Open letter: Improvement proposal for the LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Oct 4, 2018 - Marcel Odena

On the occasion of a Linkedin event in London this Friday, which they will explain us among other things the product roadmap, here is this open letter of improvement proposals to the Linkedin Campaign Manager. These are features that we believe would help to better manage campaigns. As I say, it is open, since what we would like is that if you also have things, you can add them as comments at the end of the article. I appreciate the comments of coworkers who have reported some of these improvements.

1) To be able to edit a lead generation form once saved.

Currently, you can not modify a lead generation form once it has been saved and it is a big problem because:

Any error that is detected in the form can not be corrected and a new form must be created.
If at any given time we want to modify the fields that are collected (instead of the number of employees we want to select another field) then we have to create another form.
Creating the new form is relatively quick, the problem comes because once you have the new form you have to do the following:
- Re-create the ads that worked with the old form by configuring them with the new form. If we have dozens of advertisements, imagine the effort involved.
- If we send the leads to our lead management system with Zapier, then you have to re-configure the zaps involved with the new form.

2) Improve leads management.

Currently for each lead generation form you can download a file (CSV format) with all the leads obtained.

It would be nice to have an interface in which you can consult the data of the leads obtained and make certain filters to display them according to the desired form , according to the creation date, etc.

Use case: it is known that these leads are sent to the lead management system of each advertiser through Zapier. It often happens that there are problems with sending data between Linkedin-Zapier-CRM, so to check if “leads” have been “lost” in our CRM you have to download all the forms CSVs, go one by one and look the leads according to the incident date with Zapier to check if the lead exists in our CRM, and if not, enter it.

3) Improve the load management of company files.

Currently when a list of companies file is loaded, the system tells you the percentage of companies that have been found. For example, it tells you: 80% of companies have been found and that gives you an audience of 200,000 members on Linkedin.
It would be good that the system gave us more information in these cases, indicating the companies that it has not been able to find. . In this way, it could be investigated under what name they are registered in Linkedin and improve the matching percentage.

Also the management of loading company listings is a bit rigid, because if at any given time we want to exclude a set of 100 companies, it can not be done. Or if we want to add 400 more, we have to load another file, and then in the segmentation select the 2 lists.

Once the list is loaded there is no way to know which companies are on the list , so now you have to have a lot of control to know in each list which companies were added. It would be good if it were more transparent and for each list you could consult the companies that are on the list.

4) Frequency limitation of ads.

It would be good to be able to control the maximum frequency in which we want to impact the ads to the same user. Nowadays it can not be done and some advertisers have told me that some contacts have told them that the ads impact them too much.

In Google Ads for example as a campaign manager you can select how many maximum impressions per day, per week, month, etc. you want to impact per user.

5) Improved remarketing lists.

Below I indicate desired features for remarketing, it is a transcription of what I already explained in the article Valuation of Linkedin Marketing Solutions to do B2B marketing :

The concept of “AND” when creating remarketing lists. For example, we want to tag all those users who have seen the product page “and” have also seen the price page.
Exclude users who have converted. Or the concept of “subtract lists”. What happens if a user has already converted, for example, already requested a demo? At least I would not like to bother him insisting on showing ads aimed at requesting a demo, because the user has already asked for it. This is usually solved by subtracting in the segmentation the list of users who have converted, or when you create the list, add a condition for the users that have not seen the “thanks-for-request-a-demo” page. This in Google Ads or Facebook Ads is well resolved, but in Linkedin Ads it is not yet.
Tag users according to value events : Imagine that a user is shocked with a video ad and sees it as a whole. This action has value. It would be good to tag users who have seen certain videos, and since they have shown interest we could do several campaigns with certain messages or content. Similarly, if they have made a recommendation in an advertisement (or organic publication). Or already in our own landing, if a user sees a video that we have in our landing it would be good to add the user in a remarketing list. As of today this is not possible in Linkedin.
Duration of the lists : Once a user is added to a remarketing list, how long remains on that list? It is not indicated on the platform (I do not know if the documentation is indicated, but it is not easy to know). In any case, the desired value can not be specified. That is, we can not tell you that the duration of the cookie in the list is 30 days, or 120 days, etc. This in most PPC platforms can be done.

7) More integrations with other marketing / PPC players

I’m missing the direct integration of Linkedin with:

HubSpot: marketing automation leader tool. The integration would have to allow to send the leads obtained with the lead generation forms directly to HubSpot. And on the other hand, it would be nice if the “smart lists” of HubSpot could be used on Linkedin as an audience. Why? because in HubSpot we have the qualitative information of to what degree the user is “engaged”, and therefore we can do a finer remarketing.
AdRoll: leading platform for remarketing.

As these platforms would be a very long list.

Another key integration is with Salesforce. I know that it can be integrated with Salesforce’s “Data Studio”, but I’ve already mentioned it with several advertisers and it’s not trivial. It should be a easier integration, a click, a process of authorizing the plug of the 2 platforms and done.

8) Fix some of the existing bugs in the new interface

I shall not dwell on this because it is already reported in this recent article:7 functions of the old Linkedin Ads interface that the new interface should have , which we did following the change of the old interface with the new one (beta yet).

9) Solve some bugs in the process of creating ads with lead generation forms.

The process of creating ads of type lead gen form usually goes well, but currently there is a probability of maybe 20% that the process fails, once the ad is created, at the time of selecting the desired form, there is a possibility it may be blocked and, in consequence, you can not select the form you want, by default the system takes the most recent and the “sign up” button. This is a big problem since you have to pause the ad, and create another one.

Among some professionals who are dedicated to these we have already past among us some tricks (how to make a reload of the page when it stops working) and more or less we avoid the problems, but anyway, that this should work better.

What improvements would you add?

If you also have improvements in mind for LinkedIn’s campaign manager, we invite you to share it by leaving a comment at the end of this article. Thank you!

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.