LinkedIn Document Ads: The Complete Guide 2023

LinkedIn has recently released a new ad format called Document Ads. If you’re marketing on LinkedIn, then this is something you can’t miss. With 94% of B2B Marketers leveraging LinkedIn for marketing, standing out is important, and the document ads format can help you do that now. Leverage it before it gets overused.

In this article, we’ll breakdown step by step what is document ads, how you can used it to generate leads, and engagement on your content within LinkedIn’s feed.

What is LinkedIn Document Ad

LinkedIn Document Ads allows you to documents directly in the LinkedIn feed, advertisers can reach members who can read and download content without leaving the platform. Share your content freely to build awareness and grow thought leadership or gate your document with a Lead Gen Form to capture leads.

This works especially well if you have a long-form content you’d like your audience to consume.

Why should you use LinkedIn Document Ads

These are the three main benefits when using Document ads, and why you should add it into your marketing strategy.

Building brand awareness and nurture audiences

With Document ads, you may promote engagement with audiences by sharing educational, inspiring content they can read and download.

Enhance Lead Generation Effort

You can capture quality leads by gating your document with a Lead Gen Form. To generate interest, entice audiences, and convert at scale, you can also share a preview of your document within LinkedIn’s feed and encourage audiences to get the full document in exchange for your information.

Measure the engagement level of your content

Understand how much of your document is read and downloaded across all phases of the marketing funnel. Marketers who focus solely on the number of leads is wrong. The goal of a marketer isn’t to collect leads, it is to influence the audiences. And in order to influence audiences, the content must be consumed. There’s no point getting more leads if audiences do not consume the content. Document ads changes that and allows you to track how many audiences consumed your content.

When should you use Document Ads

Document ads on LinkedIn will be a perfect for Marketers who uses eBook, slideshows, guides, case studies, data sheets, analyst reports, Infographics, and other more visual content. From a content perspective, if you’re trying to inform or educate your audience, and show case your products, feature case studies, and display your company’s mission and values, then document ads will be a good fit.

How do LinkedIn Document Ads look like?

In Document Ads, members can view your Document directly in their newsfeed without needing to leave LinkedIn. Members can be given full access to advertisers’ documents or required to complete a Lead Gen Form before accessing them.

What is the Document ad ungated experience

With Document Ads, members can read the entire document without leaving LinkedIn or providing additional information. Members can be downloaded directly to a desktop or mobile device, but it’s not compulsory for them to download to read.

LinkedIn Document Ad with Lead Gen Form experience

A preview of your Document Ad will appear in the newsfeed of members. After viewing the maximum number of pages, they will need to complete a Lead Gen Form to unlock the full document. Leads will receive a confirmation message in their LinkedIn inbox with the downloadable document, a thank you message, and an off-site link.

LinkedIn Document Ad Specifications

Here are the key specifications for your document ads:

• File type: PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX – PDF file recommended for best viewing experience
• Limits: 300 Pages or 1MM Words
• Aspects: Vertical, Horizontal, Square
• Size: 100MB

LinkedIn Document Ad Limitations

This ad format comes with a number of limitations such as:

• Campaign objectives: Limited to Brand awareness, Engagement, Lead Generation Options
• CTAs: No CTAs on the document unless a lead gen form format is used
• Unable to target using audience network (Which is fine because LinkedIn audience network isn’t great).
• The hyperlinks in your document are not clickable when members are viewing the documents within the LinkedIn newsfeed.
• Lead gen options need documents with more than one page since there must at least be more than 1 page for the member to preview before they need to download.
• Currently, you’re unable to edit a saved document ad. You will need to duplicate out a new campaign and pause the older campaign for any changes.

How to set-up a LinkedIn Document Ad

Here are the step by step processes from to set up your LinkedIn document ad. Before starting, you will need access to a campaign manager tool and your LinkedIn company page.

Log into LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Click this link to access your campaign manager. Alternatively, head to LinkedIn Marketing’s site and click on “Create Ad”. Create a new campaign manager if you do not have one.

Select the relevant campaign objectives

For document ads, you’ll need to select either Brand Awareness, Engagement or Lead Generation. Pick the right objectives as that will optimize towards the results you want. For example, if you’re looking to generate more leads and build an email list, choose lead generation objective.

Select your targeting criteria

Consider the demographics and psychographics of your target audience. Select the relevant options at this stage. We’ve covered extensively various available LinkedIn targeting options and our recommendations here.

Select the Document Ad Format

This stage is the most important because if you miss it, you’ll need to redo it. Selecting the wrong ad format will not be reversible. Read the options carefully and select “Document Ads”.

Upload your Document Ad Creative

Complete the required fields and upload your document ad creative. If you selected lead generation option, you’ll also need to state the number of preview pages.

LinkedIn Document ads analytics and reporting metrics

There are 3 objectives with different analytics you need to know. Here’s the breakdown

• Clicks: Total clicks on the document ads. Click not de-duplicated
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): Total clicks divided by total impressions
• Download clicks: Number of clicks on the download button
• Viral Download clicks: Number of clicks from the result of a user sharing to your network
• Displays: How much of your document was displayed/viewed by members (25%, 50%, 75%).
• Completions: How many audiences completed viewing the document

Conclusion

LinkedIn document ads seem very promising. It’s been a while since we’ve been excited about a product update. LinkedIn stories was a failure, Conversation ads aren’t that great either especially for lead generation. LinkedIn document ads is a great fit for both engagement and lead generation. Moreover, it’s a natural fit to a platform like LinkedIn where audiences are there to learn rather than be entertained. Feel free to dive deeper into other LinkedIn ad formats here.