Social Media Advertising Meta and Linkedin Ads

Plan, build, test and optimise modern paid campaigns across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
What you'll learn

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Evaluate how paid social, organic media, AI and platform automation contribute to modern marketing campaigns.
Select appropriate platforms and campaign objectives based on the audience, business goal and desired response.
Design focused A/B tests for messages, creative, formats, audiences and campaign destinations.
Create a structured campaign plan covering objectives, audiences, messages, budgets, creative, destinations and measurement.
Structure campaigns across Meta and LinkedIn using the correct campaign, ad set or ad group, and advert hierarchy.
Select suitable targeting, budgets, schedules, placements and advertising formats for different campaign scenarios.
Design focused creative tests comparing messages, formats, audiences, destinations and advertising approaches.
Build a measurement framework connecting business objectives, campaign goals, KPIs, targets and relevant metrics.
Analyse platform, website, CRM and campaign data to identify insights and recommend practical optimisations.
Requirements

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No previous paid social advertising experience is required.
A basic familiarity with social media or marketing will be helpful.
Access to Meta Ads Manager or LinkedIn Campaign Manager is useful but not essential.
No advertising budget is required to complete the course.
Description

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Social media advertising has become easier to access-but considerably harder to manage well.
Meta, LinkedIn and other platforms now automate more decisions through algorithms, AI-assisted optimisation and platform learning. Advertisers can launch campaigns quickly, but selecting the wrong objective, targeting the wrong audience, spreading a limited budget too widely or measuring the wrong result can still waste money.
This Social Media Advertising Masterclass gives you a structured framework for planning, building, measuring and improving paid social campaigns.
Rather than concentrating only on where to click inside an advertising platform, the course develops the decision-making skills you need to create campaigns with a clear purpose. You will learn how objectives, audiences, platforms, budgets, creative, landing pages and measurement work together-and why a weakness in one part of the campaign can affect everything else.
The course focuses particularly on advertising across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn while also examining the roles played by TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, X, Snapchat, Messenger and WhatsApp.
Understand the modern paid social landscape
Social media advertising has changed significantly.
Algorithms increasingly reward relevance and behavioural signals rather than follower numbers alone. AI and automation now influence campaign delivery, audience expansion, placement and optimisation. Short-form video has become more important, social platforms increasingly support product discovery and research, and audiences are becoming more sensitive to repetitive or low-quality AI-generated content.
You will examine what these changes mean for advertisers and why human judgement remains essential even when platforms automate more of the campaign workflow.
The course explains the relationship between organic and paid social media and shows how paid, owned and earned media can work together. You will consider when paid social is appropriate, what it can achieve and where its limitations lie.
You will also evaluate the advantages and risks of social advertising, including immediate reach, audience targeting, retargeting and measurable responses, alongside concerns such as wasted expenditure, irrelevant audiences, ad fatigue and weak campaign oversight.
Choose platforms according to their purpose
Different social platforms perform different jobs.
Facebook and Instagram provide broad reach across multiple campaign objectives and placements. TikTok and Instagram are particularly important for discovery, creators and short-form video. LinkedIn offers professional targeting and can support B2B lead generation, events and thought leadership. YouTube combines video discovery, education, and remarketing, while Pinterest, X, Snapchat, Messenger, and WhatsApp can better support more specific audience behaviors and campaign needs.
You will learn how to evaluate platform roles rather than selecting a channel simply because it is popular or because competitors use it.
The right platform depends on the audience you need to reach, the action you want to generate, the creative idea and the budget available.
Plan before you spend
A paid social campaign is not just an advert. It is a connected chain of decisions.
The course introduces a practical planning framework built around seven questions
What do you want to achieve?
Who do you need to reach?
Why should the audience care?
Where should you reach them?
What can you realistically spend?
What will the audience see?
How will you measure success?
You will explore the differences between awareness, traffic, engagement, lead-generation, sales and app-promotion objectives. You will also see how the objective selected instructs the advertising platform to prioritise particular behaviours.
If you ask a platform to find clicks, it may find people who click-but not necessarily people who become customers. Selecting the appropriate objective is therefore one of the most important decisions you make.
Structure Meta advertising campaigns
The second part of the course moves from planning into campaign construction.
You will learn how Meta campaigns are structured across the campaign, ad set and advert levels and what each layer controls.
This includes decisions relating to
Campaign objectives
Broad and defined audiences
Warm audiences and retargeting
Customer lists and first-party data
Audience expansion and platform learning
Daily and lifetime budgets
Campaign schedules
Advantage+ and manual placements
Facebook and Instagram feeds
Stories and Reels
Images, video and carousel formats
Calls to action and campaign destinations
The course does not treat automation as a substitute for strategy. You will see where Meta's automated delivery can provide flexibility and where creative suitability, tracking and human review remain necessary.
Structure LinkedIn advertising campaigns
You will also examine the structure and purpose of LinkedIn advertising.
LinkedIn can be more expensive than other social advertising platforms, but it offers access to professional targeting signals such as job function, seniority, industry, company size, skills and professional interests.
You will learn how to structure LinkedIn campaigns and evaluate advertising formats including single-image adverts, document adverts and Lead Gen Forms.
A practical B2B webinar example demonstrates how objectives, professional audiences, budgets, placements, formats, lead-generation routes and measurement criteria connect within one campaign.
The course compares this approach with other scenarios, including a local gym membership campaign and an online professional course. These examples illustrate why different commercial situations require different platforms, objectives and campaign structures.
Avoid common campaign setup mistakes
Many paid social campaigns underperform because of avoidable setup problems.
You will learn how to recognise mistakes such as
Choosing traffic when the real requirement is leads or sales
Targeting an audience too narrowly
Dividing a small budget across too many variables
Using one creative asset across every placement
Ignoring the landing page or lead form
Selecting metrics that do not match the objective
Judging campaign performance too early
Launching without consistent campaign naming or tracking
You will work with a campaign checklist covering objectives, audiences, budgets, schedules, placements, creative, destinations, tracking, measurement and follow-up responsibilities.
Connect creative with measurement
Strong campaign performance depends on the relationship between creative, delivery and measurement.
Advertising platforms may provide increasing levels of automation, but they still require strong inputs. Creative gives the platform signals about who responds, the objective identifies the result to prioritise, and measurement helps determine what to retain, change or stop.
You will learn how to design focused tests around meaningful variables, including
Problem-led versus benefit-led messages
Human video versus product imagery
Images, video, carousels and document adverts
Broad audiences versus retargeting
Lead forms versus landing pages
The course explains the difference between A/B testing and multivariate testing and why simple, controlled tests are often more appropriate than changing several small elements simultaneously.
Measure what matters
Platform dashboards contain useful data, but they rarely provide the complete picture.
You will learn to distinguish between data, reporting, measurement and insight. You will also examine how social platform analytics, website analytics, CRM and sales data, social monitoring and human feedback contribute different parts of the performance story.
The course connects business objectives, marketing objectives and campaign objectives with suitable goals, KPIs, targets and audience segments.
You will evaluate four broad categories of paid social metrics
Exposure: reach, impressions, frequency and visibility
Engagement: clicks, reactions, comments, shares, saves and video views
Action: leads, registrations, purchases, conversion rates, CPA and ROAS
Influence: recall, sentiment, customer satisfaction and share of voice
This prevents an awareness campaign from being judged only by immediate sales or a lead-generation campaign from being celebrated simply because it received likes.
Turn campaign results into improvements
Measurement should lead to better decisions, not simply produce another report.
You will learn how to create a practical measurement framework and insights dashboard, and how to conduct a post-campaign analysis.
A useful post-campaign analysis reviews objectives and KPIs, analyses results, highlights the principal findings and recommends what should happen next. It can also bring stakeholders together around a common view of campaign performance.
The course introduces incremental testing and Meta Brand Lift studies to explain why attributed conversions do not always represent sales caused directly by advertising.
You will finish by considering how to create an ongoing test-and-learn process that turns campaign evidence into practical improvements across messages, creative, formats, audiences and destinations.
Learn from an experienced marketing practitioner
The course is led by Gavin Llewellyn, a Chartered Marketer with more than 20 years of experience across B2B and B2C organisations, agencies and client-side roles.
His experience includes work across financial services, FMCG, retail, higher education and software technology, with organisations ranging from smaller businesses to internationally recognised brands including Pizza Hut, Nationwide Building Society, PepsiCo International and Volvo.
The course combines this professional perspective with structured frameworks, campaign examples and practical checks developed to help you make more informed advertising decisions.
By completing the masterclass, you will be better prepared to plan campaigns before committing budget, structure activity across Meta and LinkedIn, evaluate creative and targeting decisions, select meaningful performance measures and use campaign evidence to improve what you do next.
Who this course is for

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Marketing professionals who need to plan, manage or evaluate paid social campaigns.
Social media managers moving from organic content into paid advertising.
Small-business owners who want to make better advertising decisions and avoid wasting budget.
Marketing consultants and freelancers responsible for Meta or LinkedIn campaigns.
Junior and mid-level marketers seeking a structured approach to campaign building, testing and measurement.
Homepage

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