create a linkedin ad account - campaign manager

How to Create a LinkedIn Ad Account in 3 Simple & Easy Steps

Add commentSeptember 24, 202012 min read

LinkedIn advertising is one of the best ways to get in front of a highly qualified audience of skilled executives and professionals across multiple sectors. With its variety of ad formats and rich segmentation filters, there is no doubt that LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager provides companies a set of excellent tools to reach their target audience.

Today, we will see how to create a LinkedIn ad account in just a couple of simple steps – and how to start taking full advantage of LinkedIn as an advertising platform.

So, let’s waste no more time, as we’ve got a lot of things to cover!

Step 1: Setting up your Campaign Manager

The first step towards creating a LinkedIn Ad Account is to set up your Campaign Manager. From your LinkedIn profile or feed, go to the upper right corner at the top of the page.

From there, you have two options – the first one is to click on the button Work, followed by the option Marketing Solutions in the section LinkedIn Business Services.

Once you’ve clicked on the Marketing Solutions link, it will take you to a landing page dedicated to LinkedIn advertising. All you need to do is to click on the button Create an Ad.

The second way to create your Campaign Manager is to simply click on the button Advertise right next to the button Work. And the third way is to type down on any browser the following URL: https://www.linkedin.com/campaignmanager/.

No matter how you decide to do it, the outcome will always be the same. If you’ve already created a LinkedIn ad account in the past, you wil directly be taken to your existing Campaign Manager.

However, if you haven’t, you will be taken to a page that looks like this:

In which you can start setting up your first Campaign Manager account.

At this step, simply give your account a name, select the currency that you will be working with, and select the Company Page that you want to associate your account with.

Having a Company Page is optional at the moment of creating your account. However, it is obligatory for most of objectives and ad formats, so if you don’t have one, click on Create new LinkedIn page to do that first. You will eventually need it sooner or later.

Once you are ready, click on Create Account, and it will take you to a page where you can directly start your first campaign. However, I advise you to not do that yet, because we will need to do a couple of other things first.

If this is not the first time you are accessing Campaign Manager, you will be taken to a summary of all your existing accounts. To create a new LinkedIn ad account, simply click on Create Account from the upper left corner:

Step 2: Add your billing details

Before you can actually launch any campaigns, you will need to configure your billing method first. From Campaign Manger, click on your account name, and then, from the upper right corner, select Billing Center:

Then, click on Add credit card, and fill in the details of your credit (or debit card). Once you are done, click on Review Order so that LinkedIn can approve your billing method.

How does billing work?

Once you’ve created your LinkedIn ad account and your first campaign, you will notice that there are different ways that you can be charged for your campaigns. It can be per ad view, ad click, or ad send, depending on the format and objective that you select.

As your ad starts delivering and getting clicks or impressions, you will start to get charged automatically by LinkedIn, up to the budget limit that you have set for your campaign.

You will be billed according to the spending limits that you set when creating the campaign. This could be daily, weekly, or on the first of the month, depending on the frequency and amounts of your ad spending.

Step 3: Create a Campaign Group

The next step that you’ll need to make in order to create a LinkedIn ad account and get it running is to create a Campaign group.

It sounds a little bit confusing, but a Campaign Group is really just a way of organizing your campaigns in a more structured manner. For example, let’s say that you are a Marketing Automation company that wants to sell 3 different products:

Marketing Automation software;
Sales CRM software;
Customer service software;

If each product manages a separate budget, or you simply want to group your campaigns around their corresponding software, you can create 3 separate Campaign Groups.

If that’s not the case, you can simply use the Default Campaign Group that LinkedIn has already created for you beforehand.

Notes

And basically, these are all the steps that you need to take in order to create a LinkedIn Ad account! It couldn’t get more simple than that. At this point, you are ready to launch your first campaign, and get in front of a highly qualified audience to achieve your goals.

But before that, here are some thing to keep in mind regarding your advertising account:

Currency cannot be changed – once the account has been created, you will not be able to change the currency. For example, if you’ve created your account setting the euro as a currency, you will have to create another one if you want to set your budget in pounds.
LinkedIn Page is recommended – as we already mentioned, there is no need to have a LinkedIn Company page when creating your LinkedIn ad account. However, it is highly recommended as many of the ad formats that may want to use will require it.
You cannot delete your ad account – unfortunately, you will not be able to delete your advertising account once it has been created. In case you want to get rid of personal information, you can get in touch with the LinkedIn support team.

Creating your first LinkedIn campaign

Now that your LinkedIn ad account is up and running, you are one step closer to launching your first campaign, and reaping the benefits of LinkedIn advertising.

From your Campaign group, simply click on the button Create Campaign:

And you are ready to start building your target audience!

Because I’ve already covered the whole process quite extensively, today I will discuss it only briefly. However, you can scroll till the end of the article to check all the detailed and comprehensive posts I’ve already written.

Objectives

The first step towards creating a successful campaign on LinkedIn is to select your objective. In LinkedIn, objectives make a reference to the goal that you want to achieve with your campaign.

Do you want to drive more visits to your website? Maybe you want to generate as many leads as you can, promote your latest video, or simply spread brand awareness. You can select the objective that best fits your Marketing and business goals from this list.

As we already mentioned, some of these objectives will require a Company Page. Others may have different requirements, such as installing the Insight tag on your website, and configuing conversions. You can read everything that you need to know about objectives here.

Target audience

Create a LinkedIn ad account: launching your first campaign

Once you’ve selected your objective, the next step is to define your target audience. This typically consists of:

Selecting your target country, city, or region – you can choose multiple countries or cities at the same time, but I highly recommend focusing only on one country per campaign.
Selecting the profile language of your target audience – you can only select one at a time, and it is recommended that it matches the language of your landing page and ad creatives.
Narrowing your audience with the right attributes – you can choose from a rich portfolio of attributes, including Job functions, Job seniorities, Company Industries, and Member Interests.

Crafting the right audience for your product and goals can sometimes be challenging, especially if this is the first time you are ever doing a LinkedIn campaign.

For this reason, I wrote the article LinkedIn Ads: My Top 20 Awesome Tips to give you my best tips and practices for effective campaigns.

Ad format

Now that you have defined your target audience, the next step of creating your first campaign is to select your ad format. There are multiple LinkedIn ad formats to choose from, each with its particular requirements and technical specifications.

If you are wondering what ad format to select as a starter, the most popular one undoubtedly is Single Image Ad, also known as Sponsored Content. It requires a banner with the size 1200×628, accompanied by a text copy of less than 600 characters.

Note: keep in mind that you can’t change ad formats and objectives once the campaign is in an active state.

Placement

This step is optional, and it provides additional placement for your LinkedIn ads – however, it is not available for all ad formats.

If you decide to enable the LinkedIn audience network, your ads may also show up on other third-party apps and websites that are partnering with platform. It is usually enabled by default, and I like to keep it this way.

Budget and schedule

Next, you will have to set the budget and the schedule of delivery for your ads. Be careful with the lifetime budget option – if you forget to pause your ads, they may run forever, and your budget can get out of control.

Usually, I like to select the daily and lifetime budget option to make sure that I am setting clear limits for my campaigns. And, as I already mentioned in the LinkedIn ad account section, you cannot make changes to the currency at this point.

In terms of delivery, I don’t typically put an end date on my ads – if the audience is very small, there is a risk that the campaign will stop before completing its whole budget. However, you can set an end date if you prefer. You can also schedule your campaign to start in the future.

Bidding

This section is important because it serves as a guidance for LinkedIn when it comes to delivering your ads. For example, if you select Manual bidding, you set a maximum price that you are willing to pay for a single click, and LinkedIn will try not to exceed that.

However, if you select Automated bidding, LinkedIn will basically bid instead of you – and your cost per click might get higher than expected. You can read more about the different bidding options here.

Conversion tracking

Configuring conversions is optional, but I highly recommend that you do it. It does not take a lot of time to do, and it is extremely important for measuring your results and the efficiency of your actions.

You can read everything about conversion tracking here.

Ad creatives

Now that your LinkedIn ad account is created, and your target audience all set up, here comes the fun part! Or in another words, crafting an awesome ad that draws the attention.

Just click on Create new ad, and add the text and banner that you want to get in front of your audience:

And in case you don’t know how to make a banner that stands out, you can check my article 57 LinkedIn Ad Examples to Spark Your Creativity.

With all that ready, simply click on Launch Campaign, and it will start rotating on members’ feed immediately! And that was all for today when it comes to creating a LinkedIn ad account.

And, if you still want to learn all the tips and tricks for creating a successful campaign, I invite you to check some of my following articles:

As you can see, I have already covered a lot of these topics extensively.

Thank you for taking the time to read my article on how to create a LinkedIn ad account, and I hope to see you in my next blog post! If you have any questions or comments, do not hesitate to leave me a message down below.