Creating a LinkedIn Text Ad – Step by Step

Congratulations for staying with us this far! In this chapter you will learn the basics of creating your first text ad like you did it every day.

Before creating your first text ad or any type of ad on LinkedIn, you will first need to create an advertising account.

Head over to the top menu while logged in on LinkedIn and place your pointer on the “business services” tab.

Now click on “advertise” and then on the “manage ads” button. Enter your login information and click on “sign in”. You will be taken to your “campaign manager”.

Here you will be able to see your ads, your campaigns and your advertising accounts.

You have to create a new ad account when you want to create new ads for a company page, unless the company page already has an ad account set up.

Because we are going to create a text ad for the Company Page that we just added to LinkedIn, we click on “add account”.

A pop up window will appear, and you will have the options to look up your Company Page by name or by URL. In this example we are going to look up our company by name and let the auto complete function find it. A campaign name will be set based on the name of your company, but you can edit it if you want.

Next choose a currency to pay for your campaign expenses and click on “next”. In the following page select on the “select” button in the “text ads” box.

How to create LinkedIn Text Ad

Now you can start creating your text ad. Enter a name for your text ad campaign, choose a language to run your campaign in and click on “next”. In the following page, you will need to first specify whether you want to send your customers to your Company Page or to your company website when they click on your ad.

Now you will need to enter a headline, a description and an image for your ad. On your right you will have the option to preview your ad in various shapes and placements.

 Creating Direct Sponsored Content – Step by Step

Direct sponsored content is by far one of the best methods that you can use to deliver your content through updates that will reach people across many audiences.

Direct sponsored content is richer and looks great on the LinkedIn feed.

Who can create direct sponsored content?

Unlike text ads, direct sponsored content cannot be created by just anyone in the platform, as it requires members to have certain status. Members that can create and promote content through direct sponsored content are:

• Admins of Company Pages that have higher attributes and thus have access to the campaign manager with a role that is not limited to that of a viewer
• People that have been granted the permission to post direct sponsored content

When LinkedIn members meet any of the aforementioned criteria, they can create direct sponsored content right from the campaign manager.

Direct sponsored content can be created for new campaigns and can also be added to existing campaigns.

Let’s take a look at how to create direct sponsored content with both methods:

Creating direct sponsored content for new campaigns

In your campaign manager, select an advertising account to launch your sponsored updates. Once inside the advertising account, click the “create campaign” button in the top right corner. Now click “select” in the “sponsored content” box.

Now give a name to your new campaign and select a language to launch it, then click on “next”.

In the next page click on “create new sponsored content”. Give a name and a description for your sponsored content and click on “save”. Your sponsored content will be created.

Managing your Campaigns

The campaign manager is a great dashboard where almost all of your LinkedIn advertising tasks will be conducted.

The campaign manager will allow you to monitor your advertising and marketing ventures on LinkedIn and to modify specific details of your campaigns in a minimal yet convenient dashboard.

We will dedicate this chapter to taking a look at the many ways in which you can manage your LinkedIn advertising campaigns using the campaign manager.

Creating ad campaigns in different languages

LinkedIn will allow you to create ad campaigns across 23 different languages, and in fact, your audience will be targeted based on the language they are viewing LinkedIn in your selected language.

For example, if you select to run a campaign in Spanish, your ads will be served to those members viewing LinkedIn in Spanish.

To select the language for your campaign, simply select a language from the “language” dropdown menu when creating a new campaign. Note that the language in your creative and your selected language must match!

Setting and editing a campaign duration

You can set when your campaigns start and when they end. When creating a new campaign, simply set up a “start date” and an “end date” in the budget and duration setup. To edit the campaign duration of an existing campaign, just go to your campaign of choice, click on the “bid and budget” tab and modify the start and end dates, then click on “save”.

Turning a campaign on or off

It is worth saying that it is not good to keep a campaign running after it loses its luster, or when the time comes to replace it. When you want to turn a campaign off, go to the advertising account containing that campaign. Scroll down to see your campaigns listed and click on the green lever to turn a campaign off. You can also use this option to resume a campaign after you turn it off.