LinkedIn Business Manager: The Complete Guide 2023

If you’ve ever found it annoying to manage multiple ad accounts and pages on LinkedIn, then you’d be happy to know that LinkedIn Business Manager is finally here. Well, almost at least. It’s in its beta stages and will be launched to the public very soon.

Facebook started a similar product in 2014 called Facebook Business Manager. LinkedIn is late to the game, but at least it’s launching.

In this guide, we’ll break down how you can use LinkedIn business manager to maximize your productivity and safety with LinkedIn Ads.

What is LinkedIn Business Manager?

LinkedIn Business Manager is where you can manage all of your company’s Ad Accounts and Pages in one place. This makes marketing on LinkedIn easier for both your teams and your vendors

• All of your ad accounts and pages are linked to a single dashboard
• You can easily remove them from one place or update them with just a click.
• Share Matched Audience targeting across all your campaigns. The data in these matched audiences are automatically updated across all accounts it was shared to.

This makes it easier for you to keep track of all of your company’s Ad Accounts and Pages.

LinkedIn Business manager ensures your organization still has access to your Ad Accounts and Pages even if your employee leaves.

You can also connect your Business Manager to the Business Manager of another organization, such as your clients or agencies, to share access to your Ad Accounts and Pages while maintaining full ownership.

Why you should use the LinkedIn Business Manager?

Here are the top reasons why LinkedIn Business Manager will work for you.

• Simplify your LinkedIn marketing & advertising experience with a centralized view of all your marketing efforts.
• Add other companies or people to your Accounts and Pages quickly so they may market on your behalf.
• Easily grant access to your Accounts and Pages to the relevant people and/or businesses.
• Share audiences and data across accounts. Aligns targeting and maximizes targeting capabilities.

How does LinkedIn Business Manager work?

There’s no need to reset your Ad Accounts or Pages, and your live campaigns, billing, and data interfaces will remain unaffected. Existing Accounts and Pages users will not lose access.

This wouldn’t disrupt all existing campaigns.

How to get started with LinkedIn Business Manager?

The individuals, Ad Accounts, and Pages added to a Business Manager are determined by the organization. You can have one Global Business Manager or several, separated by Region, Business Unit, or other factors.

When to use One single Business Manager?

If global visibility is a major objective, then this is ideal.

Supporting all Business Units and Regions needs more Admins with full Business Manager access, which may result in a less organized Business Manager unless similar naming conventions are used.

It’s worth noting that you can have Ad Accounts with different billing and currency settings in the same Business Manager.

When to use multiple LinkedIn Business Manager?

Better if you require more control over a group of Accounts and Pages.

However, Maintaining global visibility across several Business Managers does require upkeep.

A Business Manager can only possess one asset that is shared with others. If an asset, such as a Page, must be used by multiple regions or business units, the owner must share it with them.

How to add Ad Accounts to your Linkedin Business Manager

If your company owns the Ad Account, select this option (recommended if you own billing responsibilities).

• Users with legacy Ad Account access will appear in Business Manager and can be requested to migrate to Business Manager by an Admin, deleted from the Ad Account, or left alone.
• Admins can assign people to any role on the Account, and Admins can share Matched Audiences generated in these Ad Accounts with other Ad Accounts.
• Ad Account Billing Admin can only be controlled in Business Manager if the person has accepted their invitation.

If you do not own the ad account, you’ll have to request access to the ad account.

• Admins can only allocate roles according to what the ad account owner allows. The Ad account owner can limit what roles are allowed.
• Owner can deactivate your Ad Account access whenever they want, and your people will also lose access.
• You will be able to control permissions exclusively through Business Manager, while the other businesses can continue to use Campaign Manager.
• Users having Ad Account access in your Business Manager can create, edit, and delete Matched Audiences. These audiences, however, cannot be shared across other Ad Accounts.
• To handle the Billing Admin job from Business Manager, Billing Admin access to the Ad Account must be allowed.

Ad Account Permissions inside Business Manager

When your Business Manager connects an Ad Account to it, permissions will migrate to and be handled solely through Business Manager.

Add Pages to LinkedIn Business Manager

There are two ways to add Pages to your Business Manager, which are defined by Page ownership.

Managing Page Permissions within Business manager

After adding a Page, Business Manager Admins or Page Admins can manage Page access in Business Manager.

How to work with other LinkedIn Business Managers (Partnerships)

LinkedIn calls these partnerships. It allows two Business Managers to share access to certain Ad Accounts and Pages, allowing each company to govern their own employee’s access for as long as needed.

How to set-up your LinkedIn Business Manager

Role definitions in Business Manager

1. Admin: Admins have unrestricted access. They can invite employees, add Ad Accounts and Pages, form Partnerships, share/unshare Matched Audiences, and access all accounts and pages.
2. Employee: Employees have view-only access and can only access the Ad Accounts and Pages to which they have been granted access.
3. Contractor: Contractors have limited view access and can only visit the Ad Accounts and Pages to which they have been granted access.

Other than the roles of Business manager, each page and ad account has its own specific roles as well. 

You may find out more about Ad account roles here, page admin roles here, paid media roles here. 

Steps to create for your LinkedIn Business Manager

• Set-up your business manager
• Invite admins
• Add Ad accounts
• Add Pages
• Review access to invite users
• Setup partnerships (If needed)

Step 1: Create your Linkedin business manager

Creation will be available via LinkedIn.com/ads when Business Manger completely opens estimated June 2022. We recommend adding Parent Company, Geo, Business Unit, and so on into your Business Manager Name.

Step 2: Invite people, beginning with Admins. 

Invite individuals using their work email addresses. These emails do not have to be linked to their LinkedIn profiles. Click on the resend button if your colleagues say they did not receive the invitation. 

Step 3: Select the roles of people in your business manager

You may invite multiple people at once by adding a comma in between emails. 

Invited people need to accept an invitation sent to their email. 

This generates a Business Manager Profile for that individual. They will use it in the future to access Business Manager Ad Accounts and Pages.

They will keep access to whatever Ad Accounts and Pages they had before Business Manager.

Step 4: Steps to Add Ad Accounts to your LinkedIn Business Manager

You can add ad accounts in 2 ways. 

1. Use Ad Account IDs or CSV Upload: Use this option if your firm is the owner of the Ad Account. We recommend that the business responsible for billing be the owner for the best experience.
2. Request access by CSV: If you do not own the ad accounts. If you want access to an ad account that already has another business manager, don’t request access. Get them to claim the account first then share it to you with partnership. 

Step 5: Approve Ad Account Request. 

Account Managers can approve the ad account request in Campaign Manager by selecting their profile photo in the upper right corner and then selecting Business Manager Requests.

Step 6: Add Company Pages

There are 2 ways to add company pages: 

1. Add Page: If the Page belongs to your company, select this option. Add Business Manager people to this Page and share Page access with another Business.
2. Request to a Page: If it’s another business’s Page and they don’t have their own Business Manager, select this option. If they do, ask them to grant you Page access through a Business Manager Partnership.

It’s important to note that you must have already invited an existing page super admin to your business manager before access can be granted. 

Step 7: Approving Business Manager Page Requests

Page Super Admins can approve requests by going to the Admin Tools menu and selecting Manage Admins. Only Super Admins who have been invited to Business Manager can approve an ownership request.

Step 8: Review access and invite remaining users

The Business Role “Needs review” shows the people who had access to the Ad Accounts and Pages before you added them to Business Manager but haven’t been invited yet.

For existing employees, you should grant them access to your business manager. If they are former employees, remove them. For people from other companies, get them to create their own business manager and get access through partnership. 

Step 9: Adding a Partner – LinkedIn Business Manager 

You can add a partner by entering the partner’s Business ID. These IDs can be found under the Business Manager Name. Both companies need to have business managers to set up partnership. Only admins can add partners 

Once you’ve added your partners, you can see them in the partner’s tab. 

Select which of your Business Manager Ad Accounts or Pages to share with the Partner by clicking Share Ad Accounts.

Partners are not permitted to reshare Ad Accounts or Pages with another company.

You may assign roles to various ad accounts once accounts are share with partners. 

Under the “Shared” Tab, you can see all the ad accounts and pages your partner has shared with you. Once you see this,your admins can now add people to various shared ad accounts and pages. 

How to manage people within Linkedin Business Manager

There are 3 main things you’d can do to manage people within your Business Manager

1. Changing Business Manager duties, including employee deletion
2. Auditing an individual’s access across Accounts and Pages
3. Adding or removing someone from many Accounts or Pages at once

You can also see all of the Accounts and Pages that a user has access to, as well as their roles. Use the individual person view to see all the ad accounts and pages he/she has access to. You can edit the person’s access to multiple accounts/pages here. 

• Access to all assets can be managed by Business Manager Admins.
• Employees or contractors with the Account Manager role on individual Ad Accounts can manage Ad Account access.
• Employees or contractors with the Page Super Admin role on certain Pages have the ability to manage access to those Pages.

Click Revoke Access to remove someone from Accounts. They will remain a part of the Business Manager, but will no longer have access to those Accounts.

How to manage Ad Accounts within Linkedin Business Manager

Here are the 3 things you can do with ad account management on LinkedIn. 

• Grant various people access to Ad Accounts
• Update multiple people’s Ad Account roles
• Remove people from Ad Accounts

View all of the Ad Accounts in your Business Manager. Employees and contractors can only access Accounts to which they have been assigned. Hit to right-side arrow to add People to the Ad Account, check Ad Account data, or browse to the Ad Account in Campaign Manager. 

You can easily manage ad accounts in the business manager once it’s been added. 

• Admins: Can control access to all Ad Accounts in their Business Manager.
• Employees/Contractors: Account Managers can only manage access to Ad Accounts for which they have the Account Manager role.

You may see all of the People in your Business Manager and add one or more to the Account.

Choose the roles that you’d like to assign each individual to for each ad account. 

Considerations for Billing Administrators

• An Ad Account can only have one Billing Admin. 
• Accounts that buy advertising with Insertion Orders do not have Billing Admins.
• If your Business Manager has Partner access to an Ad Account that is lower than the Billing Admin level, the account will be disabled.

To update or revoke people’s role, you may select them from the ad account profile page.

How to manage Pages within Linkedin Business Manager

There are 3 things you can do within LinkedIn business manager for Pages: 

• Allow several persons to access Pages. 
• Update multiple people’s responsibilities on Pages
• And remove people from Pages.

The Pages table in Business Manager displays all of the Pages that are associated with that Business Manager. Click the right-side arrow to manage access to the Page or to go directly to the Page.

You can assign page roles inside the business manager. 

Choose the Page roles the people on this Page should have.

You can choose between Page Super Admin access and individual Organic and Paid Media responsibilities.

If you need to delete many persons from the Page profile page, select them all and click Revoke Access in the upper right hand corner. To delete a single person, click the arrow and then Revoke Access.

This will immediately disable your Page access, but they will remain in your Business Manager.

Partner Management within Linkedin Business Manager 

Here’s 3 main things you can do within partner management

• Track the different businesses you work with
• Share Ad Account and Page access to a Partner
• Manage your people’s access to Ad Accounts and Pages your Partners have shared with you

Click on share pages to share your pages with a partner. 

These are the roles that your Partner can give their people on your Pages.

You can see which ad accounts are yours and your partner’s in the ad account tab. 

View the owners of your shared pages as well as the status of your access request.

View Details can be accessed by clicking the right-side arrow next to the Account or Page.

Audience Sharing for LinkedIn Business Manager

Here are the main benefits of Audience Sharing on Business Manager:

• View all Matched Audiences in your Ad Accounts
• Share or unshare audiences
• Use shared audiences in a campaign
• Share audiences with another company

Teams can now save time and share their audiences between each other easily. They no longer have to keep re-creating.

Admins will be able to see all of the Audiences that the Business Manager owns.

All Matched Audience types, including those provided via Data Integration and Engagement Retargeting segments, can be shared.

When you share an Audience, the Ad Accounts to whom you’ve shared it will see it on the Campaign Manager’s Matched Audience page and in the campaign creation flow. 

Next, You’ll need to select which ad account to share the audiences with. 

You may also unshare these audiences when you click “Stop Sharing”. 

Wrap Up on LinkedIn Business Manager

There are plenty of benefits from LinkedIn Business Manager. This is especially useful if you work with multiple agencies, and clients or just want more control over your campaigns. The set-up and learning phase will be a pain at the start. But once you get the hang of it, it should help you execute your Linkedin marketing strategy smoothly.