Increasing Lead Acquisition With LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

7 min readMar 19, 2018

Want to know how to increase your business’s lead acquisition with Linkedin lead generation forms? Try this simple, step by step guide (including images).

I know, I know, all businesses are very different (I say this all the time!). That doesn’t mean that there aren’t rules that apply to everyone…

When testing a channel for the first time, whoever you are, whatever your business does, you need to make it simple! Don’t over complicate things.

What’s the goal for your business?

If your answer is “MAKING MORE MONEY!”

Then answer this, “What’s your most important KPI?”

If you are a service business and your main KPI is to increase lead acquisitions/enquiries, then Lead Ads are perfect for you. Almost every type of business could find that lead ads work well, the important thing is to test into the channel and scale when you see results.

If you’re an e-commerce site, you might be one of the exceptions to this rule (I mean, the marketing world is huge and I am sure we could find a logical reason justifying why it might be worth testing — i.e. providing voucher codes).

However, to make this super simple, if you are an e-commerce business, I would not recommend LinkedIn Lead Ads. Get in touch with Mark Morren, our Head of Performance, I am sure he will boost your sales through one of his other channels!

We are massive advocates of testing here at Rebelhack, so we urge businesses to test all the time. If acquiring leads is important for your business then LinkedIn lead ads might be a good choice for you — so why not test to see if it works and the unit economics are right for you.

What’s the cost of LinkedIn Lead Ads?

There is no specific answer to this question. However, there are key criteria that will play an important role in defining that cost.

The cost per lead will depend on many factors (we’ve listed a few below).

Audience: Who are we targeting? There are multiple targeting criteria (see below). If a lot of businesses are targeting a specific audience, it means that the ads will have to compete with other campaigns. This would impact impression share and your CPC.

You can also upload a list of companies or emails through CSV files from the Linkedin Campaign Manager. You can then use them for targeting or exclusions.

Bid: The bid depends on the competition within that specific audience — there will be a minimum bid and a suggested bid (see an example below):

Business Type: What are you offering? Is your service appealing to a wide range of users or just to a niche market? What’s the cost of your service?

Lead Type / Level of Commitment (call to action): Are they submitting the form for:

More Info
Request a Demo
Request a Call Back
Sign Up?
This also defines the level of intent.

Number of fields in the form (LinkedIn will pre-fill most of the fields, however, usually the more fields, the higher the friction and the lower the Conversion Rate).

Usually the CPC is around £5-£10. Meaning that if you are looking to acquire leads at £5-£10 CPL your conversion rate will have to be 100% — we all know that is not the case in any campaign… at least I don’t think anyone has found one yet. Please let us know if you do!

Take a look at your unit economics. What’s you target cost per lead?

Let’s assume you want users to fill in the form to request more information about your business. See the example of a LinkedIn form below:

In the above form we are acquiring email, first name and last name.

Let’s assume that we are looking to spend a maximum of £50 per lead. LinkedIn Lead Ads would be completely feasible as a channel.

Assuming the CPC is £5, a daily budget of £50 should get us an average of 10 clicks a day. Meaning that a 10% Conversion Rate to lead acquisition would give us a lead for every £50 spent (this would be in line with our target unit economics).

What kind of conversion rate could you expect on LinkedIn Lead Ads? This also depends on the service you are offering and on the type of lead you are going after (as discussed a couple of paragraphs above).

See the stats from some of the campaigns we ran for one of our partners:

Bear in mind they had a £400 target CPL:

Creating a LinkedIn Lead Ad

Let’s go through a short tutorial on how to create a LinkedIn Lead Ad. You can create Lead Ads for InMail campaigns or for Sponsored Content campaigns. In this blog we will create a Sponsored Content Lead Ad Campaign.

What do you need?

A Banner (a creative) — The optimal size of the banner is 1200×628
Ad Copy for your Sponsored content

A Headline (Important) — Maximum number of characters: 70
An Ad Text (Important) — Maximum number of characters: 150
A Description (you can do without it, this will not be showing at all times and won’t be showing on all devices) — Maximum number of characters: 100

There is no need to create a landing page — the conversion will happen on LinkedIn
Lead Generation Form — Details on creation will follow

Once you create the banner and the ad copy, it’s time to put all the pieces together.

Create a Lead Generation form

From your LinkedIn Ad Manager Account click on “Account Assets” and then on “Lead Generation Forms” (see below)

2. Click on “Create New Form Template”

3. Fill in the “Offer headline”, “Offer details” and the rest of the requested fields.

4. Choose up to 7 pre-filled fields you want to acquire.

5. Choose the message you want the user to see after submission and select a thank you page destination.

Once the form has been created (LinkedIn has a review process of up to 48 hours which can be a frustrating wait) you will have all you need to create your LinkedIn Lead Ad Campaign.

Now let’s put the pieces together and create the campaign!

In order to create a LinkedIn Sponsored Content Lead Ad follow these few simple steps:

From the Ad Manager click on “Create campaign”.

2. Select “Sponsored Content”.

3. You will now get 2 options (1. Send people to your Website or Content 2. Collect Leads Using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms) — Select “Collect Leads Using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms”.

4. Click on the button “Create Sponsored Content”.

5. Add the Ad Copy and the Banner that you created earlier.

6. Name your Sponsored Content, then, in order to make the banner and Ad Copy appear paste the link of your website in the Box next to the logo, wait a second and delete the URL. The above will turn into the picture below (it should now display the Ad Text, Ad Headline and Ad Description):

7. Looking at the picture above, where the rebelhack.com text is, enter your Ad Text, Click on the image (the little blue pencil) and upload your banner, delete the Ad Headline and paste the Ad Headline you created, remove the content in the Ad Description.

8. Click “Save”.

9. Select the Sponsored Content you created from the list and click “Next“.