LinkedIn Begins Testing Fully Automated “Accelerate” Ad Campaigns

LinkedIn continues to lean into AI, this time within its ad creation tools, with a new element called “Accelerate”, which will essentially automate the entire campaign creation process.

As explained by LinkedIn:

“In as little as five minutes, Accelerate will recommend an end-to-end campaign and automatic optimizations to reach the right B2B audience with engaging creatives, which you can adjust and fine-tune before you launch your campaign.”

The new Accelerate option essentially empowers LinkedIn’s AI systems to put together your full campaign. You simply provide a URL for the product that you want to promote, and the system will do the rest.

“We’ll use AI to analyze the website you shared, your company’s LinkedIn Page and your account’s prior LinkedIn ads to recommend a campaign. Using this customer data, we’ll build creatives and an audience, allowing you to adjust copy, images and refine targeting parameters by adding inclusion and exclusions, like geography.”

So the whole thing is constructed by AI, which feels like you’re leaving a lot of control in the (theoretical) metal hands of the robots. But if it works.

LinkedIn’s AI models will use the information that you’ve provided to automatically adjust your campaign bids, and shift budget accordingly, ensuring you’re maximizing the best placements and creatives.

Then, at the end of the campaign, you’ll get a report telling you how it went.

So it’s essentially a “hands-off” approach to LinkedIn ads. Which could make social media marketing news and advice obsolete. I’ll start packing things up here.

“With Accelerate, we’re bringing together several of our current automation features, including Predictive Audiences, to dynamically adjust campaign targeting so you can easily and confidently reach buyers who are most likely to take action from our community of more than 950 million members.”

As I’ve previously reported, LinkedIn doesn’t actually have 950 million members, and it wouldn’t really matter if it did, because “members” and “active users” are two very different things. But that’s an aside.

Essentially, by running an Accelerate campaign, you’re letting LinkedIn’s ad system use your ad budget in the way that it assesses is best. Which could lead to better results, and indeed, LinkedIn claims that its AI tools are doing just that for many brands.    

LinkedIn’s “Automated Placement”, which uses AI to get your ads in front of the right users, has led to a 47% improvement in cost-per-conversion for brands, while “Predictive Audiences”, which is an AI-powered version of lookalikes, has improved average cost-per-lead by 21%. 

It feels like a step too far in some respects, like it’s putting too much trust in automation, to take over the whole ad process. But maybe, if it works, it could also save you a heap of money and time in campaign set-up.

Could be worth an experiment.

LinkedIn’s new Accelerate offering is available to a limited number of customers in North America starting today.