What are Dynamic Ads?

Increased personalization and engagement

Dynamic creative ads drive higher brand awareness, social media engagement, and conversions. They help marketers personalize ads by making online user profiles and content part of the creative message and imagery. When businesses are upfront about using a customer’s data to personalize and customize ads to prospects, these dynamic display formats are perceived positively and help brands cut through the clutter of other ad formats and content online.

In the dynamic lead generation ad example above, the brand pulls in a LinkedIn user’s name and profile picture to capture their attention, as people’s eyes will be drawn to photos of themselves.

The dynamic display ad also prompts them to click the call to action (CTA) “Request demo” to learn how the company is changing cloud-based collaboration. Similar ads on LinkedIn have achieved 475% above the dynamic ad click-through rate benchmark of 0.1%.

Automated ad creation process

When marketers are strapped for time or have limited creative resources, dynamic ads provide a quick and easy way to set up and launch a campaign by automatically and individually populating highly targeted display and search formats at scale.

Better targeting and relevance

Dynamic Ad targeting can be combined with Matched Audiences or custom audiences created and saved in a campaign management tool. Advertisers can use them to retarget website or social media network visitors based on past user behaviors.

Marketers can also upload an account list for their account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, which helps them target highly valuable prospects on user platforms like LinkedIn.

1. Define the target audience

Start by identifying target audiences using buyer personas to profile ideal prospects. This first step will help B2B marketers select the right platforms and formats to connect with key customer segments online.

Analyze their online behaviors and preferences using customer surveys, third-party industry research, and web analytics data to create relevant and compelling ads and content.

Some sales and marketing teams also use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to research their buyer personas’ professional interests, preferred content, and key questions or comments posted on LinkedIn. This real-time, first-party data can influence a B2B marketing team’s Dynamic Ad campaign creative and messaging.

Brands interested in launching Dynamic Ads on LinkedIn can log into the Campaign Manager tool to see what types of audience targeting are available, such as serving up ads to users by company or key decision makers, by known contacts after uploading a list of contact IDs or connecting to a contact management platform, and retargeting.

2. Select campaign objectives

Dynamic ads can be customized for various marketing objectives, such as building brand awareness, driving new website traffic or LinkedIn Company Page followers, generating leads, and converting prospects.

These campaign objectives can be set in a Campaign Management tool as part of the Dynamic Ad creation process. In LinkedIn Campaign Manager, brands can select “Create” and then select “Campaign”. This step will take them to the campaign creation page, where they’ll select “New Campaign Group.” They’re then ready to choose an objective using the screen below.

Selecting an objective will lead marketers to the next step, which is to choose ad formats, features, and bid types that support their goals during campaign creation.

4. Track and optimize dynamic ad campaigns over time

Brands can access campaign performance data directly in an ad platform’s campaign management tool to track and optimize results over time and boost their return on investment (ROI).

We recommend A/B testing different LinkedIn Dynamic Ad creative assets (e.g., swapping profile pictures, custom icons and background images, and company logos), CTAs, ad copy, and headlines to see which ones resonate best with customers and drive higher conversions (e.g., event registrations, newsletter signups, and page follows).

Marketers can install an insight tag on their website or landing page to get conversion data using LinkedIn Conversion Tracking. This step allows them to measure actions taken by users once they arrive at a page that drives downloads, form completions, and more.

This user data can also be used to launch and track retargeting campaigns to convert more browsers into qualified leads or buyers further down the road. Users will be served offers or content with which they have already engaged or expressed an interest.