LinkedIn Ads Brand Safety

With sponsored content campaigns on LinkedIn, your ads can run on the LinkedIn audience network, which means that your ads can show not on LinkedIn by itself. Now, this extended reach is great, but some brands get a little bit weary of the content that their ads could show next to on the LinkedIn network.

Luckily, LinkedIn has a number of brand safety controls to help you control where you show up. So in this video, I’m going to show you the two ways that you can control where your ads show on the LinkedIn audience network.

As I mentioned, there are two ways to control where your ads show on the LinkedIn Audience Network. The first I’m going to show you is category lists, and I think this is probably the easiest one because it’s simply folded into the campaign creation process.

You don’t have to do any work ahead of time. I’m going to be in an active client account for this entire video. So when stuff is blurred out, I apologize for that. But you should still be able to see everything that you need to for the sake of this video.

To get started, I’m just going to do the campaign creation process. So I’m going to come up here and click Create Campaign. We’ll skip past this first step. I’ll go ahead and choose Website Conversions, and now we have a placeholder campaign in here that we can work with. I’m not going to go through any of the other targeting options for LinkedIn campaigns. If you’re interested in any of that, you can check out the video at the top of the screen right now.

Instead, I’m going to skip down to the Placement Section. If we scroll down here, it’s going to be below the ad format, and you’ll see that the options that you have are pretty limited. We have the blurred out LinkedIn, meaning that you have to show on LinkedIn, but then you have the checkbox as to whether or not you want to show on the LinkedIn Audience Network or not.

For any of the brands that are really concerned about their brand safety, more often than not, I see them uncheck this box. But again, this video is to show you that you don’t have to do that because there are more specific controls other than simply opting completely in or completely out. So if I leave this checked, you’ll see that down here, we have a blue link that says show brand safety options.

So we’re going to click to expand this. And now, you can see the Exclude Categories and Add Publisher List. We’ll get to the Publisher List in just a little bit because right now, I want to talk about the category exclusions. So let’s click on this.

And now the list is going to look pretty similar to what other targeting options do on LinkedIn. But rather than being an industry, for example, these are going to be different categories of content that live on the LinkedIn Audience network.

So just for the sake of example, let’s go down to business. And then you can see that you can either Select All to Exclude All of the categories within the business category or you can check individual boxes like Advertising and Agriculture to say that you want to exclude those categories from this campaign on the LinkedIn Audience Network.

You can see that there are a ton of different categories that you can choose from, and you can add individual categories in the way that I’m doing now by navigating to a parent category and then choosing either the select all or the boxes next to the individual categories. Or you can come over here back to the house, and you can start to type in individual categories that you would want to have excluded.

One of the big ones that I know a lot of people want to stay away from is politics. So rather than trying to find it in this list, I could just type in politics, and I only got four letters in, and now politics is the only one that’s showing up. So I check the box next to that, and we’re no longer going to show up next to political content on the LinkedIn Audience Network.

Now, the one thing to know about these categories that are listed here is that they are defined by the IAB or the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Each of these different categories relies on how the partners and publishers label their content to fit into any of these individual categories.

And what that means is that LinkedIn is not responsible for these specific categorizations, and neither is the IAB. It’s on the publisher themselves to categorize their content into these categories.

Now I would imagine just like with any sort of SEO or definitely any sort of paid media; you want to make sure that you’re representing yourself and categorizing yourself accurately so that you can speak to your target audience.

So it’s in their best interest to make sure that they filter themselves into the right category. But just as a heads up, these are effectively self-identified categorizations that are then reviewed by the IAB. Overall, this option is pretty simple because all you have to do is check some boxes while you’re creating your campaigns in the original builder anyway, so there’s not a bunch of additional work to do. But again, these are just categories, and they are based on other people’s self-identification.

If we want to get more specific, there is a secondary way that we can control brand safety on LinkedIn, and that is going to be referring to these publisher lists that I skipped over a little bit ago. Rather than starting here, I want to navigate out of this campaign setup and show you where you can add your publisher lists in the LinkedIn interface.

Now that I’m back on the main campaign group screen, I want to head up to the plan menu and click on Brand Safety right below Audiences. This is where we’re going to upload our publisher lists. Now, what I mean by Publisher list is that we are literally going to give LinkedIn a list of sites and tell them that we want to either allow or block our ads from showing on those sites.

Now, your next question might be, great, that sounds good. How do we know what publishers to add to the list? And that’s why they have this little button here that says Download Publisher List. So if I click on that and with a little bit of editing magic, you can now see that I have a list of all of these different placements from the LinkedIn interface.

This entire list of sites is literally all of the placements that are within the LinkedIn audience network. You can see a number of them are main websites that you’ve probably seen before vogue.com, News.@yahoo.com. All sorts of different sites are in here. Vox, L, House Beautiful, CBS Sports, the Atlantic. There are a lot of different websites that are in here.

And actually, if I come over here, go all the way down to the bottom, you’ll see that there are 1686 individual placements listed. And yes, now you can see that a number of them are within the Google and Apple app stores. So these are not just regular websites; there are app placements as well.

Well, so as I mentioned, there are two things that we can do with this list. Let me hop back into LinkedIn real quick, and the easiest way to see what we can do with them is to pretend to upload a list.

You would then give your list a name, but then the list type is going to be the key factor here. You can upload either a Block List, which means that it will prevent your ads from showing on those specific publishers, or you can upload an Allow List, which will let your ads appear on specific publishers.

So a Block List means don’t show my ads on any of these sites, and Allow List means these are the sites that I’m comfortable having my ads show up on. You can upload either or both to your account, depending on what your strategies and levels of comfort are. As you can see at the top here, but is also in the LinkedIn Help Section, you can upload a list containing 100,000 website domains, iTunes App Store URLs or Android Play Store URLs that you want to allow or block.

It’s really important to make sure that whatever publisher you want to allow or block, whether it’s a website domain or a mobile app, that you need to include all of the domain and all App URL information for that publisher in your list to effectively block it across all of your channels. As you can see in the background of this builder, I already have a sample block list uploaded. But now I’m going to upload a sample Allow List.

So I’m just going to name it pretty similarly. I’m going to adjust my list to be an Allow type, and then I’m going to bring Excel back in here real quick. I downloaded the template from the builder, and then I just copied and pasted a handful of URLs from the publisher list just so you can see what it looks like. But it’s very simple. All the formatting is exactly the same as a publisher list. You just have to copy and paste the URLs into column A.

So now I’m going to upload this list. Everything looks good. So now I’m going to click Agree and upload. And now you can see my sample Allow list has shown up right alongside the sample block list. If at any point you decide that you need to make adjustments to these Allow or Block lists, you can just come click the three dots here. You can then edit, delete, or download the list.

Downloading effectively just lets you see who you are, either Allowing or blocking because there’s no way to review that in the interface itself. So if you want to go back and check who is allowed or blocked, you’ll need to download it to be able to review.

Now, one of the key differentiators in LinkedIn compared to some other platforms like Google Ads, which Joe recently did a video on the content controls, which you can check out at the top of the screen right now, is that there’s not an account level listing for Block or Allow lists or categories within LinkedIn.

Each one of these types of exclusions or Allow lists needs to be added at the campaign level. So let’s go back, create another placeholder campaign, and I’ll show you how easy it is to include these Block or Allow lists.

I created the same website conversions campaign, already skipped ahead to the placement section. We’re going to leave the Audience Network checked and then again expand US brand safety controls. We already talked about the categories, so now we’re going to add a publisher list here. It’s pretty simple. You either check into the block list, or you check into the Allow list. You can do both, but know what each of the different functions are.

If you have just the block list added, that means that you’re going to show up on all placements within the audience network except for the list that you have blocked. Depending on how many placements you’ve added to this list, that could mean that you’re targeting a lot of different placements or only a few.

The same logic applies if you check only the Allow list, but it works in the opposite way. If you opt into only an Allow list, that means that your ads will only appear on the placements within your Allow list and will not show up on any other placement within the LinkedIn audience network.

Again, if you have a really big list that means you could show up in a lot of places. If you have a small list, that means you’re only going to show up in a handful of placements every time you adjust either a block list, an allow list, or if you exclude certain categories, your campaign reach, scale and performance can be impacted because you don’t have quite the same expansive reach that you would have had before.

Overall, these brand safety controls need to be left up to each individual company. There’s no right or wrong way to do this. It just depends on what your company or what your clients are comfortable having their ads run next to on an expanded network.

In my opinion, these controls are extremely easy to use and make it so there’s not really a reason to not use the audience network because you can make sure that you’re showing up next to only safe content in a number of different ways, just like with any other topic on this channel. If you have any additional questions that I did not address about LinkedIn Brand Safety or any of the other PPC advertising topics, we would love to hear about them in the comments below.

Written by Michelle Morgan