LinkedIn Conversation Ads

LinkedIn conversation ads are some of the most customizable ad formats we have across any of the major platforms. Rather than just serving a banner ad, or what feels like an email through LinkedIn InMail, we can create an entire chat experience through the messenger section within LinkedIn ads.

So today, I want to give you a full run-through of setting up LinkedIn conversation ads, show you how you can utilize their templates or create a conversation from scratch, to give your customers the ability to choose whichever calls to action or which types of conversations they want to have with your business.

I jumped into our paid media pros staged LinkedIn ads account as you can tell, we pretty much never create live campaigns for these videos, but you still get the full run-through of everything we would need.

So the first thing to create a conversation ad campaign is to, you guessed it, create a new campaign. The first thing you need to do when you create a new campaign is to choose your objective, and conversation ads can work with a number of different objectives within LinkedIn ads. You can create them for a brand-aware campaign, website visits, engagement, lead generation, and website conversions.

You cannot use conversation ads with the video views or job applicant’s campaigns. As a quick view from LinkedIn’s help section, here, you can see in the image off to the right, they have those five campaign objectives highlighted that I just called out, in case you need a quick reference.

Depending on the campaign objective you choose, you’ll see different settings and maybe some slightly different options within the conversation ads themselves. But for now, I think, for the most part, people utilize the website conversions campaign objective for most of their LinkedIn campaigns.

If you do want to get a little bit more of a rundown of the campaign objectives on LinkedIn, you can check out the video the top of the screen right now. But for the sake of this video, I’m just going to use website conversions as our campaign objective. Once I do that, I will be prompted to add in the geographic locations, the different audience targeting all that stuff that for this video I’m going to skip, and then the next piece is we need to choose the ad format.

All LinkedIn campaigns only allow for one ad format per campaign. It’s not my favorite thing, but that’s the way that the platform works. So since this video is about conversation ads, you guessed it, I’m going to choose conversation ad. You’ll then notice that the LinkedIn audience network has been disabled, because this is not an ad format that works with the audience network.

The audience network is an extension of about 25% of your target audience by running ads effectively off of LinkedIn through partner apps and websites. So since conversation ads have to happen in your LinkedIn messenger section, that has to inherently be on LinkedIn.

So that’s why the audience network is turned off. You’re not going to actually be missing any reach, because you couldn’t have gotten there with a conversation ad in the first place.

You’ll then be prompted to fill in all of the budget and schedule, the bidding sections, and all of that. If you want a little bit more rundown on some strategies for the bidding strategies on LinkedIn, you can check out the video at the top of the screen right now.

Then the last piece since this is a conversion campaign, you’re going to opt into the different conversions you have in your account. Here, I would encourage you to add in all of the conversion actions you are potentially going to use within the conversation ads themselves.

This might be something that until you create your full conversation, you might want to just leave this blank, because you might not know exactly what you’re going to ask just yet. But remember, always come back in and ensure that your campaign has all the conversion actions set up in this conversion tracking section before you get started.

So then the last thing I need to do is just click next, it’ll ask me if I want to save it, I sure do, and then we’ll move on to the ad setup. As you can see by the setup flow on the left, we had to set up the campaign group, the campaign itself with all these different settings, and now we’re really just going to be setting up the conversation ads themselves.

So this will be the bulk of this video, because once we’re done with this, all we need to do is review and launch. So since this account doesn’t have any conversation ads already created that we can use, we’re going to come up here to create new ad.

Just like with any other format, the first thing we need to do is give it a name. If you’ve listened to me do any other videos on this platform, you know that is a terrible name for an ad creative. Make sure to put in some form of name that you will know what it means at a high level, you’ll understand what the objective was, what many of the calls to action were, and you’ll be able to easily decide from just the name if you want to use it later on.

You do have quite a number of characters, I have a few in here, and there’s still 233 characters available. So don’t be shy about giving your conversation ads long names so you can remember what they are whenever you come back around and you might want to use them again.

Next, you need to choose the sender of the message. Whenever you use conversation ads, they’re going to show up in the messenger section of LinkedIn, and that always needs to come from somebody or some business.

So this is the section where you choose who the message is going to come from, even if that person doesn’t actually have to log into LinkedIn to send the message itself. There is a numerous-step process to adding new senders, so I’m not going to talk about that for this video.

Maybe we’ll put together another short video at some point to show you how to do that. But there are help articles you can check out and it does say here to add a new sender contact your account manager. So what that tells me is that based on my level of access to this account, I am not able to add a new sender.

Whenever you do get ready to determine who will send the message, there are two key things to consider. First, is the authority. Does it make sense for this person to be sending messages to people? If you’re trying to generate leads for your online software business, it might make sense to have the message come from the CEO, but that also could be too high level.

It might make more sense for it to come from somebody like a salesperson, or the chief revenue officer, or something like that instead. Think about what it will look like from the user perspective when they get the message from this user, does it make sense that they’re hearing from them directly in their LinkedIn messenger.

The second piece is that you want that person to be available to check their messages in case somebody messages them back. From these ad campaigns, users can message the individual person themselves, so make sure that this person is at least somewhat active on LinkedIn.

Ideally, they would be able to log in whenever they get a message, but that doesn’t mean that they have to be there 24/7, that’s quite a lot to ask of anybody. But make sure that while this campaign is running, they are checking in and making sure that they’re not hearing back directly from customers and then ignoring them.

Next, we can upload a banner creative, which will show up alongside our conversation ads. You can see the dimensions down here below are 300 by 250, it needs to be a jpeg or a PNG and up to two megabytes.

Effectively in your LinkedIn messenger, this banner will show up next to any of the messages that are sent to you. It will only show on desktop, not on mobile, or in the conversation window itself. But it does reserve that space for you, so that no other ad will show up when somebody is trying to view your sponsored conversation ad.

So I went ahead and created a pretty basic banner for this that’s just a different version of our YouTube title card, so I’ll go ahead and upload that now. Now you can see the tiny preview off to the left of the LinkedIn conversation ads title card.

Last on this first page is that you can add a custom footer for your terms and conditions or disclaimers. So you can add any text you need to and then you have all these different text edit options from bold, underline, bullet points, super, or subscript, you can also add links. So if you need to have some sort of legal disclaimer, you can add that in here.

But for now, I don’t need that, so I’m going to skip it, and then let’s go to next step and start to really get into the conversation building. We are now in the template section of the conversation ad builder. As we’ve been able to see so far, all of the edit sections that we’re going to have are going to be off to the left, and the preview is going to be off to the right. It’s important to make sure that we keep an eye on the preview, to know what the differences are in these different templates.

Effectively, LinkedIn is trying to make it so you don’t have to start from scratch creating these conversations, because that can be a pretty daunting task if you don’t already have conversations built for something like a chat client on your website. If you do, that can be a great thing to port in, and I’ll show you how you can create your own conversation ad from scratch in just a little bit. But first, I just want to show the functionality and we’re going to do that using the templates, because that way things are already built.

So the first thing I want to show you is just what each template will translate into in the preview, and how that functions. So the first and default template that they’re going to set you on is going to be this drive event or website registrations action. The goal here is to provide event details and invite your audience to register.

Each of the different templates that you can click on will have a short section down below its name, to kind of tell you what that template is meant to do. So within this template, in the preview over here off to the right, you can see that there are a number of things that look a little bit funny.

There are some texts that are within percent signs. There are some that are capitalized and they’re in brackets, and then we have call to action buttons down here below.

So as a quick run-through, on LinkedIn, anything with the percent surrounding all caps, means that it’s going to automatically populate that information from the user’s profile. So here, it says hi, first name in the percent signs. That means that if it were to target me, my first name on my LinkedIn profile is Michelle.

So this will automatically be replaced to say hi Michelle, if it shows up in my message inbox. Whatever your first name is according to your LinkedIn profile, this type of text will automatically switch to change to what your first name is. So anything with a percent is going to be dynamic.

The second type of text is going to be anything within these brackets that has all capitalizations. There’s a number of them throughout, and each of these are designed for you to change them during this conversation ad creation process, because these values are going to be the same for everybody. They are not going to dynamically change the way that the first name variable will, because no matter who I’m sending the message to, my name, title and company are all the. Same thing with the event name, city, date, time, and topic.

Those are all going to be the same information for this webinar or event that I’m trying to tell this person about. So as we get further into the builder, we’ll need to customize that text. Then down below you can see that there are buttons that you can hover over, and each of these will be a different call to action that talks about how the user can move themselves through the conversation ad itself.

Because you can see that there are three different calls to action, that means that there are different ways that people can progress through this conversation. The first one says save my spot, and it has this little box with an arrow coming out of it.

Effectively, that means that you’re going to leave LinkedIn messenger and go to the website to register for that webinar or event. The other two don’t have that type of box with an arrow coming out of it, meaning that, that just progresses the conversation further within LinkedIn ads messenger.

So for this preview, we can see this first set of messages. But then depending on how somebody engages with the template itself, it’ll change how they progress. So if we click on other options, you can then see what the next option would be for the user.

Here are other options you might be interested in, and then the details for option 2, that will be a link that will take you off, and then other options. So basically, after this first templated message up at the top, they’re kind of leaving it up to you to fill in the blanks.

If you want to have a full understanding of what this template looks like, and what the different options are as you flow through, you can come up here and click view flowchart, and now it shows you the first message that we saw at the top and then you’ll see save my spot, tell me more and other options. Then you’ll start to see the responses depending on what users click.

So if they click the first option, which is save my spot, you’ll get a message that says awesome, we can’t wait to see you there, and then there’s an ellipse so there’s more message after that. If they choose tell me more, you can see that the event is at and then venue name, from, and I’m assuming that says time, and there are three new calls to action. You can then continue to scroll down and see all the different user flows depending on which calls to action people end up choosing.

Here, you can see the other options button that I clicked on, and then there’s user flows that follow each of those different calls to action as well, of what you can do to continue engaging with the company, and how the user can find their way through the conversation.

Each time you want to learn more about what one of these messages says, let’s say that we wanted to check in here and see what this one said. You can click on it, and then click view preview, and it’ll take you to that specific portion of the conversation. So you can preview it and see what it looks like.

Now, this is just one of the templates that LinkedIn has put together around event and webinar registrations, but they have them also created for trials and demos, enrollment for programs, website visits, driving asset downloads, other professional services.

You can use surveys, promote a podcast, recruit new hires, get donations and volunteers. Or you can go with the option that I mentioned before, which is to choose a blank template. If we choose this one, it really just starts you off as a blank template. Start your conversation ad from scratch.

Overall, that sounds pretty daunting, and a little bit tougher to walk through in this video, but I will show you in a little bit how the functionality works. Effectively, if you want to create a template from scratch, you can do that and all the functionality is going to be the same, there just won’t be any preset pieces for you to customize, you’ll have to add them in to start.

So to keep things simple, let’s just head back to the original template, and let’s say that I want to get started with this one, so I just click next step. Here’s where we start to customize all the different pieces within the template that we saw before. You’ll see that the intro message is the same that we saw in the preview, and then down below we have three different call to action buttons for save my spot, tell me more, and other options.

So let’s start to look at what it would look like if we customize these pieces. So I’m going to go ahead and change the information in this intro message to be some theoretical event, so you can see what it would look like.

So, I changed the language and the promotion a little bit, and maybe this template isn’t quite the perfect outline for this anymore, but that’s okay. I changed it to say that my name is Michelle, co-founder of paid media pros. I wanted people to check out the paid media pros videos on YouTube. They’re free and we launch them every week, and then I asked if they would like to subscribe.

So overall, a pretty short message. Ideally, I’m targeting this at people who might like to subscribe, because it might be useful information to them. So then as we move down the builder, the first thing you’ll see here is that you can add an image if we want to. So if I click that box, now I’ve got the recommended size of 250 by 250. So let’s just upload that image that I used earlier and see what it looks like.

Overall, not terrible, not great, but it’s a little bit more eye-catching to have an image here as opposed to just a set of text, it probably would be better for me to have an image that’s of the YouTube channel, instead of just this specific video. But this is what I’ve got, you guys are great, you can visualize it, it’ll be fine.

I can then customize the different call-to-action buttons that I want, and each of these different customization boxes is going to be pretty much the same. You get to choose the button text that you want, so for this, I’m going to change it to something that makes more sense for the YouTube channel.

What I asked in the intro message, I changed it to subscribe on YouTube, because I tried to change it to subscribe to paid media pros, but we only have 25 characters for each of these button text fields, and that didn’t fit. So I went with subscribe on YouTube. I can then choose the action itself. So here, I do want to send somebody to a website, but the other option is to show next message, which is what the other options are going to do.

You’ll remember in the initial preview that I walked through, you can see the difference in that between one that has the square with the arrow and the one that doesn’t. The ones that don’t effectively just further the conversation on LinkedIn. So since I want to send somebody to the YouTube channel, I’m going to leave this one to send to website, and then I’m going to enter the URL of the place that I want to send them to.

So now, when somebody clicks the subscribe call to action, they will be sent to the paid media pros channel on YouTube, so they can subscribe. Just like with every good call to action, we do want to have some sort of a follow-up and thank you message for that. So you can click edit response when somebody clicks on subscribe on YouTube.

The message that pre-fills from here is awesome, we can’t wait to see you there, and honestly, I think that’s fine. Then prompts that I can put an additional optional image if I want to, and you can do that just by clicking this additional box down here and doing the exact same thing we did for the previous one. But I’m not going to, because I think that’s telling enough.

So here I’m all set, I’m going to go back to the previous message, and we’re all set for the subscribe on YouTube piece. But let’s say that I want to customize the two calls to action down below. The next button text is tell me more, and the action is show next message.

I’m actually just going to leave that how it is because I think that makes sense, either somebody’s willing to subscribe or they want to be told more about it, they want to be told why they should subscribe.

So we’ll come over here to edit response. So if somebody clicks on tell me more, they’ll get this information. The preset here is that event is at and then a bunch of different pieces that I could fill in. Because we’re using the event and webinar template for this conversation ad, so I’m going to go ahead and customize the message here for a paid media pros channel subscription.

I took up a little less than half of the 500 characters, just putting in something pretty basic about what we do on the paid media pros channel. Just like before, I still have the option to add an image, but I’m not going to do that. Then down below, I get to choose the different call action buttons that I want to have set up, based on how people can respond to the message that I just added.

Hopefully, I’ve convinced that person that they should go subscribe, so I’m going to change the button text to that. We’ll say you’ve convinced me, and then I’m going to change it to send to a website, change this to the paid media pros channel. We could then customize the response, but when somebody clicks on this button, it’ll take them to the paid media pros YouTube channel, just like this first subscribe on YouTube button would.

I could then continue the different conversation piece if I wanted to, by having these different calls to action here. They already have two more, but let’s say I don’t want them and I can just click the trash can here. Confirm that I want to delete that call to action, and now I only have two. But you have upwards of five different calls to action for each of these.

So let’s say I changed my mind and wanted to add one back in, all I have to do is click add another button and the new builder pops up down below. It’s very easy to create any different user flow going through all of these different pieces, but the functionality will be the same, no matter what you’re doing.

Each time, you’re going to have a message up at the top, you’ll then be able to add an image if you want to support that message. You then have call to action buttons that allow you to customize the text up to 25 characters, and you can either send somebody to a website to take that specific action.

Or you can have them show a new message and that will continue the conversation within the LinkedIn ads conversation message that they have set up. I’m not going to finish fleshing out this entire conversation, because this is just an example. But once you are close to the finish, and you want to make sure that everything flows and that all of your options have been followed up on, with at least some form of thank you message once they click out and visit your site itself, you can still come up here and view flowchart.

Now, you’ll see that the message is customized based on what I have, as opposed to what was in the template originally. The different user flows talk about the buttons that I set up, the subscribe on YouTube, tell me more, and now that you’ve convinced me, we release videos at least once a week, all that good stuff.

So now this flowchart is customized because I’ve customized the template itself to what I wanted it to be. As I mentioned before, creating a blank conversation ad and starting from scratch effectively just means that when you log in, the message field over here will be blank, there’ll be no template for you to run on.

Each time you go to a different call to action section, the button will show up like this. It’ll want you to enter your button text, and then it’ll prompt you to select a call-to-action type, rather than choosing to either keep it from send to a website or show next message but otherwise all the functionality is the same, and as you start to build out your flowchart it will start to piece together based on the different calls to action you have.

And all of your flows will represent the conversation that you’ve created rather than starting off with a template. Once you’re finished setting up your conversation, all you need to do is click create, and now it sends us back into the ad step of the campaign creation process.

You’ll see here that we do have a little alert that says to run your ads, change their status from draft to active. We have one ad that is in draft as you can see here, but the last piece that I want you to pay attention to it says once an ad is active, you can no longer edit it.

So I encourage you to keep your ad as a draft until you have finalized it and you know exactly what you want it to say and then you’ll just need to come down here and change it to active. But let’s say that you did want to edit it, you can click on the three dots, click edit, and then you’ll be able to customize as needed.

You can also duplicate or send test message, which we’re not going to do right now. But you can customize this further before you set it as active. Overall, the next few steps are pretty easy, again, turn this to active click, next and then you would just review and launch the campaign just like you would any other LinkedIn campaign, it’ll show you all of the different campaign settings and the creative and the conversion action you have set up and then you’ll click launch. But since this is a sample ad in a placeholder account, I’m not going to do that because I don’t actually want this ad to run.

Overall, conversation ads on LinkedIn are extremely customizable. They’re very easy to make it, so you can let the user choose which way they want to engage with your company, and it allows you to have multiple different calls to action so that they can decide to either, I don’t know, subscribe to your YouTube channel or come to your website or maybe download a white paper.

Or some other engagement that still provides value for both you and your potential customer. Whether you use one of their templates and customize it to your need, or you start from a completely blank conversation and customize it from scratch. They are pretty easy to set up, the builder is not too terribly complicated, and you can always go back and check your user flow to see how the conversation is progressing, and make sure that you have everything buttoned up so that there’s a seamless interaction from the first message, all the way until the user finally comes to the end of the conversation.

Whether that is because they completed a call to action, or they’ve effectively just opted themselves out, and you’ve decided to leave them alone from here on out.

I’m always curious to hear how people use this conversation ad or kind of chat bot format to engage with their customers. So if you have any specific use cases that you don’t mind sharing, I would love to hear about them in the comments.

As always, if you have any other questions about LinkedIn conversation ads, or any of the other stuff on LinkedIn or any other channel for that matter. Also, feel free to hop in the conversation in the comments and we’ll get back to you.

Written by Michelle Morgan