7 features of the old Linkedin Campaign Manager that should have the new interface

7 features of the old Linkedin Campaign Manager that should have the new interface Sep 16, 2018 - Marcel Odena

In July 2018, approximately, Linkedin announced that the campaign manager’s version in force at that time (old onwards) would be replaced by a new version of the interface, which for now is beta. The change of the interface to the users was apparently gradual: on the same advertising account I found that my client had access to the new interface and I still saw the old interface. After a few weeks they changed the old interface to the new one. At first, when they told me that the new interface was available and that I wasn’t able to see it, I thought, oh what a shame, then when I had it and started to try it, I thought: I want to go back to the old interface.

I am aware that changes in applications are sometimes complex, and more so if they have to be done in a platform like Linkedin Marketing Solutions, used by thousands of users and from all over the world. Having said that, I am obliged to report important features that the old interface had and, with the change to the new interface, have been lost or unnecessarily complicated.

1) Activating or pausing campaigns should be easy.

In the old interface you could activate or pause campaigns easily. The procedure was like most PPC platforms (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.):

  • All campaigns are shown in the interface (filters can be applied or not).
  • Through a checkbox you select all the campaigns of interest.
  • You apply the desired action, either change the status of the campaign to active or pause.

In the new interface, incredible as it may seem, this procedure is not available. So, how are campaigns activated or paused? To change the status of several campaigns in the new interface you have to go campaign by campaign, select the state dropdown for each campaign and change it. Or enter the configuration of each one of them and change the state. This procedure unnecessarily complicates campaign management.

It is usual at the end of the month to pause campaigns because we are at the limit of the monthly budget that we have allocated for Linkedin campaigns. And it is usual at the beginning of the following month to re-activate these campaigns. Well, it is at such moments when you remember a lot the old interface.

2) Renaming campaigns should be easy.

In the old interface you could modify the name of a campaign without having to enter within its configuration.

In the new interface the only way to modify the name of the campaign is by entering the campaign. This makes it hard to manage them. To enter a campaign and edit its name can be 30 seconds, if you multiply it by 10, 30, 50 campaigns that we normally have, is quite some time.

It is usual among ppc manager to put “tags” in the campaigns, so they can be filtered, organized and treated. For example, imagine that we analysed what campaigns have generated Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) , a super important metric to generate business (pipe) for the company. Imagine that we get a list of 30 campaigns that generate SAL. What we want is to point “SAL” or similar to the name of the campaign, to know that these campaigns are the best in terms of generating Sales Accepted Leads (SALs). With the old interface in 2 minutes you could modify the name of 30 campaigns. With the new interface you can take 20 minutes perfectly.

3) We should be able to edit a campaign in a new tab.

In the old Linkedin campaign manager interface you could do the following:

  1. Access the campaign manager. Subsequently, all campaigns are displayed.
  2. Apply a filter on the campaign’s name and select the ones that interest you.
  3. For a specific campaign, select with the right button and click “open in a new tab”
  4. In the new tab, you could edit the campaign. You made changes (for example, modify the daily budget, the bid, edit ads, etc.) and closed the tab.
  5. You went back to the previous tab, and repeated the process for the next campaign on the list.

Using this procedure, changing the budget, bids, segmentation, whatever it was, to a set of campaigns was quite fast.

Now with the new interface of the Linkedin campaign manager you can not open the configuration of a campaign in a new tab (at least that’s what happened this week, 3-9 September 2018, working from a Mac). There were a few weeks in which it could be done but now it is disabled, I show you in this image:

Abrir en una nueva pestaña deshabilitado en nueva interfaz de Linkedin

This greatly complicates the management of campaigns, in the procedure described above, you have to do the steps 1, 2, 3 every time. If you have to modify 20 campaigns (which you have active for a specific target) you have to do those 3 steps 20 times! Each time you edit a campaign you have to return to the main view, filter and edit the next campaign.

To all this, if you add the handicaps described in point 1 (activate or pause easily) and 2 (change the name) you can imagine how complicated it is now to do a massive campaign edition.

4) Seeing the leads metrics should be very easy.

In the old interface there was a tab with all the relevant metrics related to lead generation through the Lead Gen Form ad format . A usual operation is to:

  1. Access the campaign manager. Subsequently, all campaigns are displayed.
  2. Apply a filter on campaign name and select the ones that interest you
  3. Click on the “Leads” tab and observe all the metrics:
    • Number of leads achieved
    • Number of times the page where the form is was opened
    • Conversion rate (leads obtained divided by the number of opened forms)
    • Cost per lead
    • etc.

Here you can see how metrics leads were seen in the former Linkedin campaign manager interface:

Metricas leads en antigua interfaz del gestor de campañas de Linkedin

In the new interface all this information still exists, the problem is that these metrics are arranged in a way that is very difficult to work with them . Now these metrics are combined with the conversion metrics, in the menu “Conversions and possible contacts”:

Opcion conversiones y posibles contactos nueva interfaz Linkedin campaign manager

In the new interface, they have merged conversions and leads in a single screen, conceptually it makes sense, but the implementation in terms of usability is not good, since now we can not see the leads metrics at first sight , you have to scroll laterally and fairly (the number of leads metric appears in column # 11), and the handicap is that once you’ve done it, it’s difficult to know the number you see which campaign they belong to. In the following image you can see the result:

Metricas de leads tal como se ven en la interfaz beta de Linkedin Ads

As the picture shows, you can see that one campaign has generated 26 leads, another 24, another 16, etc. but you can not see the name of the campaign, which forces you to scrolle again to the left or make all kinds of ups and downs. Another option is to download the data in a file (csv) and process and analyse them out, but I understand that this was not the idea of the new campaign manager version, right? From my point of view the new Linkedin campaign manager version should improve the usability of the old version (which by the way, was very well achieved). .

5) Select campaigns with certain states should be easy.

In the Linkedin campaign manager old interface you could select the status of the campaigns you wanted to see and it was easy.

In the new interface it has been complicated unnecessarily, specifically:

  • There is no checkbox to mark all hit states: </ i>

Checkbox seleccion estado en interfaz gestor campaña linkedin beta

  • When you check a status (checkbox) the “Filter” drop-down disappears. So if you want to see all the campaigns (active, paused, draft, etc.) you have to click on the checkbox, fold the menu, re-unfold it, click on the next checkbox, fold the menu, re-unfold it, etc. I am aware that to some extent it may be a minor issue, but my reflection is: in the old interface this worked great. Is it not logical to aspire to make a new version of the campaign manager that improves the old one? Not one that’s worse.
  • Also, there is a bug too, in certain cases not all checkboxes are shown:

estados de campaña no se muestran bien en nueva interfaz linkedin campaign manager

You have to do a vertical scroll to see all the states (and added to the disappearance of the box when a state is mark, it is crazy to make an action as simple as this):

scroll vertical para ver estados de campaña

On the other hand, in the old campaign manager version you could filter the campaigns by campaign type (promoted campaigns, inmail campaigns, etc.) , but now this does not exist.

6) Performance metrics would be nice to be able to see them from within the campaign

In the old Linkedin campaign manager old interface you entered a campaign and you knew you had it all, you had:

  • performance data (both at campaign and ad level)
  • as the tabs to edit the targeting and other configuration options.

In the new Linkedin campaign manager beta interface, the performance tab has disappeared. OMG, how I miss the old interface! With the new beta interface, the procedure to analyse ads is as follows:

  • First you have to select the campaigns you want to analyse.
  • Then you go to the “Ads” tab and there you see the metrics associated with the campaigns ads you have selected.

visualizacion de metricas asociadas a anuncios en nueva interfaz beta de Linkedin campaign manager

This procedure a priori does not seem bad, if it weren’t for the following handicaps:

  • You can not easily see the lead metrics (described in point 4). There are 10 columns associated with conversions before the lead number column does not arrive. The columns (metrics you want to see) can not be customized for now.
  • Ads can not be filtered by ad status : in the old Linkedin campaign manager interface there was an option to filter ads based on their status (active/paused), and this option has disappeared in the new beta interface. On many occasions we do not want to see the paused ads metrics when optimizing, but with the new interface we can not hide them 🙁
  • Requires 2 browser tabs to view data and edit settings : when you analyse the ads and campaigns performance, it is to see if you can apply changes to the campaign configuration to improve results. This can include anything as simple as activate/pause ads, edit the campaign’s segmentation, adjust the bid, the daily budget, etc. As it is in the new beta interface if you detect that it would be necessary to modify the segmentation or modify the bid you have to enter the campaign’s configuration, and not to lose sight with the advertisements data it is best to open a new tab to edit the campaign.

Below you can see an image of the old interface in which there is the performance tab within the campaign itself :

Pestaña rendimiento dentro de gestion campaña en Linkedin

From that tab you could easily analyse the ads performance and optimize them.

  • Status: on + off . In the previous image note that a “status” selector appears to indicate the status of the ads we want to show / analyse. This was in the old interface and is not in the new beta interface (or I have not known how to see it). If you optimize ads, it’s usually interesting to see the assets, not the ones you’ve already paused.

Below you can see an image of how the ads performance looked in the Linkedin campaign manager’s old interface. </ strong>:

Metricas rendimiento leads de anuncios en antigua interfaz Linkedin

As you can see from the 2 ads, the first has much better metrics, one has a conversion rate of 28% approx. with a cost per lead € 15, much less than half than the other ad. As there was the “Leads” tab, you could see for each ad how many leads it had achieved and at what cost per lead, so that you could easily optimize. All this mechanics was super-nice to do in the old interface because:

  • The ads performance was within the same campaign
  • There was a tab with the “leads” option and there were all the metrics associated with the leads generation. Notice that the first column you see is the number of leads metric. In the new interface this metric comes out in column 11!

7) It should be possible to select the number of campaigns shown per page.

Currently in the new Linkedin campaign manager beta interface, up to 15 campaigns per page are shown (and no more than 15 can be displayed). If your account has 50 campaigns what the interface does is apply pagination and show you only 15 per page. This can be a problem for several operations:

  • If we want to analyse and compare the performance of 20 campaigns, there will be 5 that will remain in another tab and it will be difficult to compare them.
  • If we wanted to change the state of 20 campaigns at once we would have to select 15 on the first page, change to page 2, and select the next 5. Is it unnecessary, right? Changing the status of campaigns massively can not be done anyway in the new interface.

What improvements does the Linkedin campaign manager new beta version interface provide?

From my point of view, the new interface provides practically no improvement . Being fair, I think there is only one thing that can be done in the new interface that could not be done in the old interface that is (and that has its charm):

  • In the new interface you can select multiple campaigns and see the performance of all their ads. This feature can be very useful for comparing ad performance between campaigns. Imagine that we have an ad and an identical one in another campaign, with different segmentation. Using this function we could compare the performance of the same ad based on the segmentation (that is to say, the target to which the ads were shown). This functionality I think did not exist in the old interface.

Except for this point, I can not see what improvements the new beta interface brings . And it is clear that this function does not neutralize at all all the functions described above that did have the old interface and that have been lost in the new one.

I leave you a link to href=”https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms/answer/95189″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”> the official Linkedin page in which the new interface is explained and the improvements it entails.

Can we go back and use the old Linkedin campaign manager interface?

No. It’s the first thing I thought, I’ll continue working with the old version until they get a better version of the new interface. Well then, it is not possible. Once they activate the new interface for your user there is no option in the application that allows you to return to the previous version of the interface. A pity, the truth. I really can not see the reasons.

I remember that in the last months the new Google Adwords interface (now Google Ads) was also changed. I remember that the first weeks there were also flaws, issues of usability, etc., functions that were not in the new version, etc., but there was no problem because there was the option to go back to the old interface. I was using the old one and the new one alongside a long time, until I switched to the new one, because it is honestly better than the old one, but it took a while to apply the improvements that the users (I suppose) made them arrive.

Appendix

Well, arrived here, what do you think? What is your opinion? Have you also suffered the inconvenience of having to manage campaigns with these handicaps?

I hope that what is written here will be helpful, either to people who empathize with this, or to the Linkedin platform managers, so that they have a testimony and formal request for a Request For Change (RFC). Please!

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Marcel Odena

Marcel Odena

CEO at Magnetica Advertising | LinkedIn Ads Expert

Since 2013 I've been working in the Pay Per Click Advertising Industry. I manage Google and LinkedIn Ads accounts for several B2B companies. I work to deliver results to my clients as well to contribute to do better B2B marketing. I like to learn and share my knowledge at the same time.