LinkedIn is constantly raising the bar with new ways to make it easier for digital advertisers across all experience levels to use the platform and successfully meet their campaign goals. From dynamic ads to Matched Audiences, LinkedIn has released a wide variety of features and tools to simplify and enhance the setup and execution of ad campaigns.
Most recently, LinkedIn performed a complete overhaul of the LinkedIn Campaign Manager to now allow objective-based advertising.
Before we get into all of the updates and what they mean for your LinkedIn campaigns…
A quick reminder about LinkedIn Campaign Manager
Campaign Manager is the tool that allows advertisers to create LinkedIn Ads accounts, manage campaigns, edit audiences, track campaign performance, and more:
LinkedIn is now reconstructing its advertising platform to be objective-based while meeting the needs of marketers requiring high-volume campaign management.
What is objective-based advertising?
While many platforms ask advertisers to choose an ad format (text, image, video, etc.) before identifying an objective, some (including LinkedIn) are flipping the entire campaign setup experience with objective-based advertising.
In this case, advertisers identify their campaign goals and objectives first (website visits, engagement, video views, lead gen, conversions, etc.) before choosing an ad format:
Having a clear goal in mind during the initial stages of a campaign sets the tone for all of your following actions. It allows you to make strategic decisions regarding ad placement, target audiences, payment models, metrics measured, etc.
Specifically, it enables you to:
- Easily facilitate campaign creation based on marketing objectives
- Optimize campaigns by showing ads to people most likely to take action
- Offer automated bidding for key objectives
- Provide customized campaign reporting tied to your objectives
After an objective is chosen, LinkedIn Campaign Manager offers only the ad units that apply to that specific objective. The user is then guided to construct the campaign from there for the best possible results.
During their complete objective-based overhaul, LinkedIn added three new options to their list of objectives for advertisers to choose from.
3 Objective additions to LinkedIn Campaign Manager
Introduced as a public beta in October 2018, the three latest additions to the redesigned LinkedIn Campaign Manager are brand awareness, website conversions, and job applications.
1. Brand awareness
This new objective is a top of funnel campaign option, designed to enable advertisers to tell more people about their products, services, and brand, and to maximize views of LinkedIn Ads. Since the objective is to capture attention instead of generating conversions, advertisers pay by impressions (e.g. cost per thousand or CPM) instead of clicks:
When Brand Awareness is selected, LinkedIn shows only the ad formats that support that objective, including:
- Single image ads
- Carousel image ads
- Video ads
- Text ads
- Spotlight ads
- Follower ads
2. Website conversions
The term “website conversion” covers a broad range of actions — downloading an ebook, to contacting sales, or making a purchase. That’s why LinkedIn has built a tighter integration with its conversion tracking tool to allow advertisers to create campaigns more optimized for specific actions — purchases, downloads, sign-ups, registrations, etc.
The Website Conversions objective is for the bottom of the marketing funnel recommended for advertisers to capture leads and drive valuable, predefined actions.
Bidding for this objective varies from the previous objective in that it’s charged by enhanced CPC (clicks to post-click landing pages) or CPM (impressions):
Ad formats that support the Website Conversion objective include:
- Single image ads
- Carousel image ads
- Video ads
- Text ads
- Message ads
- Spotlight ads
3. Job applications
The Job Applications objective is designed exclusively for LinkedIn Talent Solutions users trying to drive more job applications. This option gives HR and recruitment professionals the ability to runs ads to those most likely to view or click them, resulting in more completed applications via LinkedIn or the customer’s website or post-click landing page.
The Job Application objective is at the bottom of the marketing funnel, and uses either CPC or CPM pricing, charged by post-click page clicks or impressions, respectively:
Ad formats available for these campaigns include:
- Job ads
- Single image ads
- Spotlight ads
All three of these new objectives allow advertisers to create full-funnel marketing campaigns that are more aligned with their overall objectives and help improve their key results. By indicating what you want to happen from the start, LinkedIn can better anticipate your needs and help improve your campaign’s success.
To supplement these new objectives, LinkedIn has also made some other updates and improvements to the Campaign Manager.
What else is new?
Although pricing was briefly mentioned in the previous section, it’s worth mentioning again. With the recent updates, marketers only pay for the actions that are actually valuable to them. This is called optimized click pricing.
If Brand Awareness is selected, you don’t pay per click, but per impression instead — and with a Website Conversion campaign, you’re only charged for clicks directly to your post-click page.
So with optimized click pricing, campaigns are optimized for delivery to people most likely to take your desired action, and payment is more aligned with advertisers’ large objectives, providing a better ROI.
LinkedIn ad expert and B2Linked Founder, A.J. Wilcox, attests:
Objective-based buying generated 300% more sign-ups than standard bidding over an equivalent amount of time.
In addition to optimized click pricing, other LinkedIn Campaign Manager updates that enhance the campaign creation process include:
- Easier navigation: Multiple screens combined into a single, easy-to-navigate flow with fewer pages to click through
- New forecasting panel: To see estimates of expected results based on campaign inputs and comparisons to similar campaigns and advertisers
- Redesigned targeting: To be more powerful, effective, and simple to set up
- Faster, more responsive interface: Rewritten to a new technical stack, allowing faster new update releases and higher quality experiences
- Live ad preview: Enabling advertisers to see what ads look like as they’re being built
Collectively with all of these updates, the new interface has shown a 67% lift in customer satisfaction compared to the previous version.
Take advantage of the new LinkedIn Campaign Manager
As digital advertising becomes more advanced, platforms need additional context to better understand what advertisers are trying to do and maximize their campaign results. By providing more variety in campaign goals, and different pricing models to match each objective, Campaign Manager can better help advertisers achieve desired results while avoiding wasting budget on results that don’t.
Digital marketers have many ads with high-volume campaign management, and each of those ads requires personalized experiences. Get an Instapage Enterprise demo and see how our platform allows you access to a suite of tools to significantly improve your advertising ROI and streamline your post-click process.