LinkedIn Conversation Ads: Choose-Your-Path Messages

This guide uses LinkedIn's Marketing Solutions Help: Conversation ads, Create conversation ads in Campaign Manager, Conversation ads advertising specifications, Difference between message ads and conversation ads, Sponsored Messaging ads, Sender permission requests for Sponsored Messaging, Sponsored Messaging sender permission requests FAQs, LinkedIn Sponsored Messaging in the European Economic Area and Switzerland, Macros available to personalize Sponsored Messaging ads, View the conversation ad flowchart, How to preview and test a Sponsored Messaging ad and Replace a message ad campaign with a conversation ad campaign. Checked on 8 November 2026. LinkedIn changes these pages often, so check them before you rely on a detail.

What a conversation ad is

LinkedIn describes conversation ads as a way "to start a conversation with professionals and business decision-makers through LinkedIn Messaging on both desktop and mobile devices." They are "a form of native advertising displayed to members through LinkedIn Messaging based on the target audience you create."

The difference from a normal ad is the branching. You write an intro message and give it buttons. Each button either opens a web page, opens a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form, or shows the next message. LinkedIn calls the result "a message decision tree you create", so one ad can answer several kinds of reader: someone who wants pricing, someone who wants a case study, someone who wants to talk to sales.

Campaign groups, targeting, budgets, bidding and the Insight Tag work as for other LinkedIn ads; our LinkedIn ads guide covers them. This guide only covers what is specific to conversation ads.

Conversation ads vs message ads

Both are Sponsored Messaging formats. LinkedIn says they "are displayed on desktop and mobile devices and only when members are active on LinkedIn." The main difference, in LinkedIn's words: "With message ads, you can display a targeted message with a single call-to-action button." Conversation ads allow "multiple call-to-action buttons that link to your landing pages, open a Lead Gen Form, or drive engagement with more information in the next message."

LinkedIn's own advice is short: "We recommend you test both ad formats to compare performance." If you already run a message ad, LinkedIn has a manual three-stage process to switch: duplicate the message ad set to keep its audience, create and launch the conversation ad set, and only then pause the old message ad set. It works one ad set at a time, and the budget, bid and account assets such as Matched Audiences are not carried over automatically.

Objectives and pricing

LinkedIn's conversation ads page says they "are charged by cost per send (CPS) and are available under five objectives": brand awareness, website visits, engagement, lead generation and website conversions. The Sponsored Messaging page lists the same five. The step-by-step creation page lists only four in its ad set step (engagement is missing), so if you need engagement, check that Campaign Manager offers it for your account.

Two objectives add a rule for the buttons:

• Website visits: "you must have at least one CTA button leading to a landing page."
• Lead generation: "one of your CTA buttons must click to open a Lead Gen Form. Only one Lead Gen Form can be linked per ad creative."

The creation page adds a general rule: "At least one of your CTA buttons must send customers to your website." LinkedIn's help pages don't give a fixed price per send; you set the bid and budget in Campaign Manager.

Who the message comes from

Every conversation ad has a sender, shown in the inbox with a Sponsored label. LinkedIn notes that ads "might appear to be sent from a company or a LinkedIn member's profile". Members "will be able to click on the sender's name to see information about the company who paid for the ad and partnered with the sender."

Most advertisers use a person, for example a founder or sales lead. The rules for adding one:

• Only users with account manager access on the ad account can send sender permission requests. If a Business Manager account owns the ad account, a Business Manager admin with at least account manager access can request sender approval.
• "Requests can only be sent to your 1st-degree connections." They go to the member's primary email address, which must be verified.
• A member gets one request per ad account. Once the request is sent, the sender gets viewer access to the ad set and account and can see the creatives they send.
• To use a company's brand or name as the sender, LinkedIn says to contact its customer support team.
• A sent request can't be cancelled, but a sender can be removed from the account.

Plan for the sender leaving. If an approved sender later rejects the permission or is removed from the account, "any Sponsored Messaging ads where they are the designated sender are canceled. This action cannot be reversed." Canceled ads can't be accessed or duplicated. You can change the sender on an ad before that happens; the change applies only to messages sent afterwards. Senders without a public profile photo show a default silhouette.

Buttons, paths and the Not Interested button

Each button has text of up to 25 characters and an action: send the reader to a destination URL, open a Lead Gen Form, or show the next message, which can have its own buttons. You can have five buttons per message and 50 in the whole conversation.

One of the five on the intro message is always taken: "The Not Interested CTA button is required and automatically added to the intro message of a new conversation ad or when you edit or duplicate an existing conversation ad." If an older ad already has five buttons, Campaign Manager asks you to remove one. When a reader clicks Not Interested they can delete or archive the ad, and "LinkedIn will also minimize the amount of times a member sees an ad from that ad set." So you really have four buttons of your own on the first message.

LinkedIn is also rolling out a persistent button: the first button of the latest message stays visible at the bottom of the screen as the reader scrolls. It says "you might not have access to it at this time" and that it "isn't available for iOS." Put the button you care about most first.

Lead Gen Forms inside the conversation

With the lead generation objective you pick an existing Lead Gen Form, or create one, in the ad's basic info step, then point a button at it. As with other LinkedIn lead ads, the form opens pre-filled with the reader's LinkedIn profile data. Remember the limit of one form per ad: if you want two different offers, use two ads or send the second path to a page on your site. How forms are built, and where the leads go, is covered in our LinkedIn ads guide; following up quickly once a lead arrives is in our B2B website lead generation guide.

Specifications

From LinkedIn's specifications page:

LinkedIn shows a recommendation once a message passes 500 characters, "as fewer characters can drive higher engagement." For tracking parameters, it warns not to use quotation marks, and that characters such as < > # % { } [ ] in the query string can cause errors; encode the part after the question mark if the URL fails. Our UTM tracking links guide covers naming those parameters.

Personalization macros are available in the subject and messages: %FIRSTNAME%, %LASTNAME%, %COMPANYNAME%, %JOBTITLE% and %INDUSTRY%. They fall back to generic text when a member has turned off ad personalization or, for the company name, has no current job: "LinkedIn Member", "your company", "professional" and "industry". Read your copy with the fallback words in place before you launch; "Hi LinkedIn Member" is what some readers will see.

Delivery, archiving and the EU, EEA and Switzerland

LinkedIn limits how often anyone receives these ads: "we strictly control the number of times a member can receive Sponsored Messaging within a given time period," so "it's unlikely the same member will receive your ad twice within a short period of time."

Old messages are moved out of the way. The conversation ads page says they move to the reader's Archived Messages folder "between 20 and 40 days after receiving the message"; the Sponsored Messaging page says a previous Sponsored Message is archived when the member receives a new one, and that Sponsored Messages "are automatically deleted six months after delivery." Campaign reporting isn't affected either way.

Language targeting works differently from feed ads: "When you target English in a Sponsored Messaging ad set, ads are only shown to members whose profile language is set to English." To reach English and local-language speakers in one country, LinkedIn suggests separate ad sets per language.

In Europe, LinkedIn asks members in the EEA and Switzerland to choose between Sponsored Messaging ads in the inbox and banner ads above it. LinkedIn supports targeting these regions, but "Only EEA and Switzerland members who opted in to see Sponsored Messaging ads in their LinkedIn inbox will receive these ads." Members can change this under Settings, Data Privacy, Messaging experience, Inbox layout with ads. If your audience is mostly European, the reachable audience will be smaller than the targeting estimate suggests. LinkedIn also reminds advertisers that they "need to comply with applicable law at all times."

Creating and testing one

To create a conversation ad you need super admin, content admin or sponsored content poster access on the ad account's Page, and creative manager access or higher on the ad account. The steps in Campaign Manager:

1. Create an ad set with a supported objective and choose Conversation ad as the format. The objective and format can't be changed once saved.
2. Click Create new ad and fill in Basic Info: ad name, sender, optional banner and footer, and the Lead Gen Form if the objective is lead generation.
3. Pick a template that fits the goal, or a blank one.
4. Write the optional subject and the intro message, add macros or an image if you want, then add buttons with their actions and responses. "Draft with AI" is offered for subjects and messages; LinkedIn says English must be the ad set language to use it.
5. Use View Flowchart in the preview to check every path, click Create, and change the ad's status from Draft to Active.
6. Launch the ad set. Ads go through review before they run.

Before launch, send yourself a test from the ad's More menu (Send test message). The View option lets you click through the buttons in Campaign Manager, but it doesn't show the banner and doesn't open destination URLs, so the real test message is the better check. Edits to a live ad apply only to messages not yet delivered and go through review again; LinkedIn says it usually reviews within 24 hours.

The flowchart and reporting

The flowchart shows the clicks each button received, so you can see which paths readers take and where they stop. Open it from the Ads tab: select the ad and click Flowchart. One catch from LinkedIn: "If you edit a conversation ad, the flowchart only displays clicks from the most recent version of the ad." Other reports and exports include clicks from all versions, so the numbers won't match after an edit.

Clicks to your site should still be measured on your site. Add UTM parameters to each destination URL so each path shows separately in your analytics, and use the Insight Tag for conversions.

Planning a good conversation

These are our suggestions, not LinkedIn rules:

• Draw the tree first. On paper: one intro, three or four buttons, no more than two levels deep. Every path should end at a page, a form or a clear next step.
• Write like a person, from a person. The sender's name and photo are the first thing readers judge. Keep the intro short and say why you are writing to this audience.
• Make the buttons honest. "See pricing" should lead to pricing. A button that leads somewhere else wastes the click and the trust.
• Give each path its own landing page or UTM tag, so the flowchart clicks can be matched with what happened on your site.
• Have a second sender ready so a departure doesn't cancel your only ad.
• Compare with a message ad on the same audience before deciding the extra writing is worth it.

If you also want people to see a team member's own posts in the feed, see our guide to LinkedIn thought leader ads.

FAQ

How are conversation ads different from message ads?

A message ad has one call-to-action button. A conversation ad can have up to five buttons per message, each leading to a web page, a Lead Gen Form or a follow-up message, with up to 50 buttons in the whole conversation.

Can I remove the Not Interested button?

No. LinkedIn adds it automatically to the intro message of new, edited and duplicated conversation ads, and it counts as one of the five buttons.

Can the message come from our company instead of a person?

LinkedIn says to contact its customer support team to use a company's brand or name as the sender. Otherwise the sender is a member who is a 1st-degree connection of the person sending the request and has approved it.

Can we send conversation ads to people in the EU?

Yes, LinkedIn supports targeting in the EEA and Switzerland, but only members there who opted in to Sponsored Messaging ads in their inbox receive them.

How are conversation ads charged?

By cost per send (CPS), like all Sponsored Messaging ads. LinkedIn's help pages don't give a fixed price; you set the bid and budget in Campaign Manager.

A message that gets clicked still needs a page that turns the click into an enquiry. We build those sites as part of our website development work. See all our services, or browse more guides.