LinkedIn Advertising presents marketers with new and exciting opportunities to reach target audiences.
New features and updates are available to level up your campaigns, drive engagement and reach business goals with greater precision and impact.
Let’s delve into the latest releases from LinkedIn Ads – including the ones you may have missed.
1. CTV ads
You read that right: streaming, now with the power of LinkedIn’s audience targeting. In 2024, LinkedIn allows the ability to leverage its first-party data to reach your target audience in a large-screen environment.
Better yet, you can create campaigns allowing your messaging to guide the user through the funnel. Marketers can then retarget using any available ad type on the LinkedIn platform based on who is engaging with the video.
The cherry on top: LinkedIn has also partnered with NBCUniversal for premium content placements and enabled numerous safety measures via iSpot and Kantar.
To set up a CTV Ads campaign, follow these steps:
Create a new campaign.
Select brand awareness as the objective.
Between Group Objective and Audience, you will find a section labeled. Connected TV Only Campaign; enable this by clicking on the toggle.
Set your campaign like any other LinkedIn campaign (audience, brand safety, exclusions, budget).
Click next.
Add your video (here are the specs), and you’re ready to rock!
Dig deeper: LinkedIn introduces CTV ads for B2B campaigns
2. Frequency control for CTV campaigns
We’ve all been there, binge-watching a favorite TV show, only to be bombarded with the same ad repeatedly episode after episode. LinkedIn ensures your audience is spared repeat ads and grants marketers the ability to control ad frequency.
This can be set up at the campaign level, limiting the number of impressions each audience receives within a 7-day period, with support for all CTV placement formats in the near future.
Start mixing things up and adjust your frequency caps via Campaign Manager. However, note that changes take effect within the next 24 hours; they are not immediate.
3. Hybrid CTV brand lift tests
This one is really hot off the press. It’s so new that targeting is limited to the U.S. and Canada, and English must be the audience language.
This brand lift test works like this: a user is served an impression and then a survey measuring brand lift is delivered through web or mobile devices , either on the LinkedIn feed or through the LinkedIn Audience Network.
Hybrid CTV test results are provided in a PowerPoint deck at the end of the test, which is a result of LinkedIn leveraging third-party vendors to assist with the measurement. At the moment, results are not yet available through the “test” section of the campaign manager.
Essential for understanding the full impact of media on brand metrics, this page will explain the different CTV brand lift tests.
4. Boosting posts from LinkedIn pages
If you have been doing paid social for a while, you might already be familiar with boosting an organic post on Meta.
This feature is still relatively new to the LinkedIn platform and was introduced a little over a year ago.
Essentially, boosting allows a LinkedIn page post to extend its reach through an advertising campaign. This useful tactic is also very simple to use: select an objective, define your audience, set up a budget and schedule an end date.
It is worth noting that according to LinkedIn, a boosted post will have a “lighter campaign creation experience.” If you want the full power of the platform, you will have to create a campaign via Campaign Manager.
Dig deeper: New LinkedIn feature to boost your content visibility
5. Predictive audiences
I have been a strong opponent of LinkedIn’s audience expansion feature and even lookalikes, which were discontinued in February. And I was less than optimistic when LinkedIn announced predictive audiences at the end of 2023.
Predictive audiences allow you to expand your campaign’s reach by creating an audience that might perform similar actions to those within your data source.
LinkedIn achieves this by combining your data source with their AI to automatically generate a new custom audience.
Your data source can be a lead gen form, a contact list (which can include company names or individuals’ names/emails) and last but not least, a conversion coming from your Insight Tag, a website action or via the conversions API.
I love to be proven wrong, especially when performance improves. We used LinkedIn’s predictive audiences for a client targeting non-profits and saw an improvement in Cost Per Lead (CPL) of 66% and an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) fit of 90%. Even though we had to hand over some of the keys to LinkedIn, performance greatly improved.
Dig deeper: LinkedIn launches enhanced audience insights and predictive analytics
6. Conversions API
I know you don’t want to hear this, but yes, LinkedIn also launched a Conversions API, also known as CAPI, just like all the other advertising platforms.
CAPI allows you to connect both your online and offline data on LinkedIn so you can see how your campaigns influenced actions taken on your site, sales completed over the phone or leads collected elsewhere.
Setting up CAPI has a few benefits, and the assumption (tin foil hat on) is that it will be required for future fancy features:
Improve full funnel measurement, as you will have online and offline data connected to LinkedIn from your server.
You will have more signals to determine what should power which campaigns.
You can decide how you share data with LinkedIn.
If you have already set up enhanced conversions on Google Ads or CAPI on Meta, this process will be similar. The technical documentation is available here.
7. Average dwell time metric
Incredibly insightful, the new average dwell time metric helps marketers determine what ads resonate and which do not.
By measuring the time users spend (dwell) on ads, marketers are empowered to make better creative optimization decisions, enhancing campaigns in a new way.
You can check if it’s available for your campaign group, campaign or ad section on LinkedIn by setting your columns to Engagement. If you have access, average dwell time should appear as one of the columns.
It’s impressive to see LinkedIn expanding the boundaries of available data.
This new LinkedIn toggle, significant news for advertisers, means we can begin to determine whether messaging resonates, even if someone doesn’t actually click.
Before average dwell time, our best estimate for a single image was CTR. But just because someone doesn’t click doesn’t mean they aren’t receiving the message – or interested in the content.
Optimize your LinkedIn ad campaigns now
LinkedIn’s latest advancements nicely build out the marketer’s toolbox, offering new and exciting ways to enhance targeting, engagement and measurement.
Don’t let these useful features and updates fall off your radar – even small tweaks can lead to useful insights and massive results. Now is the time to get ahead of your competitors with powerful and dynamic campaigns.
