How do you test and experiment with different online advertising formats and strategies on LinkedIn?

1 Know your goals and metrics

Before you start testing and experimenting with your e-commerce ads on LinkedIn, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and how you will measure your success. Depending on your goals, you may want to focus on different metrics, such as impressions, clicks, conversions, cost per lead, return on ad spend, or customer lifetime value. You should also set a realistic budget and timeline for your tests and experiments, and use a tool like LinkedIn Campaign Manager to track and analyze your results.

2 Choose the right ad format

LinkedIn offers various ad formats for e-commerce advertisers, such as sponsored content, sponsored messaging, text ads, dynamic ads, and video ads. Each ad format has its own strengths and limitations, and you should choose the one that best suits your goals, audience, and message. For example, sponsored content can help you showcase your products or services, sponsored messaging can help you engage your prospects with personalized messages, text ads can help you drive traffic to your website, dynamic ads can help you attract attention with personalized images, and video ads can help you tell a story or demonstrate your value proposition.

3 Segment and target your audience

One of the key advantages of advertising on LinkedIn is that you can segment and target your audience based on their professional profile, such as industry, job title, company size, skills, interests, and more. This can help you reach the most relevant and qualified prospects for your e-commerce business, and increase your chances of conversion. You can also use LinkedIn's matched audiences feature to retarget your website visitors, email contacts, or account-based marketing lists, or use LinkedIn's lookalike audiences feature to find new prospects who are similar to your existing customers.

4 Test and optimize your creative

Your ad creative is the first thing that your audience will see and interact with, so you need to make sure that it is compelling, clear, and consistent. You should test and optimize different elements of your ad creative, such as headlines, images, videos, copy, call to action, and landing pages, to see what works best for your audience and goals. You can use LinkedIn's A/B testing feature to compare two versions of your ad creative and see which one performs better, or use LinkedIn's multivariate testing feature to test multiple variables at once and find the optimal combination.

5 Experiment with different bidding and budgeting strategies

Another factor that can affect your e-commerce advertising performance on LinkedIn is your bidding and budgeting strategy. You can choose between different bidding options, such as cost per click, cost per impression, or cost per send, depending on your goals and metrics. You can also choose between different budgeting options, such as daily budget, total budget, or lifetime budget, depending on your timeline and resources. You should experiment with different bidding and budgeting strategies to see what delivers the best results for your e-commerce campaigns, and adjust them accordingly.

6 Learn from your results and insights

The final step of testing and experimenting with your e-commerce ads on LinkedIn is to learn from your results and insights, and use them to improve your future campaigns. You should review your data and reports regularly, and identify what worked well and what didn't, and why. You should also use LinkedIn's insights and recommendations feature to get suggestions on how to optimize your campaigns, such as targeting new audiences, changing your ad format, or increasing your bid. By learning from your results and insights, you can refine your e-commerce advertising strategy on LinkedIn and achieve your goals.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?