Why You Might Want to Steer Clear of LinkedIn's Quick Campaign Builder Mode

LinkedIn Ads recently released a new campaign building mode. When creating a campaign, you now have the option to switch between Quick and Advanced modes.

Quick mode is tailored to those new to the LinkedIn Ads platform, while Advanced mode is the traditional campaign-building experience.

However, while Quick mode reduces the complexity and steep learning curve for newcomers that was present in the traditional campaign-building experience, it ignores one glaring problem.

One of the most common complaints we hear about LinkedIn Ads is that they’re too expensive. This is partly due to improper campaign setup.

Quick mode limits advertisers to the tools that result in poor ad performance and high costs 90% of the time.

Why is this? Let’s talk about it.

Quick Mode’s Glaring Issue

To make Quick mode easy for new advertisers to jump in, LinkedIn has significantly cut back on the options available for creating campaigns.

It’s not that having limited options is the problem. The ad formats, objectives, and targeting options that are available here are some of the best! And if any of your favorites are missing, you can always just switch to the Advanced mode.

But the one restriction that makes the biggest difference is that LinkedIn limits you to only the Maximum Delivery bidding option.

This means you can only bid by impressions, which is the most expensive way to bid on LinkedIn Ads 90% of the time .

That’s because LinkedIn bids as high as it needs to in order to spend your full budget, which throws efficiency to the wind.

You’re paying for your ads to be displayed, rather than paying and optimizing for prospects taking action.

This kind of restriction essentially renders the entire mode a huge risk to those who want their ads to be more cost-effective and efficient.

What to Appreciate About Quick Mode

All of this said, Quick mode isn’t all bad. In fact, there’s a lot to appreciate and LinkedIn has the foundation for something really great.

Aside from bidding strategy, the other campaign-building components are some of LinkedIn’s most popular choices.

These include the Website Visits objective, the Single Image or Video Ad formats, and job title, job function, seniority, and company industry targeting criteria.

Not only that, but LinkedIn also gives you the option of enabling/disabling Audience Expansion and the LinkedIn Audience Network. In fact, Audience Expansion is disabled by default, which is a huge deal!

Even though you don’t have access to everything LinkedIn has to offer when it comes to campaign building, what you are given is really good, especially if it means you can build campaigns more quickly and intuitively than if you were to go the traditional route.

It’s just disappointing that the lack of flexibility with your bidding strategy is what holds this feature back from being truly great.

Hope for the Future

Quick mode was introduced to LinkedIn Ads for the sole purpose of giving new advertisers an easier and faster way to build campaigns, without feeling bogged down or overwhelmed by the many options available in the traditional experience.

While this mode gives us much to appreciate, limiting advertisers to only those options that will result in increased costs is a sure-fire way of losing those new advertisers quickly.

LinkedIn has a valuable new feature here, held back by the limitation of being locked into a single bidding strategy.

The simple fix here would be to give advertisers at least one or two more bidding options.

As it stands now, we can’t recommend LinkedIn’s Quick campaign-builder mode, but we have high hopes that, with just some slight tweaks, it’ll be a much more viable option for new advertisers in the near future.

Have you used this feature? What do you like about it? What don’t you like? Comment below!

PS: I love to see B2B marketers thrive and I believe they can with the right tools.

So we use audience micro-segmentation strategy (a data-driven approach) to optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads. We’ll execute and manage it all for you.

Book a discovery call to get started today!

Written by Eric Jones