INTRODUCTION
According to LinkedIn, the social media site is home to 690 million professionals and is the No. 1 platform for B2B lead generation. An impressive 96 percent of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn for organic marketing and 80 percent use LinkedIn Advertising.
Like other popular social media platforms, LinkedIn is constantly evolving to create better user experiences and more effective marketing tools. In fact, there have been a variety of advertising updates since we published “New Features in LinkedIn Advertising 2020.”
Here are five LinkedIn advertising features to keep in mind for the rest of 2021.
NEW CREATIVE OPTIONS FOR SINGLE IMAGE ADS
LinkedIn single-image ads now support square (1:1) and vertical (9:16, 2:3 and 4:5) specs to deliver a full edge-to-edge experience without any gray bars. These new ad dimensions give marketers more creative flexibility; however, make sure you are using your images appropriately.
Square images are supported on desktop and mobile, while vertical images are only displayed on mobile.
LinkedIn also can scrape the image and headline text from your destination URL, which can save you time if you are sharing content (e.g. a blog post) from your website. For the best results, reference LinkedIn’s single-image ad specs as a formatting guide when posting content on your website.
You may make edits to the headline or swap out the ad image if you don’t want to use the ones scraped from your website.
CONVERSATION AND MESSAGE AD CHANGES
Conversation Ads, which launched in March of last year, now supports various ad objectives, including brand awareness, engagement and website conversions, in addition to lead generation.
If you aren’t familiar, this new form of “Sponsored Messaging” allows you to start two-way conversations with professionals and business decision-makers via LinkedIn Messaging. It is supported on desktop or mobile.
You can use them to deliver multiple offers or types of content in a single message, and you can drive prospects to multiple landing pages or Lead Gen forms. For instance, to generate leads, you can share a brief case study and include a call-to-action (CTA) to sign up to receive a related whitepaper. You also could include another CTA to schedule a meeting in the same ad.
Before Conversation Ads, you only had the option to use “Message Ads,” which is one-sided and has a single call-to-action to a Lead Gen Form.
Both forms of Sponsored Messaging now have a new baseline frequency cap. Previously, LinkedIn members were only eligible to receive Message or Conversation ads every 45 days. Now they can receive them every 30 days, which allows you to target prospects more often.
BID AND BUDGET UPDATES
Late last year, LinkedIn introduced lifetime pacing, which predicts platform activity over the entire campaign duration. This helps optimize the budget distribution and spend for your campaign, which can give you a greater ROI.
You can select a lifetime budget (a set value for your entire campaign duration), a daily budget ($10 or more) or both a daily and lifetime budget.
If you select the daily and lifetime option, you won’t be able to set an end date for your campaign. Your actual daily spend also may be up to 50 percent higher than your assigned daily budget. This allows LinkedIn to show your ad more often when your target audience is active; however, your total campaign spend will never exceed its lifetime budget.
Bid strategies also were updated. You can now specify a target cost per result for various campaign objectives, including brand awareness, website visits, engagement and video views.
LinkedIn will automatically adjust your bid to optimize for key results (e.g. landing page clicks for website visits campaigns) while staying in range of your target cost. This can help drive performance while keeping costs predictable.
IMPROVED LINKEDIN ADVERTISING ANALYTICS
In addition to adding reach and frequency metrics to its analytics, LinkedIn recently made performance monitoring upgrades for event ad campaigns and single job ad campaigns.
For example, event registrations, click event registrations (e.g. clicks that led to registration) and view event registrations (e.g. impressions that led to an event registration) are available for event ads.
Meanwhile, job ads analytics provide data for job apply clicks (e.g. clicks on the “apply” button), job applications collected through the campaign, job application rate (e.g. percent of applications relative to clicks) and cost-per-job-application.
Select “Job Applicants” as a column view from the campaign performance dashboard or “Customize Columns” to access job ad data.
LINKEDIN STORIES ADVERTISING IS ON THE HORIZON
Launched in 2020, LinkedIn Stories is a mobile-only feature for company pages that looks and functions a lot like Facebook and Instagram Stories. For example, LinkedIn Stories are only visible for 24 hours, and they support a variety of media (e.g. text, photos, video) and interactive elements (e.g. polls).
According to LinkedIn, the new feature received an incredibly positive response, which led to the roll-out of a closed beta for LinkedIn Stories Ads in December.
The immersive, full-screen video and single-image Stories Ads will help companies build thought leadership, humanize their brand or inform their audience. For instance, companies will be able to promote product demos or post tips with a swipeable call-to-action.
Like other forms of LinkedIn ads, you will be able to target by parameters such as company industry, job title, location and more, and set your campaign window. Plus, you’ll be able to retarget to users who have watched or viewed your past Stories Ads.
Additional announcements for LinkedIn Stories Ads should be coming later this year.