LinkedIn Campaign Manager Tutorial (2026): every setting, what changed, and what to choose

What Campaign Manager is, what it costs, and how to get an account

LinkedIn Campaign Manager is where every LinkedIn ad is built and paid for. It is free to use; you pay for the media. Most people confuse it with Business Manager, which is a different product that sits above it: Business Manager controls which people, ad accounts, Pages and partners belong to your company, and Campaign Manager is the ad account itself. If an agency runs your ads, or you have more than one ad account, set up Business Manager first and grant access from there. If you have one account and one person, Campaign Manager alone is fine.

To get an account: from your LinkedIn profile, open For Business in the top bar, click Advertise, then Create account. You will be asked for an account name, a currency and a LinkedIn Page to associate. Two warnings that catch people every week:

• The currency cannot be changed later. If you set up in EUR and your finance team invoices in USD, you will be creating a second account. Decide before you click.
• You need a Page you can administer to run any ad that appears in the feed as the company, and any thought leader ad from a member of that Page. Message ads can run without one.

The account then needs billing (Account settings, Billing centre), at least one person with Campaign Manager access, and the Insight Tag on your website before you spend anything.

What changed in 2025 and 2026

Campaign Manager changed more in the last eighteen months than in the previous five years. If you learned it from a tutorial recorded before late 2025, including the earlier version of mine, these are the things that look different on your screen.

The hierarchy: Campaign, Ad Set, Ad (and the old names)

Every account has three levels, and since late 2025 LinkedIn has been renaming two of them so they match Meta and Google. Your account may show either set of names for a while.

The folder level is where structure goes wrong. People create a Campaign (group) per product, per month or per country and end up with forty folders nobody reads. The structure we use on almost every B2B account is three folders by funnel stage, and it has not needed changing in five years:

• BOFU, convert: ad sets aimed at people who already know you. Retargeting audiences, CRM stages, engaged companies from the Companies tab. Objectives: website visits, lead generation, message ads. This is the folder that produces meetings.
• MOFU, nurture: ad sets aimed at people who have seen the brand but not acted. 180-day retargeting of ad engagers and site visitors with thought leader ads, case studies and documents.
• TOFU, reach: cold ad sets to the target list or job function plus seniority, whose job is to build the retargeting pools the other two folders use. Thought leader ads and video.

Inside each folder, one ad set per audience and format combination, named so that a stranger could read the report: TOFU · Target list · TLA video · UK. Do not put two audiences in one ad set; the demographics report cannot separate them afterwards.

The left bar, section by section

Campaign Manager's navigation is a vertical bar with six groups. Here is what is behind each, and how often we open it.

Overview

Renamed Marketing Overview in 2025. A home screen with spend, impressions, clicks, leads and an AI-written performance digest. We read the digest once a week for anomalies and never make a decision from it, because it counts clicks, not landing page clicks (more on that in reporting).

Plan: Audiences, Companies, Media Planner, Brand Safety

Audiences is where matched audiences (uploads, retargeting, CRM) and saved audiences live; see the audiences section. Companies is the tab that replaced the Company Engagement Report; see below. Media Planner forecasts reach, impressions and cost per result for an audience and budget before you build; it is optimistic on cost by around a third in our experience but good for sizing. Brand Safety holds your Audience Network publisher block lists, which you will not need once the Audience Network is off.

Advertise

The campaigns table. Three tabs across the top for Campaigns (groups), Ad Sets and Ads, a date picker, the column set selector, breakdowns, and the export button. This is the screen you live in.

Test

Brand Lift (multi-question since 2025), Conversion Lift (since September 2025) and A/B tests. Lift tests need budgets most accounts do not have; A/B tests are useful for audience versus audience with the same creative, less so for creative versus creative, because LinkedIn's rotation already does that.

Measure: Measurement Insights, Conversion tracking

Measurement Insights is the 2025 dashboard: member, company, ad set and format views, a customer journey view and, if a CRM is connected, influenced pipeline and revenue. Conversion tracking lists the conversions you have created and their status.

Data: Signals Manager

Where the Insight Tag, Website Actions, the Conversions API and offline conversion sources are set up. Setup below.

Recommendations

LinkedIn's suggestions, now with one-click apply and an AI summary. Most of them are variations of "raise your bid", "widen your audience" and "turn on the Audience Network". Read them for the occasional broken-ad alert; do not apply them in bulk.

Assets

Lead gen forms, saved landing pages, image and video library, and asset history. Download lead gen form leads here if a CRM integration is not connected; LinkedIn keeps them for 90 days.

Account settings

Manage access (better done in Business Manager), billing centre, edit account (name, Page, the currency you cannot change), and the account-level dynamic UTM setting.

Audiences: matched, retargeting, and CRM stages

Plan, then Audiences. Two kinds live here.

Matched audiences are lists you bring or build: an uploaded company list (up to 300,000 companies, matched by name, domain and LinkedIn Page URL; expect 60 to 90% match), an uploaded contact list (matched by email, mostly work email, and much lower match rates), CRM segments through a native Salesforce, HubSpot or Pipedrive connection, and retargeting audiences. Predictive audiences take one of those and ask LinkedIn to find similar members; on B2B accounts we have rarely seen one beat the original list, so we treat them as a last resort for reach.

The retargeting sources, and what we use each for:

• Website (needs the Insight Tag): all visitors, or visitors to a URL pattern, over 30 to 365 days. Pricing and demo page visitors are the BOFU audience.
• Single image ad and document ad engagement: anyone who clicked, or anyone who engaged, with ads in chosen ad sets. The 180-day version is the MOFU audience.
• Video: members who watched 25, 50, 75 or 97% of a video. 50% and up is the signal worth retargeting; 25% is a scroll.
• Lead gen form: opened or submitted. Openers who did not submit are the cheapest warm audience in the account.
• Conversation and message ad: opened or clicked.
• Event, Page and thought leader ad engagement: expanded through 2025; thought leader ad engagers can now be retargeted like company ad engagers.
• Conversions API events: any event you send server-side becomes an audience. This is how CRM stages become LinkedIn audiences: an "Opportunity created" event builds a sales-cycle audience, a "Closed won" event builds an exclusion.

Two numbers from Kiin Labs' thought leader ads study settle the question of why retargeting comes first. Retargeted audiences produced 25% more engagement and 20% more dwell time per impression than cold audiences at the same cost per click, and an uploaded list behaved like a cold audience with an 11% CPM premium. A list is a targeting shortcut, not a warm audience.

The Companies tab, in full

This is the part of Campaign Manager that changed most, and the part almost no tutorial covers. Under Plan, Companies replaced the Company Engagement Report in November 2024 and was expanded in December 2025. It answers the question every B2B advertiser eventually asks: which of the companies we are paying to reach are actually reacting?

What you need before it works

Companies can only report on companies it can match, so it draws from the company lists and matched audiences attached to your ad sets. If you target by job function and industry alone, you will see the companies LinkedIn could infer, but the report is built for accounts that upload a target list. The old report required a list of at least 300 matched members; the new tab is more forgiving but the principle stands: upload the list you care about, even if some ad sets target more broadly.

The metrics, defined

Windows run from 7 to 180 days. Filters cover engagement level, size, industry, list and matched status. Everything except organic and inferred data exports to CSV.

The 2025 addition: lists in one click

Filter to the companies you want, tick them, and Create company list turns them into a matched audience without a spreadsheet. That is the whole mechanism for moving accounts through the funnel inside the platform: engaged companies become a BOFU ad set audience, unengaged companies after 90 days at a decent penetration rate become an exclusion or a creative test, and paid-lead companies become a suppression list so you stop paying to reach people already in the pipeline.

Three ways we use it every month

1. Exclusions. Companies with hundreds of paid clicks and no leads or site visits are usually the over-clickers: agencies, consultancies and job seekers. Exclude them and the cost per landing page click drops immediately.
2. Retargeting and sales handoff. Very high and high engagement companies, sorted by members targeted, go to a BOFU ad set with a direct offer, and to the sales team as a warm list with the evidence attached.
3. Outbound signal. Export the paid engagement columns weekly, push them into Clay, enrich the engaged companies with the right contacts and start a sequence that references what they engaged with. This is the core of our Warmbound service, and it is why ad engagement replies at roughly three times the rate of a cold list: the company already chose to interact.

Creating an ad set: the ten settings in order

From Advertise, choose the Campaign (group) and click Create, then Ad Set. What follows is every screen in the order LinkedIn shows it, with the choice we make and the reason.

1. Objective

The objective decides which formats you can use, how LinkedIn bids and what "result" means in the report. The choices that matter:

• Brand awareness and Engagement are the only two objectives that can run thought leader ads. Kiin Labs' study of 464 accounts found engagement beats brand awareness on engagement and dwell time on every audience under 30,000 members; brand awareness only wins on cheaper reach on large cold audiences. Default to engagement, switch to brand awareness only on cold audiences over 30,000.
• Website visits over website conversions for traffic. Conversions optimisation needs volume LinkedIn rarely gets from a B2B account, and it narrows delivery to the people most likely to have converted already.
• Lead generation for lead gen forms in the feed or in the inbox, and since 2025 for event ads.
• Video views, the classic version, not Accelerate. In our video study the video views objective delivered 18% cheaper views than brand awareness and 25% cheaper completions than engagement.
• Job applicants, talent leads, website conversions for messaging: rarely relevant.

2. Location

The default is "recent or permanent location". Switch it to permanent location, otherwise a Dubai target list picks up everyone who flew through Dubai last month. Set the profile language to English unless you have translated creative; LinkedIn matches on the language of the member's profile, not the language they speak.

3. Targeting

Two workable approaches. Attributes: job function plus seniority, and either company industry and size or a member skill. Job title is precise but small; LinkedIn's title matching misses variants, so function plus seniority reaches the same people at three times the size. List: an uploaded company list, with job function and seniority layered on top so you reach buyers and not the whole company. Always add exclusions: competitors' companies, students and entry level, functions that click but never buy (for most SaaS: education, arts, military and protective services), and your own company.

The account list guide covers how to build the list. The demographics report, after two weeks of spend, tells you what to exclude next.

4. Audience size

The forecast panel on the right shows the audience size as you build. For cold feed ad sets we keep it under about 100,000 members; above that you cannot see frequency building and cannot tell which segment is working. Retargeting ad sets can run at a few thousand members. LinkedIn's minimum is 300 matched members, and below roughly 1,000 delivery gets erratic.

5. Audience Expansion and the LinkedIn Audience Network: both off

Under the targeting block are two ticked boxes. Enable Audience Expansion lets LinkedIn add members it considers similar; on a list you built on purpose that is dilution. LinkedIn Audience Network serves your ads on third-party apps and websites, which for a B2B account means banner placements in games and news apps. In our audit of 107 accounts, $274,000 of spend went to the Audience Network, and the worst account we have seen had 99% of a $50,000-a-month budget served off LinkedIn. Untick both, save the ad set, then open it again and check: Campaign Manager has a habit of re-enabling them on save, and the Recommendations tab will keep asking you to switch them back on.

6. Ad format

The format list depends on the objective. Single image, carousel, video, document, event, conversation and message ads, thought leader ads (a post by a member, sponsored) and, under some objectives, text and spotlight ads. Which to use is its own article: the best LinkedIn ad format for B2B SaaS. The short version: thought leader ads for TOFU and MOFU, document ads where you want leads in the feed (42% lower cost per lead than single image in paired accounts), message ads for BOFU demos, and single image for traffic and retargeting.

Placement is also here: LinkedIn feed, and optionally the Audience Network you just turned off. Sizes, ratios and character limits for every format are in the ad specs reference.

7. Budget and schedule

LinkedIn's minimum is $10 a day per ad set. A working rule of thumb for cold feed ad sets is $1 to $2 per day per 1,000 members in the audience, so a 20,000-member list runs comfortably at $30 to $40 a day. Set a start date and no end date; add an end date only for a defined test. Lifetime budgets pace unevenly on LinkedIn and daily budgets overspend by up to 50% on any single day (LinkedIn averages it over the week), which surprises finance teams. A full-funnel test with three folders needs about $4,000 a month in media to read anything; see how much to budget.

8. Bidding: manual, low, checked daily

Three strategies: Maximum delivery (LinkedIn spends the budget at whatever price), Cost cap (a target average cost per result) and Manual (you set the bid per click, impression, view or send). We run manual on almost everything. In the 464-account study, the highest-bid campaigns paid 128% more per engagement than the lowest-bid campaigns in the same account, and bidding low cut cost per result by 32% with the same delivery on most audiences. LinkedIn's suggested bid range is an anchor, not a floor: start under the bottom of the range, check delivery daily, raise in 10% steps only if the ad set does not spend. Cost-per-click versus cost-per-impression bidding was a tie on cost per landing page click in the same study; use CPM on retargeting where you want reach, CPC on cold traffic.

Two newer options appear here on lead generation and conversion objectives: Qualified Leads Optimization (send lead quality back through the Conversions API and LinkedIn optimises toward the qualified ones) and Conversion Value Optimization. Both need volume: below about 50 qualified events a month the algorithm has nothing to learn from, and the ad set behaves like maximum delivery.

Message ads bid per send. The conversation ads study found the highest-bid campaigns paid 80% more per send than the lowest-bid campaigns with no gain in open rate, so bid low there too.

9. Conversions

Tick the conversions this ad set should count. Only ticked conversions appear in its Conversions and Leads columns, and the attribution window and model you set on the conversion apply here. Attach the demo conversion to BOFU ad sets and a softer one (pricing page view, content download) to TOFU, otherwise TOFU reports zero conversions and someone cuts its budget.

10. Ads

Create new, browse existing content (sponsor a Page post or, for thought leader ads, a member's post after they approve it), or duplicate from another ad set or account, which since 2025 works across accounts in the same Business Manager. Run three to five ads per ad set. Refresh cadence comes from the fatigue data: on audiences under 10,000 members creative fatigues about four times faster than on large audiences, so every two weeks under 10,000, monthly over 100,000. Campaign Manager's frequency column under-reports this: the accounts in our study showed a reported frequency of 3.5 against a true 9.5 once you count every ad set reaching the same members.

Flexible Ad Creation (December 2025) builds up to 64 combinations of intro text, headline and image and lets LinkedIn optimise between them. On a large audience it is a fast creative test. On a small list it splits already-thin data 64 ways. Draft with AI writes intro text from your landing page; it produces the median LinkedIn ad, which is exactly what you are trying not to run.

Lead gen forms inside Campaign Manager

Assets, then Lead gen forms, or build one inside an ad. A form has a headline, a privacy policy URL, up to twelve fields (LinkedIn pre-fills profile fields; every typed field costs completions), optional custom questions, hidden fields for UTMs and campaign names, a thank-you message with a link and, since September 2025, a Book an Appointment step that drops a Calendly picker into the form so the lead books before leaving LinkedIn. Leads sync to a connected CRM in real time or download from Assets for 90 days.

The numbers from Kiin Labs' lead gen forms study ($13.6M, 489 advertisers) that should shape how you build them: a demo form completes at 2.2% in the feed and 40% in a message ad; a content lead costs $164 and a demo lead $343 at the median account; a phone number field cuts completion by two thirds. Two Campaign Manager gotchas: form opens are not leads (the Overview counts opens in "engagement"; only the Leads column counts submissions), and LinkedIn reports some leads it never delivers to your CRM, which we wrote up in LinkedIn is reporting leads you never got. The full form guide, specs to integrations, is at LinkedIn lead gen forms.

Conversion tracking in 2026

Data, then Signals Manager. Four layers, in the order to set them up.

1. Insight Tag. A JavaScript snippet, or the LinkedIn Insight tag template in Google Tag Manager. It powers website retargeting, website visits in the Companies tab and Website Actions. Check it under Signals Manager: it should say "active" with a last-received time within the day.
2. Website Actions. Once the tag has seen your site, Signals Manager lists your buttons and pages; tick "Book a demo" and "Pricing page" and they become conversions without a developer. This replaced most event-specific pixels in 2024.
3. Conversions API. Server-side events for anything the browser cannot see: form submissions behind consent, app events, and offline conversions from the CRM (meeting booked, opportunity created, closed won) matched by email. Since 2025 it can be configured inside Google Tag Manager with automatic hashing, and 2026 added IP-address matching. This is also the input for Qualified Leads Optimization.
4. CRM connection. Salesforce, HubSpot and Pipedrive connect natively; they feed the revenue view in Measurement Insights and let CRM stages become audiences.

On each conversion you choose the attribution window (1, 7, 30 or 90 days post-click and post-view) and the model (last touch by ad set, or the data-driven model added in December 2024). Keep post-view attribution in mind when you read the Conversions column: a 30-day post-view window will attribute a demo to an ad the person scrolled past four weeks earlier. We report post-click and use post-view only to understand influence.

Reporting: the columns and breakdowns that matter

Advertise, Ad Sets tab. The column selector has preset sets and a custom option. What each set is for:

Breakdowns

The Breakdown button splits any row by conversion, by LinkedIn Audience Network on or off (run this first on any account you inherit), by device, by placement and, for thought leader ads, by author. The date picker has a compare option that puts two periods side by side. Performance chart plots any metric over time for the selected rows. Export sends the table to CSV; the Reporting API and tools like our LinkedIn Ads MCP pull the same data into a warehouse or into Claude.

Professional demographics

Per ad set, the Demographics button shows impressions, clicks and CTR by job function, title, seniority, industry, company, company size and location. Sort by clicks with CTR alongside: high clicks and high CTR from a function you do not sell to is a click-farm segment to exclude. This report, plus the Companies tab, is the whole exclusions workflow.

Measurement Insights and revenue

Under Measure. The 2025 dashboard is where LinkedIn shows influenced pipeline and revenue from a connected CRM, at company level, with the data-driven model. It is the best board-level view LinkedIn has produced, and it is influenced revenue: it sees the ad touch and the CRM outcome, not the outbound sequence, the referral or the sales call in between. We show it alongside CRM-sourced attribution, never instead of it.

Boost vs Campaign Manager vs Business Manager

Why a campaign does not spend, or gets rejected

In the order we check, because the order matters:

1. Bid below the floor. The most common cause. Raise by 10% and wait four hours.
2. Ad in review or rejected. Review takes up to 24 hours; rejections are usually a claim in the copy ("number one", "guaranteed"), a before-and-after image, or a landing page that does not match the ad. Check the Ads tab status column.
3. Campaign (group) paused or ended. The folder above the ad set has its own switch and schedule.
4. Audience too small or too narrow for the format. Under 1,000 members delivery is erratic; message ads need larger audiences because LinkedIn caps sends per member.
5. Budget too low for the bid. A $10 daily budget with a $12 CPC bid cannot clear one auction.
6. Billing failed. Account settings, Billing centre.
7. Conversion-optimised ad set with no conversions. Switch to website visits until the conversion fires 50 times a month.
8. The ad set has aged out. Cold ad sets on small audiences stop delivering as frequency climbs; a new ad in the same ad set resets it.

Campaign Manager vs Meta Ads Manager vs Google Ads

Most of our clients run all three; how they fit together is in the full-funnel strategy and the paid media service pages.