LinkedIn Ads has been rolling out several new features and we’re here for it! In my last post, I outlined a couple of our favorites: device performance and company engagement level reporting. We’re still testing and brainstorming lots of ways to leverage these features in our client accounts, as well as working our way through some additional new features in the platform. I’ll walk you through some of those now.

Dynamic Group Budgeting

According to our reps, this feature will be available in the next month or so. Dynamic Group Budgeting seems akin to Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization feature and works like other automated bidding algos to get the most results for your campaign objective within your given budget. Here’s a glimpse at what it will look like in the UI:

You can choose Daily or Lifetime budgets, as you currently can at the campaign level, and bidding options will remain the same based on your campaign objective.

One really important note about this feature: you won’t be able to turn DGB off once it’s launched. This honestly seems like a huge limitation that I think might cause advertisers to shy away from testing it out. Who wants to be locked into something that might not actually produce better results?

Otherwise, LinkedIn makes the following suggestions when testing DGB:

Quality Score

LinkedIn Ads has jumped on the bandwagon of other platforms by rolling out Quality Score rankings. It’s worth noting that these are only applicable to Sponsored Content campaigns and those using Manual bidding.

LinkedIn uses your predicted CTR, as well as those in your peer set targeting the same audience, to determine your QS ranking. Here is how scores are calculated:

2. For each auction your ads compete in, a score is calculated by dividing the pCTR of the highest performing ad in that auction by the pCTR of ads in your campaign.

3. An average score is then calculated for all scores from auctions targeting the same audience.

4. Each campaign is given a Campaign Quality Score based on how the scores of the campaign’s ads compare with the average score.

5. Scores are normalized on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the best.

6. Scores are calculated daily for active Sponsored Content campaigns. Historical Campaign Quality Scores are not available to view.

To help determine which ads win the auctions, LinkedIn uses a combination of bid and relevancy score. Relevancy scores aren’t available to view in the UI, but according to LinkedIn Quality Score can be used as a proxy.

To see your Quality Scores, just export a Campaign performance report with all columns included. Your campaign must be active, not using the Video view objective, using Sponsored content format, and have competed in a minimum number of auctions to have Quality Score calculated.

If your scores are low, you’d use the same strategies to boost as you would in other channels – test different creatives, CTAs, landing pages, etc to see what resonates best, and review your audiences to work to refine to help increase performance and relevance.

Dynamic Ads

Dynamic Ads have been around for awhile in LinkedIn Ads. You might have noticed them to the right of your LI feed with your profile picture attached:

It makes sense that LinkedIn would be targeting me with an ad like this since I’m the Director of Operations here at Clix.

The biggest selling point of this ad type is personalization, as these ads automatically pull in information from a user’s profile, like name, picture, company name and/or job title. There are three ad formats you can use:

Follower Ads are pretty straightforward – they’re Brand Awareness ads that can help you gain more LI company page followers.

Spotlight Ads can be more lead gen focused, as you can send users to your site or landing page and track actions. LinkedIn also considers this a Brand Awareness building ad type as you can establish your thought leadership, content, etc. with your target audience.

Jobs ads have the most format options, with three altogether based on how many job openings a user matches:

• The Jobs You May Be Interested In ad format will only be shown to members who have at least three applicable job opportunities from the company.
• The Picture Yourself ad format will be shown to members who match with one or two current job openings at the company.
• If the member has no suitable job matches with your company, they will see the Jobs Page ad format directing them to the LinkedIn Page jobs tab to explore opportunities.

Jobs You May Be Interested In:                                               

Picture Yourself:   

Jobs Page:

Note that if you want to use Dynamic Jobs Ads, you’ll need to choose the Job applicants objective and then the Jobs Ads ad format as well:

Dynamic Ad Formats by Campaign Objective

Here is a really handy table that outlines which of these dynamic ad formats are available for which campaign objectives:

It’s important to note that LinkedIn users can opt out of their profile info being used in Dynamic/personalized ads, so you might miss out on reaching potential followers/candidates/etc by using personalized ads.