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This page is a workbook. Fill it in top to bottom before anything is built in Campaign Manager. Each section has a “Concept review” dropdown explaining what the section is for. The dropdowns explain the thinking; the decision is yours.
This brief sits between the marketing campaign brief, which covers strategy across every channel, and Campaign Manager, where the campaign is built.Grayed E.g. text is a placeholder. Delete it and replace it with your own. Examples use Doughnut Labs, a SaaS company that sells disruptive Doughnut Technology.
Record the decision and the reason, not the click path. This brief fixes objective, conversion action, budget, bid strategy, audience definition, and format so they can be reviewed before spend starts. In-flight bid adjustments and creative rotation stay with the media buyer.

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Setup

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Objective and conversion action

LinkedIn’s campaign objectives, as of 7 August 2026:
The objective and the ad format together decide which bid strategies are available. Not every strategy appears for every combination, so confirm the pairing in Campaign Manager before committing a bid approach in this brief.
On LinkedIn the objective narrows both the available ad formats and the available bid strategies, so it is a structural decision made early rather than a label applied at the end.There is a real choice between a native lead form and a landing page, and it is a trade rather than a preference. Lead forms convert at a higher rate because they pre-fill from the member’s profile, and they produce leads who never saw your page and may be less qualified. Recording which one this campaign uses, and why, is what makes a later argument about lead quality resolvable.

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Budget and bid strategy

LinkedIn’s bid strategies, as of 7 August 2026:
LinkedIn costs more per click and per lead than the other paid platforms in this knowledge base, usually by a wide margin. That changes what a sensible test budget looks like: a budget that would produce a clear read on Meta can produce almost no data here, and a campaign that ends “inconclusive” was often just underfunded.Maximum delivery gives up cost control in exchange for spending the budget. Cost cap keeps a ceiling and will underdeliver to hold it. Which failure you prefer is the actual decision, and it is easier to make deliberately at brief stage than in week three.

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Campaign structure

On LinkedIn the campaign is the targeting unit, not the ad set, so structure decisions here are really audience decisions. Splitting one audience across several campaigns divides an already small pool and slows every one of them out of learning.Audience overlap is the specific risk. Two campaigns targeting job titles that substantially overlap will bid against each other in the same auctions, which raises your own costs. Listing the audiences side by side in one table is the cheapest way to notice that before it happens.

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Targeting

Targeting built from a customer profile. Attribute-based: job title, company size, industry, seniority. Targeting built from an uploaded list. Named accounts or contacts. The file lives in the audience list store, never in this brief.
Reference a list by its name only. No account names, domains, or contact details in this brief. See the audience list store for where the file lives and who may access it.
Match check. Fill this in before creative and copy are briefed, not at the pre-launch checklist.
A LinkedIn campaign needs at least 300 matched companies to serve, whatever the row count was. Check this before anything is produced. A list that matches short is a scheduling problem caught early and a write-off of finished creative caught late.
Fix the audience at brief stage and leave it alone, the same way you fix the bid strategy. On account-based campaigns the audience is the campaign, so adding accounts mid-flight rewrites what the numbers mean and the periods either side stop being comparable. See when a list changes mid-flight.
Audience expansion and the LinkedIn Audience Network are both on by default in some setups. Both widen delivery beyond the audience you defined. Set each one deliberately and record why, so a later change in cost per lead can be traced to a decision rather than a default.
LinkedIn’s targeting is the reason to be on the platform and the reason it is expensive. Firmographic and job-title targeting reaches people you cannot reliably reach elsewhere, and the auction prices that access accordingly.Audience size is worth recording because it sets the ceiling on what the campaign can do. Too narrow and delivery stalls regardless of budget; too broad and the targeting advantage that justified the cost has been given away. The number belongs in the brief so the trade is visible before launch rather than inferred afterward.Profile-based and list-based targeting are split into two tables because they answer to different things. A profile is a description your team owns and can restate; a list is a file somebody selected on a date, and the useful facts about it are who chose it, on what basis, and when it stops being current. Collapsing both into one row loses exactly the provenance that a list handed over from another team most needs, since the person who knows the answer is usually not the person running the campaign.The match rate sits in the brief rather than only in the checklist because of when it is actionable. At the checklist a short match is a campaign that cannot launch after the money has been spent on creative. At brief stage it is a list that needs more rows, which is a conversation with whoever supplied it. Recording the previous rate alongside it is what turns a number into a trend, so a list decaying from 78% to 51% is visible before it becomes a delivery problem nobody can explain.

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Creative and copy

Copy templates by format: Single image, Video, Carousel, Document, Message ad, Conversation ad, Text ad, Follower ad. Creative has to meet the LinkedIn creative specs.

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Naming and tracking

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UTMs

One tagged URL per audience or variant, not one per campaign. utm_content carries the variant name, so variants that share a tag report as one row.
utm_campaign carries the platform campaign name, not the marketing campaign name and not the brief’s file name. The three are set out in which name is which. A slug like fresh-batch-trial in this field will not join to anything in your platform export.

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Experiment

Optional: fill this in only if part of this campaign is a controlled test.
Check the sample size before committing to a test here. LinkedIn’s cost per result means a test that would reach significance on another platform inside a week can take a quarter, and the experiment brief will surface that during the design step rather than after the budget is spent.

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Measurement

Where this campaign is reported: E.g. Paid media dashboard, rolled into the weekly report

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Post-launch

Platform settings on this page were checked on 7 August 2026. LinkedIn changes objective names, bid strategy availability, and Accelerate campaign coverage regularly. Confirm the current options in Campaign Manager before filling in a brief, and update this page when they move.
Last modified on August 12, 2026