LinkedIn Ads Optimization: Tips and Best Practices

When formulating a Linkedin ads campaign, it is important to make use of all of the tools and guidance available to see the best outcome of your ad.

This means having a working knowledge of how to advertise on LinkedIn, as well as what to do (and not to do) to ensure your ad reaches the highest engagement possible (and without overspending on your marketing budget).

Whether you’re new to LinkedIn, or have been using it to market your brand for some time, there are always tips of the trade to include that you may not have harnessed yet to ensure ad success. And because, like everything, LinkedIn is constantly evolving, it’s worth keeping up to date with marketing trends, as well as any changes or improvements the platform makes.

Those of you looking to include LinkedIn ads to their strategy will need to continually focus on optimization of your campaigns. This article features the best tips and practices from our LinkedIn advertising agency to do just that.

Case Study: How We Helped a Security Analytics Software Company Generate 42% More SQLs Using LinkedIn Ads

1 – Using LinkedIn Ads for Your B2B Marketing Strategy

LinkedIn is the ultimate platform for all B2B advertisers, as it offers myriad techniques and tools to create an effective marketing campaign that focuses on lead generation, brand awareness, website traffic, and pushing sales.

Just some of the other reasons LinkedIn is so profitable include:

It allows you to build and approach a highly targeted audience of brand decision makers. You can target via industry, job title, company growth, interests, locations, groups, and so much more – more so than any other social media channel.
It helps businesses build/boost brand awareness. LinkedIn has an enormous user base (currently circa 930 million global users, as of early 2023), meaning building your brand awareness amongst a wider audience is extremely doable.
Lead generation. As we mentioned above, LinkedIn is one of the best channels for brands looking to generate (and convert) leads, particularly for B2B brands. It enables users to create tailored campaigns (such as via lead gen forms) aimed at a pinpointed, data-driven ‘hot’ audience.
Monitor KPIs. You can track your results with the platform’s extremely reliable and on-point metrics. Data is a fundamental part of observing how one’s campaign is performing in order to make insightful decisions or necessary amendments. You can do this by tracking how many users have viewed your ad, how many users have clicked on your ad, and how many have engaged (such as clicked on the CTA to visit your website, etc).
Wide variety of ad formats. Whatever your campaign goal is, there’s an ad format to suit it to ensure the best results. Some of these include sponsored InMail, sponsored job postings, display ads, etc.

2 – Optimizing Your Campaigns For Maximum Punch

While LinkedIn provides invaluable tools to create killer campaigns, there are still a few practices worth implementing to ensure the best results.

Be Thorough With (& Regularly Update) Your Target Audience List

The outcome of your campaign almost exclusively relies on how well you’ve collated your audience.

But it doesn’t stop there. Your audience list will require fairly regular maintenance. You need to define and refine your audience. Here’s how:

Understand your market. This means having an awareness of the people who would most benefit from your products/services. Be specific by honing in on age, gender, industry, location, and job title.
Create buyer personas. This is the best way to really understand the fundamentals of your target audience. This means understanding them on a more cellular level by defining their goals, desires, obstacles, etc.
Customer analysis. Looking at your current customer base and outlining why they come to you.
Look at your unique selling point/value proposition and understand why it is your customers are satisfied.

It is important to get into the habit of reviewing and refining your audience list on a regular basis to ensure your ads are always hitting relevant users. This will save you time and money in future campaigns.

Make Sure Your Ad Content is Eye-Catching & Compelling

You need to design campaigns that make it impossible for your audience to ignore and continue scrolling. Making them compelling is the key, and this involves:

Strong and obvious CTAs.
Relevant content (images, headers, copy, etc).
A/B testing your ad before it goes live.

All aspects of your campaign must directly correlate to the product/service you are selling via the campaign. This includes ensuring the CTA is applicable and leads to the right area of your website (for example, your product page, and not just the homepage).

All of your copy must be expertly written too. This means hiring a professional if you’re not confident about this aspect. Nothing is more off-putting to a lead than an illiterate, grammatically incorrect piece of writing.

Your CTA (call-to-action) is a key part too. It must be obvious to identify. Use something relevant like “Click Here”, “Download Link”, “Buy Now”, etc.

Finally, before your ad goes live, it’s wise to A/B test it first because this can provide priceless feedback that you can then implement, guaranteeing a better success rate.

Case Study: How We Helped Kodo Survey to Generate 167% More Leads in 3 Months Using LinkedIn Ads

Reach Your Audience Via Target Groups

One of the many benefits of advertising on LinkedIn is the platform’s vast options for targeting, which goes beyond that of most other advertising platforms.

LinkedIn allows you to target via groups, such as skills, expertise, and interests, which users are able to upload onto their profiles, which is beneficial to the advertiser because they can define what groups their product/service appeals to and target that way.

It is worth mentioning that, when targeting via groups, you will need to ensure that the groups you focus on have enough members to achieve a meaningful reach.

Also, it can be beneficial to use different ad formatting depending on the locations of your target audience. This is because LinkedIn groups stem from varying geographical areas.

3 – Top Tips To Improve Your Ads’ Performance

If your previous LinkedIn ads haven’t performed as well as you’d hope, or you’re a LinkedIn ad newbie and want to make sure your first campaign gets off on the right foot, here’s what to do.

Bid Low

Your campaign’s budget is important and it’s wise to avoid overspending on your cost-per-click (CPC) ads.

LinkedIn has a feature called Enhanced CPC Bid, which enables you to bid a set amount to target users that the platform has identified as having a high ad-click potential. The goal being to generate as many clicks as possible while keeping your spend low.

The trick is to bid low to begin with and increase it after your ad’s launch, if need be (i.e.: if you’re not seeing the results you’d hoped for).

Implement Your CRM List (If You Have One)

Many companies utilise a customer relationship management system (CRM) which allows them to store the data of clients and leads. This can be a priceless tool for marketing (particularly retargeting campaigns).

LinkedIn allows you to upload your CRM list onto the site, which creates what’s known as a Matched Audience, the process of which can take up to 24 hours, so it’s wise to not leave it to the last minute.

The Matched Audience has 30 days until it expires, so make sure your campaign is launched swiftly to avoid missing out.

Conversion Tracking

We talked earlier about the importance of tracking your ad’s progress, as well as how LinkedIn provides in-depth tools to do so. But just to reiterate, when creating a campaign where the goal is to convert leads, make sure you define how you wish to track the conversions on your Campaign Manager.

For example, if it is directing them to your website to be converted there, you will need to implement an Insight Tag within your websites coding to be able to track conversions (as your website is non-native to LinkedIn, LinkedIn’s in-house KPIs will not be able to see if a conversion has occurred on your website).

A/B Testing

Yes, we know we keep going on about A/B testing, but there’s a good reason for that! We want to drum it in how important it is. It can be time-consuming, but it’s worth it if it means a lucrative ROI on your ad.

To save a bit of time during this process, you can use the ‘Duplicate’ feature on LinkedIn, which allows a quick and seamless (as well as, identical) copy of your ad, enabling you to change one feature at a time to test and amend as needed.

Double-Check Your Demographic

This will ensure your ad is absolutely reaching the right people at the right time. This needs to be done once you’ve actually launched your campaign so that you can see what audiences your campaign is reaching.

You can do this by heading to the ‘Campaigns’ tag in your account and clicking on the blue ‘Demographic’ button. This will display certain information such as impressions, CTR, clicks, and conversion rate, based on the group parameters you’ve set.

If you notice that the info from the demographic reporting seems unrelated to your targeting, it may mean that you need to exclude them from your criteria to filter out any irrelevant audiences, which will also mean your budget is being better spent.

Tweak Your Images (If Needed)

Because internet-users have a short attention span, it’s important your ad’s image grabs them immediately.

More often than not, the reason why an ad’s engagement isn’t as fruitful as it should be is the image isn’t quite right. It can be worth swapping your current ad image for a new one that is perhaps more relevant to the subject and/or better quality. You may be surprised how this breathes new life into your ad and enhances the impressions.

Visuals are crucial for advertising, so clear, simple, high-resolution images that feature bold colours and are in-keeping with the subject of the ad is key. Images that are ‘busy’ may be subconsciously off-putting, so go with ones that are clear and concise and easy on the eye.

If you’re unsure of what image to use, go with your logo over a random stock image. But ultimately, don’t be afraid to try out different images in the duration of your campaign’s life, if your engagement isn’t satisfactory.

Call out your audience.

A great way to grab your audience’s attention is to call them out in your ad. An example would be calling them out on a particular challenge they may be having that relates to your product or service (e.g.: “Not getting enough traffic to your website?”).

A company with a problem will be looking for solutions, so if you advertise that you’re aware of the problem in the first place, this acts as a ‘hook’.

Also keep in mind to analyze continuously your campaign’s performance, this will help you to take better decisions.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is a brilliant tool for all B2B marketers, and by implementing the above guidelines, you can expect to see a profitable return-on-investment on your ad spend.

If you’d like to learn more about how we help B2B SaaS and Tech companies grow their MRR through LinkedIn advertising, contact us online or send us an email today at info@getuplead.com to speak with someone on our team.