LinkedIn has come to be one of my favorite advertising platforms over the last year. New features are constantly being released to give advertisers more insight into performance. With all of the releases though, it can be tough to keep up with the seemingly ever-changing platform.

I’ve listed below some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned from working in LinkedIn Ads.

1. Understand How Conversions Are Reported

The conversion number you see reported in the top summary section, as well as the conversions in the graph, is a combination of post-click and view through conversions.

I think it’s incredibly valuable to report on both post-click and view through conversions, especially for an advertising network like LinkedIn, where people aren’t actively looking your product or service. However, I always report on them separately so the client has a true understanding of the impact of the ads.

To see post-click and view through conversions segmented out, you’ll want to click on the Conversions tab below the data summary.

2. View Performance for Different Conversions in Your Campaign

If you are tracking multiple conversion actions within the same campaign, you can break down the data within the conversion report. However, as you can see in the example below, it only segments total conversions, not post-click and view through data.

3. Duplicate Champion Ads When Setting Up a New Ad Test

Just like any other platform, you should be testing your LinkedIn ads on a regular basis. When you upload a new ad, though, I tend to find that LinkedIn still gives a majority of the impressions to the champion ads still active in the account, even with the rotate ads event option selected.

Because of this, I like to duplicate the champion variant so that all my ads start at zero when I begin a new test.

You can duplicate ads right in the interface by navigating to the Ads section and clicking the duplicate icon under Actions.

4. Use Demographics Reports to Evaluate Audiences

Demographics reporting is a relatively new feature in LinkedIn and it seems to be steadily improving over time. Currently, you can segment performance by company industry, job seniority, job function, company size, location, country, and company. This will show you how your campaigns are currently performing for each of these groups.

I like to use this report to see if I should break out new campaigns to target top-performing audiences. This way I can bid separately on and tailor ad copy to each demographic.

This is a different section than the Website Demographics at the top of the page which shows you insights about your website audience.

5. Try Out Objective-Based Bidding

Another new LinkedIn Ad feature, objective-based bidding, lets you choose your campaign object and corresponding bid method.

You can choose between three options:

• Awareness: Reach people within your target audience and raise awareness of your brand. Awareness will use CPM bidding.
• Website Visits: Maximize the number of people visiting your website. Website visits will use CPC bidding.
• Website Conversions: Maximize the number of people taking a valuable action on your website. LinkedIn automatically raises or lowers your campaign’s CPC bid to get you more conversions at the best possible price.

6. Always Review Linkedin Audience Network and Audience Expansion Settings

For each campaign you create, you have the option to opt ads into the LinkedIn Audience Network as well as enable Audience Expansion. Each of these settings is enabled by default for Sponsored Content campaigns, so make sure to think about if these are settings you want to leave active. 

LinkedIn Audience Network will show your ads on websites outside of LinkedIn on their premium network of publishers. Check out this post to learn more about the LinkedIn Audience Network.

Audience Expansion will broaden the reach of your campaign by showing it to audiences with similar attributes to your target audience. This can help scale your campaign reach if you are targeting a low volume audience. However, this can also lead to people not in your target audience seeing your ad.

7. Upload a List of Company Names Instead of Adding Each One Individually

If you or your client has a list of companies they want to target, you can upload the list directly into the interface via the Matched Audience option within Account Assets.

LinkedIn recommends a list of at least 1,000 companies, but you only need 300 matched members for your ads to show. There is also a maximum list size of 300,000 records. This feature can take up to 24 hours to update so make sure to check back on it after uploading.

These are 7 tips I’ve found helpful for managing LinkedIn Ads.

What other tips and tricks have you come across for LinkedIn ads? Let us know in the comments below!