Understanding LinkedIn's advertising tool

Campaign Manager is LinkedIn’s self-service ad management tool that helps you create, launch, and evaluate the performance of your LinkedIn ad campaigns. To launch ad campaigns with Campaign Manager, you need to set up four entities:

Ad account
Campaign group
Campaign
Ads

Here’s an overview of the four different entities in Campaign Manager:

Account entities	Functions and features
Account	• Billing and payments • Manage user roles and account permissions • Association with a LinkedIn Page • Account assets • Reporting
Campaign group	• Group budgets for multiple campaigns • Set statuses for multiple campaigns • Set schedules for multiple campaigns • Organizing groups of campaigns • Reporting
Campaign	• Select an objective • Create an audience • Select ad format • Set bid, budget, and schedule • Apply conversion tracking • Attach ad creatives to the campaign • Reporting
Ads	Choose from different ad formats to best suit your campaign: • Sponsored Content (single image, click-to-message, video, carousel image, single job, event, or document ads) • Dynamic ads (follower, jobs, or spotlight ads) • Sponsored Messaging (message or conversation ads) • Text ads

Here's a tip

The entities in Campaign Manager are set up as a hierarchy, which means that you need to create each one to launch an advertising campaign. Your ad account is at the top of the hierarchy.

After you complete your campaign group set up, you’ll start creating your campaigns. You can create multiple campaigns in a campaign group.

Your campaign is where you’ll start building the framework for your ads. When you create your campaign, you’ll:

Select an advertising objective. LinkedIn has nine different objectives to choose from for your campaign. Keep in mind, you can only choose one objective for each campaign, and your objective will determine the ad formats, budget types, and bid types that you can choose from.
Create your audience. You can choose to create and save your own audience using LinkedIn’s attributes, use a Matched Audience, or build a new audience using a Matched Audience.
Select an ad format. LinkedIn offers different ad formats, ranging from video ads, message ads, and text ads. The available ad formats will change depending on your campaign objective.
Set a bid, budget, and schedule for your campaign.
Apply conversion tracking and determine the placement of your ads.
View or export performance metrics for all ads within the campaign.

Here's a tip

When you’re getting started, try different workflows (for example, different objectives or audience attributes) to see how your options and results may change based on your selections.

Manage your campaign spend

You can manage your campaign spend by setting a bid, budget, and campaign schedule. You can choose from different bidding strategies, such as maximum delivery (automated), cost cap, and manual bidding. You can also choose a daily, lifetime, or both a daily and lifetime budget, as well as a schedule for your campaign.

When you set a total budget or end date at the campaign group level, it will limit all campaigns in the group to that budget or schedule.

Budget – For example, if you set the campaign group budget for $1,000 USD, the campaigns under that campaign group will be stopped once they reach an overall total of $1,000 USD, even if you set a different budget limit at the campaign level.

Schedule – For example, if you set a campaign group end date of August 30, all campaigns in that group will end on August 30. If you set a later date for a particular campaign (for example, September 3), that campaign will end on August 30.

Important to know

Before you can launch your campaign, you’ll need to associate a valid form of payment with the account.

Related tasks to create, edit, delete, and manage your campaigns

Learn more about campaigns