What Are LinkedIn Spotlight Ads?

Written By Alex Cherry

LinkedIn is a powerful networking platform that is gaining popularity at an exponential rate. LinkedIn allows you to meet different individuals, connect with professionals from all over the world, strengthen business relationships, learn new skills and techniques to help improve your work, and even find an audience for your brand. 

You can use LinkedIn for multiple reasons, but one of the most famous ones remains using it to increase your brand awareness and sell your business in the market. You can execute this resourceful plan due to some excellent features like “LinkedIn Spotlight Ads”. 

If you want to learn more about LinkedIn Spotlight Ads and how they work, then go through this article till the end. 

LinkedIn Spotlight Ads- A Dynamic Ad Format

The LinkedIn Spotlight Ads are a dynamic ad format. They are one of the most popular LinkedIn Ad types that you can control as a LinkedIn advertiser. These ads are specific and personalized to each LinkedIn member. The perks of using these ads are that when members click on the spotlight ads, they will automatically be sent to your website or landing page. 

These ads are often seen on desktop devices and are specifically designed for each member based on their own LinkedIn profile data such as their profile picture, their company name, their job title or description, etc. While each member sees their personalized information, the profile information of the members is not displayed to other members. LinkedIn members even get the option to refuse their profile information from being used to personalize the ads. 

LinkedIn Spotlight Ads’ Objectives

The LinkedIn Spotlight Ads can support all types of funnel marketing such as:

Brand Awareness

The brand awareness spotlight ads focus on telling people about your company and your products, services, or organizations by choosing the “Brand Awareness” objective for your ad campaigns. The bidding strategies and ad formats that are available for raising your brand’s awareness to optimize the reach or impressions of your ads. 

Brand Awareness Ad Formats

The following ad formats support this objective.

  • Single image ads
  • Carousel image ads
  • Video ads
  • Event ads
  • Text ads
  • Spotlight ads
  • Follower ads

Website Visits 

These ad objectives encourage members to visit your website or landing page through the “Website Visits” ad objective. The people who are most likely to click on your ad will be shown these campaigns that would direct them to your website, landing page, or any URL. These objectives are in the middle of the marketing funnel to engage the target audience.

Website Visits Ad Formats

The following formats are acceptable for these ad objectives.

  • Single image ads
  • Carousel ads
  • Video ads
  • Event ads
  • Text ads
  • Spotlight ads
  • Message ads
  • Conversation ads

Job Applicants

The job applicants’ ad objectives allow you to promote your job opportunities to the top talent by choosing the “Job Applicants” as your ad objective. Just like Website Visits, your ad will be shown to those who are most likely to view or click on your job ads, thus, getting more applicants in return. This objective is present at the bottom of the marketing funnel.

Job Applicants’ Ad Formats 

The following ad formats apply to this category.

  • Sponsored Content single job ad
  • Dynamic jobs ads
  • Single image ads
  • Spotlight ads

Creating LinkedIn Spotlight Ads 

If you want to create and launch a successful LinkedIn Spotlight Ads campaign, then just follow these easy steps. 

  1. Access the Campaign Manager.
  2. Next, choose the account name that you desire to create a campaign for. In case you do not have both yet, you can make a new account by choosing “Account” from the dropdown menu. The following applies to creating a campaign group. 
  3. Now define your campaign objective and the audience that you want to target and reach. You can do this in the “Audience” section by choosing the “targeted audience” aspect. 
  4. Complete the next section by setting a budget, schedule, and bid. 
  5. Customize your ad and choose your favorable ad rotation.
  6. Finally, make sure that all your campaign details are correct. Make some final edits if need be and get ready to launch your ad. 

After all these steps have been completed, you can now start your ad by clicking “Launch Campaign”. Keep in mind that this ad will only get started once it gets approved.

LinkedIn Spotlight Ads Specs

The spotlight ads portray your company’s products, events, services, and content which may require some information to work. Here are the specifications and information that are essential to be found in your spotlight ad:

  • A short ad description that can be used up to 70 characters.
  • A short ad headline of up to 50 characters.
  • Organization name with 25 characters, including spaces. Note that the company’s name will also be available once the cursor hovers over the logo.
  • The minimum size of a photo in PNG or JPEG format should be 100x100px. Note that the pictures will be pixelated if they do not reach the minimum size. On the other hand, a larger picture will be reduced to the minimum size to fit the ad.
  • A CTA button text should be present with a maximum of 18 characters, including spaces.
  • The landing page’s URL is the most important part of the ad and should have a URL prefix of http:// or https:// and have 500 characters for a destination field URL.

Related Questions 

What type of LinkedIn ads performs best?

Statistically speaking, out of 410 responses, 42% of people indicated that “Single Image Ads” have proved to be the best-performing LinkedIn ad option for their client’s business. These are followed by “Video Ads”, then “Promoted Text Posts”, and so on.

How are LinkedIn ads different from Facebook ads?

LinkedIn ads are preferred to reach out to B2B marketers because of the professionalism of the platform. On the other hand, the more informal Facebook ads are better for B2C brands.

How do you use dynamic ads on LinkedIn?

You can use dynamic ads on LinkedIn by including one clear message and call-to-action on each ad. For Follower Ads, you can exclude existing followers from seeing your ads to make sure that you are gaining net new prospects. For spotlight ads, upload a custom background image to add more visuals to your ad.