Setting the Best Objective for Your LinkedIn Ad Campaign: A Simple Guide

From a marketing team’s perspective, knowing the objective of an ad campaign up-front focuses the entire effort, from creative to execution to optimization. 

When ad campaigns come to life, the objective is often clear, but not always. In these instances, the objective provides an instant reminder of what the team wants to achieve. It’s part map, part confusion eliminator. Ultimately, the objective empowers focused productivity.     

Selecting your objective is the first step of LinkedIn’s objective-based advertising experience. Knowing your objective helps us streamline your ad campaign and allows us to optimize your campaign toward your objective. 

LinkedIn supports full-funnel objectives grouped into three areas:

1. Awareness objectives maximize your brand’s share of voice through impression-based campaigns.
2. Consideration objectives revolve around getting your audience to learn more about your business. They encourage customers to click to a website, watch videos, or interact with the content. 
3. Conversion objectives maximize lead generation and the ability to track actions important to you on your website site. Examples include content downloads on your website and generating leads.

LinkedIn Ad Campaign Objectives and When to Select Each

LinkedIn’s advertising objectives are based on the action you want your audience to take after seeing your ad. Here are the objectives you’ll choose from.  

Brand Awareness

Select when: You want to use impression-based campaigns to drive brand recognition and share of voice among your audience.

Website Visits

Select when: You want your audience to visit a website destination where they can learn more about your business. This is the most frequently used objective. 

Engagement

Select when: You want your ads to generate social actions, such as likes, comments, shares, and followers. This objective is popular in the realm of community-building. 

Video Views

Select when: Video is available as a format to support other objectives, however, this is the only objective that optimizes for video views itself. Choosing video views gives you the option to bid and optimize based on cost-per-view. 

Website Conversions

Select when: You want to optimize for actions on your own website that you define as valuable. Examples include visiting a specific page, downloading a resource, or filling out a form on your website. Campaigns with a Website Conversions objective will use the LinkedIn Conversion Tracking feature. 

Lead Generation

Select when: You want to generate leads directly on the platform. For this objective, you’ll use Lead Gen Forms. These are pre-filled, providing a seamless experience for members and high-quality lead data for advertisers. This is one of the most effective ways to get leads on LinkedIn. 

Knowing your objective helps us to deliver better results for your campaigns because we can optimize the campaign experience based on your goals.

How to Track Performance Against Your Objective

LinkedIn’s advertising platform, Campaign Manager, reports a wide range of metrics for every campaign you run. By choosing your objective, you’ve already completed the first step. Next: 

1. Identify your key metrics based on the campaign goal
2. Set up conversion tracking and Lead Gen Forms
3. Evaluate ad performance
4. Optimize with demographic insights
5. Optimize with performance insights

For additional details, links, and resources that can help you optimize your way to objective attainment, read our step-by-step process for analyzing LinkedIn ad campaign performance.

Ready to get moving toward your next goal? Get started at LinkedIn.com/ads.