If you’re trying to figure out which LinkedIn ad format is right for your campaign, you’ve probably already realized there’s a lot to pick from. Some formats crush it for cold outreach, others work better for retargeting or demand gen. And LinkedIn keeps rolling out new formats every year. So let’s break it all down.

This is your full guide to the different types of LinkedIn ads and formats you can run in 2025. I’ll cover what works, when to use each one, and drop real examples from how we actually run LinkedIn Ads for clients.

Types of LinkedIn ads

Let’s begin by giving you an overview of the different LinkedIn ad types, along with some practical examples. By the end of this article, you’ll have a clear understanding of which ad type best suits your specific needs and goals.

Sponsored Content

1. LinkedIn Single Image Ads

Single Image Ads are the most common format across all the different types of LinkedIn ads. You’ve seen them everywhere in your LinkedIn feed, one image, headline, intro text, and a CTA button.

Why Single Image Ads are still the foundation:

  • They’re simple to launch
  • They work well at every stage of the funnel
  • They give you enough space to deliver one clear message per audience

Our playbook for cold audiences:

When you’re targeting prospects who’ve never heard of you, your single image ads should stay extremely simple and clear. We typically structure cold layer creative around three core angles:

  • What makes you different from competitors
  • The core solution or service you offer
  • The key pain point you solve

Example cold ad lines we’ve run:

  • “Tired of LinkedIn ads that never generate sales calls? We fix that.”
  • “How SaaS companies generate demos without cold DMs.”
  • “The LinkedIn ads strategy behind 500 booked calls.”

Our playbook for retargeting:

For warm audiences, we switch to what we call “third-party validation creative.” These are single image ads that feature:

  • Case studies
  • Testimonials
  • Third party validation (press mentions, podcast appearances)
  • Thought leadership content (news articles, expert interviews)

Instead of feeling like another ad, they look like organic content or earned media. This builds trust without needing to hard sell again.

Where Single Image Ads fit inside LinkedIn ad formats:

Among the different types of LinkedIn ads, Single Image Ads remain the core workhorse format. They’re easy to test and flexible enough for both cold and warm layers.

The LinkedIn carousel ad give you one of the most flexible LinkedIn ad formats inside the different types of LinkedIn ads available. Instead of just one image, you can show multiple cards that users swipe through, with each slide having its own headline, link, and CTA.

LinkedIn carousel ads are great for e-commerce if you have a bunch of different products like clothing brands, for example. You visit their website for one thing, and then you get hit with a carousel ad as a retargeting ad that has five of their top-selling items. And each one of those images, if you clicked, it would take you to that specific item in a different section on that website.

LinkedIn carousel ads can be applied in the B2B world as well. For example, if they visit our website and then there’s a carousel ad that shows all of our different services such as LinkedIn outreach, LinkedIn paid ads, Google search, Website visitor identification… it’s almost like a product catalog that would be a really good use.

Why Carousel Ads work:

  • You can showcase multiple products, services, or value props inside one ad.
  • Each image can link to a different landing page or offer.
  • Great for both SaaS and eCommerce depending on how you structure them.

Our playbook:

We rarely use carousel ads cold. Instead, they work much better for retargeting after someone has already hit your website. For example, when someone visits Impactable, we retarget them with a carousel that highlights:

  • LinkedIn Paid Ads
  • LinkedIn Outreach
  • Google Search
  • Website Visitor ID
  • White Label Services

It works like a mini product catalog where the user self-selects what they want to learn more about.

Other ways we use Carousel Ads:

  • Client testimonials on each card
  • Industry-specific case studies
  • Multi-step service breakdowns for complex offers

Where Carousel Ads fit within LinkedIn ad types:

Among the different types of LinkedIn ads you can run, Carousel Ads give you the most real estate to showcase multiple angles of your offer inside one creative.

3. LinkedIn Video Ads

LinkedIn video ads give you something most formats can’t: real engagement data. LinkedIn tells you exactly how much of your video someone watched: 25%, 50%, 75%, or 97%. That lets you build retargeting audiences based on real intent signals.

testimonial video ad

Where video shines:

  • Humanizing your team
  • Demonstrating expertise
  • Warming up cold audiences

Our playbook:

We like to run short team-intro videos in the retargeting layer. It helps people recognize us when they’re not quite ready to book a call yet. We’ve also used expert breakdowns as high-authority content.

One example that crushed for us:

We audited a $500K/month LinkedIn ad account for a $5B company. We turned that audit into a video walkthrough and ran it as a retargeting ad. When cold visitors saw us breaking down that size of account, they instantly saw our credibility without us having to say anything.

4. LinkedIn Event Ads

LinkedIn Event Ads are one of the more unique formats among the different types of LinkedIn ads you can run. These ads let you promote webinars, virtual trainings, workshops, or in-person events directly in users’ feeds.

linkedin event ad

Why Event Ads work so well:

  • LinkedIn dynamically displays how many people have already registered for your event. As the number grows, so does your social proof.
  • When users register, their connections may see notifications, organically spreading your event across their network.
  • You can invite your own first-degree connections directly to the event from your personal LinkedIn profile.

Where Event Ads fit into LinkedIn ad formats:

They’re great for top-of-funnel demand generation or mid-funnel nurture. If you’re running educational sessions or showcasing your product, Event Ads allow you to fill the funnel while also building warm audiences.

Our playbook:

We’ve used LinkedIn Event Ads to promote live LinkedIn Ads strategy workshops. As registrations come in, LinkedIn amplifies visibility through organic notifications. After the event, attendees automatically feed into warm retargeting pools for follow-up offers.

5. LinkedIn Document Ads

LinkedIn Document Ads are one of the most useful LinkedIn ad formats for turning your content into lead generation without forcing people off-platform. These ads let users access, preview, and download documents directly inside the LinkedIn feed.

Where Document Ads fit into the different types of LinkedIn ads:

They work great for SaaS companies or agencies that have high-value resources to share with their ICP. Instead of sending cold traffic to a landing page, you give prospects instant value inside LinkedIn itself.

Why we use them heavily:

  • Share educational content like guides, benchmarks, checklists, or reports.
  • Establish trust and thought leadership by providing real value upfront.
  • Use LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms to capture leads when someone wants the full download.
  • Build retargeting audiences based on who engaged with your document.

Our playbook:

We often run Document Ads offering our latest LinkedIn Ads playbooks or SaaS benchmarks. The user can preview a few pages inside the ad. If they want the full version, they submit the lead form without ever leaving LinkedIn.

6. LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads

LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads are one of the most powerful formats among the different types of LinkedIn ads you can run today. They let you sponsor personal posts from your team directly inside Campaign Manager and serve them to your exact target audience.

linkedin thought leader ad example 3

What sets Thought Leader Ads apart is their authenticity. They resemble regular personal posts rather than traditional ads, which helps convey your message more effectively.

thought leader ads example 1

What makes these LinkedIn ad formats different:

  • The ad shows up just like a regular post from the person’s profile.
  • They don’t feel like ads, which massively improves engagement.
  • You still control audience targeting, budget, and reporting inside the ad account.

Why we use them heavily:

  • These ads humanize your brand. People engage with other people way more than company pages.
  • You can position founders, sales leaders, or subject matter experts directly in front of your ICP.
  • Every like, comment, and share builds more social proof inside the feed.

Our playbook:

We run Thought Leader Ads to promote founder posts breaking down real strategies we use with clients. When prospects see your leadership team giving away value upfront, it builds trust long before they talk to sales.

More advanced plays here: LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads Strategies.

7. LinkedIn Article and Newsletter Ads

Article and LinkedIn Newsletter Ads allow you to promote your LinkedIn long-form content directly.

Why they’re useful:

  • Build newsletter subscribers inside LinkedIn
  • Push content to very targeted audiences
  • Great for nurturing cold traffic into warm audiences

Our playbook:

If you’re running founder-led content or a company newsletter, you can promote that content to your exact ICP and grow subscribers while staying 100% native to LinkedIn.

Sponsored Messaging

8. Click-to-Message Ads

LinkedIn Click-to-Message Ads are one of the newer formats. Instead of leading to a landing page, the ad opens a message thread directly inside LinkedIn when someone clicks the CTA.

Why we like them:

  • Lower friction than Message Ads
  • Higher open and engagement rates
  • Great for soft consults and demos

Example play:

We’ll run these mid-funnel:
“Have questions about LinkedIn Ads? Click here to message our team directly.”

9. LinkedIn Message Ads

LinkedIn message ads deliver one sponsored message directly into someone’s inbox. They are almost identical to conversation ads. The only difference between them is that the conversation ad has multiple choice buttons that you can have at the bottom, while the message ad is just a straight message.

When they work:

  • Warm audiences
  • ABM targeting
  • Event reminders or offers

Where people mess these up:

They spray too wide. Since you’re charged per send, targeting needs to be tight. We usually limit Message Ads to smaller warm lists that have previously engaged.

10. LinkedIn Conversation Ads

Another ad type I really like is LinkedIn conversation ads.

They send a message to the person’s inbox, and it looks like it’s coming from a personal LinkedIn account. They show up as a sponsored InMail, and it has a message, but then has multiple-choice options for the prospect to choose from, with each option either sending them to a URL or delivering a reply.

How they work:

  • Your ad shows up as a sponsored message inside the inbox
  • You include multiple CTA buttons that the user can pick from
  • Each option routes them to a URL or triggers a reply flow

Why we like them:

  • They’re interactive, not static
  • Prospects feel like they control the conversation
  • You can guide them naturally toward booking calls, watching demos, or downloading content

Our playbook for warm retargeting:

So it could be like, “Hey, First Name. I noticed you were checking out our website…did you have any questions?”, and then it could have three options, like “Take another look”, “watch a quick demo”, and “book a call”. And each of those buttons could either go to answer or send them to a website or a call booking link or something like that.

LinkedIn conversation ads need to be hyper-targeted because you’re charged per send. You should get super narrow on a very specific industry, company size, and even who within those companies you’re targeting, so that your message could be super personalized, like “Hey Jeff, I notice you’re the CMO of a software company here in Texas..”.

If you want to use these in the cold layer, I would also recommend leveraging some kind of intent data (e.g., they attended some conference). If you could get a conference list of everyone who attended a relevant conference, and you send out a cold email and said, “Hey, I noticed that you were ad world 2022. You know, I was there, and I really enjoyed it. I’d love to get your thoughts on …”. So using some very personal piece of information to stand out would be really good.

You can also use conversation ads in the retargeting phase, so after they visited your website you hit them with a conversation ad, but it’s specific to an industry. For example, our retargeting message would sound like “Hey, I noticed that you were checking out our website and you run a marketing agency. I wasn’t sure if you saw this, but we offer white label solutions. We’d be more than happy to talk more about x, y, and z”.

Budget warning:

This is a really cool type of ad, but they can be costly though. Because you pay per send, you can’t send a million of them, so you need to be much more targeted.

Lead Gen Forms

11. LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms

LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms are one of the highest-converting options across the different types of LinkedIn ads. Technically, they’re not a standalone format but an objective that can be layered into multiple LinkedIn ad formats like Single Image, Video, or Document Ads.

Why LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms crush landing pages:

  • Forms auto-populate with the user’s LinkedIn profile info
  • No need to redirect to an external landing page
  • Much lower friction, especially on mobile
  • Higher completion rates compared to most SaaS form pages

Our playbook:

We use Lead Gen Forms for top-of-funnel lead magnets like:

  • LinkedIn Ads Playbooks
  • SaaS Benchmarks Reports
  • Webinars and live trainings
  • Checklists and industry guides

The user previews the offer inside LinkedIn, clicks the CTA, and submits the form instantly without ever leaving the platform.

Where Lead Gen Forms fit into LinkedIn ad formats:

Among all the different types of LinkedIn ads, Lead Gen Forms give you the easiest path to collect names, emails, job titles, and companies directly inside LinkedIn without needing your website to do the heavy lifting.

Bonus guide: Lead Gen Form Best Practices Guide

Text and Dynamic Ads

12. LinkedIn Spotlight Ads

Another ad type that I really like right now is spotlight ads. LinkedIn Spotlight ads are one of the most underrated LinkedIn ad formats right now. They appear in the right-hand rail and dynamically personalize the ad using the viewer’s name and profile picture.

Why we like them:

  • They’re dirt cheap compared to in-feed ads. We often get 10 times more impressions for the same budget.
  • Hardly anyone uses them, so competition is low.
  • They grab attention because people naturally recognize their own name and face in the ad.

Our playbook:

We use Spotlight Ads for both webinars and long-form video promotion. Instead of pushing people straight into a sales pitch, we give them content first. For example:

  • “Hey [First Name], want to see how we scaled SaaS companies to $1M ARR? Watch this 3-minute video.”
  • “Learn exactly how our clients book LinkedIn calls without cold DMs. Free recorded webinar.”

Where they really shine:

You can send the click anywhere: a YouTube video, a prerecorded webinar, your blog, or even your demo page.

The CTA button is fully customizable. Instead of “Learn More,” you can write things like:

  • “Watch The Free Training”
  • “See The Full Case Study”
  • “Watch Now (3 Min)”

Why it works:

These ads let us educate instead of hard selling. When prospects are ready, we’re already on their radar. It’s authority positioning disguised as content promotion.

13. LinkedIn Follower Ads

A LinkedIn follower ad is used to encourage users to follow or visit your LinkedIn page. This is a little ad to the right of the home feed that has a couple of lines that you can customize. It’s a very short amount of text (like one sentence at the top) and it also pulls in the profile picture of the prospect.

So each person that’s viewing the ad sees a customized version of it, so if I’m viewing the ad, it might have my profile picture and say, “Hey, Justin” and have a quick message.

Unlike the LinkedIn spotlight ads which are totally customizable as far as what you want the call-to-action button to say and where you want the CTA to take them (you could put any URL that you want as the destination), LinkedIn follower ads provide a couple of default CTA options.

If the prospect is following you – then the CTA is going to say, “Visit company”, and if they’re not following you the CTA button will be “Follow”. Although you have less creative freedom when creating follower ads (compared to spotlight ads), the big thing that I’ve seen work really well is using emoticons to catch their attention.

One big mistake I’ve noticed is that most people are putting LinkedIn follower ads in front of prospects who have never been to their website and trying to get them to follow the company page. What I like to do is after they’ve already visited my website, I retarget those people with follower ads.

14. LinkedIn Text Ads

LinkedIn text ads are simple ads that have two different positions they can be placed in: at the top and on the right of the feed.

Here are a few main reasons to use this ad type:

  • LinkedIn Text ads are low-cost. Text ads are not going to get a ton of clicks just because a lot of times they go unnoticed, but they do a really good job of peppering someone’s feed and staying in front of the prospects for a really low cost.
  • The destination URL can be whatever you want. Depending on your goals and stage of the funnel, you can strategically use different destinations for the prospect. I like to funnel prospects over to our YouTube page and say something like “Learn how we booked 140 plus calls without using lead gen forms” sending them straight to that YouTube video.
  • You’re selling to people without them feeling like you’re selling to them. When I send prospects to a video about our LinkedIn retargeting strategy that really resonates with them, and it’s really something they think will work for them, they’ll hit us up and book a call.

Final Thoughts

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for LinkedIn Ads. The mix you run depends on your budget, offer, funnel stage, and target accounts. Start with what fits your current sales motion and layer in additional ad formats as you scale.

If you want help figuring out your LinkedIn ad mix, you know where to find us. Book a free strategy call and we’ll break down exactly what formats make sense for your funnel right now.