How to Create a LinkedIn Ad Campaign in Ad Manager

Introduction

The Ad Manager organizes LinkedIn advertising into a three-level hierarchy: Campaign Groups, Campaigns, and Ads. This structure helps you manage your advertising efforts efficiently by grouping related campaigns together and defining specific budgets, audiences, and creatives at each level.

Step 1: Create a Campaign Group

A Campaign Group serves as the top-level container for your LinkedIn advertising efforts. It allows you to organize campaigns by business goals and set overarching budgets and schedules.

Campaign Group Details

When creating a Campaign Group, you will need to provide a descriptive name, such as "Q4 SaaS Leads." You must also select an objective, choosing between Lead Generation to capture leads using LinkedIn forms or Website Traffic to drive clicks to external landing pages.

Budget & Schedule

Define the budget for the Campaign Group by specifying a daily or lifetime amount. Set the start and end dates to control when your advertising will run.

Bidding

Input a manual bid for Cost Per Lead if your objective is Lead Generation or for Cost Per Click if it is Website Traffic. Campaign Groups are ideal for organizing campaigns based on specific business objectives.

Step 2: Create a Campaign Inside the Group

After setting up your Campaign Group, you can create individual Campaigns within it. Each Campaign defines its own audience, budget allocation, and media type.

Campaign-Level Fields

Assign a unique name to your Campaign and select the media type, which can be single image, video, or carousel. Specify the language and geographic location for your audience.

Audience Targeting

Audience targeting is mandatory and requires you to define locations to include or exclude. Optional filters include Job Title, Industry, Company Size, Seniority, Skills, Education, Interests, and Traits. You can build audience logic using up to three attribute groups with OR logic within groups and AND logic between them. Include and exclude rules are supported. For example, you might target Marketing Managers or Directors in the Healthcare industry while excluding Interns.

Step 3: Create Ads Inside the Campaign

Each Campaign can contain multiple Ads, allowing you to test different creatives and messages.

Ad-Level Fields

Provide an internal identifier for each Ad. The media type is determined at the Campaign level and can be single image, single video, or carousel. For carousel ads, each card can have its own headline, image or video, and destination URL.

Creative Fields

Write an introduction text of up to 3000 characters, a mandatory headline of up to 70 characters, and an optional description of up to 300 characters. Select a call-to-action from LinkedIn's list, such as Learn More, Download, or Apply. A destination URL is required for all ads; the CRM will automatically prepend https:// if it is missing.

Lead Gen Forms

If your objective is Lead Generation, you can create lead gen forms. These forms include an auto-generated but editable name, a headline and description displayed prominently, and up to 12 pre-filled fields like Name and Email. You can add up to three custom questions, which can be short answer or multiple choice, and up to 20 hidden fields for UTM tags or campaign IDs. A privacy section with a mandatory URL and optional disclosure text is required, along with up to five consent checkboxes. The confirmation page can feature a thank-you message and an optional call-to-action like Visit Website or Download.

Step 4: Review & Publish

Before launching your campaign, you will be taken to a Review & Publish screen. This screen displays the campaign objective, budget, schedule, and optimization mode. It provides a full creative preview for both desktop and mobile devices and performs validation checks to ensure URLs are valid, budgets meet LinkedIn's minimum requirements, and all required fields are completed.

Step 5: Viewing Campaign Group Performance

After publishing, you can track performance by navigating to Statistics > LinkedIn. At the Campaign Group level, you can view spend, impressions, clicks, and click-through rate. Campaign-level metrics include conversions, audience effectiveness, and cost per lead. Ad-level data shows creative performance, such as click-through rate, cost per click, cost per lead, and conversions.

Best Practices

• Organize Campaign Groups by business objective, such as Awareness or Lead Generation.
• Keep Campaigns focused with one audience definition each.
• Run multiple Ads per Campaign to compare creative performance.
• Start with broad audience targeting and refine using filters over time.
• For Lead Generation, use shorter forms to improve conversion rates.
• For Website Traffic, always enable UTM tagging to enhance analytics tracking.