For organizations advertising on LinkedIn managing multiple LinkedIn Ad Accounts, LinkedIn Pages, and multiple users accessing these assets, the whole marketing operation can become quite overwhelming and challenging to do so effectively.
Broadly speaking, LinkedIn’s advertising ecosystem allows businesses to promote with paid (LinkedIn Ads) and organic (LinkedIn Pages) tactics. There are nuances, of course, but having a clear handle on these two features is the foundation for marketing on this platform.
Enter LinkedIn Business Manager. In 2022, LinkedIn launched a centralized platform meant to increase control and visibility across multiple assets, they named it Business Manager.
In This Post
- What Is LinkedIn Business Manager?
- When Does Business Manager Make Sense?
- User Governance, Roles and Permissions
- Cross-Account Audience Sharing
- CRM Integration for Enhanced Attribution
- Simplified Billing Management
- Business Manager vs Campaign Manager?
- Conclusion
What Is LinkedIn Business Manager?
LinkedIn Business Manager is a centralized platform that helps manage multiple LinkedIn Ads Accounts, Pages, and user access. Business Manager includes benefits like cross-account audience sharing, CRM integrations, enhanced attribution, and perhaps its most impactful feature, enhanced user roles and permissions across all assets.
LinkedIn Business Manager offers powerful features that can streamline and enhance your advertising efforts, and we believe it adds value in most scenarios. However, it is not a requirement. Organizations can adopt it at their own pace and start leveraging its benefits when they are ready to maximize value.
When Does Business Manager Make Sense?
There is no clear-cut answer, but LinkedIn recommends Business Manager when:
- You manage multiple LinkedIn Ads Accounts and or LinkedIn Pages
- You manage multiple people’s access
- You need to reach the same buyers across Ad Accounts
- You’d like to understand attribution of your marketing efforts in LinkedIn by linking your CRM
We, however, find Business Manager can bring value in most teams, particularly in user governance, privacy and security.
In some cases, doing without Business Manager is quite fine. For example, if you have a single Ads Account and you are the sole user, Business Manager might not be able to provide much more value.
To better evaluate if Business Manager is right for you, let’s quickly touch on its main features.
User Governance, Roles and Permissions
One of the strongest features of LinkedIn Business Manager is the ability to have an overarching view on all users across Ad Accounts and Pages.
Many organizations are not aware that, through Business Manager, organizations can manage access to LinkedIn advertising assets by associating a company email to a person’s profile.
Managing ad accounts and pages with a personal email poses significant risks, including privacy breaches, security vulnerabilities, and accountability issues. Unlike company emails, personal accounts are beyond the organization’s control—if an employee leaves or loses access, recovering the account can become complicated. Additionally, personal emails are more likely to be targeted by phishing attacks, putting sensitive business data at risk.
At the very least, it can damage the organization’s professional image. For example, granting admin access to king_clown69@yoyokomail.com doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in security and brand credibility.
Business Manager admins can assign and adjust roles, ensuring that users have the appropriate level of access based on their responsibilities. This feature not only enhances security but also simplifies onboarding and offboarding as team members join or leave projects.
That said, it is possible to manage access to both assets individually (as illustrated below). However, even with one account, managing multiple users can become quite the balancing act. Once you get into two assets, even it’s just a Page and an Ad Account, it is easy to lose sight of users.
If your company has a strong user governance and privacy culture, you will want to consider LinkedIn Business Manager just for the user management feature alone.
Cross-Account Audience Sharing
Business Manager allows businesses to share LinkedIn Matched Audiences across multiple Ad Accounts.
This feature is especially valuable for organizations running campaigns for different brands, regions, or product lines and reaching out to the same buyers makes sense. Sharing Audiences prevents recreating and maintaining each setup for every account, allowing marketers to save time and ensure consistency across multiple campaigns.
This cross-account sharing also makes it easier to implement retargeting strategies or lookalike audience campaigns, enabling better targeting and higher ROI.
CRM Integration for Enhanced Attribution
For businesses looking to improve revenue attribution, LinkedIn Business Manager integrates seamlessly with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. This integration allows organizations to connect their LinkedIn campaigns directly to their sales pipeline, providing a clearer picture of how LinkedIn ads influence conversions and revenue.
By linking CRM data to LinkedIn Ads, you can go combine data that opens the door to custom analysis, improved LTV calculations, and overall better understanding of B2B campaigns that typically have longer sales cycles.
Make sure your organization has clear privacy guidelines when it comes to dealing with personal information from users for marketing and attribution purposes. Depending on the region you may have to comply with different laws such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – EU/EEA, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) / California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) or Japan’s Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI).
Simplified Billing Management
LinkedIn Business Manager also offers a basic feature for centralized billing for organizations managing multiple accounts with Ads Billing Centre. Admins can view and manage payment methods, invoices, and account spend in one place, making it easier to track budgets across campaigns.
LinkedIn Business Manager’s centralized billing feature is a step forward for account and access management, but its billing features are not as robust as Google’s Campaign Manager or Meta’s Business Manager. For example, in LinkedIn Business Manager every Ads account needs own billing setup, while in Google and Meta you can have various account linked to a single billing account. This prevents efficiencies like centralized invoicing, setup for each account, and individual transaction history.
We suspect it’s a matter of time for LinkedIn Ad’s Billing Centre to step up it’s game and offer similar efficiencies as other advertising platforms. Meanwhile, it is still worth taking advantage of this feature.
Business Manager vs Campaign Manager?
This question, while does not make much sense, often comes up and we find it important to add some context on it.
When you link an Ads Account to your Business Manager, your Campaign Manager is still in use. That is, these two features work together. Like other tools, Business Manager would become a sort of bridge to jump into the Campaign Manager account you want to go.
As shown in the screenshot below, your linked accounts will show under the “Ad accounts” menu. You will be able to click on the icon that says “Campaign Manager” to go to the respective Ads account Campaign Manager. (On a curious note, clicking on the account name shows the people that have access to this Ad account. It takes a few rounds of clicking to get used to clicking on the right icon to go to the campaign manager.)
Conclusion
LinkedIn Business Manager is packed with features that make managing LinkedIn Ad Accounts and Pages more efficient and secure. From centralized user governance to cross-account audience sharing and CRM integration, it provides tools aimed for medium and large organizations, but also some that smaller teams can benefit from.
Each of these features has its own unique value, and in future posts, we’ll dive deeper into how to maximize their potential. For now, if your organization is looking to streamline LinkedIn operations and improve marketing effectiveness, Business Manager is worth exploring.
If you have questions on how to use LinkedIn for your business, contact us today.
Thank you LinkedIn, Uniconlabs, Freepik and Hajicon for the images used on this post!
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