LinkedIn is a massive network with over 756 million members in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. It’s only natural for you to be advertising there.
The problem is that you might find that your ads aren’t getting the love they deserve.
If that’s the case for you and your LinkedIn ads are not getting impressions, keep reading.
Why?
LinkedIn Ads Not Getting Impressions? 6 Reasons Why!
In this article, we’ll show you the six most common mistakes that people commit when advertising on LinkedIn. Some of which you might be doing right now, and how to avoid them.
#1 – LinkedIn Rejected Your Ad
Just like any other ad-powered platform, LinkedIn will not run new ad campaigns without making sure that it abides by its Advertising Policy.
Their policy restricts or completely prohibits different content. Additionally, they have a bunch of guidelines that revolve around the safety and privacy of the platform. You can find all of that on the LinkedIn Advertising Policies page.
In the case of your ad not complying with these guidelines, you’ll receive an email within 24 hours citing the reason as for what it was rejected. Alternatively, you can find the status of your ad in the Campaign Manager. To do that, click on your campaign and select the Ads tab.
If the ad’s status is listed as Rejected or Not Approved, it means the ad’s content, offer, or landing page violates LinkedIn’s policy.
Many people who are new to the network’s advertising tools might wonder why their LinkedIn ads are not getting impressions. Little do they know, the ads aren’t even approved.
Thankfully, some ads can be edited to meet the guidelines.
You can edit Dynamic Ads, video ads, Direct Sponsored Content, and other ad formats in the Campaign Manager. However, if you want to make some edits to your Sponsored Content, you are going to have to first turn off the ad, post a new Company Update that meets the guidelines, then boost it.
Of course, you are going to have to wait for any update you make to be reviewed.
#2 – LinkedIn Ads Not Getting Impressions? You’re Not Bidding Enough
A common reason why your approved ads aren’t getting impressions is that you’re bidding too low.
When setting up a payment for a new campaign, you’ll find yourself having to choose between cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-mille (1,000 impressions), also known as CPM.
Then, each time a user visits a page containing an ad and they happen to fall into the targeting options of the advertiser, the ad enters the auction with competing advertisers.
In other words, if your bid isn’t high enough, your ad won’t be able to beat these real-time auctions. This means it will show up way less, scoring you little to no impressions as a result.
The simple fix to this is to increase your bid.
Worry not; you won’t be going into this blind since LinkedIn will provide you with a suggested bid range that represents a rough estimate of competing bids made by others.
In order to make your campaign more competitive against others, you need to increase your bid. Try to set your bid near the higher end of the Suggested Bid Range that’s provided to you by LinkedIn.
#3 – You’re Not Managing Your Budget
When running ads on LinkedIn, you have to spend a minimum of £10 per day per ad campaign, which is relatively higher than other options such as Google Ads or Facebook.
If your LinkedIn ads are not getting impressions and you are barely meeting this minimum spend, then we recommend that you explore other options.
Yes, LinkedIn ads are extremely effective, but there are cheaper options out there. So, if you think a £10 per day minimum price tag sounds unreasonable, explore other options.
If you decide to stick with LinkedIn, we recommend that you allocate the majority of your marketing budget to one campaign at a time. Give it a chance to gain traction, then use LinkedIn’s Website Demographics tool to analyse where the campaign succeeds and where it fails.
When analysing your website demographics, focus on the targeting criteria that you selected before starting the campaign. Figure out which subcategories are giving you the most traffic. Then, remove any targeting criteria that don’t serve your goals and switch to new groups in the next campaign.
The same should be done for your campaign performance data. Closely analyse it and watch how your cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) and click-through rate (CTR) are evolving. The former will give you an idea of the size of your audience, while the latter will explain the situation of the ad itself.
#4 – Your Content Isn’t Engaging
This is yet another common reason why many advertisers’ LinkedIn ads are not getting impressions. They simply upload ads that aren’t relevant to their target audience. In other words, their ads aren’t compelling enough.
Here are a few steps on how to make your ads compelling:
First off, use something that can catch the attention of your audience. Most people who are on LinkedIn are there for the sole purpose of gaining insights in relation to their skills or profession. Keep that in mind when creating ads.
Basically, you need to convince the users to click the ad and stay engaged with whatever the content might be. This can be done by offering something valuable such as a demo, free trial, special benefits if they click your ad, and more.
Include attention-catching phrases (also known as CTA) such as Sign Up, Try, Download, and more.
Additionally, include a relevant image in the ad. Keep in mind that the default background colour in LinkedIn is neutral, so using bright colours can go a long way in catching the attention of anyone.
Create anywhere from two to four different variations of the same ad within your campaign and test them individually. The variations might include changes to the images, text, CTA, and more. Obviously, every ad you have displayed will be shown to your carefully selected audience, but you can determine which one(s) performs best by testing different variations and keeping track of their performance.
A lack of variety can be a good enough reason as to why your LinkedIn ads are not getting impressions.
For example, you notice that an ad is performing better than the rest based on the CTR. Pause the other ads and continuously experiment until you find a sweet spot.
#5 – LinkedIn Ads Not Getting Impressions? You’re Not Taking Advantage of LinkedIn Matched Audiences
Custom targeting options from LinkedIn are a great tool that advertisers often end up overlooking. It can lead to their LinkedIn ads not getting impressions at all.
All you have to do is to provide LinkedIn with any sort of data you collect in order to produce more results at a cheaper rate.
Website Retargeting
If your website is already getting traffic, you can focus on creating ads for that audience instead of stretching yourself too thin.
A website retargeting campaign allows you to target your website’s visitors. It ensures that you don’t miss any of them.
Why?
Because the fact that they visited your website is already an indicator that they have some interest in your website, making them the ideal target for your ads.
To set up such a campaign, you need to add your LinkedIn insight tag to the global footer of your website. If your website sees a decent amount of traffic, you’ll have an audience to advertise to.
Email Contact Targeting
This is the second advertising feature by LinkedIn that you should definitely check out in case your LinkedIn ads are not getting impressions. As the name suggests, this feature allows you to upload lists of contacts to LinkedIn and run appropriate ads targeting users with those emails.
For this to work, you will need a list with a minimum of 300 email addresses that correspond to their respective LinkedIn members. However, LinkedIn recommends targeting at least 10,000 individuals! If getting your hands on contact lists of that many people is feasible, don’t shy away from it.
Account Targeting
The last type of LinkedIn’s matched audience campaigning is account targeting, and it’s a feature only LinkedIn offers. It allows you to target users who work in specific companies.
For this type of campaign, you should submit at least 1,000 different companies to ensure having an audience large enough to advertise to.
#6 – You’re Only Using One LinkedIn Ad Placement
LinkedIn’s ad placements can be categorised under three main types: text ads, sponsored messaging ads, and sponsored content.
Text ads are displayed in the right sidebar of LinkedIn’s desktop version. Sponsored messaging ads are basically ads in the form of messages that run within LinkedIn Messaging. As for sponsored content ads, they can take the form of a single image, a carousel, a video, an event, or a single job ad.
You can achieve good results using any of these placements. Most advertisers tend to go for sponsored content and neglect the rest. This might be the reason why their ads are not getting impressions.
We have already established that advertising on LinkedIn can be on the costly side. However, that shouldn’t stop you from running numerous ads in one campaign. Don’t go into it thinking that the £10 that you need to pay per day is for a single ad.
As mentioned above, you should create at least four ads within each campaign, each with a different design. You can even make use of video and carousel image ads.
The point is you shouldn’t limit yourself. Try as many ads as possible and interchange between them based on their performance. You can access this on the Campaign Performance and Website Demographics. The numbers will tell you everything. From there, tailor your campaign properly to get the best out of it.
Besides testing different individual ads, you could also try out different combinations within an ad. One example of this is combining text with ads.
Talk with a LinkedIn Pro
LinkedIn ads are hard to tackle and get right, which is why you’re looking for the reasons your ads aren’t getting impressions, right?
Well, if, after trying all of the solutions we detailed above, you’re still not getting impressions and seeing results, you can hire us to help you along the way!
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