LinkedIn Ads Tutorial For Beginners [2026]

you want to get more leads into your business but you need to ensure that they're high quality and Linkedin ads seem to have insane potential but you don't want to waste years of trial and

error trying to figure it all out the problem is where the hell do you start well LinkedIn ads are actually simpler than you think over the last 4 years we've generated over a quarter of a million inbound leads with ads with

millions in ads spend on LinkedIn and over a 100 clients manage and in this video I'm going to cover everything we've learned giving you a simple stepbystep setup guide then I'll explain

the three main factors that make your ads actually convert I'll also show you the best practices for targeting your ideal audience on LinkedIn so that you can guarantee higher quality leads and

finally I'll show you the features that LinkedIn automatically turns on but you must turn off otherwise your campaign won't convert and you'll have absolutely no idea why and just so you know who I

am my name is John I'm the founder of a company called mmax media it's my mission to create the most simple efficient and effective client acquisition system possible something I've dubbed the controlled growth

framework and to help you by either teaching you that system or implementing it for you if you want that help there's a link in the description so why is LinkedIn so powerful well I look back at

our own internal ad stats for the last year now we run ads on LinkedIn and on Facebook and I found that our cost per lead on LinkedIn was three times higher than our initial cost per lead on

Facebook so at first glance on paper not good but digging a little bit deeper the overall cost per acquisition again was actually lower on LinkedIn and the reason was that yeah the leads on

LinkedIn were more expensive but they were also way more qualified by simply putting yourself on LinkedIn as a user you're pre-qualifying yourself as a professional and that quality of lead

significantly impacted our schedule rates our show rates and our close rates so how do you set up a campaign that's going to get these results for your company well good news I'm going to show

you right now so let's up a campaign in LinkedIn now the LinkedIn ads manager is structured into campaign groups campaigns and ads campaign groups help you organize your account you can also

set objectives and budgets at this level which can work situationally but we tend to manage these at the campaign level at the campaign level you can also set

objectives and budgets but with slightly more control this is also where you define your target audience and select the ad formats that you want to use if you're just started the best objective

to use is lead generation the others can situationally work um I cover when and how to use those in our ultimate LinkedIn ads guide now in terms of AD formats if you're starting out always go

with single image to a code audience we find in 90% of cases it will be your top performing creative type now we'll return here shortly when I show you how to set up those audiences and also cover

those settings that LinkedIn sneakily turns on that you must turn off so setting up your campaign properly is your first step to success but if your ads suck you're literally going to be throwing away money even if everything

else is perfect so let's have a look at the ad level now this is where we upload the creatives and copy that your target audience will see in their feed now here's five things we found that lead to

ads that actually convert so imagine you're scrolling through your feed it is lited with the same old boring corporate drab posts on top of that everything is just washed with blue because it's a corporate platform and blue is a

corporate color and it's all really professional and everyone lacks any originality so the first thing you want to do is avoid ads that look corporate so humor memes offbrand tongue and cheek

flashy all work well boring ads however are ads and if you're thinking oh we're different those rules don't apply to us trust me they do send me an email we put on a bet and I can take some of your

money secondly if possible avoid the color blue your ads work well if they stand out so using the same color palette as everyone else well yeah third

point is to use the ad format one by one or 1080 pixels x 1080 pixels this Square format takes up slightly more space in the feed fourth point is to use this body copy template it's consistently our

top performer you are welcome fifth point is to use this headline copy template right here again consistent top performer and the emojis help your ADS stand out also I just realized I was only going to give you three points but

I've given you five and here's a bonus because I think it zesty cuz you're still watching this so here's a really simple template you can use for your ad creative now all this ad stuff's really going to help you but if you're your audience isn't set up properly then

you're going to be sending your ads to interns instead of CEOs by the way this is insanely common and I see it all the time when I run ad account audits for people who've tried to set up ads without any sort of guidance so if you do want guidance to get it right first

time there's a link below but for now let's run straight through how to set up your audience properly so LinkedIn superpower is its targeting so let's say we want to reach out to HR leaders on LinkedIn now when setting up our

audiences we want to use three structures one targets your audience based on their job title the next by their job function and seniority there's a side note you should use and in that

situation and not or and finally we have an audience that throws in a wild card specific to your exact situation so for example job function and seniority mixed

with a companied growth rate of 5% a year and I know what you're already thinking I know exactly who I need to Target so I'll just use the job title thing well job titles on LinkedIn are actually a free text field but the

options that you can select within the LinkedIn ads manager on which means you can limmit Yourself by going down this route also you need to test all these three options I guarantee one will

result in better performance than the other two but you need to test if you don't you are simply gambling so practically we'd have our campaign group and then we'd have three campaigns each

targeting those HR leaders in a very slightly different way and then in each campaign we'd have a minimum of five different ad variations duplicated across the three campaigns this gives

you a solid framework to test collect data and find out what works best for your exact situation now at the start I mentioned that LinkedIn is colluding

against you to set you up for failure with some default settings but what are they and why are they so dangerous well a few years ago I launched a campaign and my performance in the ads manager

looked amazing but no one was actually converting so I dug a little deeper and I realized that I had accidentally left one of these settings on which was ripping through my budget it was the the

LinkedIn Audience Network now this puts your ads on thirdparty websites which make your metrics in the ads manager look absolutely incredible but the quality of that traffic is awful in fact

most of it is actually bot traffic so firstly we want to ensure that the LinkedIn Audience Network is Switched Off luckily for some objective types this is already automatically turned off

also LinkedIn suggests you use audience expansion again this is a way for LinkedIn to boost vanity metrics within the ads manager it puts your ads in front of people that you haven't

specified which completely negates the power of linkedin's targeting and leads to unqualified leads so make sure you always turn both of those off so with all this set up you're pretty much ready

to go but another valuable lesson that I've learned with all these years of experience is that the ads aren't the biggest factor in success what matters far more is your offer and your overall

system for client acquisition thankfully in this video here I cover the endtoend framework that we use which will set you up with most efficient and effective system for client acquisition