How to Run LinkedIn Ads: Complete Strategy, Optimization & Performance Guide (Step-by-Step)
Introduction
If you’re working on a B2B marketing strategy, then using LinkedIn Ads could help you grow your business! At Digit Cure, we have over 7 years of experience in the digital advertising space, and we have seen how companies can generate great results (ROI) with LinkedIn Ad Campaigns as well as how many companies are just wasting budget due to poor strategies and targeting, as well as not continuously optimizing their campaigns.
In this blog, we’ll cover everything from setting up a campaign to advanced strategies so you can create effective LinkedIn Ads that give you results!
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What Are LinkedIn Ads & Why Should You Use Them?
LinkedIn Ads provides an avenue for paid advertisement to be displayed on LinkedIn by utilizing their Campaign Manager software. In comparison to other social media platforms, LinkedIn connects users to professionals such as the decision creator, the executive level business man/woman and the ‘mover and shaker’ in your industry that are currently working in a business context.
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We have continually seen success through the use of LinkedIn advertising since we have been targeting on LinkedIn by either the title of the person, the seniority level of the person and/or the size of the company, that the use of LinkedIn advertising is more advantageous than other sources of B2B leads. The core types of LinkedIn Ads consist of the following:
- Sponsored Content (single image, carousel, video)
- Message Ads (sent directly to LinkedIn inboxes)
- Dynamic Ads (personalized, auto-filled with profile data)
- Text Ads (simple right-rail ads)
- Conversation Ads
- Lead Gen Forms (pre-filled, frictionless forms)
If you want to connect with high-value professionals, gain qualified leads, or establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry with your marketing mix, you should be including LinkedIn Ads in your overall plan.
Step-by-Step Guide: How to Run LinkedIn Ads
Step 1: Set Up LinkedIn Campaign Manager
To create a new LinkedIn account linked to your Company Page go to www.linkedin.com/campaignmanager where you will have one control panel for all of your campaigns on LinkedIn.
Step 2: Define Your Campaign Objective
LinkedIn organizes its campaigns into 3 different objectives, namely Awareness, Consideration and Conversion. Based on our experience in working with clients in various industries, generating leads and converting visitors from your website tend to yield better overall business success.
Step 3: Build Your Target Audience
LinkedIn stands out for its ability to provide sophisticated tiered-bid strategies for segment targeting to help marketers reach their ideal target audience:
- Job titles, functions or levels of seniority
- Industry/company size/individual business names
- Skills, education or total years of experience
- Groups/interests on LinkedIn
At Digit Cure, we consistently advise using a matched audience as a base (uploading an existing client list or retargeting site visits), then adding additional layers to improve the relevance of your messages while lowering your overall cost per click.
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Step 4: Choose Your Ad Format
Ensure that your format corresponds with your objective. Single Photo Advertising is best for creating brand recognition. Lead Gen Ads are designed for capturing leads directly. Message Ads are a great way to get registrants or demos of your products at events.
Step 5: Set Your Budget & Bid Strategy
LinkedIn allows you to set daily or total budget caps. Use manual bids until you have enough of an established history (usually after 2-3 weeks) before switching to automated bids in order to monitor Cost Per Click (CPC) more accurately as well.
Step 6: Launch & Monitor
Once campaigns go live, you should check their performance on a daily basis at first for the next week. The LinkedIn algorithm will take 1-2 weeks to stabilize how much money is being spent on each campaign, so if you need to make a significant change, do not do so too quickly after launching.
LinkedIn Ads Best Practices for Maximum ROI
When it comes to running successful LinkedIn Ads, the most important thing to remember is that you have to be disciplined throughout the entire campaign. In our experience, here are some effective practices:
- To keep your advertisements from becoming tired, you should use 3-5 creative variations within separate campaigns.
- You should exercise caution when activating LinkedIn’s Audience Expansion because it can dilute precision in targeting.
- When possible, you should utilize Lead Gen Forms rather than landing pages; Lead Gen Forms typically have a conversion rate that is 2-3 times greater on mobile devices than landing pages do.
- If you restrict your audience to a minimum of 50k, you will reduce both delivery and cost per click.
- To keep your creatives fresh and maintain engagement rates, refresh all creatives every 4-6 weeks.
With every client we work with, we promote the fact that they need to be patient when using LinkedIn Ads because compared to Meta and Google Ads, LinkedIn has a much higher cost per click than those platforms. However, in a B2B environment, lead quality is worth the cost.
LinkedIn Ads Optimization: How to Improve Campaign Results
Optimizing LinkedIn ads should be considered an ongoing effort and not just a one-off setup. At Digit Cure, we follow these steps to improve LinkedIn ad performance on an ongoing basis:
A/B Test Systematically: Only test one variable at a time (i.e., headline, image, CTA, or audience segments) for any given ad campaign. Testing multiple variables together makes it impossible to know which one is causing changes.
Use Performance Insights: Use Campaign Manager’s demographic breakdown to identify which audience segments are converting at the highest rates. If you’re getting clicks from CFOs but they aren’t converting, it’s possible that your landing page is not in agreement with their intent when clicking your ad.
Adjust Bids Based on Performance: Disable any ads with Click Through Rates (CTR) that are low (below 0.4%) and put more money into ads that generate the best results. Over time, we have found that 20% of ads typically account for 80% of results on LinkedIn.
Retarget Engaged Audiences: Build retargeting campaigns for people who viewed more than 50% of your video ad, visited your website, or opened a Lead Gen Form and did not submit the form. Warm audiences convert significantly higher than cold traffic.
Measuring LinkedIn Ads Performance (Key Metrics That Matter)
When analyzing your LinkedIn advertising performance, do so by looking at more than just vanity metrics. Here are some KPIs that actually matter:
- Click-Through Rate (CTR):Your Click Through Rate (CTR) should ideally be between 0.4% and 0.6%. Adjust your creative if you are below these benchmarks.
- ost Per Lead (CPL): varies based on the industry you are in but should typically be $40-$80 in B2B. If using premium audiences then you may be paying more but could still receive great returns from doing so.
- Lead Quality Score:Your Lead Quality score should consist of how many Sales-Qualified Leads (SQL) you receive from LinkedIn traffic compared to leads generated through other channels.
- Conversion Rate: Depending on what you’re hoping to achieve through this campaign, monitor form fill-out rates, demo requests or sales.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Connect leads from LinkedIn with your company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and revenue sources. This is the final metric that you should consider.
At Digit Cure we set up UTM Tracking & link all LinkedIn campaigns to Google Analytics 4 and your company’s CRM systems to allow you to know exactly where your ideal pipeline exists and how much is coming from each campaign versus all of your impressions!
Common LinkedIn Ads Mistakes to Avoid
Over the years, we’ve examined a large number of unsuccessful LinkedIn marketing efforts, and the same errors have been found repeatedly:
- Too broad a target for your ads: In all likelihood, you’ll wind up with lower performance from a 5,000,000+ audience than you would from a smaller but more precise audience because of inefficiency and so on.
- Landing page issues: You can’t compensate for having a slow, generic or mismatched landing page with a well performing ad.
- Far too little management of the campaign once it has started: LinkedIn ads require a lot of daily/weekly management during their first 30 days after they are activated.
- Forgetting about the conversion pixel: You cannot track conversions (and build retargeting audiences) without the LinkedIn Insight Tag installed on your website.
- Creative ideas used to target both warm and cold audiences: Targeting cold audiences using the same creative idea as when you are sending warm audiences should not be done, make sure you customize messaging to suit those two groups.
Advanced LinkedIn Ads Strategies for Better Results
When your campaigns have reached stability, implementing these advanced techniques can significantly increase performance:
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) on LinkedIn
You can upload a list of targeted companies and serve ads only to their employee’s employee group; This is particularly impactful for enterprise sales cycles with multiple influencing stakeholders
LinkedIn Thought Leadership Ads
Another newer way to generate ads through your executives and employees’ personal posts (e.g., through social media) as advertisements; For now, our tested & reliable engagement with this format is much higher than traditional brand advertising.
Sequential Messaging
Use ads in a certain order: Start with awareness video, then consideration content, finally a direct offer. This follows the buyer’s journey and builds trust before/while asking for action.
Lookalike Audiences
The Lookalike feature on LinkedIn turns your best customers into a new audience, which is a great way to expand past your original target list and still remain relevant.
How to Create High-Converting LinkedIn Ad Creatives
To Capture someone’s attention with LinkedIn ads they need to stand out from all the other content in the Professional feed, i.e. be “eye-catching.” Based upon our campaign performance analysis, here are proven best practices:
- Provide value first; not brand identity: Always lead off from addressing the pain point you solve (the problem) and not “who am I?”
- Use actual people (with faces) in your creative or video ad(s): Human images are consistently 5+ times more effective than stock images alone.
- Headlines should be no longer than 70 characters in order to avoid being truncated on mobile devices.
- Use contrast and bold type to make your ad more noticeable in LinkedIn’s clean news feed.
- Match your call to action for the different stages of the marketing funnel by using ‘Learn More’ for creating awareness and using ‘Request a Demo’ for converting users into customers, etc.
Video ads that are shorter than 30 seconds typically contain captions and have a strong hook within the first 3 seconds of the video performi_ng better than static images in our clients’ campaigns; this trend is particularly strong with product demo videos and case studies.
Budget Planning & ROI Expectations for LinkedIn Ads
To have any realistic success with LinkedIn Ads you really need a realistic budget. The minimum daily budget for advertising on LinkedIn is $10 but practically:
- You can expect to spend $1,500-$3,000/month while you are in the testing phase of your campaign (Months 1-2), in order to collect sufficient data to properly optimize.
- Once you move into the scaling phase (Month 3 and beyond), you will want to increase your spending on your best performing campaigns incrementally by 20%-30% each month.
- Expected Cost Per Lead (CPL) is $50-150 for most B2B campaigns; $50-100 for niche, targeted segments.
- Most campaigns will have meaningful ROI within 60-90 days of launch when properly optimized.
At Digit Cure, we take a phased budget approach: Start conservative, learn fast, then scale what’s working. Clients that commit to at least 3 months of testing see better long-term results than clients that only measure results after the first 30 days.
Conclusion
The effective operation of LinkedIn Ads is 1 part strategy, 1 part science, and 1 part continual education. This platform provides great rewards for precisely targeted ads with quality creative work completed continuously and detrimental consequences for generic ads that are set-and-forget.
The fundamentals of beginning an advertising programme on LinkedIn (no matter if you are a new advertiser or scaling up) will remain the same: develop an understanding of the target audience, test what works, evaluate measures that matter to improve the overall campaign performance, and continue to optimize the ad over time.
Digit Cure works with businesses from many different industries to help them implement high-performance LinkedIn advertising programmes that generate real pipelines. If you are ready to reduce the guesswork in developing a LinkedIn Ads strategy based on a proven methodology, please let us be of assistance to you.
FAQS
How to run LinkedIn Ads effectively for beginners?
Define your main goal (lead generation or traffic to your website). Presently, audience targeting needs to be defined accurately through job title and company size data; while choosing creative types of LinkedIn ad and how much to spend (led ad options, sponsored content, etc. Each campaign can begin with a minimum budget of $20-$30/day per individual campaign’s budget) and assess performance over two weeks before optimizing ad campaigns.
What are the best LinkedIn ads optimization strategies?
The best optimization methodologies for LinkedIn Ads have A/B testing (testing 2 separate versions of an advertiser’s creative ads versus each other against each other’s metrics), demographic/psychographic based audience refinement, retargeting to “warm” audiences that have been preciously interacted with via an advertisement and providing them with the promise of refreshing ad creative materials (creator) roughly every four to six weeks while utilizing CRM systems/campaign analytics entered into their media costs to evaluate the quality of leads produced from ad campaigns.
How can I improve LinkedIn ads performance?
The three key focus areas for making improvements to LinkedIn ads results are: (1) quality of the creative (higher use of authentic photos and definite value proposition and identifiable call to action); (2) precision of your audience (layered targeting using the two matchmaking processes), and (3) congruency of the landing page (the same content on the ad appears on your landing page and loads properly on smart phones).