When working in LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager, it is important to understand how to create a campaign the right way. Today, I will walk you through how to properly set up a campaign with proper targeting rules.
How To Start
To start creating your campaign you will click the white “Create Campaign” button at the top right of your Campaign Manager dashboard.
This will take you to a page where you have 3 options. These options are the type of ad you are running. It is important to chose the right ad type as this cannot be changed later. If you are unsure what type of to run, we have attached an article that can explain the different LinkedIn ad types.
Once you have selected your ad type you will be prompted to name your campaign. This name should be something relevant to the targeting. If you are going to target CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, it would make sense to call it “CEO Job Titles | Fortune 500| US” instead of “December 2017 Campaign”. As you can see the first name is way more descriptive than the second name.
After naming your campaign, you can create your ad. If you already have one in mind, you will click the blue “Create Sponsored Content” button on the top right. Once created, you will check the box next to your ad and then click the white “Sponsor Selected Content” button on the top right.
If you do not yet have an ad ready you can skip this step by just clicking next.
Targeting
Now this is where we get into the meat of LinkedIn ads. Targeting on LinkedIn is superior to any other platform when it comes to targeting professionals. There are a lot of options and a lot of ways to target people on LinkedIn. Trying to understand all the different targeting aspects could take a while, so I have linked to our guide that shows what each section of LinkedIn targeting does.
In LinkedIn ads, you must fill out your desired location. This is pretty easy and straight forward. Next, I would disable the “Enable LinkedIn Audience Network” and the “Enable Audience Expansion” check boxes. Different professionals will tell you different pieces of advise, but when spending $6+ per click we don’t want to waste money, and these are places that we can’t control.
Lastly, I would stick to 4 different types of targeting:
- Job Title
- Job Function with Job Seniority
- Member Groups with Job Seniority and exclude Sales and Business Development Job Functions (Unless you are trying to market to Sales & Biz Dev Professionals)
- Member Skills with Job Seniority and exclude Sales and Business Development Job Functions (Unless you are trying to market to Sales & Biz Dev Professionals)
These 4 types of targeting will give you the most accurate and the most coverage in your campaigns. Let’s run through a scenario where we can see these in action.
Let’s say we sell a software to businesses that will help their Finance team be more effective. In order to get talking to this company we will need to target key decision makers. Let’s follow the 4 campaigns above to create our 4 audiences.
Campaign 1:
Job Title: Senior Manager of Finance, Finance Director, CFO, VP of Finance, & Senior VP of Finance.
Campaign 2:
Job Function: Finance
Job Seniority: Manager, Director, VP, CXO, Owner, President
Campaign 3:
Member Groups: Finance Club, Finance Professionals Worldwide, & Finance Professionals
Job Seniority: Manager, Director, VP, CXO, Owner, President
Exclude Job Functions: Sales, Business Development
Campaign 4:
Member Skills: Finance, Corporate Finance, & Accounting
Job Seniority: Manager, Director, VP, CXO, Owner, President
Exclude Job Functions: Sales, Business Development
Notice how we targeted the same people 4 different ways. This will provide you with a lot of coverage. Also, notice how we excluded Sales and Biz Dev. This is because a lot of these people join groups or add skills to attract our audience, so by excluding them we don’t show them ads and save us money in the long run.
Bid & Budget
After creating your audience you will proceed to the next section of building your campaign, which is the Bid & Budget. LinkedIn does have a minimum $10 a day budget, so be mindful of that if you have a small budget.
You should always start bidding with the website visits which will charge you per click. If you ads are doing great and achieve a 1% CTR (LinkedIn average is a .35% CTR) or higher you should switch to Awareness bidding as this will lower your CPC by about 20%. If you switch to Awareness bidding, keep a close eye on CTR as bidding this way can get very expensive very fast.
Following these steps will help you to get off to a great start in your LinkedIn Ads campaigns. Use this as a base for your account and then build and test new targeting types as you become more and more comfortable within LinkedIn.
If you want to know more about LinkedIn Ads, you can catch me over at Howell Marketing. We are a digital marketing agency that focuses on building sustainable lead generating accounts for our members!