How to set up a Linkedin campaign that performs
By: Dominik Elmiger
Tags: Linkedin Marketing, Linkedin Ads, LinkedIn, Create Linkedin Ads

Create a Campaign Group

After logging into the Linkedin Campaign Manager, create your first campaign.

Campaigns can be put into ‘groups’. This is not necessary but can be useful for better budget control (I used to run 4 individual ad accounts, UK, France, Germany, US, with campaign groups, we can split this regionally)

As you can see below, campaign groups allow you a Total Budget — I feel more comfortable having these safety nets. For whatever reason, you can also schedule your entire campaign groups. Obviously this is hierarchical, and any campaign setting would be overruled by the Campaign Group setting.

Choose a Campaign Objectives

For a quick start and campaigns with direct performance, consider the campaign objective below:

Website visits Lead Generation Website conversions

Which campaign objective is right for me?

The campaign set up for all three objectives is the same. The difference will be on the ad format. The lead gen ad requires a form to be set up. More on that, later.

Set up your Target Audience

You have various ways to set up your targeting. If you’re pursuing some account-based marketing campaigns, you may want to use CRM onboarding. This is a technique where you upload either contact records or account information into Linkedin Audiences. Let me show you how this is done:

CRM onboarding — how to upload contacts OR accounts

Upload contacts or accounts into Linkedin

The two templates are available to download, the information needed are:

CSV template for contact upload

CSV template for company upload

Once you left this to render for about 24 hours, you should be able to select the audience within your campaign set up.

The exciting thing (especially for account uploaded), you can still overlay Linkedin’s targeting. Let’s continue with this.

Saved Audience (if this is the first time you create a campaign, it’ll be empty, you can however save your audience at the end of this campaign and then retrieve the information for future campaigns). Linkedin has a new feature and got set up lists already (never used it) Select countries, regions, cities… I tend to exclude continents where I don’t want traffic from (but then I’m paranoid) profile language

Who is your target audience

This is where you have to play around and get to a comfortable with the reach and budget which is indicated in realtime on the right hand side.

Realtime audience and performance forecast indicator

Make sure to exclude your competitors and choose between job functions or job titles.

You can start running ads with an audience size of 300 — if you have a highly targeted campaign, perhaps that’s what you want to do.

If you previously uploaded contatcts/accounts, this is where you can select your ‘matched audience’.

Choose your Ad format

Which ad format is right for you? This depends again on your objective. Having said that, I focus on direct performance — hence the Single Image ad is going to be your winner. Carousel and video ads are engaging, but won’t deliver conversions.

This conversion ad (beta) is a message delivered to your inbox, expensive, but if you’ve got the money — test it.

Choose your ad format

Placements

err, no thank you Linkedin.

Budget and schedule

Linkedin advertising is expensive! £20 per day is not a lot. Tip: you can try and reduce costs by splitting out target regions/cities. When I targeted the US, the CPC would drop when I excluded NYC.

Automated bidding or manual CPC? I’m old school, unless you have campaigns running for a while, start manually.

A Linkedin rep told me to go above the recommended bid. This is auction based, so you’re not actually paying £12.01, but only a little bit more than the highest bidder. By going in high, you also make sure that out of the big pool of people, you reach those who are considered of better quality (Linkedin algorithm logic).

Great, you’ve reached the end (skipping the conversion tracking here). Let’s move over to the ad.

Set up Linkedin ads

Create a new ad (it may be tempting to just use an existing post, but bear in mind that it won’t have the right tracking)

Create a new ad

I don’t want to talk too much about the design of ads. Other have got this covered. I will say that the ad below is good, don’t be shy using hashtags in your ad copy. I think it could do with a Linekdin CTA.

Call to action options

URL tracking

Make sure to add correct utm tracking. Likely to be:

utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=linkedin&utm_campaign=q3-offer

Medium is cpc (cost per click), this is for Google Analytics to allocate it into the ‘Paid Search’ channel. If you don’t want that, choose something different, but you ‘must’ change the Default Channel Grouping in GA, otherwise the traffic will be allocated into ‘Other’, and that is really annoying and cannot be rectified retrospectively.

If you want to differentiate the ads (and you should, because you should always have a minimum of 2 ads running at any given time) add:

utm_content=ad1

So, you’re complete URL will look like:

https://www.yoursite.com/?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=linkedin&utm_campaign=q3&offer&utm_content=ad1

Always paste this URL into a browser to make sure it doesn’t break.

Create a second ad, perhaps just changing the text, review the campaign and launch it.

Create ads with Lead Gen forms

If you want to have native lead capture directly on the ad, you need to create your form first, before you start on the campaigns. This is how it’s done.

Create lead gen forms

And this is how you download leads from the platform:

Download leads

Consider Zapier to automatically transfer these leads into your CRM.

What next?

A single touchpoint through a download doesn’t mean much. Think of the entire flow, what happens next, does the lead enrol on an email outreach cadence? Does the SDR reach out?

Hope that helps… give me a shout if the above isn’t clear.