LinkedIn reorients Campaign Manager with objective-based campaign workflow

LinkedIn Campaign Manager’s ad preview feature.

LinkedIn updated the reporting interface for its Campaign Manager in July. Now, it’s updating the campaign creation part of Campaign Manager. The company announce a new objective-based campaign workflow on Monday, that includes new ad forecasting and preview features.

Why marketers should care

As has become common in other ad platforms (Facebook, Google, Quora, etc.), the new set up process in LinkedIn Campaign Manager starts from a campaign objective perspective, rather than having advertisers start by choosing an ad format.

“We have ‘flipped’ the entire experience — instead of beginning your campaign creation process with a series of products to choose from (Sponsored Content, Text Ads, etc), advertisers are now asked to define their goals and objectives for their campaign (website visits, engagement, conversions) and our UI guides the user to build out their campaigns from there,” says a LinkedIn spokesperson.

Starting this month, advertisers will have to define their specific objective when building out an ad campaign on the platform, i.e. if they want to drive more traffic to a website, generate leads, earn more video views, etc. Once they set an objective, LinkedIn’s ad platform will only surface ad units that apply to that objective.

The overhauled Campaign Manager also comes with a few new features, including a forecasting panel that displays estimates of the expected ad results based on campaign inputs and comparisons to similar campaigns and advertisers. There is also an ad preview feature that lets advertisers see how ads looks while being built.

More on LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager

1. The new beta design for the campaign creation process within Campaign Manager will be available to all LinkedIn advertisers starting November 14.

2. LinkedIn says the newly overhauled design is laying the groundwork for objective-based optimization and ad prices that it plans to introduce mid-2019.

3. Along with the new forecasting and preview features, LinkedIn says the newly redesigned Campaign Manager includes easier navigation between screens and a completely redesigned ad-targeting experience.