What LinkedIn offers advertisers

LinkedIn is a social network meant for professionals and businesspeople. But what makes it an interesting platform for advertisers? Is it the unique, specific ad targeting options, or LinkedIn's audience itself, which is entirely different from ordinary social networks?

Since LinkedIn has hundreds of thousands of users in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, this platform is an excellent place to raise awareness of your service or product among a professional, qualified target group. LinkedIn is primarily a business platform, which affects the make-up of its members but also the way people communicate, the potential for business and the overall culture. When advertising on LinkedIn you need to bear in mind that advertising here is dearer than on Facebook or Google Ads, but it allows targeting like no other platform.

Basic settings and campaign types

Let us go through the basic settings, targeting options and ad formats together.

Basic settings and campaign types

On LinkedIn we can choose from 3 basic goals when creating ads - awareness, consideration and conversions.

Awareness aims at building awareness of a brand or product.

When we choose consideration as the goal, we can pick from as many as 3 sub-goals we want to achieve. These goals include website visits, engagement and video views.

With the last goal, conversions, we can collect completed forms, web conversions or recruit for a job position.

Which audiences can we target in campaigns?

LinkedIn is distinctive precisely thanks to the targeting options it offers. Besides demographics, which is the usual type of targeting, interests and custom audiences, which we can use on this platform as on almost every advertising platform, on LinkedIn we can also target our campaigns by work experience, education attained and company.

With companies you can choose from many criteria, such as company category, company name, company turnover and others.

When targeting by work experience you can choose from criteria such as job function, seniority, years of experience and so on.

LinkedIn also offers "mixed" custom audiences, which are often very broad, though.

Watch out for language targeting

When creating a campaign you have to choose the language in which the people you want to target have their profile set. Slovak is not yet one of the options, though. Probably the most common languages Slovak users have their profiles set in are English and Czech. That means if we choose Czech at this step when setting up the campaign and target Slovakia as the location, our ad will show to people located in Slovakia who have their profile set in Czech.

However…
The problem does not entirely end with choosing a language. It mostly happens that if the text in the ad (and likewise in the graphics, if they contain any wording) is not in the same language we chose when creating the campaign, the system tends to reject the ads.

Which ad formats can be created on LinkedIn?

Besides the classic formats such as single image (that is, an image with text beneath it), video ads and the carousel (several images in a row that can be swiped through), other interesting ad types can be created on LinkedIn.

Event ads are ads that serve to promote an event. With this ad type you first have to create an event page on LinkedIn and then an event campaign.

Document ads aim at document downloads. Documents can be viewed directly on LinkedIn, and when someone views a document they can download it. A good tip with this ad type is that URLs in the document are clickable only after it is downloaded, so if we want to increase downloads it is worth using a URL in the document. This ad type is ideal for sharing e-books, case studies, infographics, presentations and so on.

Lead Gen Forms serve to collect forms. With this ad type 3-4 fields are recommended for filling in, though as many as 12 can be chosen at most.

Thought Leader Ads serve for building awareness or for engagement. With this ad type the point is that a post — a single image or video by some person — is promoted. That person must be associated with our LinkedIn page as an employee, and permission to promote their post must be requested from them. Such an ad type is suitable if someone works at our company who is an expert in the field or a well-known person, or if we want to build trust in the brand through real employees.

Text ads are essentially classic text ads where we pay either per click or per ad impression.

Dynamic ads are automatic personalised ads that adapt to the user seeing them. The system pulls the user's details itself, such as name, job position and photo, and builds them into the ad. These include Spotlight ads, from which the user clicks through to our site, and also Follower Ads, which serve to gain followers on LinkedIn.

After reading this article you have all the information you need to launch LinkedIn advertising. Should anything in this area be unclear, do not hesitate to get in touch.