Many marketers are totally missing out on the power of LinkedIn Ads. Today, we’re gonna walk you through how to use LinkedIn’s original ad format called the Text Ad. If you’re ready to run LinkedIn ads but don’t know where to start, or worried that the costs are too high, then LinkedIn Text Ads are for you.
About LinkedIn Text Ads
Originally, when LinkedIn Ads came out at the end of 2007, they only had one ad format: it was Text Ads. They were really unassuming, and they definitely looked like an ad. They had 25 characters allowed in a headline, 75 characters for a description. And the one thing that really set them apart from Google Ads, which were popular at the time, was an image, a whole 50-pixel by 50-pixel image.
Then, in 2013, LinkedIn came out with Sponsored Content Ads, and because of that, Text Ads kind of took a back seat and became a lot less attractive. So if you’ve been curious about LinkedIn Ads but maybe have been scared a little bit by the cost, we would recommend diving into Text Ads here. Because they have really low costs, their floor is the lowest of all ads, you can pay all the way down to $2 per click still, and they have really low engagement rates. So it’s a really low risk way of getting into LinkedIn Ads to dip your toe in the water. Let’s jump in and create your first Text Ad now.
Create a New LinkedIn Campaign
So we’re going to start from our Ads Dashboard, and we’re going to click on Create campaign.
We’ll go with the objective of Website visits, because most of the time that’s what we’re going to be doing with Text Ads.
Audience Targeting
And here we get to select an audience. The audience we’re going after here is going to be social media marketers, so we’re going to start with skills.
So we’ll go to Job Experience, and Member Skills.
There is a Social Media Marketing skill, and there’s also Paid Social Media Advertising, those are pretty excellent.
And that produces an audience size that’s pretty large, you can see, 8.4 million. We only recommend audience sizes of about 20,000 to 80,000, so we’ll try to chop this down.
We’ll go to Narrow audience further, and let’s make some assumptions here. Maybe a company isn’t willing to send an employee to a conference unless they have, let’s say 50 or more employees. So we’ll go to Company Size, and select everything from 51 and above.
So that took us down to 4.1 million, which is certainly better.
Let’s take a look at Interests.
So in Narrow Further and Interests, you’ll see Marketing and Advertising, and then there’s Digital Marketing, and then underneath Digital Marketing there is Social Media Marketing. That’s a pretty solid interest for target audience.
So that takes us down to 360,000 people, so we’re almost there!
Maybe we also look at seniority. So if we go to Job Experience, Job Seniorities, and let’s say someone who’s a manager.
That takes us to 50,000, which is right smack in the middle of where we wanna be.
We’ll scroll down further. Make sure you’ve unchecked this box for Enable Audience Expansion.
And now we get to choose the ad type here. The one that’s selected is Sponsored Content, and you can see there’s all kinds of different ads here. Text Ad is the one that we want to select.
Budget and Schedule
We’ll come down here to the Budget & Scheduling section. You get to set your daily budget, let’s say it’s $50 a day. It has selected for me Maximum CPC Bid, which is perfect.
Text Ads has a floor of $2, so you can’t go below that. I wanna start at the floor because if I can spend my whole $50 during the day on the very lowest bid amount, then I just got the cheapest cost-per-click and the cheapest cost-per-conversion possible from the network. And if I have $50 per day allocated for ad spend, and I’m only actually spending about 20, then I can always come in here and increase my bid every few days until I start spending what was actually allocated.
Before we leave this screen, you can also change your campaign name to be really descriptive. You can name them after the ad format, and the objective, and the audience, so if you see this campaign inside of your dashboard, you’ll know exactly what it represents.
Now I’ll click on Next, and here we get to click Create new ad.
First I’m going to upload my image, and they require 100 pixels by 100 pixels.
Then we get to select a headline and a description. The headline is 25 characters, the description is 75, and you can push them right to a link on the website. Input your URL exactly as you want it clicked on the ad with your UTM parameters.
And you can see here from the preview what it’s going to look like.
If I click Create, the campaign is in draft, so if I click Next, and then Launch Campaign, now this is live.
You might launch a LinkedIn Text Ad, and it may not get approved for up to 24 hours. So if you launch and you’re not getting impressions immediately, that’s probably why. Every single ad on LinkedIn gets approved by a human. And of course, if you want to learn how to get the most out of your LinkedIn Ads, click here for our LinkedIn for Business series.
