“If you’re in B2B, your audience is on LinkedIn.”
This is the premise that launched my paid digital experiments for MyFBAPrep. Although I was willing to test Reddit, Google Search, and Meta ads, I was the most excited and expectant about testing LinkedIn ads.
Here is a rough timeline of how we got started, check-in points and pivots, and how we optimized in a short timeframe.
Table of Contents
- LinkedIn ads setup
- Campaign group creation
- Campaign creation
- Ad creation
- Initial results and A/B testing
- Key results and conclusion
Setting up LinkedIn ads
Returning to the basics, here’s a primer on setting up LinkedIn ads in the first place.
First, create a LinkedIn ad account at linkedin.com/campaignmanager/accounts. You will need to be signed into your individual LinkedIn account to access the panel.
Then, set up your first campaign group. Here’s a quick breakdown of the differences between Campaign Group, Campaign, and Ads on LinkedIn.
- Campaign Group: Top-level grouping for your campaigns, where you can set an objective, schedule, and budget. All three of those variables can also be set at the campaign level.
- Campaign: A group of ads, where you can set targeting, ad format, audience, placement, and tracking options. You can also set budget, bid strategy, and schedule at this level.
- Ads: Individual ads where you can set the name, introductory text, headline, destination URL, CTA, and add creatives.
1) Campaign Group creation
Step 1: Name your campaign group and set a goal
Consider how you plan to set up and segment campaigns when naming your groups. You could batch campaigns by project, location, branch, budget, project owner, or more.
For example, you can do [Ad Manager] [Service Grouping] [Objective] so you can tell at a glance which audience the group of campaigns is targeting, and where you’re directing them. Or if you have different departments handling LinkedIn ads, you could add a department qualifier to easily sift between campaigns.
Goals include;
- Brand awareness: Reach more people with your post
- Website visits: Get more clicks to your landing page
- Engagement: Increase social engagement and company page followers
- Video views: Share your videos with more people
- Lead generation: Gather info from people interested in your business
- Website conversions: Capture leads or drive actions on your website
- Job applicants: Drive more applications to your job opportunities
Note: While testing, you can turn off the Group Objective and then set your objective at the Campaign level. I was advised to set objectives, budgets, and timelines at the campaign level rather than group level.
Step 2: Set a group budget and schedule
Once you set a group objective, further options will drop down to set your budget for the entire group of campaigns as well as timing for the invidual ads.
You can choose to 1) run an ongoing campaign starting from a certain date, 2) set a start and end date, or 3) set a start and end date with a lifetime budget that supercedes the end date.
I kept budget optimization off in the meantime, as I was advised to keep everything as manual as possible while setting up.
I was also advised to avoid setting budgets at the campaign group level, and instead set budgets at as low a level as possible while testing for easy adjustments.
2) Campaign creation
Step 1: Select the campaign group to build your campaign under
You’ll be able to preview the basics of the campaign group or change to a different campaign group before you proceed.
Step 2: Name your campaign and set your objective
If you didn’t set your objective at the Campaign Group level, this is when you can do so.
Campaign naming tips
- Since this is also where you can set your ad type and bid strategy, consider those variables when you name your individual campaigns. For example, you can do [Audience] [Ad format] [Budget].
- If you chose not to do so at the Campaign Group level, you can also set your objective and budgets at this point. So you could do [Objective] [Audience] [Ad format].
- I was also advised to add [Landing Page] to indicate which page we were directing ads to (for example, our contact page, a service page, a blog, or something else on the website. Ex. [Objective] [Audience] [Landing page]
Step 3: Set up your audience
You have the options to:
- Set the location of your audience
- Exclude audiences in certain geographical areas
- Narrow your audience by list, behavior, a lookalike of another well-performing audience, job experience, title, company demographics, and much more
- Limit your audience by excluding individuals in an uploaded list, who work for certain companies or industries, and more (all of the same options as the “Narrow” option)
I was advised to dig into where most of our bot or spam traffic was coming from and exclude those locations. I did this with Heap and GA4 and followed the advice of the agency trainer I was working with to set up our LinkedIn ads.
Then I set up the company industries and job titles we wanted to target. We were fortunate to have a target list of leads, which I uploaded as well.
I was also advised to exclude certain job titles for our particular use case, such as those from sales and business development. We also excluded anyone working for competitors from our audience.
And since I had listed a bunch of logistics-related roles in our targeting list, I excluded company industries that would also have those roles but were irrelevant to our services.
Step 4: Set your ad format
Surprisingly, you have to set ad format at the campaign level. You cannot have a video ad and a spotlight ad both under the same campaign.
I was advised to start out with single-image ads and video ads (via another campaign) for an AB test.
Step 5: Select your placement strategy
Similar to other ad networks, LinkedIn gives you the option of sending your ad to non-native platforms. We opted out of this service, as we only want our LinkedIn ads to show on LinkedIn. You can exclude certain categories in the LinkedIn Audience Network (including “uncategorized” placements) but we’re just starting our test and didn’t want to risk any brand exposure.
Step 6: Set your budget and schedule
Then we set up our budget, schedule, and bidding.
You can choose to set a daily budget, lifetime budget, or both, and when to start and end. If I was doing a test, I would do a lifetime budget, capping the campaign out at how much funds we put aside for the experiment. Then, the daily budget would control how quickly we spend our budget over a period of time (if we want a short test or a quick one).
Your options include;
a) A daily and lifetime budget with a set start date (good for a set budget you want to utilize over time);
b) A daily budget with either a set start date or a set start and end date (good for either ongoing campaigns or if you have a set budget with some wiggle room);
c) A lifetime budget with a set start and end date (good for campaigns with a strict budget that you don’t necessarily need spread out over time);
Step 7: Set your bidding goal and strategy
I was advised to select Maximum delivery for our bidding strategy to start out, as LinkedIn still had to learn what a good audience and amount for us would be.
Our bidding could also be optimized for website conversions, landing page clicks, or impressions. The recommended option would differ based on overall objective. For example, I chose “Website conversions” for this campaign objective, LinkedIn recommended “Website conversions” as our bidding optimization goal. In another campaign, I chose “Website visits” as our objective, so LinkedIn recommended “Landing page clicks” for a bidding optimization goal.
Step 8: Set up conversion tracking
Then it’s time to set up conversion tracking. You can set a conversion with an Insight Tag, Conversions API, or CSV conversion.
I added the LinkedIn Insight Tag to our website using Google Tag Manager and then verified it was working by going to Data > Sources and then confirming our Insight Tag was active.
From there we could define what a new conversion would be. We used the naming convention to easily see the type of conversion and lookback period.
We set attribution to Last Touch – Each Campaign since all campaigns are likely to work together to get a contact form submission. Last Touch – Last Campaign would only apply if the conversion is likely to come from a single campaign.
With all of that done, it’s finally time to create ads!
3) Ad creation
From here things were easy enough to figure out with just the UI. We created a few image ads and a few video ads using the same text and landing page.
Here’s what the UI looks like to upload LinkedIn video ads;
Here’s what the UI looks like to upload LinkedIn image ads;
Once all of the images and videos were uploaded and published, the next thing to do was wait and check on performance and spend every single day.
Initial results and A/B testing our LinkedIn ads
I ran our first LinkedIn ad, a static image campaign under a generic eCommerce audience, from December 12 to 19. I set the campaign goal to conversions on the website (essentially contact form submissions), and we spent almost $450 for a single click that week.
From there, we did three things differently;
- Tested a different goal (switched to website visits rather than conversions to give LinkedIn a chance to learn our audience)
- Tested a different audience (using a custom list of names, emails, and LinkedIn profiles we know are in our ICP)
- Tested new creatives, specifically a few video ads that we had designed by our digital agency
After another two weeks, we saw the biggest differentiator was having a new targeted audience (test #2).
I turned off the ad that had a different goal but same audience, and left the new audience and new creatives running. Our three-week check-in (Dec 12, 2024 – Jan 2, 2025) numbers are below, with the new audience + single-image creative in the lead for results.
Key results: Boost in contact form submissions
More interestingly, we saw a bump in our overall contact form submissions in Decemeber, during what is normally a slower month for our industry. We also saw more contact forms than the same month the previous year, but that may also be due to external factors. For example, last year brands were gearing for a recession, this year I’ve heard a lot of brands concerned about tariffs, general shipping rate increases, and changes in sub-pound shipping pricing.
Digging in further, I filtered for weekly traffic from organic and paid social channels and saw a corresponding upward trend that matched when we started running LinkedIn ads.
I would also note that around this time (starting in November) we also started investing more in our CEO’s thought leadership on LinkedIn, which likely had a positive effect on the company’s LinkedIn profile as well.
At this point, we are excited about investing more in this channel and experimenting with different ad formats, giveaways with lead-gen forms, audience lists, and bidding strategies. The initial results are promising, despite LinkedIn having a traditionally longer and more expensive conversion process. I’ll update this article periodically as I gather useful advice and lessons along the way.