Carousel ad tips

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Carousel ads on LinkedIn allow you to tell an interactive story to inspire your target audience to take action. Make the most of your campaigns with these tips for identifying your objective, creating effective content, and proving the value of your carousel ads.

Choose your carousel campaign objective

Identify your key objective for each carousel campaign. This will inform your carousel content and how you measure success.

Common goals for carousel ads include:

 •  Brand awareness (tell people about your brand)
 •  Website visits (tell people where they can see more)
 •  Lead generation (tell people why they need your products or services)

Measure success based on your objective

After choosing your objective, you’ll be able to download reports in Campaign Manager, the advertising platform on LinkedIn, to see the results of your carousel campaigns, including clicks and impressions by individual card. Reporting viewable directly in the Campaign Manager experience will be available in the coming months.

Metrics that align to common carousel ad goals:

•  Brand awareness and consideration: impressions, clicks, engagement rates
•  Website visits: click-through rates
•  Demand generation: conversion rates, leads, and cost per conversion


To view reporting, go to the Performance tab in Campaign Manager, export, and download.

Plan carousel content based on your objective

Relevant content is at the core of a successful carousel ad campaign – keep it clear, visually compelling, and focus on telling your story or showcasing your products and services to drive your point home. Identify your objective before creating new content or repurposing existing content, so that your carousel aligns with the success you want to drive.

Here are some way to achieve your marketing objective:

For brand awareness and brand consideration:

•  Tell your brand story
•  Provide insights to position yourself as a thought leader
•  Share stories of customer success

For conversions:

•  Showcase multiple products or services
•  Feature a single product or service in depth
•  Highlight various opportunities, like events or helpful resources 

Best practices for creating carousel ads

 •  Capture and maintain your audience's attention with visual storytelling.

 •  Feature graphics, people, and dynamic text to draw your audience in.

 •  Include clear messages and calls-to-action on each carousel card description.

 •  Leverage existing content by packaging together content with a similar theme, or deconstruct a large piece of content into carousel cards.

 •  Start with 3-5 cards in your carousel, and test adding more cards from there.

 •  Try slotting your carousel cards in different orders, and optimize based on performance.

 •  If you tell a story, place the main value add or call-to-action in the final card to encourage your audience to swipe through the whole carousel.

 •  Refer to LinkedIn carousel ad specs while planning to make sure that your content is formatted properly.

Create your carousel ad campaign

Log in to Campaign Manager to create a campaign.

1. Select your main objective: get visits to your website, drive engagement, or collect leads
2. Select Carousel

To accomplish your campaign objective, you can either:

•  Send traffic to your website or multiple landing pages
•  Collect leads using LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms.

Match your bid method to your marketing objective: 

•  To get website visits, bid by cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM)
•  To collect leads, bid by cost per click (CPC)
•  To get more clicks for your budget, bid by automated bidding

In Campaign Manager, LinkedIn automatically selects the optimal bid method for your carousel campaigns based on your objective.

Follow best practices for Sponsored Content

Carousel ads are one form of Sponsored Content on LinkedIn. Make the most of your campaigns with tips for creating effective ads.

•  Be descriptive in the main ad headline and text. This will help your audience understand your message.

•  Feature a clear CTA (call-to-action), so your audience knows how to act on their interest.

•  Be specific with ad targeting, but not so specific that you narrow your audience. Choose location and two other targeting criteria to start, and follow ad targeting best practices.

•  Get more Sponsored Content tips to maximize results from your carousel ad campaign.

Test and optimize your carousel ads

Every brand has a different recipe for success. Increase your ROI by testing the tactics that work best for your carousel ad campaigns.

Try the following tests to get started. For clear results, test one variable at a time. This will help you understand the factors that affect your campaign results.

A/B test the number of cards:

•  Short (3-5 cards): Clearly establish the theme at the beginning of the carousel and built it throughout the cards.

•  Long (6+ cards): Tell a richer story that makes an emotional connection or impart knowledge (i.e. snippets from recent research).

While 3-5 cards is the sweet spot for driving strong engagement, longer carousels are an option to share even more content and details.


Test the order of cards:

•  When your audience sees a carousel in the feed, the first card will be in full view, and the second card will be in partial view.

•  Try different images on the first two cards, mix the order of the rest of the cards, monitor card performance, and update the order to feature cards with the best performance first.


Clicks and impressions by individual card are available in the downloadable reports for carousel ads. To measure lower funnel success of the carousel ad overall, use LinkedIn’s Conversion Tracking tool. This will enable you to measure the number of leads and other valuable actions that your carousel content generates.

For more tips and ideas, download The Secret Sauce: How LinkedIn uses LinkedIn for Marketing.