In this 2025 tutorial, the presenter delivers a concise crash course on LinkedIn Ads, walking beginners through the entire workflow from understanding the Campaign Manager hierarchy to launching a live lead‑generation campaign. The video explains how LinkedIn’s campaign groups, campaigns (ad sets), and ads correspond to familiar Facebook terminology, outlines the two main audience types—predictive (interest‑based) and matched (company list or retargeting)—and argues for starting with a broader audience (~1 million) and using audience expansion rather than a tight 100‑200 k target. The instructor recommends using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms as the simplest conversion asset, detailing the rich field options (profile URL, phone, job title, custom questions, etc.) and the ability to deliver lead magnets or conversation‑style ads directly within LinkedIn. The step‑by‑step campaign creation process covers choosing Classic mode (full control) versus Accelerate, setting budgets, turning off campaign‑budget optimization initially, naming conventions, and selecting auto‑targeting or saved audiences. A key strategic tip is to upload 5‑10 different creatives per campaign so LinkedIn’s algorithm can surface the best performer, then prune losers over time. The presenter wraps up with practical advice—keep audiences broad at launch, monitor cost‑per‑lead, and join a free “Predictable Profits Mastermind” community for ongoing support.
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How's it going? In this video, we are going to be doing a LinkedIn Ads crash course in a small amount of time. So you can get inside of LinkedIn Ads, start testing them, and start seeing results with them. LinkedIn Ads is a little bit different to Facebook and a lot of other ad platforms. It tends to be a little bit more expensive because you're going more direct to B2B in some cases, and just CPMs are a little bit more expensive. However, that doesn't mean that it can't work. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you a breakdown of the platform, show you kind of the lay of the land and what you need to know. I'm gonna set up a campaign from start to finish, showing you exactly how I would do it if I was running ads on LinkedIn for the first time. And we'll go from there. This may be a multi-part video, but this video is really gonna be the foundation for everything. And even if you watch this just by itself, you'll have more than enough needed to launch LinkedIn ad campaigns. So let's get right into it. So looking at the LinkedIn ads, Campaign Manager. It's pretty similar to other ads managers, and it's actually very similar to Facebook. The naming is just a little bit different for things. So all you need to know of is here in the top left, you have your campaign groups, your campaigns, and your ads. And this is pretty much structured in a very similar way to Facebook or other ad platforms. But just think of your campaign groups as your campaign, your campaign tab as your ad set tab, and your ad would be your ad, same thing. That's the only difference across the board. Outside of that, you'll see a few options here on the left-hand side as far as like measurement goes to set up your conversion tracking. If you're gonna be sending people to a different site, you've got lead gen forms if you wanna make those connections to landing pages, et cetera, as well as audiences and whatnot in this plan section. And this is basically like the custom audience section inside of Facebook. You can choose to create either a predictive or a matched audience. Predictive is basically just a custom audience off of interests. And then matched audience is usually off of company lists and retargeting by engagement and stuff like that. So that's pretty much everything there. And there's the same thing as lookalike audiences. So say I wanna make a predictive one, you will need a lead gen form obviously to make this one work. Whereas a matched audience, you can kind of upload a document, lead gen form. You can also just go off of people that are interested in your company page as well. So it's a little bit more broad. Now, that being said, let's just get into actually making an ad. I think the first time you do a LinkedIn ad, I would really recommend doing a LinkedIn lead form. It's just the easiest way to get things set up and to start getting leads. And the quality tends to be pretty solid as well. And you have a few more customization options. So first things first, we'll hit create right here and we will create a new campaign group. Name it whatever it is you'd like to name it. And if we're gonna be doing a lead form, we'll choose lead generation. If you were gonna be doing something like sending someone to a page to purchase something or sending someone to a page to opt in, you would just do website conversions. Then from here you can choose your budget and your optimization if you'd like to. Budget optimization is very similar to Facebook's campaign budget optimization. So same thing, you can choose it on or off. I'd recommend keeping that off at first and you hit create. From there, what LinkedIn Ads Manager does is it makes the campaign group. You have to click it, go inside of it, and then choose to make the campaign or the ad set if we're gonna kind of be comparing this to Facebook. So then make the campaign. You'll choose kind of how you wanna make it. I would recommend doing Classic because you can choose every single feature, whereas Accelerate is gonna be similar to like Facebook's Advantage Plus, where it's just gonna recommend a lot of things for you. Then it's making sure that you're good with the campaign group that you're inside of. Then you can name the campaign, choose what you're marketing. I mean, you can skip this. However, it does help if you can add in a name. So if I was choosing my company, I'd put that in, and I'd put in my website, and you can hit save. Auto-targeting, very similar to Facebook's Advantage Plus. You can choose to do that or you don't have to. And then here's the audiences. So you can choose to have your saved audiences if you made any. LinkedIn audiences are like pre-recommended audiences from LinkedIn. That you can choose. You can also use auto-targeting. And what that does is LinkedIn is gonna use what you gave it to optimize and build your own audiences, right? It'll use AI to kind of figure out who to go after. Once again, I'd recommend building your own. From here, how I would recommend setting up your campaign, and I've heard multiple things from people at LinkedIn directly. Some people have said to keep your audience target size as tight as possible. So keep it around, anywhere from like 100,000 to 200,000 tops. I found that that can limit a lot of reach at the beginning, and I actually like keeping the audience pretty broad at the beginning. So choosing company demographics, education, interests to keep it probably around a million tends to do better for me at first, and then you can start to dial it in. I would recommend using audience expansion at the beginning. You just want to start getting leads at the end of the day. Then you'll set up choosing your image format, however that is, how you'd like to do it. You can even associate your company page to this as well, which is pretty normal. Outside of that, it's pretty standard placement stuff, budgets, bidding, which I'm not gonna cover in this video, but that's pretty much everything there. And then you'll move on to the next step, which would be, let me do this real quick. Which will be to actually go to the ad level and set up your ads. At this point, you'll actually make your ads for your campaign. So you'll click create a new ad, and it's all pretty simple at this point. You'll choose the ad name, you'll create your lead gen form. What's awesome with LinkedIn lead gen forms is you can really get detailed on what you want to collect from people. So you could choose LinkedIn profile URLs, their phone number, work email, work phone number, which is super interesting. Choose their job title, function, or seniority, information about their company, education, or their demographics, right? Then you can also add custom questions in there if you'd like, multiple choice or single lines, and you can add those options. Privacy policy, pretty standard stuff as well. What's really cool about LinkedIn is you can do direct lead magnets inside of lead gen campaigns. What's really cool about it is If I back up here, you'll actually choose conversion asset with a lead gen form. Or I'm sorry, this is conversation asset. So this one actually is basically like a click-to-DM ad. I mixed them up. But there's an option at the beginning when you're making a campaign where you can have someone click to download a lead magnet directly inside of LinkedIn and get like a PDF or something like that. Or you have the option to send them to a conversation. Which is really cool. It's similar to a DM ad inside of Instagram or Facebook. After that destination piece is complete, then you'll work on actually making the ad text URL. And I know you, we don't necessarily, or we're not sending people to a URL, but LinkedIn generally recommends and requires that you have to put in your website URL here just so it associates it with the ad. Then you can choose to upload your images or videos. And adjust the call to action, and you're pretty much good to go. How I would recommend setting up LinkedIn campaigns is I'm gonna show you one that's actually in action right now, because I'd recommend setting them up a little bit differently to what I've done in the past with a Facebook campaign. And all you'll do is you essentially will have multiple ads per ad set. So if I open up this one, so you can see this campaign group had a lot of different ad sets inside of here, decent amount of leads and pretty good cost per lead as well. So for this one, for example, you'll see that we have one ad set or one campaign, but in that campaign, I think we've got around 9 or 10 different creatives. And this is what we've found to be the most cost effective, especially at the beginning running LinkedIn ads, feeding the algorithm as many creatives as you can. I'd say between 5 to 10. Ends up being a really good sweet spot. LinkedIn will, similar to Facebook, will choose which one's winning the best. You can slowly start to cut your losers and you're left with your one winner. This is the easiest way to set up LinkedIn ads. Like I said, this is a crash course, very basic, but this is how I would recommend it. I wish I got this when I was first setting up LinkedIn instead of stumbling around and trying to do it similar to Facebook or trying to adhere to what LinkedIn says and have a very tight audience. In the future, it's useful. But in the beginning, keep your audience a little bit broader, start getting some leads, have multiple ads inside of your campaign, and watch your LinkedIn work. If you have any questions, feel free to drop 'em below. I'm sure I'll release multiple parts of this video in the future. And if you have any extra questions, be sure to join the Predictable Profits Mastermind, a totally free community where you can ask ad questions, get feedback, and see what other ads are working. I'll see you in the next video.
