Set up LinkedIn ad campaigns

The best way to structure a LinkedIn account is to make each layer answer one question, so the results tell you something. LinkedIn organizes ads in three layers, and Kite uses each one for a different job:

• The campaign group holds one goal, such as "Q1 demo requests." It has a name, a start date, and optionally an end date and a lifetime budget that caps spending across everything inside it.
• Each campaign reaches one audience with one objective. This is where the targeting, bid, daily budget, and schedule live.
• Each ad carries one message. A campaign usually holds a few ads that try different angles on the same audience.

Here's an example. Say you sell expense software and want demo requests from two kinds of buyers. Kite would build one campaign group for the demo push, with one campaign for finance leaders and another for operations leaders. Inside each campaign it would put two or three ads, one leading with time saved on month-end close and another leading with fewer receipt-chasing emails. When results come in, you can see which audience responds and which message wins, because no campaign mixes both questions.

Kite keeps audiences in separate campaigns for a second reason, too. LinkedIn prices each campaign by its audience, so a campaign that mixes CFOs with junior accountants ends up with one bid that suits neither.

For most B2B campaigns, the strongest targeting combines what a person does with the kind of company they work for. Job title or seniority describes the buyer, and industry and company size describe the account. Kite builds that combination from your ideal customer profile and the customers it has researched.

LinkedIn only accepts targeting from its own fixed lists, so Kite looks up the exact entries before using them. It can search LinkedIn's lists for:

• locations, from countries down to cities
• job titles
• seniority levels
• industries
• company sizes
• specific employers
• skills

Every campaign needs at least one location, and Kite always sets one.

Kite also decides how narrow to go. A tight audience of CFOs at 50 named accounts is precise but costs more per person and can take a long time to spend its budget. A broader audience of finance leaders across an industry is cheaper to reach and gives LinkedIn more room to find the people who click. Kite explains which way it leaned and why, so you can push it in the other direction.

Two delivery settings stay the way you'd expect unless you ask otherwise. Kite shows ads on LinkedIn only and leaves the LinkedIn Audience Network, which places ads on partner apps and sites, switched off. Audience expansion, which lets LinkedIn add people similar to your audience, follows LinkedIn's default.

Kite sets the bid and budget from what LinkedIn says your audience costs, rather than from a guess. Before it prices anything, it picks the campaign objective that matches your goal:

• Website visits when you want qualified people reading a page.
• Website conversions when you want a demo request, signup, or download on your site.
• Brand awareness when you want your name in front of an audience repeatedly.
• Engagement when you want people to react to and share the post.
• Job applicants when the campaign is for hiring.

With the objective and audience settled, Kite asks LinkedIn for its suggested bid. LinkedIn returns a low, default, and high suggestion for that exact audience, along with the range of bids and daily budgets it will accept. Kite chooses a bid and daily budget inside those ranges and can pay per thousand impressions or per click. A narrow audience of senior buyers gets a higher bid than a broad one, because that's what LinkedIn charges to reach them.

Kite then sets the schedule. Every campaign has a start date, and an end date is optional. If you give the campaign group a lifetime budget, it also needs an end date, because LinkedIn won't accept a lifetime budget on a campaign group with no end.

A LinkedIn ad is a Sponsored Content post from your Company Page, and Kite builds the post and the ad together. Each ad has intro text above the image, a headline below it, a landing page, and an optional button such as Request demo, Sign up, Register, or Download. It can carry a single image, or two to ten images as a carousel.

Kite writes the copy in your brand's voice and checks every line against LinkedIn's limits. LinkedIn cuts off intro text after the first line or two in the feed, so Kite puts the hook in the first sentence and uses the headline to state the value or the next step. It designs the images in your brand's colors and type and uploads them to your ad account's media library.

Before choosing an angle, Kite can look up the LinkedIn ads your competitors are running right now, including their copy, images, and landing pages. That shows which messages your market already sees too often and where there's room for yours.

Every ad needs somewhere to send people. If the campaign calls for a dedicated landing page, Kite can build it on a website it hosts and point the ad straight at it.

For more on what makes a LinkedIn ad work, see LinkedIn ad examples for B2B small teams, with the copy that made them work Coming soon .

A campaign that aims for conversions needs the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website, because the tag is how LinkedIn sees that someone who clicked the ad later signed up. The Insight Tag is a small piece of code that also lets LinkedIn build retargeting audiences from your site's visitors.

Kite finds your ad account's tag, or creates it if the account doesn't have one yet. On a website Kite builds, connecting LinkedIn Ads adds the tag automatically. On a site hosted somewhere else, Kite gives you the snippet to paste into your site's header. Either way, Kite then checks whether the tag is firing by reading which of your domains have reported visits to LinkedIn in the last 30 days. It also flags any domain where tracking has been blocked in Campaign Manager.

Kite builds every campaign group, campaign, and ad as a draft, so nothing runs or spends until a person launches it. Kite tells you what it built and why, and the draft appears in the Draft campaigns list on the LinkedIn Ads card in Kite's team settings, with its campaign group, budgets, and schedule.

While the campaign is still a draft, you can ask Kite for changes in plain words. "Drop the operations campaign and double the budget on finance" or "Start it on Monday instead" is enough, and Kite edits the draft directly.

When it looks right, a team owner or admin clicks Launch and confirms the budget. If the campaign group is still a draft, it launches along with the campaign. LinkedIn then reviews each ad before it starts serving.

Launching is where the useful information starts. Kite checks each ad's review verdict and serving status, so if LinkedIn rejects an ad and the campaign stalls, Kite notices and tells you why. It also reads how your campaigns perform in LinkedIn's reporting and looks at which audience and which ad are earning results.

When the numbers say a campaign deserves more money, less money, a different bid, or a new end date, Kite proposes the change. The proposal shows the current value next to the new one, with Approve and Decline buttons in the Kite web app, or in the Slack thread if your team works with Kite there. Anyone on the team can approve it, and Kite writes the change to LinkedIn.

Kite can pause a campaign, a campaign group, or a single ad on its own, because pausing only stops spending. When an ad is burning budget without results, Kite pauses it and tells you what it paused and why.

Some changes call for a new draft rather than an edit. To reach a different audience or add a fresh ad, Kite builds a new draft campaign, which keeps the results from the original campaign clean and goes through the same Launch step.