LinkedIn Advertising is the paid advertising offering of 📝LinkedIn, through which businesses build campaigns in LinkedIn's Campaign Manager and target members of the professional network.
On its ads page, LinkedIn lists four ad formats that advertisers can use alone or in combination. It describes Sponsored Content as "Media-rich ads that appear in targeted members' LinkedIn feeds on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices," Sponsored Messaging as "Direct messages sent to your target audience through LinkedIn Messaging," Dynamic Ads as "Personalized ads at scale based on people's LinkedIn profile data, such as company name or job title," and Text Ads as "Self-service, pay-per-click desktop ads."
According to LinkedIn, each campaign begins by choosing an objective across awareness, consideration or conversions, followed by targeting criteria, an ad format, and a budget and schedule. LinkedIn says advertisers can target an audience by job title, function, industry and more, choosing from "over 20 different audience attribute categories," and it states that over 1 billion active professionals are on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn sells its ads through an ad auction in which an advertiser's bid competes with other advertisers who want to reach the same target audience; LinkedIn says the cost required to win depends on the bid and the desirability of that audience. It describes its model as objective-based pricing: each campaign objective has a different billable event, and the advertiser is charged only when that event occurs. Under the Website Visit objective, for example, LinkedIn charges only when someone clicks the link to the advertiser's website.