New LinkedIn Ads Features, 2026
LinkedIn has rolled out several new features over the past year, and we’ve been putting them through their paces. After six months of testing and tweaking, here’s what we’ve discovered works, what doesn’t, and the small details that make a surprising difference.
Ad personalisation: It needs to be obvious
LinkedIn’s personalisation feature has some great applications and offers new ways to standout on the feed. We’ve seen doubling or tripling in engagement rates in some cases! But it requires a more explicit approach than you might expect.
Particularly in a more traditional B2B industry, we received a few enquiries from confused prospects who didn’t realise the content they were seeing was personalised, and assumed we were using their business name in our ads. Dropping in a company name isn’t enough to signal to the reader that the ad was personalised.
Our solution is now to ensure the personalisation is overt: address people in the first person using their own name, followed by their company name, then move into the problem-solution framework and close with a clear call to action. The recipient needs to immediately understand they’re seeing personalised content.
Personalisation is only available under certain campaign objectives. When setting up personalised ads, click the ‘personalise’ button beneath your copy. You’ll need two versions prepared: your original copy and the personalised variant.
The ‘partnerships’ tab: A promising concept, but limited in execution
The Partnerships feature shows a dashboard view where you can easily see when LinkedIn users have mentioned your page. It sounds useful in theory, but in practice, we haven’t found it that helpful.
Be aware that it only captures posts where your page has been explicitly tagged, not casual mentions without the tag. This makes it unsuitable as a brand monitoring tool. Secondly, it only works for your main company page, not sub-brand pages, which fragments the view for organisations managing multiple brand pages and ad accounts.
So far, we haven’t found the partnerships area particularly helpful for our workflow. When promoting thought leadership content from employee profiles, we can already track that visibility through the advertising dashboard. The Partnerships feature hasn’t added much beyond what we could already see. But if it’s developed further we can see the potential for more robust brand monitoring in-platform!
The ‘testing’ tab: Run multiple creative types in an ad campaign
One straightforward improvement: LinkedIn now allows you to run campaigns with multiple creative formats within the same campaign structure. This makes A/B testing considerably more efficient and gives you cleaner data comparison within a single campaign view rather than juggling separate campaigns for each creative type. However, ‘Testing’ is tucked away from your main ad account. It’d be great if LinkedIn just made different creative types available in LinkedIn Campaign Manager, rather than having to do a separate campaign for videos, a separate campaign for images, documents, etc.
Personalisation has been the standout winner, provided you make it unmistakably clear. The Partnerships feature feels half-finished and needs broader functionality to become genuinely useful. And the ability to test multiple creative types in one campaign is a small but meaningful improvement. Bring it to Campaign Manager already :)
As always with platform features, the key is testing thoroughly within your own context rather than assuming any tool will work as advertised straight out of the box. Any questions let us know at hello@cusp.co.nz