LinkedIn Media Buying — The Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn ads in 2019

Published in

Marketing And Growth Hacking

5 min readMar 3, 2019

As of 2018, LinkedIn, now owned by Microsoft, claimed 260 million users, 61 Million Senior level influencers, 40 Million decision makers like to spend their spare time.

Who is LinkedIn Ads for?

LinkedIn advertising will be particularly well adapted if your company has a B2B activity. For B2B, LinkedIn is one of the most effective targeting solutions. Nevertheless, due to these different advertising formats, the management can also meet the objectives of B2C companies, especially in terms of employer brand and branding.

When to deploy LinkedIn Ads?

Before considering LinkedIn advertising, it is necessary to work on the social network. Depending on the campaign, you can highlight a personal profile (such as your sales representative) or your business page.

Make sure that your profiles are optimized visually (photo or profile logo, cover image). Although some formats allow you to run advertising without a profile or page, the formats that include these are more effective.

Besides, the format “Sponsored content” including the logo and the link of your company page is one of the most used thanks to its efficiency. Example with Expert Market below:

The different types of LinkedIn Ads campaigns

Let’s take a look at the different types of campaigns that the social network offers you. Here are the 4 types of LinkedIn Ads campaigns:

“Sponsored Content” campaigns

These campaigns allow you to promote content as you are surely used to doing on Facebook. Promoted content appears in LinkedIn feed with the mention “promoted”. With these campaigns, you can promote both the content already published on your LinkedIn page and create advertising content from scratch.

Dynamic Ads Campaigns

Here, you can personalize the advertisement by automatically integrating the profile of the person in order to challenge him. These ads are in the right column.

Text Ads Campaigns

This is the oldest and simplest LinkedIn Ads advertising format. Here the advertisements are composed of a small image and a text. Like the previous format, they are displayed in the right column.

“InMail” campaigns

This last format allows you to send InMail messages directly in the boxes of people you target. The messages are almost like a classic Linkedin message but include a visual, a call to action button and, of course, the word “promoted”.

Options according to your objectives

In parallel to advertising formats, you will have the opportunity to choose different objectives:

1. Send the visitor to your site or content;

2. Collect leads via a built-in LinkedIn form (very useful for not taking the user out of the LinkedIn environment and thus improving the conversion rate)

3. Have views on your video.

Targeting offered by LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads targeting is particularly well thought out for B2B. Of course, you can target by age, gender, and location, as in most ad networks, but you can mostly benefit from social network targeting. Here are some examples:

You are a service provider dedicated to insurance professionals, you can target the leading insurance companies or simply the insurance industry. If your service is more for large companies, you can also filter. For example, we have targeted professionals in a specific country working in the field of insurance in companies with 500 to 1000 employees:

In another case, you offer a monitoring service for marketing teams, you can target marketing managers of companies with more than 500 employees:

You can target by:

· Company Name

· Business industry

· Size of the company

· Position Title

· Function

· Seniority in the company

· School

· Field of study

· Level of study

· Skills

· LinkedIn groups followed

· Years of experience

· Subscribers of a business page.

You can also enable re-targeting options to target, on LinkedIn, people who visited your site or subscribers to your newsletter. In the same way as on Google Ads or Facebook Ads.

Cost per click (CPC)

Black beasts of LinkedIn advertising, the costs per click are very high. If we take the two examples, here are the costs posted by LinkedIn:

For the insurance target: between $3.93 and $6.85 with a recommendation of $4.32.

For the marketing responsible target: between $4.67 and $8.3 with a recommendation of $5.14

Whatever you’re targeting, it’s hard for you to get a CPC of less than $3. Note that you have the choice between the automation of your bids and the manual selection of these. With automation, LinkedIn determines your CPC based on your targeting and your goal.

To ensure the profitability of your campaigns, consider systematically tracking LinkedIn conversions. This option is available on the screen where you determine your budget and your CPC.

If you wish to be supported for your campaigns, do not hesitate to contact me using any of the social media platform by searching 33Qamar.