaluable as a B2B ad platform.

We know that social media ads are the most effective when a business specifically targets where its buyers are already online. 

Whether you have experience with LinkedIn advertising or not, it’s easy to see the value of boosting your content and creating targeted promotions to reach a specific audience of LinkedIn members.

In this article, we are going to give you some tips and tricks to help you prepare to run successful LinkedIn ads, including:

  • Why should you optimize your LinkedIn ads
  • What are the requirements
  • A step-by-step guide on how to optimize your Linkedin advertising campaigns

For more in-depth information, let’s get started!

LinkedIn Advertising: Is It Worth Optimizing?

The size of the audience is just one factor. Yes, LinkedIn gives you access to a large number of potential users with over 690 million members. Users of LinkedIn aren’t just influencers. Over 63 million decision-makers, including over 10 million C-level executives, make up its audience.

This audience has twice as much purchasing power as the typical web audience. LinkedIn ads have the potential to reach the right person with your message directly.

However, mastering your LinkedIn ad targeting strategy is essential to maximizing effectiveness and avoiding wasteful spending.

Advertising optimization can significantly enhance the buying process for advertisers who are aware of their audience with the highest performance.

LinkedIn is one of the best social media platforms for advertising, but marketing on it costs more.

  • Cost per click (CPC): $5.26
  • Cost per 1000 impressions (CPM): $6.59
  • The cost per message sent (CPS): $0.80

LinkedIn Advertising Requirements

The advertising guidelines on LinkedIn’s platform are fairly typical of those on Facebook and Google, as well as other social media platforms.

To set up your LinkedIn advertising account, follow these steps:

  • A company page with a profile picture
  • At least ten followers 
  • A business email address

linkedin advertizing

To start, go to LinkedIn.com/advertising to create an ad. Additionally, you can use this link to gain access to additional options on LinkedIn Ads Manager, where you will perform the majority of your reporting once your campaigns have begun.

Either the LinkedIn ads manager or the LinkedIn ads editor can be used to manage advertising campaigns on LinkedIn. 

Pro Tip: Use LinkedIn ads manager because it gives you more options for data and reporting.

Step-By-Step: How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Advertising Campaigns

As mentioned, we will include a step-by-step guide on optimizing your LinkedIn advertising campaign and getting successful.

Here is how:

Narrow Down Your Targets and Goals

Before you start, ask these questions to yourself: What kind of advertising campaign are you running, and who are your target customers?

The following step is to conduct in-depth customer research to comprehend your target audience. You can’t run an effective campaign if you do not know your audience.

The audience is made up of people who have different preferences. You can be specific about your goals in a way that appeals to your audience if you know who they are.

Your approach should be based on your audience’s characteristics and the type of promotion you are carrying out. This point is very important because taking the right steps can help you focus on your goals and figure out how to get there.

Include These 3 Elements for an Effective Ad

To attract viewers to view your products online, make your advertisements overwhelming. There are three steps to creating compelling ads:

  • Use powerful calls to action (CTAs)
  • Be relevant
  • Test, test, test!

Pro Tip: Use short and clear CTAs such as “buy now” and “sign up today.”

Make sure to re-check your ads for grammar mistakes. Some people quickly lose trust when they see even minor errors.

Before launching and making your LinkedIn ads live, you should always test them. Also, if you would like to know more about LinkedIn headlines, have a look at this article.

Use And/Or Targeting to Reach the Right Audience Type

The And/Or targeting feature can be useful when you’re ready to start limiting your audience.

This enables you to exclude individuals specifically based on a characteristic or to get even more granular within a targeting category.

If you want to target for example content writers, you can target the job title “content writer” or “content writing” as a skill and a certain level of experience.

Now, let’s see how to locate and use LinkedIn‘s And/Or functionality as follows:

1. Find the option to “start building your audience section” in the campaign’s audience section.

2. Choose the criteria you want to use for targeting.

3. Utilizing the “or” feature, select “add more attributes” to broaden your audience.

4. By selecting “narrow audience further (AND)” and adding the appropriate attributes, you can further target your campaign.

5. To exclude particular targeting characteristics, select “exclude audience.”

6. Click “view audience summary” to review your audience’s criteria.

Pay close attention to the tab labeled “forecasted results” located to the right of the campaign manager. This will demonstrate how each distinct And/Or criteria alter the size of your target audience.

Track Your Ad Analytics and Adjust

LinkedIn offers a number of metrics that you can use to evaluate the success of your ad once it has gone live.

  • “Impressions,” or the number of times your advertisement has been seen, is the first metric.
  • The number of people who clicked on your advertisement is the second metric.
  • The “unique click rate,” which is the ratio of your ad’s unique clicks to impressions, is the third metric.
  • “Engaged views,” or views that led to a click on your LinkedIn profile or email capture, are the fourth metric.

These metrics can be changed based on how your campaign objective is set up because different objectives will have different standards for success.

In addition, LinkedIn provides a number of additional metrics, such as “cost per click,” which is the average amount paid for each click, and “cost per engagement,” which is the average amount paid for each view that is engaged.

For instance, you might decide to increase your budget if your unique click rate is lower than you would like it to be. Or, your audience might shrink if your cost per click is too high.

Key Takeaways

Here’s what you have learned today in short: 

  • LinkedIn – the number one B2B social media platform for content distribution ─ with over 600 million professionals.
  • Use LinkedIn ads manager because it gives you more options for data and reporting
  • Conduct in-depth customer research to comprehend your target audience because you can’t run an effective campaign if you do not know your audience.
  • Use short and clear CTAs such as “buy now” and “sign up today.”
  • LinkedIn offers a number of metrics that you can use to evaluate the success of your ad once you go live.

Now it’s your turn to start optimizing your LinkedIn advertising campaigns. 

Let us know in the comments if you found this article helpful.

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