LinkedIn Document Ads
Linkedin document ads allow advertisers to take a specific asset like a pdf, a PowerPoint, or a word doc and include it in the ad creative. The user can then view the document for free or download it as a piece of gated content. This can be valuable for advertisers because it eliminates the step of sending users to the website. They can view and download directly from the ad. So in this video, we're going to show you which campaign objectives can use document ads, will show the differences in bid strategies and ad formats between the objectives, and then, once your document ad campaigns are live. We'll show you what metrics you can view from these campaigns within the LinkedIn campaign manager, I'm in our LinkedIn campaign manager, and the demo acc out right away. Let's start creating a campaign. You can name yours whatever you want, select the proper campaign group, and then we can go to next, and here's the first step on how we can start creating a document ads campaign.
As of the recording of this video, there currently are only three campaign objectives that you can select to create a document ad, the first is going to be brand awareness. The second is going to be engaged and the third is going to be lead generation now, while those three do allow you to set up document ads, there is a difference in how document ads work, depending on which one you select the brand awareness and engagement campaign objectives allow advertisers to share the content freely. Users will be able to look through the document and download it directly from the ad without giving up any information. If you choose the lead generation campaign objective, you are essentially creating a gated content campaign. This means anyone who views your ad will have to give up some sort of information to be able to download it from your document ad.
The initial campaign setup is going to be pretty much the same for all three campaign objectives, except for a few areas and those areas are going to be bid strategy and then the actual ad creation itself. So first, let's look at brand awareness. You see I've already updated the name of the campaign. Our campaign objective is brand awareness now, in this, video I will not be covering the targeting options we get within LinkedIn ads. We released a video earlier this year covering the targeting options you get within the platform, so go back and watch that one to find out all the best ways you can reach your target audience on LinkedIn, but after you have chosen whatever targeting options you would want here we can head down to add format and there we see we can create a document ad.
Now you may have noticed once I select a document ad. We did get a little warning down below. If you do select document ad, the audience network has been automatically disabled and I have no problem with that. I, typically, don't start any of my LinkedIn ads campaigns with that setting enabled if I keep scrolling down. There's the placement warning that we just covered skipping over budgets and everything. Here's the first area that's going to differ between the campaign objectives, and that is the bidding strategy for a brand awareness campaign objective. Here are our options. You can look at a reach, or optimization goal just trying to get in front of the most unique users as possible, or you can choose to optimize based on impressions. If you choose impressions, you see, there's a maximum delivery and a cost cap, but I'm going to go back up, go back to reach, and if we choose to reach, we just get the maximum delivery option trying to get the most results. So that was the brand awareness campaign objective and, if I scroll back up, we can look at changing our objective this time, I'm going to choose engagement again: choose all your targeting options but I'm just going to keep scrolling select document, add again and if I scroll down to the bidding section again, we see the bid. Optimization goals are different in an engagement campaign compared to a brand awareness campaign. If we look at the options here, we're defaulting to engagement clicks it's typically what I do from this sort of campaign objective and we see the difference between engagement versus brand awareness. Brand awareness is more focused on getting in front of the most unique users possible whereas an engagement ad wants people to take some sort of action. It could be following your company page visiting your company page clicking on your ad, and in this case, of course, we want them to download our document, and just like brand awareness, you do have the option to choose impressions I'm going to leave it here.
As engagement clicks because I do want people engaging with my ad and downloading this document, so you have everything in your campaign set up. We have the document ads ad type selected above fill in your daily budget. Choose your ad schedule: if needed, make sure you have your conversion tracking in place and then we can click on next to start creating our ads. Since there aren't any ads already created within this campaign, you could go up and click create a new ad or just click on the big image right in front of you, as I mentioned earlier, a document ad is going to look and work the same whether you choose the brand awareness or engagement campaign objective, not including the name this ad field, the only fields we get are for an introductory text and a headline I'm just going to name this ad, really quick and then move down and paste in some introductory text, you see that we only get 600 characters but be careful when you're creating the ad.
But while we get 600 characters, it's going to get cut off at a certain point as you're creating your document ads you'll be able to look at the preview and we'll be able to see it once we upload a document, then you'll have an idea of where your introductory text may get cut off, so you can make those adjustments. We try to keep the text short enough, so users can see the entire message now I'm going to just add in a document, so we can start looking at the preview and you see the documents could include pdfs PowerPoints, and documents like a Microsoft word doc. This is a very old brand, lift document that a google rep gave me so many years ago, and you see once I uploaded a document. Linkedin automatically made the headline the file name of the document that you uploaded and the headline is appearing right above the document that you did upload I, don't like that. So I'm going to replace this headline with something I created, so there we see my headline of doing.
Youtube ad work appears right below my introductory text and right above the document. This is only 20 characters and it fits nicely if I try to add a little bit more. You see my new headline is only 80 characters out of the 200 they provide, but we can see that it's already cut off, so keeping it short and sweet while still getting your point across is going to be beneficial, and this could be something that you just need to test out with different ad variants, I'm going to remove that option. The preview isn't updating, but that's okay. If we look at the actual preview, in this case, I uploaded a pdf, a user will be able to highlight the asset or the document and scroll through the pages. The same effect is going to be available, whether you're uploading, a PowerPoint or a word document, and then the call to action which the advertiser does not get to control is going to be to download the document. A surprise right? Pretty much the whole point of a document ad, if you click on the option, it's showing the title again confirming with the user. So some additional steps, we're okay with this action, rather qualify the user a little bit and then they can download.
And now the pdf is popping up, in my case, in a separate window, if I head back to LinkedIn I can x out of this and then I'm going to create the app. So you can see there aren't any images you need to upload. You don't have to prep any videos or anything like that. The main creative for a document ad is going to be whatever asset. You are uploading to the ad I, don't plan on launching anything so I'm going to save and exit, and then that's looking at creating a new campaign this time, using the lead generation campaign objective head back up to create choose a campaign, updating my title to differentiate the campaigns and then click next there we see our lead generation campaign objective once again choose your targeting options, select the document ad format and then let's scroll down and look at the bidding options for a lead generation campaign objective if you've already been running, lead generation campaign objectives within your account, and you have a good history of leads coming in or overall conversions.
The default settings that LinkedIn provides in the bidding section are typically what I use I'm doing a lead generation campaign I want them to optimize and get me more leads over time. The maximum delivery bidding strategy has worked phenomenally for this objective. But if you have a brand new LinkedIn ads account, you don't have much conversion history to help LinkedIn feed its machine learning for its automated bidding. You may want to change the campaign objective for now. So besides leads you could go after clicks and impressions. I've never used impressions for a lead campaign, objective clicks sometimes, and here's where you can choose a manual bid strategy for someone engaging with your ad still I am going to recommend the leads bidding strategy. That's why we chose this campaign objective in the first place besides maximum delivery, you can look at setting a cost cap, and the recommendation going to be depending on what you have chosen as your targeting options, in my case I'm just going after anyone in the united states.
So it's giving me a high number: let's go back to maximum delivery. So now that we're in the third campaign objective, where you can use document ads, you pretty much see the main difference between each of the objectives is going to be depending on which bidding strategy you want to use and the goals of your document ads campaign, and then really the only other difference if we click next and go to add creation is going to be how the document ads will look like in a lead generation campaign objective. So let's create a new ad I'm going to start filling in some of the information. Again. Add in the exact introductory text, I'm going to choose the same document and quickly I'm just going to add in the same headline, but we can see in the portion on the left. There are some additional settings to this document ad in a lead, gen campaign. The first is going to be previewable pages. Remember. Essentially, we are creating a gated content piece if you're looking to get someone's information first before they can download the asset. You don't want to give away the whole document. You probably just want to tease them a little bit and if they want to see all the good stuff they have to give some information.
So how many pages do you want the user to be able to see before they have to give their information, depending on what you upload, you can just click and drag it essentially letting LinkedIn know only let the user view x amount of pages for free in this case, I dragged the button over to the right. So for now, I'm telling LinkedIn a user can see. 19 pages of this document, the pdf I uploaded- has 20 total pages, so the maximum of previewable pages will be one less than the total amount within the document. That's a little bit too much I'm going to drop mine down to like three I have no recommendations. Here. It's going to be depending on what type of asset you are uploading to this ad and, of course, this is lee generation and it's a gated piece, so we need to attach a form if I scroll down in the preview option. You see the call to action is to unlock the full document. We cannot change the call to action, but you can select a form that you've already created if you're new to LinkedIn lead generation campaigns. You can check out a video that we already have on the channel that talks about the full lead gen campaign setup. But for now, I'm going to choose a form that we already have created within the account I wanted to scroll up a little bit to call out this message.
Once you launch the campaign and the ad becomes active, you cannot update the form that is attached to your document ad. If you need to use a different form, you're going to have to pause the old document ad variation and create a new one, it's fairly easy to do just to duplicate the old ad and change out the form before you save it. Now, if you've created a legion ad using a single image ad format, once a user has filled out the form they're sent to a splash page within the lead form where they could visit your website and then download the document. Well, in this case, once the form is completed, the user will receive leave a message in their LinkedIn inbox. That includes the document that you attach to the ad again, that's in their LinkedIn inbox. So from here, since the ad preview isn't updating and can't showcase what this one exactly looks like I'm going to click create, and here we get more information about the variant I created.
We already covered what file types are allowed within document ads, but there are also some other limitations. The file size cannot be larger than 100 megabytes and the document that you upload cannot be longer than 300 pages or over 1 million words should be pretty easy for you to have those in place now. This is just only one ad variant. We would always recommend testing around four or five per campaign. The best option for testing different variants would be if you have different assets or documents, and you want to see which one users are engaging with the most or which one is the most popular that they want to download. It is the most, but if you don't have multiple documents or assets, look at testing out different headlines and introductory text to see if that makes a difference in terms of engagement or downloads. But if you're good, with the variants that you have, you can go, click next and then launch your campaign.
So after your campaign launches, you probably want to understand how are they performing and if you use the default performance columns, you may be looking at just the key results and the key results are going to show you what happens depending on which campaign objective, you've selected. So in the lead, gen 1, it's going to look at overall leads which that one's going to be okay. But if you choose the engagement or brand awareness campaign objectives, those key results are going to be focused on reach, potentially impressions or engagements, and while those key results could be important depending on what your campaign goals are, you probably still want to know how the asset downloads are performing and LinkedIn provides that information. Instead of using the performance columns, you can click on the drop-down and LinkedIn provides a default document, and column structure, so we still get information about the key results. Your impressions click all that fun stuff, but here are some of the important columns up above we see download clicks the number of times people have clicked the download button scrolling over a little bit more.
We see options for viral download clicks. This can happen if someone shares your ad and then, if other people saw your ad, that one person is shared, or if it keeps getting shared over and over again, all those additional download clicks will be counted in the viral column scrolling over. We see display columns. This will show you how far users got within the document that you used within your ads. These are going to be more relevant for your brand awareness and engagement campaign objectives where you're giving the whole document away for free and there we see completions to mark 100. They viewed the whole thing and those same options from the viral side, so this is just the default documents, and column setup.
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