LinkedIn Adds 3 New Marketing Objectives to Its Campaign Manager

LinkedIn recently released updates to its Campaign Manager aimed at making it easier to achieve the right results that better align with your larger marketing objectives. 

The platform has put significant investments toward enhancing its advertising features this year. From updated ad targeting capabilities to new integrations, LinkedIn has been pushing towards developing a product that is more competitive in the paid social space. 

Now, it’s revisiting the first step of the process: Campaign Objectives. 

Of course, with any marketing strategy, having a clear objective in mind in the initial stages of a campaign sets the tone for all of your actions from then on, allowing you to make strategic and focused decisions. 

With paid social media campaigns, it’s no different. Companies can create virtually the same ad campaigns on social with completely different goals in mind. 

Thus, it’s important for the system to know if you want to drive sales, convert new leads on an offer, or simply boost brand awareness. Knowing these goals at the start of a campaign allows better platform ad placement, payment models, and metrics for advertisers.   

LinkedIn’s new campaign objectives

To help marketers achieve the key results needed to meet their goals, LinkedIn rolled out three new campaign objectives: 

• Brand Awareness: The brand awareness objective introduces the first top-of-the-funnel ad objective to the campaign manager, helping brands better execute these types of campaigns. Because the objective is to capture attention rather than drive traffic, advertisers pay by impressions rather than clicks. 
• Website Conversion: The term “website conversion” can cover a pretty broad range of actions — from someone simply downloading an eBook, to more advanced actions like contacting sales or making a purchase. For this reason, LinkedIn has tightened the integration with its conversion tracking tool to allow you to create more focused campaigns around the specific website conversions you’re looking for, like purchases, downloads, or sign-ups. 
• Job Applicants: By nature, LinkedIn is a huge recruiting tool for companies looking to attract candidates. Now, any LinkedIn Talent Solutions customers can create ads using Campaign Manager, whether they’re trying to drive applications to LinkedIn or back to their company website. 

These tools can help marketers run better campaigns that are more aligned with their larger objectives. 

By indicating exactly what you want to happen from the start, LinkedIn can better anticipate your campaign needs to help you be successful. 

Optimized Click Pricing 

To go along with these new objectives, LinkedIn has also updated its Click Pricing so marketers pay for the actions that are actually valuable for them. 

If you select the Brand Awareness objective, you will no longer be charged per click, but rather per impression. 

Additionally, if you are running a website conversion campaign, you’ll only be charged for clicks direct to your goal landing page. And, for social engagement campaigns, pricing has been optimized for social actions, such as likes, comments, or shares. 

This way, the payment model is more closely aligned with your larger objectives, providing a better ROI for advertisers. 

Final Thoughts

As digital advertising products become more advanced, its machine learning systems can benefit from additional context that helps it understand what exactly you’re trying to do. 

Providing more variety in campaign goals, as well as different pricing models to match each type, will help advertisers get the results they need, while avoiding paying for the actions that they don’t. 

To learn more about LinkedIn’s new objective-based advertising model, you can visit its help center here.