Short answer: LinkedIn Ads run from Campaign Manager, a self-service ad tool. You create an ad account, pick an objective, a format and an audience, then set a budget and a bidding strategy. The price comes from an auction, so there’s no set cost per result.
How Campaign Manager is organized
Campaign Manager works with a hierarchy of four levels: the ad account, the campaign, the ad set and the ad.
The ad account holds the settings that apply across campaigns, such as payment, user permissions and shared assets. Campaigns and ad sets take those settings and define your strategy, including the objective, the audience and the budget.
Ads are built inside ad sets, and they are the creative your audience sees. A campaign groups several ad sets and controls their budget, schedule and status in one place. You can choose the objective on the campaign or on each ad set.
Create your ad account
Creating an ad account is the first step in Campaign Manager. These are the steps LinkedIn gives for a new advertiser:
- From your LinkedIn homepage, click For Business at the top of the page and select Advertise.
- On the welcome screen, check the account name, the Company Page and the currency LinkedIn suggests.
- Select the checkbox to agree to the LinkedIn Ads Agreement and Advertising Guidelines.
- Click Create account.
LinkedIn then takes you to the page where you create your first ad set. The suggested Page is the one you’re an admin of that was updated most recently, and the currency is based on your LinkedIn profile.
Check both before you click, because the currency and the LinkedIn Page can’t be changed once the account is created. Data from that Company Page also shows up in the ad account’s reporting.
If you aren’t an admin of any Page, the welcome screen lets you create one. Our LinkedIn company page guide shows how to set it up, from the logo to the sections to complete.
Whoever creates the account gets account manager and billing admin access, and can add colleagues or partners. In our view, someone who stays at your business should create the account and add the agency as a user, so the account stays with you.
Choose an objective
The objective is the result you want from a campaign or ad set, and each one comes with its own ad formats and bidding strategies. LinkedIn groups the objectives by stage of the marketing funnel.
The awareness stage has Brand awareness. Consideration has Website visits, Engagement and Video views. Conversions has Lead generation, Website conversions and Job applicants.
Talent leads, the last conversion objective, is only available to companies with an active LinkedIn Recruiter contract.
Lead generation captures leads on LinkedIn with a Lead Gen Form that comes pre-filled with LinkedIn profile data. Website conversions captures leads on your website and encourages the actions you define there.
In our view, a business that wants contacts should start with Lead generation, because people send their details without leaving LinkedIn. Website conversions makes sense once the Insight Tag measures your site.
Pick an ad format
Once you select the objective, Campaign Manager asks you to choose a format from the ones that objective allows. The full list covers single image, carousel, video, event, text, spotlight, follower, document, article and newsletter, conversation, message and job ads.
The list changes with the objective. Video views only takes video ads, and Job applicants offers job ads, along with single image and spotlight ads. Brand awareness and Engagement also allow thought leader ads.
Targeting and its limits
Every ad set needs a location and a profile language. The location can be the permanent one on the member’s profile, a recent one based on the IP address for short visits, or either one.
You pick one of the 35 profile languages. If you choose English, the ad set reaches every member in your location, whatever language they set on their profile, except in Sponsored Messaging.
Any other language shows your ads only to members who match it. LinkedIn recommends writing the ad in the language you select, and once you add an ad, the language can’t be changed.
You can add company attributes, such as the company name, industry, size or your own Page’s followers. Professional ones include job title, job function, seniority, skills and years of experience.
Matched Audiences let you upload a list of companies or contacts, or retarget people who visited your site, opened your Lead Gen Form or engaged with your Page. Predictive audiences use LinkedIn’s AI to find people likely to act like those in your data.
If you’d rather not build the audience yourself, Auto-Targeting combines LinkedIn’s professional audience, platform signals and your inputs to build one for the ad set.
An ad set needs an audience of at least 300 member accounts. If your choices severely limit your reach, an Audience Too Narrow message keeps you from saving the targeting until you increase the audience size.
In the European Economic Area and Switzerland, reach for some attributes or audiences may be limited. There, Matched Audiences only match members who opted in from their ad settings.
Campaign Manager splits the work into levels, like Meta Ads Manager, which uses campaign, ad set and ad, as our Meta Ads Manager guide shows. In our view, the difference is the audience. On LinkedIn you choose people by job title, company or seniority, so it fits when your buyers share a job title, an industry or a company size.
What LinkedIn Ads cost
What you’re charged for depends on the optimization goal and the bidding strategy of your campaign or ad set. The cost of your ads comes from an online auction.
When a placement opens for someone in your target audience, your ad competes with other advertisers’ ads that have similar formats and audiences. As your ads win, the impressions, clicks, video views or message sends add up to your ad spend.
LinkedIn names the factors that set your price: the target audience, the bidding strategy, the objective and your ad’s relevance. The cost to win the auction depends on how desirable your audience is, and the more relevant your ad, the lower the price you pay.
Budgets go on the campaign, shared across its ad sets, or on each ad set. An ad set can have a daily budget, a lifetime budget for its whole schedule, or both.
A daily budget is an average. On a given day, spend might be up to 100% higher than the daily budget. With no end date, the ad set won’t spend more than seven times the daily budget in a week, Monday through Sunday.
With a daily budget and start and end dates, total spend stays within the daily budget multiplied by the days in the schedule. A lifetime budget with dates must reach a minimum that depends on the duration, and Campaign Manager shows it if your budget is too low.
Choose a bidding strategy
The strategies on offer depend on your objective and ad format. Maximum delivery bids for you with machine learning and aims to deliver your entire budget. It charges by impressions, with no bid or cost cap to set.
A new ad set on maximum delivery goes through a learning phase, and LinkedIn warns that results might fluctuate during it.
Cost cap also charges by impressions. You set a cost per key result, an average Campaign Manager tries to stay under as it sets your bids. LinkedIn offers it for Brand awareness, Website visits, Engagement, Video views and Lead generation.
Manual bidding lets you set the amount you’re willing to bid for a key result. Depending on the objective, format and optimization goal, it may charge by impressions, landing page clicks, engagement clicks, sends or video views.
Manual bidding gives you the most control over your bid, but it might not deliver the same results as the optimized strategies.
With cost cap or manual bidding, Campaign Manager suggests a bid range, an estimate of what other advertisers targeting the same audience are paying or bidding.
In our view, a first campaign is easier to read with maximum delivery and a lifetime budget you’re willing to spend in full. Once you know what a result costs you, you can set a cost cap from your own numbers.
Measure results with the Insight Tag
The Insight Tag is a piece of lightweight JavaScript code for your website. It enables features like in-depth campaign reporting and website retargeting.
To get it, go to your ad account in Campaign Manager. Click Measure on the left menu, then Signals manager and Insight Tag. You can copy the code, send it to a developer or use a tag manager.
Add the code to the pages on your domain, preferably right before the end of the body tag in the global footer. LinkedIn asks you to keep straight quotation marks in the code, not curly ones.
Consistent with its terms, LinkedIn says the Insight Tag should not be installed on pages that collect or contain sensitive data. That can include pages offering specific health-related or financial services or products to consumers.
Depending on the content, it may go on a generic homepage for a pharmacy or a bank. It should not go on consumer pages for certain types of medications, or on pages where people manage their financial accounts or medical appointments.
After you install it, LinkedIn waits for a page on your domain to load to check the tag. Validation can take anywhere from a few minutes to 24 hours after that.
If your site already runs Google Tag Manager, our Google Tag Manager guide shows how to add a tag, test it and publish. LinkedIn lists Google among the tag managers that support the Insight Tag, along with Adobe, Tealium, Ensighten and Floodlight.
Set up conversion tracking
Insight Tag conversions, also called online conversions, track what happens on your website, like a form sent after an ad click. They need the tag on your site, because they must be verified before they show in reporting.
In Campaign Manager, click Measure, then Conversion tracking. Click Create conversion and select Insight Tag conversion. Then name it, choose a category such as Lead and set its value.
LinkedIn advises against leaving the value out: with no value, you can’t measure the impact of your ads.
After that, choose how to track it. Website Actions collects actions like button clicks, page visits or form submissions without extra setup or code. A manual setup counts a page load or a specific event, and a tag manager works too.
An image pixel also exists, but LinkedIn calls it less accurate, since it only enables third-party cookies and can’t use enhanced conversion tracking.
Conversions are only tracked when attached to an ad set. The source status shows as Unverified until your site gets traffic, so LinkedIn suggests visiting the page where the tag is installed.
In our view, install the tag and create the conversion before the first ad goes live, so your first days of spend are measured.
To see LinkedIn visits in Google Analytics, tag the links in your ads with UTM parameters, as our UTM parameters guide explains. Campaign Manager lists URL tracking parameters among its ad set features.
LinkedIn notes that, because location targeting methods differ, a third-party tool such as Google Analytics may show different results.
Before you launch your first LinkedIn ad
- Someone who stays at your business created the ad account and added the agency as a user.
- The currency and the Company Page on the account are the right ones, since they can’t be changed.
- The objective matches what you want, such as Lead generation for contacts.
- The audience has at least 300 member accounts, and the profile language matches your ad.
- The budget type and the bidding strategy are set, and you know the most the ad set can spend.
- The Insight Tag is installed and the conversion is attached to the ad set.
RememberLinkedIn Ads are bought in an auction. You choose people by their job, company or seniority, and the more relevant your ad, the lower the price you pay.
If your business is in Miami-Dade, our social media management service plans, designs and posts on your Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, in English and Spanish.
Questions about LinkedIn Ads
How much do LinkedIn Ads cost?
It depends on the auction. Your ads compete with other advertisers’ ads, and the price depends on your target audience, your bidding strategy, your objective and how relevant your ad is. You control spending with a daily or lifetime budget.
Does a lifetime budget spend the same amount every day?
No. Spend follows the impression opportunities, so you could spend 10% of your budget on one day and 30% on another. Your total spend will never exceed the lifetime budget of your campaign or ad set.
Can LinkedIn look for qualified leads, not just any lead?
Yes, within the Lead generation objective. LinkedIn can capture qualified leads with Lead Gen Forms, using qualified lead data that you share from your LinkedIn Conversions API.
Can my agency manage my LinkedIn ads?
Yes. An account manager or billing admin can add colleagues or partners, such as your agency, to the ad account. Whoever creates the account gets both kinds of access automatically.
What can I do at the ad level?
At the ad level, Campaign Manager offers preview, editing and duplication, with a setup specific to each format. It also lists drafting ads with AI and flexible ad creation among the ad features.
Sources
Read on November 9, 2026. From LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Help, on Campaign Manager and the ad account: How LinkedIn's advertising tool works and Create an ad account in Campaign Manager as a new advertiser. On objectives and formats: Marketing objectives available for your ad campaigns and Ad formats for objective-based advertising. On targeting: Targeting options for LinkedIn Ads. On cost, budgets and bidding: LinkedIn’s advertising cost and pricing, Campaign and ad set budgets and Campaign and ad set bidding strategies. On the Insight Tag and conversions: Add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website and Set up Conversion Tracking for Insight Tag conversions.