LinkedIn Carousel Ads

This guide is built from LinkedIn's Marketing Solutions Help, starting with its carousel ads overview and the pages linked in each section below. Campaign Manager's structure, Lead Gen Forms and conversion tracking are in our LinkedIn ads basics guide, and carousels on Facebook and Instagram are in our separate Meta carousel ads guide. LinkedIn's help pages call the level where you choose an objective, audience and budget an "ad set", so this guide does too.

What a LinkedIn carousel ad is

Carousel ads are a Sponsored Content format. LinkedIn's overview says they "display multiple images in succession in a single, carousel-style ad format" and can be "customized to have unique images, captions, and destination links" on desktop or mobile. Each card is one image with a headline under it, and people scroll sideways through the cards inside one ad.

A few limits from LinkedIn's carousel ads FAQs shape how you plan the campaign:

• Images only. Video is not available in carousel ads. LinkedIn's suggestion is to create a video ad set instead (see our LinkedIn video ads guide).
• One format per ad set. LinkedIn says "carousel ad sets only allow for carousel ads," so you can't mix carousels with single image or video ads in the same ad set.
• Off LinkedIn too. The LinkedIn Audience Network can be turned on for ad sets using single image, carousel, document or video ads, so a carousel can also run on partner apps and sites.

Objectives and Lead Gen Forms

The create carousel image ads page lists five objectives you can pick for a carousel ad set: brand awareness, website visits, engagement, website conversions and lead generation. Our LinkedIn ads objectives guide explains what each one optimizes for and shows which other formats they allow.

Lead generation is where carousels work differently from a plain link carousel:

• Carousels can link to landing pages or to a Lead Gen Form. Ads with a form "include a CTA (call-to-action) button in each image description"; standard carousels that link to landing pages don't have that button.
• Each card can go to a different destination URL, but with a Lead Gen Form "the CTA will link to the same Lead Gen Form for all carousel cards", as the carousel specs put it. You can't send each card to its own form.
• LinkedIn's best practices page suggests adding custom fields to that one form if you want to learn more about your leads.

How the forms themselves work, and how to get the leads out, is covered in the Lead Gen Forms section of our basics guide.

Carousel ad specs

These are the requirements on LinkedIn's Carousel Ads advertising specifications page:

Two points from the best practices page are worth noting. Carousel images are square, which "differs from standard Sponsored Content", and an image that isn't the recommended size may still run "with gray letterboxing around them." Ads that don't meet LinkedIn's advertising guidelines can be rejected; what happens then is in the ad review section of our basics guide.

Creating a carousel ad

To create a carousel ad you need super admin, content admin or Sponsored Content poster access on the LinkedIn Page the ad account uses, and creative manager access or higher on the ad account (our Campaign Manager roles guide explains these roles). Then, following LinkedIn's step-by-step page:

1. Create an ad set with one of the five objectives above, or open an existing carousel ad set.
2. On the Ads in this ad set page, click Create new ad(s).
3. Enter a name (it only appears in Campaign Manager), the introductory text and a destination URL. Tick the checkbox under the URL field if every card should go to the same page; you then can't add separate card URLs.
4. Upload an image to each card with the Upload icon. Crop lets you zoom, straighten or rotate the image by 90 degrees.
5. Use the Reorder icon on each card to change the order.
6. For a lead generation ad set, pick a call-to-action button and a form in Form details, either an existing Lead Gen Form or a new one.
7. Click Save ad, keep Add to ad set ticked, and launch the ad set when you are ready. Ads are reviewed before they run.

Instead of building a new ad, you can also browse existing content and reuse a carousel you made earlier. Only Page super admins and content admins can reply to, disable or delete comments as the Page on a carousel ad.

Editing after you save

LinkedIn's pages don't agree on this point, so check before you launch:

The create page is the most recently updated of the two (three months ago, against a year for the FAQs), and both the specs and create pages name the cards specifically. Treat the cards as fixed once saved: proofread every image, headline and URL in the preview first. If a card needs changing after launch, plan on making a new carousel ad rather than editing the old one.

How many cards, and in what order

LinkedIn's best practices page says to "Start with 3-5 cards (out of a possible 2-10)". Its longer carousel ad tips page calls 3-5 cards "the sweet spot for driving strong engagement" and suggests testing short and long versions:

• Short (3-5 cards): set the theme at the start and build on it card by card.
• Long (6+ cards): tell a fuller story or share more detail, such as snippets from recent research.

On order, the tips page notes that in the feed "the first card will be in full view, and the second card will be in partial view." Its advice is to try different images on the first two cards, mix the order of the rest, and move the best-performing cards to the front. If the carousel tells a story, it suggests putting the main value or call-to-action on the final card so people swipe to the end. Other points from the same page:

• Put a clear message and call-to-action in each card description.
• Package existing content with a similar theme, or break one large piece of content into cards.
• Test one variable at a time, so you know which change moved the results.
• Start targeting with location plus two other criteria, specific but not so narrow that the audience shrinks (more in our LinkedIn ads targeting guide).

Reporting on each card

In Campaign Manager, the Breakdown dropdown on the reporting dashboard has a Carousel option. LinkedIn's reporting page says it "allows you to view reporting for each card of your carousel image ad." That is how you see which cards people click and which they skip. The other breakdowns, column views and benchmarks are in our LinkedIn ads reporting guide.

The tips page also says that "Clicks and impressions by individual card are available in the downloadable reports for carousel ads." Those are the CSV reports you export from Campaign Manager. The same tips page still says in-platform card reporting "will be available in the coming months", which the Carousel breakdown has since covered.

LinkedIn matches metrics to the goal of the carousel:

Card clicks show interest, not results. To see the leads and other actions the carousel as a whole produces, LinkedIn points to its conversion tracking, set up with the Insight Tag or Conversions API (see the tracking section of our basics guide).

Carousel, single image or document ad

Each LinkedIn image format has different limits, and the choice usually comes down to how many separate messages or links you have:

• Single image ad: one image and one link. Per LinkedIn's single image specs it allows landscape (1.91:1), square (1:1) and vertical (4:5) images up to 5 MB and introductory text up to 3,000 characters, against the carousel's square cards, 10 MB per card and 255 characters.
• Carousel ad: 2 to 10 images, each with its own headline and, outside lead generation, its own link. It suits several products, services, steps or stories in one ad.
• Document ad: a PDF or other document people read page by page in the feed, optionally gated with a Lead Gen Form. If what you have is a PDF that people page through, this is the format to use; see our LinkedIn document ads guide.

If you also run carousels on Meta, note that the specs, text limits and card-order options differ; those are in our Facebook and Instagram carousel guide.

How we build LinkedIn carousels

This is our own practice, not LinkedIn's guidance:

• We write the card list first (one message per card, the strongest one first) and only then brief the design, so every card earns its place.
• We export all cards at 1080 x 1080 px and check the headlines in the preview on a phone, since the cards are small in the feed.
• Because cards can't be relied on to be editable after saving, we get the client's sign-off on a full preview before we save the ad.
• To test card order or count, we make a second carousel ad in the same ad set and change one thing.
• We check the Carousel breakdown after the ad has had time to gather impressions, and report card clicks next to the conversions the ad drove.

If you want help planning LinkedIn campaigns, see our services.

Frequently asked questions

How many cards can a LinkedIn carousel ad have?

Between 2 and 10. LinkedIn suggests starting with 3 to 5 cards and testing whether more cards work for your audience.

What image size do LinkedIn carousel cards use?

LinkedIn recommends 1080 x 1080 pixels at a 1:1 ratio, up to 10 MB per card, as JPG, PNG or non-animated GIF. The images are scaled to 312 x 312 pixels in the ad.

Can I put videos in a LinkedIn carousel ad?

No. LinkedIn carousel ads only take images. For video, create a separate video ad set.

Can each carousel card go to a different Lead Gen Form?

No. Cards can link to different web pages, but with a Lead Gen Form every card opens the same form. You can add custom fields to that form.

Can I see results for each card of a LinkedIn carousel?

Yes. Choose the Carousel option in the Breakdown dropdown in Campaign Manager to see reporting for each card, or export a CSV report with clicks and impressions by card.

For more on LinkedIn advertising, see our guides to LinkedIn document ads, LinkedIn video ads, LinkedIn event ads and LinkedIn ads bidding.