2024 may be the year you need to learn how to set up a LinkedIn Ad. Our friends at San Diego PR firm Clearpoint Agency have predicted that “LinkedIn will explode in 2024… with the degradation of Twitter (now called X)”. With 985 million members and 58 million companies listed, we think LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B!

We’ve written a lot about organic marketing on LinkedIn (unpaid/non-ad posts) throughout the years as we’ve managed 7 LinkedIn Company Pages for our clients and ourselves. But as LinkedIn continues to reduce the reach of unpaid posts, we believe advertising on LinkedIn may become a need to continue to drive leads for B2B organizations. 

Both Facebook and Instagram were previously almost entirely ad-free, but throughout the years they’ve made it harder and harder for unpaid posts to reach folks, and ramped up ads on their platforms. We think LinkedIn will follow a similar pattern in the coming years. The platform’s revenue surpassed $15B in 2023, with nearly $6B coming from advertising—that’s nearly 1% of global advertising revenue!

So how can you get started with advertising on LinkedIn? Here, we’ll walk you through how to set up a LinkedIn ad in 3 steps!

3 Steps For How To Set Up a LinkedIn Ad

Step 1: Create a Campaign Group

Navigate to the Campaign Manager and Select Advertise. Then select Create > Campaign Group.

Name your Campaign Group with something to distinguish it from other Campaign Groups.

Select your Objective. We’re choosing “Website visits” and may drive some campaigns to our website and others to LinkedIn Events. Note: Your Group Objective cannot be changed once you save your Campaign.

Your daily budget must be at least $30 or you can set a Lifetime Budget of $930 at minimum.

We’ve selected a “maximum delivery” bidding strategy. We’ll run this campaign for 1 month. 

Now, our new Campaign Group shows up in our dashboard.

From here, we can pause the Campaign Group for now while we’re working on it. 

Step 2: Create a Campaign

Select +Campaign to add a Campaign to your Campaign Group.

We’ll work in Advanced mode as we set up our LinkedIn ad. 

Create Your Audience

For this campaign, we are going to target employees of Danone. 

To do so, we’ll create a new audience that includes the parameters needed to reach the right folks at that company. 

As we narrow it down, you’ll see the Target audience size number on the right shrink. 

Simply type in the company name into the search bar and check the correct one.

This selection lowers our target audience to only 32,000 people, which LinkedIn alerts us to. They suggest a minimum audience size of 50,000. 

Though not recommended, we can continue to narrow our audience further. 

Select Narrow, and choose from Audiences or Audience attributes. For our campaign, we want to only reach folks in the Marketing department. So we’ll choose Audience attributes > Job Experience > Job Functions and check Marketing and Media and Communication.

Now, you’ll see our Target Audience has grown to 7,000,000+! That’s because by default ALL people in Marketing and Media and Communications are being added to our Audience, not just those at Danone. Be sure to change the OR to AND to show just those Marketing professionals at Danone.

Now, our audience size is 2,000+. A little small for LinkedIn’s liking, but not too small to continue. 

You may choose to enable audience expansion to target folks with similar titles and companies. For this campaign, we really just want to reach Marketing employees at Danone. We’ll select “Save audience” and continue.

Choose Your LinkedIn Ad Format

In our work on the organic marketing (non-paid) side of LinkedIn, we’ve found that multislide PDF Documents perform extremely well. Carousel images are similar in function, but the platform is saturated with that ad type.

We’re interested in testing out performance differences between Documents and Carousel images. Videos are costly to produce, Events perform badly in our experience on the organic side, and Single images will surely garner less “dwell time” than multiple images or slides.

For these reasons, we’re going to choose Document for this Campaign. Note: Your Ad Format cannot be changed once you save your Campaign.

Choose Your Ad Placements

We recommend unchecking the “LinkedIn Audience Network” option to display your add with 3rd party publishers. Ads shown outside of LinkedIn may have formatting issues that you cannot control and won’t have visibility into.

Track Your Conversions

Since the goal of our ad campaign is to drive traffic to our website, we’ll want to set up Conversion tracking. This is the last step of the Campaign Setup and is optional.

Step 3: Create an Ad on LinkedIn

Our last step is to create our ad!

We’ve already chosen Website visits as our goal and Document as our ad type, so we’ll now upload our PDF Document to be used as the ad and enter our Destination URL.

Here, we can give our ad a name, write the text, upload the PDF, add a headline, destination URL, and select from preset calls-to-action.

Now, simply save and exit.

You can preview your Ad from the Campaign groups dashboard.

Turn on your Campaign Group, click to your Campaign and launch it when you’re ready!