A Complete Step-by-Step LinkedIn Ads Guide for 2026

LinkedIn has become the hunting ground for B2B marketers who know their ideal customers are wearing business casual and scrolling between meetings.

The platform provides access to professionals by job title, company size, industry, and approximately 17 other data points, allowing for targeting that is absurdly precise. You can literally serve ads to ‘Director of Marketing at SaaS companies with 50-200 employees who recently changed jobs.’

But the interface throws campaign objectives, audience parameters, and bidding options at you with the assumption that you’ve done this before. Most people haven’t.

This LinkedIn ads guide breaks down the entire process into actual steps you can follow. By the time you finish reading, you’ll know how to launch LinkedIn campaigns that generate leads and build brand awareness with ClickUp’s help!

Let’s get started.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ 💪🏼

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What Are LinkedIn Ads and Why They Matter

Unlike social media platforms focused on personal connections, LinkedIn is a professional networking hub where decision-makers, industry leaders, and job seekers spend their time. In fact, 44% of B2B professionals believe it’s the most important platform.

This unique positioning makes LinkedIn ads a powerful tool for B2B marketing, recruitment, and professional brand building.

Benefits of LinkedIn ads

Here’s why businesses are investing more in LinkedIn advertising:

• Lead generation: Capture qualified prospects through native lead gen forms that keep users on the platform, reducing friction compared to external landing pages
• Account-based marketing: Pinpoint specific companies and job titles to run hyper-personalized campaigns aligned with your sales team’s target list
• Brand authority: Sponsor content from your executives to establish thought leadership and visibility with key decision-makers in your industry
• Precise targeting: Layer targeting by job title, industry, company size, and seniority; these are filters that simply don’t exist on other social platforms
• Recruitment: Source passive candidates already engaged in their professional networks without relying on job board posts alone
• Retargeting warm prospects: Re-engage people who’ve visited your website or interacted with your content since they’re already further down the funnel

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Types of LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn ads lead to a 33% boost in purchase intent for brands. The platform offers multiple ad formats, each designed for different campaign objectives and stages of the buyer’s journey.

Here’s a closer look at these types. 👀

Sponsored content

Sponsored content appears directly in users’ feeds and blends seamlessly with organic posts. This is LinkedIn’s most versatile format, supporting image, video, carousel, document, and event ads. The native placement means users see your message in their natural scrolling experience, making it feel less intrusive than banner ads.

Sponsored ad types in LinkedIn include:

• Single-image ads work best for product launches or quick announcements with strong visuals
• Video ads capture attention faster and generate higher engagement rates than static content
• Document ads let users preview whitepapers and case studies without leaving LinkedIn
• Event ads promote virtual and in-person conferences, plus drive RSVP registrations directly from the platform
• Carousel ads highlight multiple products or ideas across swipeable cards inside one ad unit
• Thought leader ads amplify posts from executives, founders, or employees directly in the feed
• Connected TV (CTV) ads deliver full-screen video on premium streaming platforms using LinkedIn targeting
• Article ads promote long-form content directly inside the feed for deeper engagement
• Newsletter ads help grow subscriber lists by surfacing recurring expert content
• Job ads put open roles in front of qualified candidates based on real-time profile data

Sponsored messaging

Conversation and message ads deliver one-to-one sponsored messages directly to a user’s LinkedIn inbox, creating a personalized touchpoint. Conversation ads take this further by letting users choose their own path through branching options, enabling self-qualification based on their interests.

These LinkedIn ads help you:

• Share time-sensitive offers or event invitations requiring immediate action
• Reach prospects in a less crowded space than feed-based placements
• Reduce friction by letting users select relevant options upfront
• Create a sense of exclusivity compared to public feed ads

Text ads

Text ads are compact, clickable units appearing in the right rail or top banner on desktop. These small-format ads are charged on a per-click or per-impression basis and work well in conjunction with larger sponsored content campaigns.

Reasons to include text ads in your mix:

• Efficient for testing messaging before committing budget to larger formats
• Right-side placement reduces ad blindness since they’re outside the main content feed
• Lower CPCs make them suitable for budget-conscious campaigns or retargeting
• Minimal creative requirements mean faster setup and iteration

Dynamic ads

Dynamic ads automatically pull information from a user’s LinkedIn profile, like their name and photo, to create personalized, eye-catching creatives. Follower ads specifically promote your LinkedIn Page with this personalization element.

Key advantages of this personalization approach:

• Profile personalization increases click-through rates significantly versus generic ads
• Follower ads build your audience while making page follows feel individually targeted
• Minimal creative lift since personalization happens automatically
• Particularly effective for retargeting website visitors or lookalike audiences

Lead generation forms

Lead gen forms are embedded directly within sponsored ads and allow users to submit their information without leaving LinkedIn. The form pre-populates with data from their LinkedIn profile, including name, email, company, and job title, dramatically reducing the effort required to complete the conversion. You can customize which fields appear and add additional questions specific to your business needs.

Why lead gen forms outperform external landing pages:

• Zero page load time since forms exist within the ad itself, reducing abandonment
• Qualified submissions because LinkedIn profile information is typically accurate and verified
• Immediate data capture without relying on users to fill out forms on your website

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Accelerate vs. Classic Ad Sets in LinkedIn

When you set up a LinkedIn campaign, you get two ways to run your ads: Accelerate and Classic.

Accelerate uses automation to optimize your targeting, bidding, and creative combinations, while Classic keeps everything manual so you can control every setting yourself. The table below highlights how they differ and when each one makes sense to use. 📝

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How to Create a LinkedIn Ad Campaign (Step-by-Step)

Here’s a LinkedIn ads guide to set up, configure, and launch a campaign that reaches the right professionals with the right message. 💬

Step #1: Access Campaign Manager and set up your ads account

Begin by visiting LinkedIn.com/ads or selecting Advertise in the top navigation of your LinkedIn profile.

You’ll need an active LinkedIn Company Page to proceed. If your organization doesn’t have one, create it first by filling in basic company information, uploading a logo, and adding a company description.

Once you’re in Campaign Manager, click ‘Create’ to start the setup process.

You’ll be asked to name your ads account, select your currency, and add a payment method. This is also where you designate which Company Page will run the ads and establish team access for colleagues who need to help manage campaigns.

Step #2: Choose your campaign objective

Your campaign objective determines the ad formats you can use, how LinkedIn optimizes your ads, and which bidding options are available.

LinkedIn offers objectives like Awareness (building brand recognition among your target audience), Consideration (driving engagement and website visits), and Conversion (capturing leads or sales).

Think carefully about what action you want professionals to take after seeing your ad. So if:

• You want to build awareness, focus on impressions, and reach across your target audience members
• You’re running a lead generation campaign, prioritize forms and conversion tracking to measure qualified prospects

Step #3: Build and refine your target audience with precision

LinkedIn’s targeting capability is one of its greatest strengths. You can narrow your audience by job title, job function, industry, company name, company size, seniority level, skills, and professional interests.

Start by identifying who your marketing ideal customer profile (ICP) is.

Are you trying to reach marketing directors at tech companies with 500 to 5,000 employees? Are you targeting HR leaders in the retail industry? Layer multiple targeting criteria to get increasingly specific.

You can also create matched audiences by uploading a list of existing customers to find similar professionals, or by retargeting people who visited your website.

Most campaigns perform best with an audience size between 100,000 and 1 million people for Sponsored Content formats. Too small and you won’t reach enough people. Too large and your message becomes less relevant.

Your audience targeting strategy should include:

• Primary job titles that decision-makers hold in your target industry
• Company size parameters that match your typical customer profile
• Geographic targeting, if you only serve specific regions or countries
• Exclusions to remove prospects unlikely to convert or who are already your customers
• Matched audiences using your own customer data for higher relevance

Step #4: Select your LinkedIn ad format

The format you choose shapes how your audience experiences your message.

Consider what creative assets you have available. If you only have one strong image, single-image Sponsored Content is appropriate. If you want to showcase multiple products or walk someone through a process, use Carousel Ads. Match your format to both your objective and the story you want to tell.

Format selection factors to evaluate:

• Objective alignment to ensure the format supports your campaign goal
• Creative assets you have available to build the ad properly
• Audience device preferences and where they consume content
• Historical performance data, if you’ve run ads before
• Story complexity and whether you need one image or multiple elements

Step #5: Set your budget, bidding strategy, and campaign timeline

You can set a budget at the Campaign Group level for platform optimization or at the individual campaign level for tighter control. Choose your bidding strategy carefully:

• Maximum Delivery lets LinkedIn optimize automatically to get the most results for your budget
• Cost Cap lets you set a target cost per result, so LinkedIn works to stay under that number
• Manual Bidding gives you control over bid amounts

Most advertisers starting out should use Maximum Delivery for simplicity and to benefit from LinkedIn’s AI optimization. Set a daily budget that won’t overextend your resources, a total campaign budget as a spending limit, and select start and end dates. You can pause campaigns at any time or extend them if they’re performing well.

Step #6: Create compelling ad creatives

Now, you build the actual ad creative that will appear to your audience.

Depending on your format, you’ll upload images, write headlines, add descriptive copy, and include a call-to-action (CTA) button.

LinkedIn recommends building 4 to 5 ad variations within a single campaign, allowing the platform to test and identify which creative resonates best. Make sure images meet technical requirements: minimum 100×100 pixels, saved as .jpg or .png, and under 2MB file size.

Your creative strategy should address:

• Headlines that immediately communicate the value or benefit
• Ad copy that speaks to your audience’s specific pain points or aspirations
• Imagery that is professional and relevant to your target audience
• CTA buttons aligned with your campaign objective
• Multiple creative variations tested simultaneously for performance comparison

🚀 ClickUp Advantage: No more switching between ChatGPT for copy, Midjourney for images, and design tools for layout. ClickUp Brain combines AI writing + image generation in your workspace so your marketing team can move faster and stay focused without AI sprawl.

Try this prompt: Write three versions of LinkedIn ad copy promoting our new project management course for marketing directors. Keep the tone professional but approachable, focused on saving time and reducing team chaos.

Use ClickUp Brain as your marketing copilot

Then generate a clean, modern hero image showing a confident marketing professional working at a sleek desk with multiple organized project dashboards visible on their screen—bright, minimal aesthetic with blues and whites.

Step #7: Install conversion tracking (Optional)

If you only track clicks and impressions, you’re missing the full picture of what your ads actually drive.

Install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website to track when someone from your ad takes valuable actions like filling out a form, downloading a resource, or making a purchase. This pixel-based tracking connects your advertising spend to actual business results, giving you clarity on return on investment.

You can create conversion events for different actions people take on your website. For example, you might track form submissions separately from purchase completions. This data becomes invaluable for optimizing campaigns and demonstrating advertising value to stakeholders.

💡 Pro Tip: Before launching, conduct a thorough review of every element to ensure it’s ready. You should:

• Verify your objective matches your business goal
• Confirm your audience targeting is specific enough to be relevant, but broad enough to reach sufficient people
• Check that your creative is compelling and meets technical specifications

LinkedIn conducts a review process, typically completed within 24 hours, to ensure everything meets platform policies before going live.

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Measuring LinkedIn Ad Success

Most LinkedIn advertisers obsess over impressions while ignoring metrics that predict profitability. You need to measure what converts, not just what gets seen.

Track these metrics:

• Click-through rate (CTR): Compare your CTR against previous campaigns and your industry peers. Stagnant or declining CTR signals your creative or targeting needs refreshing
• Cost per click (CPC): Track this consistently across campaigns to identify which audience segments or ad formats are more cost-efficient for your business
• Conversions: Only track actions with business value. Form submissions your sales team ignores are worthless. Define what conversion actually means for your goal
• Lead quality: Score leads on fit criteria before celebrating conversion numbers. A high volume of unqualified leads wastes resources and skews your performance data
• Return on investment (ROI): Work backwards from your customer lifetime value to set realistic acquisition cost targets. This determines if your ad spend is sustainable long-term

🚀 ClickUp Advantage: Lock in a steady review rhythm for your LinkedIn ad campaigns with Recurring Tasks in ClickUp.

Set a weekly or biweekly task that brings your key metrics, creatives, and audience performance back into focus, so you can catch shifts early and adjust with intent. It keeps your optimization cycle consistent, reduces last-minute scrambling, and supports a smoother path to stronger campaign decisions.

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Limitations of LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn is powerful for B2B marketing, but it’s not a universal solution. Understanding where the platform falls short helps you allocate budget more strategically across your full marketing mix.

Where LinkedIn ads face real constraints:

• High costs: CPCs and CPMs are significantly higher than those of other social platforms, making large-scale consumer campaigns expensive and often unprofitable
• B2C limitations: LinkedIn’s professional focus makes it ineffective for reaching consumers outside work contexts, limiting reach for retail and lifestyle brands
• Smaller audience pool: Fewer active users than Facebook or Instagram means you’re working with a narrower addressable market for most campaigns
• Limited creative flexibility: Brand voice must remain professional and formal, restricting playful, edgy, or casual creative approaches that resonate elsewhere
• Ad fatigue: A smaller audience means your ads rotate through the same people repeatedly, leading to declining performance and view fatigue over time

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Tools and Templates to Streamline LinkedIn Ads

The right tools and templates (like ClickUp for Marketing Teams!) take the repetitive work off your plate so you can spend more time on strategy and creative workflow management.

Here’s a quick overview:

Now let’s look at it in detail.

Built-in Whiteboards for brainstorming in a unified workspace

Brainstorming for LinkedIn ads works better when you structure it around the platform’s strengths. Try dividing your whiteboard into three columns: job titles you’re targeting, problems those people have at work, and how your offer solves them.

ClickUp Whiteboards give your team a visual canvas to map out campaign ideas, sketch ad concepts, and connect the dots between audience pain points and messaging angles.

You can drag in notes, drop images for inspiration, draw rough layout ideas, and link everything directly to Tasks in ClickUp when you’re ready to move forward.

Hear it from Lulu Press on using ClickUp:

Ad creative tracker to keep all your assets centralized

Keeping track of LinkedIn ad creative gets messy fast. You’re testing different images, headlines, copy variations, and audience pairings. After a few weeks, it’s hard to remember which combination ran where or what you learned from it.

The problem compounds when you’re collaborating. Someone launches a new creative without realizing you already tested that angle. Or a winning format gets forgotten because nobody documented why it worked.

Get free template

ClickUp’s Advertisement Template helps here. It gives you a structured framework to manage every stage of your LinkedIn ad campaign. For example, you can:

• Use ClickUp Custom Fields such as Allocated Budget, Publication Link, Release Date, Platform, and Target Audience to map each ad
• Move tasks to different statuses, such as New Request, Research, Implementation, Live, and Complete, so everyone knows an asset’s stage
• Pick from ClickUp Views like Calendar, By Client, Budget, Advertisements, or Designers for stakeholder visibility

LinkedIn content calendar to keep track of the schedule

Running LinkedIn ads without organic content to back them up is a missed opportunity. When someone sees your ad and clicks through to your company page, what do they find? If the last post is from two months ago, you’ve lost credibility before the conversation starts.

A LinkedIn content calendar helps you coordinate the two. Perhaps your ad campaign promotes a webinar, so your organic posts that week provide context around the same topic. Or you’re retargeting people who engaged with a post, so you need to know what’s scheduled and when.

Try this LinkedIn content calendar template. 👇

Get free template

Bring your ad content schedule into sharp focus using the ClickUp Content Calendar Template.

It lets you map every LinkedIn asset—from awareness posts to lead-gen updates—onto a clear calendar where you track concept, draft, review, and publish. You’ll find Custom Fields for Channel, Target Audience, Publish Date, and Content Type, making it easy to segment your content.

AI-powered reporting dashboard with at-a-glance summaries

Staring at LinkedIn Campaign Manager’s native reporting only gets you so far. The data is there, but it’s scattered across tabs and time ranges, making it hard to see the full picture or spot trends.

A reporting dashboard pulls everything into one view. You can track spend, impressions, clicks, and conversions side by side. More importantly, you can watch how metrics move together over time.

ClickUp Dashboards give you a single view of how your LinkedIn ad campaign is performing while showing how the team is moving tasks forward. You can track KPIs like clicks, CPL, CTR, conversions, spend pacing, and audience performance using cards that pull data from the work your team updates every day.

Team workload, task progress, approvals, and production timelines sit beside your campaign metrics so you can see whether delays, creative revisions, or volume changes are affecting results.

Layer in AI Cards powered by ClickUp Brain, such as:

• AI StandUp: Gives a quick summary of one team member’s recent work activity
• AI Team StandUp: Shows what multiple team members accomplished over a selected time range
• AI Executive Summary: Highlights the overall health and key updates of your campaign folder or project
• AI Project Update: Offers a high-level progress snapshot of tasks, timelines, and blockers
• AI Brain: Lets you ask targeted questions about performance, delays, or priorities for instant insights

Automations and Agents to keep the work moving forward

Managing LinkedIn ads involves a lot of repetitive steps.

Someone finishes the creative, then you have to remember to send it for approval. A campaign ends, then you have to pull the report. Nothing is difficult on its own, but keeping track of it all eats time.

ClickUp Automations and AI Agents can handle repetitive steps in your LinkedIn ad workflow, so your team can focus on execution.

Some automation examples to try:

• Status > Ready for Review > Auto-create an approval task
• Custom field Targeting Updated > Assign task to campaign lead
• Status > Approved > Change status to Ready to Schedule
• Status > Live > Notify analytics owner
• Every Friday > Create a Performance Review task
• Priority updated > Auto-adjust due date

Agents do the same thing, but without you having to lift a finger. They can assign tasks to team members, send updates, collate summaries and reports, and even answer questions for you. See how. 👇🏼

Voice-first productivity with a standalone desktop app

ClickUp Brain MAX works as a desktop AI companion that pulls context from your tasks, docs, and connected apps, so you get answers grounded in your actual campaign work.

You can search for ad drafts, find past performance notes, pull targeting details, or surface the latest LinkedIn metrics from your workspace without switching tabs. It also supports multiple AI models, so you can draft copy variations, clean up audience descriptions, or turn scattered ideas into actionable steps while staying inside your workflow.

Talk to Text in ClickUp Brain MAX lets you speak your thoughts and convert them directly into text for tasks, notes, or messages.

It recognizes @mentions and links, supports custom vocabulary so your industry terms and campaign names are understood, and works across apps, which means you can capture a full optimization idea while looking at LinkedIn Campaign Manager, then drop it straight into the task that needs an update.

It removes the friction of typing during busy review cycles, keeps your thinking uninterrupted, and gives your team clearer, faster handoffs when decisions need to move.

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Best Practices for LinkedIn Ads

Try these best practices to improve your LinkedIn ads. 📈

Stop treating LinkedIn like Facebook with job titles

The biggest mistake marketers make is running the same playbook they use on other platforms.

LinkedIn users are in a different headspace. They’re not scrolling to unwind. They’re scanning for professional value between meetings. Your creative has maybe two seconds to signal relevance before they move on.

This means leading with specificity. Generic pain points get ignored. But mention something that sounds like a conversation they had last Tuesday, and you’ve got their attention.

Match your offer to the awareness level

Cold audiences don’t want demos. They barely know who you are. Pushing a sales conversation too early wastes budget and burns potential customers before they’re ready.

Think in stages:

• Unaware audiences need educational content that establishes credibility
• Problem-aware audiences respond to frameworks or perspectives that reframe their challenges
• Solution-aware audiences want proof: case studies, comparisons, specifics

Only people actively evaluating deserve the demo ask.

Most LinkedIn ad accounts have one offer running to everyone. That’s leaving money on the table.

Let your ads breathe before making decisions

The temptation to check performance hourly is real, but LinkedIn’s algorithm needs time to optimize. Making changes after a day or two of data leads to false conclusions. A campaign that looks like a dud on Tuesday might find its footing by Friday once the system learns who’s engaging.

Give new creatives at least a week and a few thousand impressions before judging. Otherwise, you’re reacting to noise, not signal.

Use exclusions as aggressively as targeting

Most advertisers focus on who they want to reach and forget about who they want to avoid. Excluding current customers, competitors, job seekers, and unqualified industries sharpens your audience dramatically.

Review your campaign data regularly for patterns.

If a certain segment clicks but never converts, exclude them. Tight exclusions mean your budget reaches people who can buy.

Time campaigns around buying cycles

B2B purchases follow rhythms tied to budgets, quarters, and planning seasons.

Advertising a big-ticket solution in December when budgets are frozen wastes money. Ramping up in Q1 when new budgets unlock makes every dollar work harder.

Learn when your customers typically evaluate and buy. Adjust your campaign calendar to match: heavier spending during active buying windows, lighter maintenance during slow periods.

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Step Up Your LinkedIn Ad Campaigns With ClickUp

LinkedIn ads can feel chaotic when every step pulls you in a different direction. You plan the creative in one place, track performance somewhere else, and remind your team about reviews in yet another tool. Once you get past the learning curve, though, the whole process starts to feel like a rhythm you control.

ClickUp helps you keep that rhythm tight.

You shape campaign concepts on ClickUp Whiteboards, monitor performance trends through ClickUp Dashboards, and take care of repetitive tasks with Automations.

And when it’s time to build creatives, you move even faster. ClickUp Brain writes your ad copy, drafts variations, sharpens headlines, and helps you adapt messaging for each audience segment. Then you use ClickUp Brain MAX to generate clean, on-brand ad visuals right inside your workspace. Even your quick ideas land in the right place with Talk to Text, so nothing slips during review cycles.

Everything stays connected, which means every campaign moves with more clarity, consistency, and confidence.

Sign up for ClickUp today! ✅

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