Last updated on

The Practical Guide to LinkedIn Ads

A while back, I had the chance to teach a three-hour session on LinkedIn at UCL in Odense. It was a great experience, and it pushed me to turn the core lessons into a post you can actually use.

This post is based on close to a decade of digital advertising experience, especially the last 3–4 years running B2B campaigns on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn can be a powerful channel, but it’s rarely “plug and play.” It’s expensive compared to many other platforms, and it works best when your business model can carry the cost.

What is LinkedIn advertising?

LinkedIn advertising is paid distribution of your message to a professional audience on LinkedIn. That includes formats like:

  • Text ads
  • Single image ads
  • Video ads
  • Document ads
  • Lead Gen forms
  • Retargeting campaigns

The main advantage: targeting and context. You can reach people based on role, seniority, company size, industry, and more—while they’re in a work mindset.

When should you use LinkedIn Ads?

LinkedIn Ads can work well when you need to reach a professional audience and you want to:

  • Build awareness in a defined ICP
  • Drive high-intent traffic to a focused page
  • Capture demand through Lead Gen forms
  • Support pipeline with retargeting

Personally, I treat LinkedIn primarily as a channel for customer acquisition or pipeline influence—not cheap traffic.

And a reality check: in B2B, the journey from “interest” to “customer” can take a long time. In Umbraco, we’ve seen selection cycles stretch beyond a year, and buying committees are often larger than people assume.

When should you NOT use LinkedIn Ads?

LinkedIn isn’t the best choice for every business.

  • If your audience is primarily B2C, you’ll usually get better economics on platforms like Meta, TikTok, YouTube, or Google.
  • If your budget is very limited, you may be better off starting with lower-cost distribution: organic LinkedIn content, email, partnerships, or a focused outbound motion.

LinkedIn can still be useful on a small budget—but the strategy needs to be tight.

Practical tips for better LinkedIn results

I’m skipping the “how to set up an ad account” basics. Those guides already exist.

Instead, here are operator-level tips that reliably improve results.

Tip 1: Use LinkedIn’s retargeting to make a small budget work harder

Retargeting is often the easiest way to get decent performance without spending aggressively.

One of the simplest approaches is video-view retargeting:

  • Run a video to your core audience
  • Build retargeting audiences based on watch percentage (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%)
  • Follow up with a more direct message to the people who actually engaged

This works because video can be relatively cheap to distribute, and watch time is a strong engagement signal. If someone invests 15–30 seconds, they’re giving you permission to continue the conversation.

More writing connected to this topic, based on shared tags.