How LinkedIn's advertising tool works

Last updated: 1 week ago

Campaign Manager is LinkedIn’s self-service advertising platform. It allows you to create, manage, and measure ad campaigns that reach professionals across LinkedIn’s network. To launch ads, you’ll work within a structured hierarchy made up of four key entities:

  • Ad account
  • Campaign
  • Ad set
  • Ad

Understanding how these entities relate to each other is essential for building effective campaigns and managing your advertising strategy. 

Campaign Manager hierarchy and features

The entities in Campaign Manager define how your advertising is structured and managed. They determine: 

  • Who can create ads on behalf of your organization 
  • Who sees your ads and where they appear 
  • How much you spend and how you pay 
  • What assets are shared across campaigns 

Each level in Campaign Manager has a specific purpose: 

  • Your ad account controls settings that apply across campaigns, such as payment, user permissions, and shared assets.  
  • Campaigns and ad sets inherit those account settings and define your marketing strategy, including objective, audience targeting, and budget.  
  • Ads are built within ad sets and reflect the creative content your audience will see.
Ad account hierarchy flowchart

Depending on your organization’s size and advertising goals, you can use a range of features to efficiently build campaigns, measure performance, and optimize results. 

Hierarchy entity Description Basic features Advanced features 
Ad account The top-level container for your advertising setup Billing setup, user roles, LinkedIn Page connection Shared audiences, conversion tracking, brand safety, experiment testing
Campaign A way to organize and manage multiple ad sets High-level budget, schedule, and status control across ad sets Objective selection (campaign-level), budget optimization across ad sets
Ad set Defines strategy and targeting for your ads Objective selection (ad set-level), audience targeting, ad format, bidding strategies, budget, and schedule Conversion tracking, placement control, URL tracking parameters
Ad The creative unit shown to your audience Format-specific setup (e.g., image, video, message), preview, edit, duplicate Drafting ads with AI, flexible ad creation

How to get started with Campaign Manager 

Creating an ad account is the first step you’ll take in Campaign Manager. After you’ve created your account, you can create and launch your first ad campaign. Then, you’ll continue to monitor and optimize the performance of your campaign.  

Learn more about how to set up your ad account, campaigns, ad sets, and ads with the following resources: 

Get started with: Description
Setting up your ad account Learn about the basic steps to set up your ad account, as well as the advanced features available.
Setting up your first campaign, ad set, and ads Learn how to plan your marketing strategy and structure your ad campaign.
Measuring and optimizing campaign performance Learn about the essential and advanced features available to measure and optimize your campaign performance.

How to manage multiple ad accounts

If you’re an agency or a large marketing organization, you might want to create multiple ad accounts to manage different clients, products and services, or business regions. If you need multiple ad accounts, you can use Business Manager to help you manage account permissions, billing, and performance reporting at scale.  

With Business Manager, you can: 

  • Link all your ad accounts and LinkedIn Pages to a single dashboard. 
  • Give the people within your organization and the businesses you work with access to your ad accounts and Pages from a single location. 
  • Manage how you pay for your ads across multiple ad accounts using Ads Billing Center. 
  • Share Matched Audiences, allow lists, and block lists across ad accounts and with partners. Whenever an audience or list is updated, that change is instantly reflected across all ad accounts and campaigns using it. 
  • Connect your CRMs to view advanced performance reporting. 

Learn more about getting started with advertising on LinkedIn 

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