LinkedIn Ads Show

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On this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show, we're talking about the biggest oversight that LinkedIn made on their ad platform, the feature that is constantly requested.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn ads fanatics, whether you call it dayparting or ad scheduling, one of the most requested features that I've heard for LinkedIn ads is the ability to turn ads on and off at certain times of the day, or certain days of the week, or certain times of the week. I've personally asked LinkedIn for this at every chance I've gotten. And so far that request has fallen on deaf ears. Today, we're doing another deep dive. And we're talking about why dayparting is important, and how to analyze your traffic patterns during the day. In the news, by the time you hear this episode, I'll be on an Alaskan cruise. Now, I love cruises. But every time I've gone, it's been to somewhere warm with beaches. Well, it's no surprise, I'm a ginger, which means I'm naturally allergic to the sun. Seems like Alaska will be the perfect trip for my fair skin. This will be my first vacation since the beginning of COVID. And I'm excited to finally unplug. And I'm hopefully going to be back here in a couple weeks with a brand new action packed episode, and coming from a clear and rested brain. Alright, enough about me, let's go ahead and hit it.

Alright, so what is dayparting or what is ad scheduling? This is simply the act of being able to turn your ads on and off during certain times. And of course, all of the major ad platforms have this. LinkedIn seems to be the only one who hasn't developed this feature. Facebook has it, Google has it, Microsoft ads, and probably honestly, everyone else. The reason why I call this LinkedIn biggest miss is that if you look at all the other platforms out there, traffic patterns are very undefined. But here you have LinkedIn, where people tend to use it on a normal schedule that you can predict because of business hours. We've had so many clients request, hey, we don't have a sales team in on Saturday on Sunday so we don't want to drive leads on those days, but let's keep running every other time. Or maybe you just only want to run during business hours. Or maybe you only want to run on weekends. Because LinkedIn traffic patterns are so predictable. It makes it really important to be able to define your traffic by what time of day and what day of the week, they're on the platform. So LinkedIn really is perfect for day parting, yet it hasn't ever developed it. An analysis that you can definitely do is go into campaign manager and export as much of your data as you can by day. And then what you can do is add in a new column in Excel for day of the week, then you can use an Excel formula based off of the date to figure out which day of the week it is, then with one pivot table, you're aggregating all of your ad performance data to find out which days of the week work best for you. I'm obviously breezing through this. This isn't a class on Excel. But we've done quite a bit of this and what we found is that, obviously, the weekends usually have less desktop traffic, a lot more mobile. So surprise, surprise, if you're advertising using text ads or dynamic ads, you're probably not going to see much action on the weekends as opposed to sponsored content and sponsored messaging, you'll probably see a lot more traffic on the weekends than the other ad formats. We generally find that Tuesday is the best day. It's the one with the most impressions, the most click volume. But we recently had a client where Tuesday was constantly the worst day. So don't always count on that. Monday and Wednesday usually are pretty top too, it's like, Tuesday is number one and then Monday and Wednesday are two and three. We consistently find that holidays don't perform very well. So if you're looking for a way to save your budget, it might be a good idea to pause on holidays. If you're going to do this analysis and start looking at your campaign performance by the day of the week, you'll probably want to compare things like your click through rate or your engagement rate. You'll probably want to look and see which days spend the most. Which ones have the highest cost per click or the highest cost per lead. And if you're not amazing in Excel, go grab one of your colleagues or coworkers who is and show them this segment. They'll know exactly what to do. All right, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into hourly analysis.

4:38 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com the LinkedIn Ads experts.

If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads so far, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale We are, of course, official LinkedIn partners and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com. We'd love to chat with you about your campaigns.

All right, let's jump into an hourly analysis. So what's so interesting about the platform is LinkedIn does not give us hourly reporting, which means you might figure that certain hours of the day are less helpful to advertise during as others. And this is definitely true. So we've spent a lot of time on these analyses, and will tell you, it's a lot harder to get access to. If you really, really want to follow us on this, you can do this analysis, but fair warning, it's going to suck. It's not a fun process. What you have to do is log into your campaign manager account, every single hour on the hour and make note of all the stats. The number of impressions, the amount of spend, the number of clicks, number of leads, etc. And then every hour during the day that you get data, you subtract it from the data from the hour before leaving you with just the amount of data that was generated during that last hour. You're going to want to continue this for ideally, at least a week, like I said, it's totally going to suck. You're gonna have to get people from around the globe all helping you to do this. And then of course, you will have to adjust for some errors. Every so often, you'll log into campaign manager and the stats will have changed and you might find that during a certain hour, you see a negative value for number of impressions or amount of spend, that's hard to deal with. As a shameless plug, I will mention that if you don't want to do this, yourself, the clients that we work with, we do this analysis for them. Now, if you are going to do this yourself, I've got three suggestions for you. First of all, don't bid too high because that could cause you to run out of your budget before the whole day is complete. Let's say your budget ran out by 4pm, you'll notice a lot of zeros after 4pm that day until it resets for the day. On that same note, don't budget too low. You need to make sure that you have enough budget for the whole day. So again, you don't run out and have your ad stopped partially through the day. This analysis is much much better if you have high budgets and high bids because what that's going to give you is not just a limited amount of like the number of impressions by hour that your audience sees, but if you're bidding high enough or aggressively enough, that impression, volume by hour will show you what the traffic pattern of your ideal prospects looks like. And that can be really powerful. You might find that, wow, my audience starts to wake up around 6am. And it looks like they go into the office around 8am or start working around then you can see little bumps along the way. When we're doing this analysis, we're looking for things like which hours of the day have higher volume, or are less expensive, or have higher conversion rates. You want to take into account what your costs per click are during the day, or your cost per lead or conversion rates. And be aware, if you're analyzing your cost per lead and your conversion rates, you have to be using LinkedIn lead gen forms. You can't count on LinkedIn conversion tracking off of your website to allow you to do this because there is a significant delay that could land in the next hour or multiple hours later. So it's a lot better if you're using the lead gen forms. But look for the volume of clicks by hour. Look for your volume of impressions that tells you like when people are most active on the platform during the day, which days and which hours. And of course, look at your click through rates to see when people are paying the most attention. If you tell your LinkedIn rep that you're doing an analysis like this, a fair warning you will hear them say that when you pause a campaign, it resets your relevancy score. Well, this is absolutely not true from our experience. I say pause away. You have to ask yourself, why would LinkedIn be telling me this? Well, it's because they want your money. If you ever pause your account, less money is probably going to them. But let's dive in a little bit. Why would your relevancy score get reset if you paused? Well, I could see LinkedIn saying that if you pause an ad or a campaign for too long, then enough time has passed that maybe it's no longer timely to them. So they've got to reset the relevancy score to allow you to have your ad prove itself again. I've heard some reps suggest that maybe if you pause for two weeks at a time, maybe it resets it. But I would say it's really, really similar to launching a new ad where that campaign itself, if it has a high relevancy score, then the ad that you launched within it, whether it's an existing ad that's been unpaused after two weeks or something, or if it's a brand new ad, it's still gonna borrow from the relevancy score of the campaign. And so if your relevancy score is still strong, that ad should still be able to pick up fast and be good to go. So even if our relevancy score resets, I'm not too worried about it. But of course, if you have heard or experienced differently, please let me know. This is just from our experience. But I will say that we have done a lot of ad scheduling and day parting on the platform and we haven't noticed any deleterious effects from it. But if your experience is different, we would absolutely love to know. So make sure to email us at [email protected]. And let us know what you've seen. Once you've done this analysis, and you find out what times of day or what days of the week work better for you, it's time to actually try this out. You can either do this manually or with a third party tool that can pause and unpause your LinkedIn campaigns for you. But do make sure that you've done this analysis before you start day parting your campaigns. Because we don't want you to go in with the assumption that weekends or after hours are bad, you really need to run ads during those times, and then sample and actually do the analysis to prove it. Because if you are just randomly pausing or and pausing your account where you think, your results may not be what you're trying to go for. And of course, it goes without saying probably, but when you're thinking about what times do you pause, it probably makes sense to pause during those times where performance is lowest. I mentioned this is something we've asked LinkedIn a lot for, and they've never given it to us. So what we did is we actually built our own internal proprietary tool to do this day parting for us. And by doing it, we've seen some pretty extreme successes of being able to analyze and show ads only during specific times. If this is something you want help with, like I said, clients of B2Linked, we do this analysis for you so you don't have to do it yourself. So I realize this is a bit of a shameless plug, but we'd love to help you with this analysis and research and help you perform better. Plus day parting is not the only set of tools we've created. We've created the ability to create and edit both campaigns and ads in bulk. So when you work with us, we're able to move faster than anyone else can. If something's not working well, we can pivot quickly. And of course, we can launch faster to take more advantage of opportunities. I hope that I've provided enough value to all of you so that you don't mind a shameless plug every now and then. So I'll leave it there at that. Alright, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up so stick around.

12:29 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

Okay, resources for the episode. If you or someone you know is trying to learn LinkedIn Ads, check out the link down below in the show notes to the LinkedIn Learning course that I did on LinkedIn Ads. It's by far the most comprehensive and inexpensive course out there. And if I do say so myself being the author, it is really good. So definitely check that out. Also, on whatever podcast player you're listening to hit that subscribe button. And also please do rate us. And if you would be so kind, leave us a review as well. The reviews really, really help. You'd be doing me a giant favor. With any suggestions, questions feedback on the show, email us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Announcement about the left-hand navigation being reverted

Offers Epsiode

Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses 

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

LinkedIn Sponsored Messaging, Message Ads, Sponsored InMail, Conversation Ads. These are the ad formats on LinkedIn that are most confusing, and also intriguing to advertisers. I'm about to demystify them on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. For years, I've been getting questions about the sponsored messaging ad formats on LinkedIn. And honestly, I've been waiting a long time to do this episode, I was waiting until I found a whole bunch of success with these ad formats. And honestly, I've been really disappointed. I was hoping to find a formula for what always works. But I've collected all of the opportunities for success that I've been able to find on this episode. And I'm excited to finally share them with you. First off in the news, LinkedIn has a little message across the top of every account that says we've temporarily changed the design of our navigation menu, learn more. You can click there to see the note in the Help section of LinkedIn, or just look in the show notes down below, I've linked to it there. And what they've explained is they've reverted the new left hand navigation experience that was released just in the last handful of weeks. And it's been temporarily reverted back to the old top navigation experience. I reached out to a contact at LinkedIn and I got the inside scoop. It turns out, they didn't revert it because of any bugginess or anything like that. It was actually the second order effects of it. They noticed that the new experience adversely affected advertiser behavior on the platform. I won't go any deeper into that. But just I expect that after they make some minor adjustments or improvements, we'll get it back, there wasn't a problem with the navigation experience itself. It's more about what us advertisers did after getting that navigation experience. Alright, with that, let's jump into the actual content. Let's hit it.

So first off, you need to understand what the different ad formats on LinkedIn are. It's the whole class of ad formats that are pushed right to your messaging box. Rather than being seen somewhere else on LinkedIn. These are called Sponsored Messaging. And there are two different kinds of ad formats that fit underneath that umbrella, we have Message Ads, which used to be called Sponsored InMail. And then we have Conversation Ads, which are one of LinkedIn's newest ad formats. And it's that choose your own adventure kind of chat bot experience. And the way that they work is they show up directly inside of your message box when you're on LinkedIn. And the only way for you as an advertiser to pay is to pay per send. Now LinkedIn is only going to send these to people who are actively logged in. So thank goodness, you're not going to be paying for all of those inactive users who haven't opened their message box in a year or more. Now, I did get to use the message ads format back when it was Sponsored InMail back before it even came to Campaign Manager, it was when you used to have to work directly with a LinkedIn rep. And here's what it was like it was probably the worst investment I've ever made. It cost $3 per person you sent to. And so it landed in a bunch of inactive accounts. When I ran these years and years and years ago, it was, like I said, the worst investment that I ever mad and we promptly stopped as soon as we saw that there was just nothing good coming from these. But thank goodness back in November of 2016. It was released as an ad format that you could access within Campaign Manager. And as soon as they did that, they made it so it could only show up when someone was active, which is fantastic. They also lowered the price you could pay all the way down to I think I've seen as low as like 25 cents per person you send to. So those were the Message Ads. Then we got Conversation Ads back in March of 2020, when it was released on Campaign Manager as well. We were part of the beta. It's a really good ad format. But it suffers from a lot of the same issues that message ads do. And one of the things that I always talk about when I talk about this ad format is how these are the most expensive ads on LinkedIn. And a lot of people are shocked when they hear me say that because they think that it's one of LinkedIn's cheapest ad formats. So here's the logic around it. So an average cost per send of one of these ads might be somewhere if it's in North America between about 50 cents to $1 per send. So say for example that you sent these messages to 1000 people, that means that you'll be paying between $500 to $1,000 in total. And in this case, the average open rate is about 55%. So of those 1000 messages that you sent, you can expect about 550 opens. Now an average click through rate on these ads is around 3.2% And that's for message ads. Conversation Ads, it's significantly higher. But at 3.2%, that would result in about 17.6 clicks. So all of this calculates out if you do that division of 17.6 clicks with your $1,000 in spend, you come out to a whopping cost per click of between $28 and $57. It's pretty wild. That is per click, that is not per conversion. I will say though, don't let the possibility of the high costs dissuade you from using Sponsored Messaging because with the right offer, and it does have to be the right offer, that is the key here, you can drastically reduce those costs to the point where this ad type can even be more effective than sponsored content, or any of the others. For instance, we had a client who instead of getting the normal 55%, open rate, they were getting an 80% open rate, and instead of the 3.2% click through rate average, they were getting a click through rate of about 20%. And that means we were getting costs per click in between about $3 to $6. All just depending on how much you were paying per send. And of course, for sponsored content, most of the time we would kill to get costs that low. And that's why these ad formats are so special. If you have the right offer. If you don't know what I mean by offers, go back and listen to episode 10. We've linked to it below in the show notes as well. It's all about offers. But here's what you need to keep in mind for these message ad offers. It has to feel very much like a personal invitation is how I like to think of it. The reason why is when you send one of these ads, it's going to look like it came from a person. And it shows up as a message rather than just a banner ad, which feels a lot more invasive if it's spammy. But if it's not spammy, it feels a lot more personal and inviting. If you're gonna send one of these and just say like, click here to talk to our sales rep, or click here to sign up for our webinar. And these are to cold audiences, chances are these are going to be the most expensive clicks you've paid for on the network. It's not going to turn out well in your favor. If however, your offer is really good at either fluffing their ego with something like because of who you are in the industry, we want to offer you a sneak peek or early access to something that your peers are going to be jealous of. Or maybe it's an invite to an in person swanky event where you're going to get to rub shoulders, with important people in the industry just like you there's going to be hors d'oeuvres and drink served and all that, that works really, really well here as well. We've also found these to work quite well for hiring. You can essentially send someone a message that says, here's what we're looking for, you look pretty qualified, are you interested in applying, and we can get people to show interest that way. We've also found some recent success with offering something like a gift card in exchange for someone being willing to take a demo. So that's pretty cool, too. Hopefully, these types of ideas are getting your brain spinning. So you can be thinking about ways that you can utilize this. New offers you could come up with that feels special enough to be sent out through a Message Ad or a Conversation Ad. Some of the times that we've seen these ad formats work out really well. We of course had the one client I was telling you about the head 80% open rates and 20% click through rates. That was for an in person event that worked really well. We've worked with many of the largest hiring services on LinkedIn. And we also had a client who was offering a gift card through Conversation Ads that ended up converting really well. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into the differences between Message Ads and Conversation Ads.

8:41 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the partner you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead at the most scale. We are, of course, official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaign and we would absolutely love to work with you.

9:19 Alright, let's jump into the differences then between these two ad formats that you get underneath the Sponsored Messaging umbrella. So first off, you have Message Ads, which is like getting an InMail message from a person and it'll say promoted or sponsored. It's a single message. It has both a headline and a body. But it doesn't work exactly like an InMail message would because the person can't actually send a reply back. The reply is all grayed out. It's basically like, click on one of these options that I'm giving you and if not, there's nothing else you can do and they just click on the next message. Conversation Ads, on the other hand, is very, very different. We talked about them being a choose your own adventure are more like a chatbot experience. They are quite similar, they show up in your InMail the same way, but they don't have a subject line. Instead, it's just the body copy opens immediately to multiple calls to action that you can thread together like a conversation. And then recipients can interact by selecting calls to action that you've put together. And then they receive an automated message back along with an additional call to action that they might want to select. The way you could think of this is like, let's say there's a big trade show going on in your industry, you can send out a Conversation Ad asking someone, are you going to be at this big trade show next week or next month? And if they say, yes, you could say great, come by our booth, we'll give you swag, and we'll treat you really special. Or if they say no, you can say well click here to get on our list for when we come back, we're going to be teaching a webinar all about everything we learned at this show this year, and about how the industry is changing and all that. So you can see how depending on someone's response, you can give them a different pathway that they might be interested in responding to. And we have found conversation ads to be about 30% more efficient than Message Ads. And I would chalk that up to basically a Message Ad, if you're not interested in the one thing that's being offered, you just shut it off, and you just move on to the next message. But a Conversation Ad, there are multiple chances to convert there. And the chances are a lot higher that you're going to find one or two that are actually interesting to this prospect. And so you'll end up with about 30% more conversions, which is great. That being said, they do take a lot more time to build. So keep that in mind, it's a lot harder to actually build those ads, but they do perform well. I mentioned at the beginning about how some people think that these are some of LinkedIn's cheapest ads. And the reason for that is definitely fixable. And I really wish LinkedIn would fix it. When you're inside of your Campaign Manager dashboard. And you're looking at one of these campaigns, the columns that you're used to looking at like average CTR and average CPC, these metrics are just going to be straight up wrong. And the reason why is campaign manager calls it a click when someone opens one of these ads. But I have a very different opinion on what a click actually is. In my mind, a click means that a prospect should be then presented with an opportunity to convert. But according to LinkedIn's definition of a click being an open, you can't convert right from there, you have to do one extra step. So here's what you want to keep in mind, you're looking at campaign manager, you see average click through rate and you think, Oh, this says 65% click through rate. That's amazing. Well, that actually is pretty good, but that's only your open rate. That means of all the people you send it to 63% clicked to open it. Now what we don't know, we don't know how many people click open, just to market is read so it's not standing out in their inbox as a message that needs to be read. So I don't necessarily think that an open is a high vote of confidence of whether something had a good headline or good initial like hook. You also look over and see average cost per click is 57 cents. Well, that is not what it is per click, that's your cost per open. So if under columns, if you move away from performance, which is probably defaulted to, and moved to Sponsored Messaging, some of the metrics in here are still wrong. If you scroll all the way over to the right, average CPC is still says the exact same thing as cost per open. But you will notice that there's a column there called sponsored messaging clicks. This is your actual clicks, when someone clicked on one of the calls to action that you put inside of your Sponsored Messaging Ad, you'll see your open rate was also called click through rate for before, but now this is the proper definition for it. And then you'll also see a column for click to open rate. That is your actual click through rate. That is the Sponsored Messaging clicks over the number of opens. So basically, if you're using this ad format, make sure that you are looking at it through the columns sponsored messaging, rather than just ad performance, because otherwise it'll throw you off. I've had so many people tell me that, oh, we're using these sponsored messaging ads, and we're getting like $1 cost per click, and they're way outperforming everything else, then we dive in and find out like as soon as we can see that their cost per conversion is significantly higher than any other ad format. And they realize, Oh man, I got tricked. My cost per click was actually $25 to $50 rather than $1. And we as advertisers should know this better. And I do think that LinkedIn should do a much better job of educating that and make it very, very clear for us. If you end up exporting this data. When you pull it out into Excel, you'll notice the column AO is called clicks Sponsored Messaging. And that's when generating a campaign level report. That's the one you'll want to use in all of your calculations for a click. Now, these are a very special kind of ad format, because they have incredible capabilities. The first one is that you can use what LinkedIn calls macros, or dynamic fields. That means inside of your message, you can insert dynamically, someone's first name, their last name, their company name, their industry, or their job title. So imagine you had a message like hi, first name, I see work at company name, we found other people with job title have found this really interesting, we thought you'd want to take a look. Something special to note is this is one of the ad formats that is eligible to be used in conjunction with LinkedIn lead gen forms, and we would highly recommend it. Because the cost on these are so high, you definitely want your conversion rates to be as high as possible while you're evaluating them. So you can make sure that it's it's going to be an ad format that works well for you, there isn't a way to preview these ads as you're writing them. So what you do is you can send a test message as you're crafting it. And that way, while the message is still in draft, it'll send directly to your LinkedIn account. And you can go look in your own messaging box to see exactly how it looks. I mentioned that it comes from an individual, if you work with your LinkedIn rep, they can turn on the ability for it to come from your company page instead. But I highly, highly want to discourage you from doing this. When it comes from a person, it generally gets a much higher open and conversion rate. When it comes from a company, it definitely feels like an ad. Something else special about these is that it will allow you to create a 300 by 250 pixel banner image that it says it's optional, but I would not call it optional. This is ad inventory that when someone is on desktop, and they open up your message, you get a free ad that accompanies your conversation ad. I think this is huge. Don't bypass this just because you think oh, I don't have the creative, it's worth it, go into Canva, create a quick 300 by 250 pixel image and be done. Imagine what this would look like if you sent someone a personal message. And then an ad for your top competitor happened to show up on the page at the same time, it's not a good look, you will notice that there are some limitations along with these ad formats. The most noticeable one is that there is a tight frequency cap. And this frequency cap is a person on LinkedIn can only receive one of these ads every 30 days. It used to be every 60 days, then they lowered it down to 45. Now it's 30. I wouldn't be surprised to see LinkedIn open this up to being once every 15 days in the future. But for right now, it's still one every 30. And that's not one from you every 30 days, that's one of these period. So no one else can send someone one of these, you've essentially monopolized their inbox for the whole month, which is kind of a cool feature. LinkedIn says that they do this frequency cap because they really care about their member experience. And they feel like if they sent any more than this, they would get annoying. But that seems really silly to me. Considering that people on LinkedIn who are popular, who are in high positions, they end up getting Sales Navigator InMails, like three, four or five a day, some of you may be getting considerably more than that. So one of these every 30, I don't think people can even tell that which ones are sponsored, versus which ones are sent by someone with Sales Navigator just trying to spam their inbox. A big downside here is that when someone sends you a Sales Navigator InMail, it actually sends a copy of that InMail to your email as a notification so that you can click to open it right there. But when you send one of these as a sponsored message, LinkedIn is not going to send an email to notify them, it'll just appear in their box when they're logged in. If you are a large advertiser, these are very hard to budget for because that inventory is unpredictable. You might run for three or four days with a large budget and say, Oh, this doesn't make sense at all, we're not spending anything that we want to. And then all of a sudden, a whole bunch of your inventory opens up from people who haven't received one of these in 30 days. Now they're open. And then in one day you spend 17 grand, that actually happened to us. So make sure when you use these, you're probably going to want to use them for a month or more just to make sure that you're taking advantage of all of your audience who may have already received one of these before and they're going to open up sometime during your campaign where you can send them. As you go to evaluate these, realize that there's going to be a lag in performance because oftentimes people will receive the messages and end up opening or clicking on them. days or even weeks after the initial send. So you don't want to run this for two days, look at the performance and say, Oh, this obviously isn't gonna work for us, because it still could. Give it some days for those sends to mature into opens and clicks. Unfortunately, these don't have any sort of retargeting that you can do, except for just lead gen form opens, I really wish we had the ability to exclude someone who had received multiple of your sponsored message ads without opening them or without clicking. I hope we get this kind of functionality in the future. We mentioned that you can't really respond to these, but if you are sending these in mass, there are going to be people who want to respond to you and want to get in touch and have a real conversation. So tell the person whoever this is coming from their account, that they might expect additional people sending connection requests, sending InMails, and maybe otherwise trying to get in touch. And here are the specs for these. So first off, we have Message Ads, where the name of your ad, because you can of course name most ads on LinkedIn, you get 255 characters there. You get to select from any sender that you've gotten permission to send from their account. Your subject line gets 60 characters, but it's truncated on mobile so I would suggest going shorter than that, if you can. The text section will let you have up to 1500 characters here. But again, if it's a giant wall of text that's daunting to read, chances are people are going to just move on to the next message. So I would recommend keeping these really shortened to the point. You can put links, you can put a main call to action that's up to 20 characters. You can put hyperlinks inside of your actual text, and you can't insert anything like video or other types of media. I would absolutely love it if we could put like animated GIFs and embedded audio into these, hopefully in the future. Then we have Conversation Ads, and again, these have names that are up to 255 characters, the same options with adding senders and having that 350 by 250 pixel banner image. Your intro message is shorter, it can only be up to 500 characters, then it will show your calls to action and each one of those can be up to 25 characters. You can have up to five buttons per message. So what I want you to take away from this episode is I want you to understand that these are ad formats where if you have a special, a VIP, a personal invitation kind of offer, then these are the right ad formats for you. If you don't, they're probably going to be too expensive so I would still recommend test out your offers on Sponsored Content first, maybe even text ads and dynamic ads, and come and test into Sponsored Messaging when you have an offer that you feel like could work really well. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up so stick around

23:06 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

Okay, here are the episode resources. First of all, if you go down into the show notes, you'll see a link to the announcement about the left hand navigation being reverted. So you can go and read LinkedIn's whole answer in their help section. Also, check out our episode on offers, episode 10 if you haven't already. It's one of our tried and true episodes, it's definitely one you're going to want in your toolbox. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn LinkedIn Ads, definitely point them towards the link that we have down below for the course on LinkedIn Ads. This is one that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's about an hour and a half long and it is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost that you'll have for a LinkedIn training. Look down at whatever podcast player you're using and hit subscribe if you haven't already. Please do rate the podcast on whatever player you're using. Please, please, please, and I mean you, please go and review the podcast if you like what you're hearing. People reach out to me all the time saying that they love the show, but I'm not saying the reviews come in and that will help more than you know. So please, please, please, I'm begging, leave a review. With any comments suggestions, questions for us about the show, reach out to us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Data Studio dashboard that Anna Shutko and AJ created together

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Have you heard of Supermetrics? If you're a LinkedIn advertiser, it's your new best friend. We're covering the capabilities on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So we're highlighting another tool today in the LinkedIn advertisers arsenal. We're discussing a tool that I've been using now for years. It's absolutely indispensable for our team, because we're managing so many different accounts. And we're dealing with so much data. That tool is called Super metrics. And it's a very simple way of getting all of your ads data into a spreadsheet, or visualization tool for better reporting and analysis. I'm excited to welcome Anna Shutko from Supermetrics to answer my questions, and give you the inside scoop on what's coming. Anna and I go way back. And we've even collaborated on a free dashboard for LinkedIn advertisers, that you'll all get here in the show notes and I think you'll enjoy it. Without further ado, let's jump into the interview.

Okay, I'm really excited here to have Anna Shutko from Supermetrics. She is the Brand Strategist at Supermetrics. She's also host of the awesome podcast, The Marketing Analytics Show, make sure you go and subscribe to that right now,if you're not already. She is based in Helsinki, Finland. And she was number seven on the Supermetrics team. She has been there over five and a half years she is one of the OGs for sure. She's also an avid cyclist and skier. Anna, I'm so excited to have you on the show. We've been friends for a long time. Thanks so much for joining us.

Anna Shutko 1:42 I know, right?! Thank you so so much for having me. I'm super excited to be on the show.

AJ Wilcox 1:49 I'm just as excited to have you I have so many great questions for you. Well, I'm the host. And so if I say that they're great, it's a little bit biased, but didn't really have some questions I think are gonna be really good for you. And for those of us who are listening, tell us anything about yourself that you want anything I may not have covered in your intro.

Anna Shutko 2:05 Yeah, sure. So I think you nailed my bio. So I did a piece of furniture with Supermetrics. As I like to joke about it. I've been at the company for quite a while now more than five years. Wow. It's crazy when you think about it. So what people usually find interesting because I sometimes go in client calls and then when my colleagues introduce me, they're like, yeah, she's been here with us for such a long time. And people who knows Supermetrics are very, very surprised, because I guess not so many people like me have been with the company for a long time. We were a tiny team back then. Now we've grown fantastically. And we've grown so fast. Now we're over 250 people. It's crazy. So yeah, it's been a wild ride. And yeah, like I said, I've been moving between different areas of marketing between different departments. So I started as a growth marketer, then I went on to become a product marketing manager. I was also product manager, I was managing the relays and different connectors. And then I moved on to brand marketing. And now I'm super excited about my new role. So I'm building the brand measurement system, and I'm pretty sure we're gonna hear more about it. But yeah, that's a little bit about me. So many different areas. It's super exciting to see the company grow. It's super exciting to change all these different roles and learn more about connectors, including or favorite LinkedIn connectors. So that's a bit of a thing.

AJ Wilcox 3:39 Oh, beautiful. And I am a fan of the LinkedIn connectors for sure. So thank you for your great work on those. Let's go ahead and start in here on the first question. So for those who are not already familiar with Supermetrics, what are the challenges that Supermetrics solve. Why is Supermetrics originally in business?

Anna Shutko 3:58 Yeah, definitely. So Supermetrics essentially, is a data pipeline tool, as I like to call it. So we transfer data from a variety of different data sources or connectors, how we call them interchangeably. And these are LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, HubSpot, e-commerce platforms like Shopify. We cover over 80 different platforms. And like I said, literally any most popular and big marketing platform, you name it. And we transfer all this data to set up different data destinations. So we have sub categorized them into spreadsheets. So these are your Google Sheets and your Excel. Then there are different data visualization tools like Google Data Studio, or Power BI, Tableau, so data analytics/data visualization tools. And the third group is our data warehousing clusters. So we transfer data to different data warehouses like Azure, Google BigQuery, etc., etc., etc., And data links so you can combine your all your data in one place and store it securely. So that's a little bit about Supermetrics. So because we cover a lot of data destinations, and we connect to many different platforms and transfer the data, we cover a variety of different scenarios here. And this is actually historically has been the challenging part within product marketing, which also makes it very, very interesting that because we have so many products, we can help you cover multiple scenarios of what you want to do with your data. So you can have your reporting and dashboarding. So these are your client facing reports for agencies. And if you're an in house marketer, you can create your so called boss pacing reports, you have to create within your team. So these can be done in tools like Google Sheets, there are lots of writers who take advantage of Google Sheets and Excel and the formulas they can create there. And also, of course, do the visualization tools like Google Data Studio, super easy to add connectors there, it's super easy to create beautiful reports there and share them with your team. Then there are some cases of ad hoc analyses. And these are usually related to the questions you need to answer right now. So for example, why is my LinkedIn Ad spend so high and I have not seen the results? Or why does target audience A perform better than target audience B? So if you have this question and you really want to quickly acquire your data to answer the specific question, Supermetrics for Google Sheets can be a really good tool because we have the sideboard technology where you can select the metrics and dimensions you want to pick, and then it will pull the data into the spreadsheet, so that you can quickly answer very pressing questions. And another use case we have is the data warehousing use case where you can tie data across multiple different sources. So instead of just looking at one or two, or three or five data sources, you can create really complex models. But in order to create these models, you need to store your data in one place in order to join all this data. So here, you can pull all the data into your Google big query and then visualize it with a helpful view. But you can also perform the necessary data transformations within this data warehouse. So for example, you can compare the performance of your ad networks such as Google versus Facebook, again, you can segment and test different audiences, you can join data in the way you want to see sequel. And also you can report on the whole user journey. So for example, your clients started by clicking on your LinkedIn ads campaign, and they went to your website. And then you capture their website behavior with Google Analytics, maybe some of this data is coming from your CRM. And then with the help of a data warehouse, you can store all these data and then inquiry to connect the pieces together and see the whole user journey. So here are our most popular use cases.

AJ Wilcox 8:20 Okay, so just out of curiosity for being able to track the whole buyer journey. What sort of software or tools do you need in place in order to I guess, get that journey across all the different platforms? Is that requiring that they're in a CRM or something that's already natively tracking all of that?

Anna Shutko 8:36 Yeah, so usually depends on the company. Some companies might not necessarily have the budget or the need for a CRM. Of course, having a CRM is ideal. So if you have something like HubSpot, or it's Salesforce, it's really, really good also because their API's are so robust. They allow you to create custom dimensions and custom metrics to track your unique use cases. So for example, your users have, like I said, clicked on your LinkedIn Ads, and then they land on a website. And then they have to fill in a form. And the form might be somewhere, like on a different website, maybe it's an event and you're hosting a registration on Eventbrite, say for example. So when they put their data into Eventbrite or somewhere else, you also need to somehow capture this data within your CRM. So an alternative solution here could be to build a web page there where they would fill all their details. And then you can store all this data within the server ad. And then at the same time, you can combine it with the data coming from LinkedIn Ads. So it really depends. I would recommend starting with a combination of like ad networks, and reporting on that data and then combining it with data from Google Analytics. This can be the easiest when you're using a CRM, but at the same time, you can already start seeing a better overview of your user journey, and then connect to your CRM and then build on top these custom goals and metrics to create more of a reporting system.

AJ Wilcox 10:16 Very cool. This is a topic that's been really top of mind for me, as I'm thinking about, as cookie apocalypse continues, and we losing our dependence on third party cookies. How effective are we as marketers going to be being able to track someone across the whole user journey when we know that, that cookies disappearing? This is fascinating to me So thanks for helping us out with that. So those are the problems that Supermetrics solves. Why is Supermetrics in such a good position to solve this problem? Why not, you know, Google themselves, just replace you with having a simple tool that just spits out their data. Same thing with LinkedIn? Like, why is Supermetrics solving this problem and not anyone else?

Anna Shutko 10:57 Yeah, that's definitely a really, really good question. I can talk about this for hours. But we only have a limited amount of time, I guess. So first of all, Google is one of our partners. So Google, of course, is a massive, massive company and they have an amazing set of tools, but they are not the whole ecosystem. So there are lots of other players like Facebook, like LinkedIn, like Twitter, like HubSpot. And they also provide a set of really, really good API's, which allow you to export the data on the campaigns that are run. So super metrics, like mentioned, helps combine all this data and then we push this data to a number of different destinations. These are not just Google Sheets, these are Excel, for example. So for example, if your company is using Microsoft and you are required to use the office space, then Supermetrics can be a real really good tool because we can help push this data to your Excel desktop, say you set up your inquiries, and then you go offline completely. And then you can analyze your data using Excel. So like I said, we don't only connect to Google platforms. We help connect different players within the ecosystem together. And another good example is our Data Studio product. So Google Data Studio is a free data visualization tool for those of you who do not know. And they have native integrations with Google Analytics, Google Ads and other Google platforms, that is true. But for example, many marketers use Supermetrics to get data from Facebook or LinkedIn to the same data visualization tool. And if you're running ads on multiple different platforms, it would be a little bit silly to just analyze your Google Ads data without analyzing what you're doing on your LinkedIn as a platform, kind of like together. So we help marketers gain a very holistic view of their performance in the tools they already know, in the tools they already can use in the tools they already know how to use. So for example, if you know how to use Google Sheets, you can just install Supermetrics add on. And then you can continue using your favorite tool without this learning curve without the need to learn a new tool, and just query the data from the platform you want, say LinkedIn Ads, and just create the reports there. Or you can use these tools in combination. So we have a native Data Studio connector for our required products, for example, you've combined the data from multiple different sources in your inquiry project, and then you want to visualize this data. So you can use our Data Studio connector to do this. And the names of metrics and dimensions will have clear descriptions to to be very easy for you to understand what kind of metric you're visualizing, and how you can create a better report using all these tools together.

AJ Wilcox 13:54 Oh, I like it. Alright, thanks for sharing that. I definitely think I'm of the same opinion you are that any of the other networks or channels could easily come out with a product that allows easier access to the data they have. But the Supermetrics advantage here is just being able to aggregate from all of these different connectors, regardless of whether or not any of them come out with an easier way for us to do it ourselves. Tell us about your relationship with LinkedIn, as well as the other platforms. What do you get from that partnership? How long have you been partners, that kind of thing?

Anna Shutko 14:26 Yeah, sure, definitely. So with LinkedIn, we've been partners for quite some time. And there are many, many marketers, 1000s of marketers, is what we're talking about that reported their LinkedIn Ads. And then concrete budget pacing reports with Supermetrics. So we've recently demoed our product to your team. And like I said, we have really, really good and close collaboration there. And in addition to LinkedIn, we partner with Stack Adapt, HubSpot, Google, like I mentioned, AdRoll and many, many other data source and data destination companies. So when we partner with a company, we try to create the best possible value for the end user, of course. So we love creating templates for Data Studio especially. We've created some with the HubSpot. So we sit together with their product managers and think, Okay, what kind of metrics would be great to visualize for users. And we create completely free reporting templates with all the needed metrics and dimensions that our user can use as they are, or they can just take them as a blueprint for their own reports, they can tweak the metrics, they can tweak dimensions they can do that they want. And it's really amazing to partner with these companies, because we can combine the best of both both worlds so to say, so we have the reporting and analytics and data consolidation expertise, and the platform's bring their own know how, their knowledge to the table. So AJ you and I created this really, really good LinkedIn Ads dashboard. And this is one very good example of how your know how or some platform managers know how can be combined with Supermetrics know how.

AJ Wilcox 16:20 Which is beautiful, we are going to link to that dashboard down below in the show notes so everyone can get access to it. But, Anna I'm so glad you brought this up. Because this has been a couple years ago, or a few years ago now. But we worked for about six months, I think on creating this dashboard, we call it the ultimate LinkedIn Ads dashboard. It's in Data Studio, it's totally free, like you mentioned, and anyone out there can go and get really complex analysis of their LinkedIn Ads. And that was because of you and I working so hard on that. I'm a big fan, I hope everyone goes and grabs that. Just to make it clear as to what Supermetrics is doing for LinkedIn advertisers. I mean, it's it's cool that you guys aggregate all of the different data and channels together into one spot. I think marketers who are responsible for more than one channel would love that. But for LinkedIn, specifically, you advertisers who are listening, you know how hard it is to get data out of LinkedIn. If every time you want to do a report, you have to go and click the export feature inside of campaign manager, and then put it into Excel, and then you know, do whatever formatting changes, you need to do, create pivot tables, then all of a sudden, all of that data is it's a snapshot of it, you can't do anything else with it. And so the next time your boss asks for a report, you're going and doing it again. What Supermetrics does is it will take, even on a schedule, this is my favorite part about it, you can say I want this data going into Excel or into Google Sheets, and I want it every day at 2am. I want it to go pull the next day's data. And then it's always there any report any pivot table that you build, all you have to do is just refresh. And now you'd never have to build that same report ever again. So, so cool. We'll talk about more of my favorite features of Supermetrics here a little bit later. But I just wanted everyone to know like, this is why it's so valuable for you. This is why I'm doing this tool spotlight on Supermetrics. Because there just is no other way to do with LinkedIn, what Supermetrics does. So I want to hear from you. What are the capabilities of Supermetrics, especially as it pertains to LinkedIn advertisers?

Anna Shutko 18:28 Yeah, definitely. So I've mentioned a couple of capabilities. And like I said, because we have a product umbrella, it allows us to help customers solve multiple reporting and reporting related issues. So we have your ad hoc reporting, where we can acquire the data on the fly. And this is your Google Sheets, Excel products. We help with the data consolidation. These are your data warehousing products, building beautiful data visualizations, or you can have little exploration in Looker or Tableau or Power BI. Another really interesting thing I'd like to highlight here is that as you know, LinkedIn ads API constantly changes will always constantly change. LinkedIn is always coming up with new features. And he was right, you mentioned that it's challenging to export the data out of LinkedIn Ads. And this is something we're really help with, but it will also help you export this data in the right format. And we can help you create reports with really, really high data granularity. So what it means in practice is that you can test and report on many different pieces of a LinkedIn Ads campaign audiences. You have your campaign types, creatives, objectives, and you can break down your campaign into different pieces, pass these pieces individually or perform an AB test, and then make really, really smart optimizations. So this is one thing that I really, really like and would like to highlight here. And typically, we help achieve this with our Google Sheets product. And one very precise example is, again, the dashboard AJ and I have built. Belt. So you can report on not one, but four different types of spend. So there are formulas that help you calculate your total spend, projected spend, goal spend, as in the amount of you have to spend without under over spending. And then the cumulative spend to something you've spent overall. And here, we've taken one metric, which is spend, and then your budget goal, and then transformed into four different kinds of spend. And this brings me to my earlier point about data granularity, you can report on really granular data. So you can break down your spend by day, you know, Google Sheet, then create these calculations to have these four different types of spends. And then think about it holistically for not one, but four different viewpoints. And then create your budget pacer that can help you allocate budgets. Because LinkedIn Ads is a very costly platform, as we all know. So having these different types of spend calculating these different types of spend is really, really helpful. And the same thing goes with audiences and can campaign types. You can break all these spend down by multiple different dimensions, like what kind of audience brings the best ROI, what kind of campaign type performs better than the other campaign types. What kind of creative helps me get more clicks? So you can get really, really nerdy with your data. And this is something I really, really love. And another beautiful thing is that you can then combine this data. So if you don't want to look at it in a very granular way, you can also combine all this data in Google Data Studio report. And again, this is something that we've tried and tested, and it worked. So after you've analyzed all these types of spend, you can push them into the to see the dashboard to see bigger trends. So for example, you've noticed that your projected spend during this month is higher than your projected spend over the last couple of months. And you can start thinking, why you can understand what might be like bigger drivers behind this change. And in addition to this, you can add all different types of other data. For example, you can add your data on AB testing to see which campaigns have performed better historically. Or you can even add your data from LinkedIn Pages. Because if you use LinkedIn Ads and LinkedIn Pages in combination with can be a very, very powerful duo. It can help you uncover many sides on your audience. So there are a lot of different ways in which Supermetrics can help you slice and dice your LinkedIn Ads data. But also create really, really good reports that can help you get a general overview.

AJ Wilcox 23:02 I love this, there's no data that you can get from campaign manager that you can't get within Supermetrics. And you own the data, you get to do whatever you want with it. So just like what Anna was talking about, with the ability to break down your spend by ad type and by audience, all these things are fantastic. But then you realize you could have a Google sheet or a page in your Data Studio dashboard that allows you to see the AB tests you're running, and another page that might show you just your budget, like what Anna was talking about. And another one that could be just your metrics at a glance like, hey, how are my general click through rates, or my general conversion rates, all of this you can do, it's super easy. And just in the dashboard that Anna and I built for you here a couple years ago, all of that is like already set up for you. So very, very cool. Anything else you want to share about the capabilities that we should go over?

Anna Shutko 23:58 Yeah, definitely. Also, we have real really nice use cases. There is a tab on our website where you can read more about what other clients are doing. And I know it's useful for a fact because our customer success managers have found it very useful. So you can also learn from other people and you can check what some other guys are doing with their Facebook Ads campaign and apply the same ideas to your LinkedIn Ads reporting, which I think is super super exciting, because understand and basically steal ideas in the best possible way. Understand how others are running their reports. Another really, really good feature is the automated way of reporting. For example, once you've set your LinkedIn Ads budget tracker in spreadsheet, you can say, hey, I want to update my data and if my spend increases, and if it crosses you know the threshold to XYZ amount, send me an email. There is literally no human error unless you set up the query correctly. So you can easily get the data you want, whenever you want. And you can also set up rules and get customized alerts whenever something goes wrong. So you don't need to monitor your ad campaign on a daily basis. You don't need to worry about this, you set the report once, and then you forget about it. And then you can think about creatives, audience testing, whatever you want, whatever is on your table. So that allows you to focus on more interesting problems, which has always been the case for me, for example, when I'm using Supermetrics, I noticed that every single time I'm able to automate something, I can use this time on something else, which is something more exciting. And also, you can report in your campaigns faster, which of course, is a great thing, since you save a lot of time and then can spend it on something else. And yeah, like I said, we help cover pretty much a variety of reporting use cases, we also have a template gallery. So you can check it out on Supermetrics.com. We have our Google Sheets template gallery, we have our Data Studio template gallery, and we're gonna link to the dashboard AJ and I created so you can see how you can visualize your LinkedIn Ads data.

AJ Wilcox 26:17 Oh, I love it. Thanks for sharing those. So what are some of the results that your customers have seen for their LinkedIn Ads because they are using Supermetrics?

Anna Shutko 26:26 Yeah, definitely. So first of all, they are seeing improved targeting. Like I mentioned, once are able to really select your data in a variety of different ways. You can dig deeper into it, and then understand what exactly is working and what exactly is not working. So imagine, if you're diagnosing a patient, and you have only one, two, or maybe tools, that's not really going to give you enough information into what's wrong. And a campaign cannot really tell you what's wrong about it. So once you have a whole tool set being maybe Supermetrics for Google Sheets, data warehousing, etc, etc. You can slice and dice your data in a variety of different ways. Now you can diagnose your patient much better. You can pinpoint exactly what's wrong, whether it's the campaign type, or the spend, or the audience, or maybe creative, or maybe something else. And then you can really, really understand how exactly we're going to go about this. So of course, all that leads to increase ROI, time saved, and improved communication. What we've seen within the teams, because instead of arguing, you know, oh, you've adjusted this spend in a wrong way, no we should have increased these bids, you have much more intelligent conversations. And hopefully your team dynamic improves, because you can just look at the numbers. And this is something we also use internally. We just pull up a dashboard, we just check the numbers and the numbers never lie, and then they tell you the direction you need to take. And we just go from there. So it's very, very cool to use data to your advantage.

AJ Wilcox 28:16 Amen to that. And how much does Supermetrics cost for these advertisers who want to use it for their LinkedIn campaigns and haven't used it before?

Anna Shutko 28:24 Yeah, definitely. So it really depends on the product. So I don't want to provide inaccurate information. So the best way to check it is to go to Supetmetrics.com and then check the data destinations you want to use. And then check how you want to report on your LinkedIn Ads campaigns. So the price for Google Sheets is of course different from the price you are going to have for your data warehouse. But if you need a custom solution, our sales team is of course happy to help you. So you can select not just LinkedIn Ads, but a variety of different connectors. And this is what I normally would recommend. So don't just pick LinkedIn Ads, you can pick Google Analytics, or LinkedIn Ads, and LinkedIn Pages, for example. You can combine these data with our ad data plus google analytics connector for our Google Data Studio destination. There is a massive combination, all different data sources and the different data destinations you can potentially have so the price of course depends on that. And also, the pricing is relatively simple. You know, it might not sound as simple when I'm trying to describe it. But once you pick your destination, once you pick your connectors, you just pick the number of your accounts and how often you want to refresh your data. But that's about it. Once you know all these factors, once you understand which one wants to go with, then it's pretty simple.

AJ Wilcox 29:54 And it is really reasonably priced. I've been using the tool now for years. Absolutely love. That's why I'm doing a tool spotlight on Supermetrics when there are plenty of other LinkedIn tools that I'm probably not going to cover. So thanks for providing such an awesome tool at good pricing. All right, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive right back in the LinkedIn

Speaker 4 30:13 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked. com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

AJ Wilcox 30:22 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the partner agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the utmost scale. We're official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns, and we'd absolutely love the opportunity to get to work with you.

AJ Wilcox 30:51 Alright, let's jump right back into the interview. Let me ask you, we've talked a lot about the capabilities of the platform and the company. What's your favorite feature of Supermetrics? Like, you're obviously a marketer yourself and a dang good one? What is the most helpful aspect of it to you?

Anna Shutko 31:06 Yeah, sure. So first of all, I really, really love that we collaborate with our data destination partners very closely. And that allows us to develop product which sits within a data destination so to say, in most cases. Not all our products need data destinations, but most do. And I'm talking about all our Google Data Studio we co developed together with Google's team, working very closely with their engineers. So you can go to Google Data Studio, you can create any kind of report with Supermetrics, without ever leaving Google Data Studio. And this is amazing. You don't have to go from one page to another page to the next page. You just go to your Data Studio, you select LinkedIn Ads as a connector, where you connect it to your dashboard. And that's it. You can basically query data and create beautiful reports. So the experience is very, very intuitive. It's very smooth. And same thing applies to our Excel and Google Sheet product. So we have a sidebar, where you can take metrics and dimensions you want to pull. And then some magic happens here and your data just appears within a spreadsheet. So the adoption is very, very fast. I remember when I first saw our Google Sheets product, I fell in love it it instant, and it happened more than five years ago. But it's still remember it because the experience was so good, even back then. And another really, really useful feature is perhaps the ability to pull data from and report on multiple accounts easily. So I'm not talking about data sources here. But accounts, for example, you are an agency, and you're running campaigns on 50,60, 70, 100, different LinkedIn Ads accounts. And you have a really, really big client. And then they have 70 accounts. And imagine connecting these accounts one by one to your dashboard would be a complete nightmare. With Supermetrics, you can just select them all at once or then pull them all into the same spreadsheet all into one database, to a one to one Data Studio report. And then with the drop down selection, you can just take which accounts you want to see date the data from and this data will appear. It's very, very, very helpful for our agency friends over there. And the same thing happens with all the other data sources. So Google's accounts and if you want to combine your LinkedIn Ads with Google Analytics data, it's very, very easy to report on.

AJ Wilcox 33:55 Very nice, I'll tell you, I have several things that I absolutely love about Super metrics. I've played with a lot inside of Data Studio. And what I love is number one, it's fast. When you're in Data Studio, and you're using Supermetrics as your data source, the pages just load nearly instantly. It's super, super fast. It's also really easy to use, like I use LinkedIn API. And I know what that's like to be looking at these metrics on the back end that have a name, and you're going I don't know what that name is. Supermetrics calls them things like every column, every source, every metric, every KPI, they're all named in ways that even just a very, very basic marketer, like brand new to the industry could still understand what it was they were building. If you've ever tried to take data directly from LinkedIn. So you export it to a CSV, and then you try to put that into Data Studio. What you'll notice is the columns aren't of the right data types, and you have to keep going into your spreadsheet and making changes when you use Data Studio or Google Sheets, but especially Data Studio with the Supermetrics connector, everything already comes in and exactly the right data types, you're never going to have to worry about, oh, my dates aren't showing up because Excel didn't recognize it was a date. And then Data Studio didn't recognize that it was either, you never have to worry about that. Something else that I love, let's say you go into campaign manager, you do an export to CSV. And it's a, let's say, an ADS report or campaigns report, when you look at that column of like, click through rate or cost per click, as soon as you try to combine that or do some kind of like an average, those averages don't mean anything. If you try to do an average of a whole bunch of percentages, it will make some kind of an average, but it'll be wrong. And Supermetrics fixes all those like every time we export something with Supermetrics. All of the columns are accurate all the time in a way that they wouldn't be from LinkedIn directly. I'll also mention one more thing, which is there was a metric that I wanted to see inside of super metrics that I knew LinkedIn had access to it was a new one. And I mentioned something to you, Anna. And you said, Oh, let me message the engineering team. And I want to say it was within like, a couple hours, you've messaged me back and said, Hey, check it, we should have that data available now. And so it's fast, like Supermetrics is always on top of new changes.

Anna Shutko 36:23 I think we should definitely hire you, AJ, if you're ready to move to Helsinki, just know, just let me know, I have a spot for you on the team.

AJ Wilcox 36:32 I am very good in cold weather. So we should talk about it. Let me ask what's coming up in the future that you're super excited about with Supermetrics?

Anna Shutko 36:40 Yeah, so there are so many things that are coming up. First of all, we have multiple new data warehousing destinations for all of you data nerds out there. So you can store your LinkedIn Ads data in more places. And also, we are always developing our data sources, and then pattern paths for now. So you can then combine this one connects data with a variety of data sources. And that's been on the product side. I am always very excited about the new product developments. But also, I'm very exciting about The Marketing Analytics Show. This is the podcast that I host. We're gonna interview really, really cool guest. You're going to hear more about the first party data. So something AJ and I briefly talked about at the beginning of this podcast, and how you can tag your data correctly before you cleanse your data warehouse, and many, many other cool topics. And every single time I talk to these guests on super, super excited because the share very interesting viewpoint about this industry.

AJ Wilcox 37:52 I love it. I'm a subscriber of the podcast, make sure you all go back and listen to episode four, because yours truly was on there. Just kidding. You don't have to listen to that particular episode, go listen to something that you don't already know super well. If you're listening to the show, you probably get everything that we talked about. Something that you mentioned, that I think is so helpful is that if you're making all of your decisions, from the data that you get directly from LinkedIn, you will find that you're making the wrong decisions. What I mean by that is like the data you get from LinkedIn on things like even conversions, leads, means next to nothing, until you find out whether those are qualified leads, whether those leads are actually turning into sales. And so Anna, what you mentioned that is so cool is this direction of moving into the data warehousing solutions. So now you have access to what LinkedIn has. But then with other CRMs and other data partners and data warehouses, you're able to then combine that with the data that you can find only from your CRM, or other sources that can report to you on number of qualified leads and other elements of lead quality, how many proposals sent, closed deals, what the deal closed for, and you can actually report on what really matters. So that makes me really excited. So final question. This might be something you've already answered. But what are you most excited about either personally or professionally, yourself?

Anna Shutko 39:15 Yeah, sure. I am excited about a few things in general. And like mentioned, there have been really, really exciting product developments at Supermetrics. But one thing I wanted to pinpoint is that right now I'm building the brand measurement system. And this is basically a series of data transformations and dashboards that help combine all the data about our brand and how it's performing. And I'd like to say we drink our own champagne, it's a Supermetrics. So of course, we're using Supermetrics to consolidate all this data. So it's really exciting to work in this project. And it's really exciting to see how our product works from the client perspective. And of course, whenever I'm ready, I'm happy to share all the insights and all the learnings.

AJ Wilcox 40:09 Wonderful. Well, as you're coming out with that stuff, how can people follow you? How can people obviously I would say, make sure you subscribe to The Marketing Analytics Show. But how else can people find out this stuff as you're releasing it?

Anna Shutko 40:21 Yeah, sure. So I am on Twitter. So it's @AnnaShutko on Twitter. And you can just follow me there. I promise you, I really promise that I will post more and I will post more updates on the podcast and insights that are learned after building this system. And another way to connect with me is to follow me on LinkedIn, you can connect with me there, you can send me a DM and I will also be posting some of the updates there.

AJ Wilcox 40:54 Oh, I love it. Okay, we'll put all those links here in the show notes below. So make sure you do follow Anna, reach out to her if you have questions. Anna, thanks so much for coming on the show. I think it's very obvious that I'm a huge Supermetrics fan. I really just appreciate our collaboration in the past, and everything you've shared. Is there anything else that you want to share with us before we jump off?

Anna Shutko 41:15 Yeah, sure. Thank you so much, AJ, for inviting me, it was a very, very interesting conversation, great questions. And I love being interviewed by fellow podcast host. So one more thing before we leave. So I'll ask AJ to link the article we co-wrote in the show notes. So you can follow how exactly we came up with these four different types of spend you can monitor, and how you can report on AB test for your LinkedIn Ads campaign, there was a lot of good stuff there. So also, this article contains really practical instructions and how you can connect your LinkedIn Ads, and then create this superpower spreadsheet and then connect that spreadsheet to Data Studio dashboards so you can also use different charts and visualizations. So not only will you learn how to approach LinkedIn Ad spend reporting. You will also learn a bunch of different tools, hopefully. So check it out. I really hope you enjoy it. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. And I'm really, really happy to be part of this LinkedIn Ads community.

AJ Wilcox 42:27 Wonderful. Well, thanks, Anna. I will definitely link to all of that. And just a big shout out to you everything that you're building is awesome for us marketers. So a huge thank you from the LinkedIn Ads community.

Anna Shutko 42:37 Thank you so much. I'm so happy you are enjoying.

AJ Wilcox 42:39 All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around

Speaker 4 42:49 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more AJ Wilcox, take it away.

AJ Wilcox 43:00 Okay, like we talked about during the show, I have the Data Studio dashboard that Anna Shutko and I created together. So check the link there in the show notes, you'll absolutely love that I'm sure. There's a killer template for budget tracking inside of Google Sheets, as well as the full Data Studio dashboard that we created together. You'll also see the link to Anna Shutko on Twitter, as well as her LinkedIn profile. So as she said, send her a DM, follow her, connect with her all that good stuff. She's also the host of The Marketing Analytics Show so you will see a link to that. Because all of you are podcast listeners, obviously, you'll definitely want to go check that out and get subscribed. Any of you who are looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, or maybe you have a colleague that you're training or something like that, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Learning. It's by far the least expensive and the best quality training out there and it's next to no dollars. It's pretty cheap compared to any other training. You'll enjoy it. Please do look down whatever podcast player you're listening on and make sure you hit that subscribe button. We'd love to have you back here next week. Also, please rate and review the podcast. Honestly, I say it way too much. But it really means a lot. It makes a difference to me. So please, please, please go leave us a review. We'd love that with any suggestions, questions, feedback, anything like that. Reach out to us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Analysis of Job Titles vs Functions

Systematic Approach to LinkedIn Targeting

Targeting Deep Dive

Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses 

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

LinkedIn only understands 55% of job titles. Wait, what? Really? What does that even mean? Well, we're dissecting how Job Title works on LinkedIn ads today on the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So I put a post out about a month ago that mentioned a stat that I use, and quote quite regularly. I've said in the past, LinkedIn only understands 30% of job titles. And the post got a lot of engagement and several people question that stat. Where I got it from, not to mention the number of LinkedIn employees who've messaged me on the back end and said, Hey, AJ, where did you get that stat? I'm curious. And of course, no one's very disrespectful. No one's commenting, like AJ, you're a liar. That's bullcrap. But I wanted to walk you through my methodology of how I came up with that stat. And especially to inspire you guys all to do the same thing. I want everyone doing research to better understand how the platform works. Well, after being questioned on that stat, the 30% stat. I'm happy to report that we dug in and reran a bunch of research, and found that LinkedIn had actually improved, its targeting quite a bit in the last several years. So let's dive in now and explore.

I think, first of all, what you need to understand is that job titles as a field on LinkedIn, are freeform, meaning that anyone can type whatever they want. You can come up with your own title, you can use a standard one that's been around for years. And LinkedIn, not to mention any other platform, really can't be held accountable for trying to understand every single weird and odd job title out there. I'm connected to a CEO whose job title used to be Chief Trashcan Emptier something cute like that. And of course, LinkedIn is going to look at that job title and say, I have no idea who that is or what they do. So what LinkedIn does is it takes a look at the job title and tries to categorize it in which job functions in which seniorities it should fit. And I would say for the most part, it does a pretty good job of categorizing these. And then they take it a step further, which I don't actually like all that much. There's this concept called super titles. And you won't know about LinkedIn having super titles, unless you have access to LinkedIn's ads API like we do, because it's one of the elements you'll see in the API. But basically, what they do is they'll take and group similar job titles together to roll up into one kind of a master job title. So when you go and put in the job title of Salesforce Administrator, you probably don't know this, but you're probably adding quite a few other job titles along with it. And we're really trusting LinkedIn, that they've done a good job of grouping these job titles together. And the problem is, you can't actually see anything about your super title and you can't see the other job titles that are being targeted underneath it. Like I said, most of the time, LinkedIn does a pretty dang good job of this. We have noticed a few weaknesses. The biggest weakness we've seen is, for some reason, the job title Marketing Specialist gets rolled up to Chief Marketing Officer. So we had a client where we were targeting CMOS, and we noticed that a lot of Marketing Specialists were coming through their forms. And so of course, we did the great agency thing, we went in, and we excluded the job title of Marketing Specialist. And then all of a sudden, the whole campaign was too small to run. We were targeting CMOS, specifically by job title and as soon as we excluded Marketing Specialists, boom, the whole audience went away. I definitely think that this is a bug, I think someone miscategorized that one job title. But I think it's fair to say this is probably not the only mistake that LinkedIn has made. And so you do have to be pretty careful when you're using job title targeting. And let me start by saying, I hope none of you get the idea that AJ hates job title targeting, because I certainly don't. I still use it a lot. And I still recommend that everyone else use it a lot, too. But the reason why I care so much about this is we need to understand how each type of targeting works so we can use that as a tool to help us optimize towards whatever our goal is. For one client, I might use only job title targeting. And another I might do 10% job title targeting and 90% job function targeting. And it just totally depends on a client's budget, and who their target audience is. If you go back and listen to episode two of this podcast, we talked about the systematic methodology for how we go about targeting an audience. I don't want you to misunderstand and think that what I'm telling you is job title targeting is weak and doesn't have a place and you shouldn't use it. I will say though, whenever we use it, we generally have other campaigns targeting the same persona through a different way that are meant to support that campaign. And, of course, we're going to analyze the day data afterwards to help us understand, you know, did Job Title outperform or underperform? Do we need to bid one of them up, one of them down? What can we learn about how we are targeting these people? So go back and listen to episode two to go way deep into that. And if you stick around till the end of the episode, I'm going to go over a couple of comments that we got on that post that I told you that had a lot of engagement with really good questions, really good input. And we'll answer those questions right here at the end. So make sure you stick around. And here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll get to dive into the methodology of the data collection.

5:33 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

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Alright, let's jump here into the methodology. We know that job function is by far the most broad way that we can target someone on LinkedIn. And sometimes we might have a job title, like my example of Salesforce Administrator that we can't target by job function. There's no job function for Salesforce Admins. And actually, I just checked they do they fit underneath the IT job function. Okay, that was interesting to know. So if job function is the most broad, and we want to test job titles, which we know is one of the most narrow, the best way I could think of to do this was to take job function and seniority, a combination of which has a really common job title associated with it. And then compare those audience sizes to the job title. So I'll give you an example. If we take Marketing Managers as the job title, that's a pretty standard job, that there should be a lot of people who have and if we take a look at the audience size associated with that, and compare it to the audience size of the job function of marketing, plus the seniority of manager. Ideally, if LinkedIn had a perfect understanding of all job titles, those would be the exact same audience size because they're essentially the same audience. So that was what I set out to go understand and prove. So as I review this data, it's important to understand that there's a lot of job titles that aren't directly aligned with a direct job function and seniority. So we can't compare, we won't have these insights. So what I wanted to do was compare all of the ones that we can see the ones that we can understand. And hopefully that gives us a good idea of maybe what we can expect for the ones that we can't see and can understand. For everyone to follow along. If you go down in the show notes below, you can click on a Google sheets link. And that will take you to the Google sheet where we put all of this research. And please let us know anything that you've improved. Or if you've taken this and started your own study or understanding somewhere else, please, we'd love to take part in the analysis with you. And also, if you can tell anything that we've missed or should be improved in our testing methodology, please speak up, let us know. So what we did is we took the top five job functions that are really standard that was Sales, Marketing, Finance, IT, and Operations. And we paired each of them with the seniority of Manager, Director, VP, and C-level, we went and collected their audience sizes, as well as their suggested bid ranges. And then we compare those against campaigns that we put together, where we just expressly targeted those job titles. So for instance, under Marketing Manager, there were things like Digital Marketing Manager and other types of Marketing Managers. And I went ahead and added them to the list to kind of buoy them up. In that particular list, I didn't include product marketing, so anything with product, I left it out, just so you understand. And you can see all the data there in that sheet. You can see those that LinkedIn understands the very least, and those that LinkedIn understands the very best. There are a couple of call outs that I've got for you on this one. For instance, VPs of Operations, LinkedIn only has 13.6% of them accounted for in job titles. I thought that was pretty interesting, because a VP of Ops should be a pretty standard job title. Then we have like an Operations Manager, which LinkedIn actually really understood quite well. It matched really high at 77.8%. So those were our highs and lows. And there were a couple really odd ones, for instance, Marketing Managers, the job function audience size on this one was only 360,000, but the job titles size was 640,000. And I'm pretty sure that's a weakness in LinkedIn job function targeting, because Marketing Directors have 490,000 and generally, there are more managers than there are directors. So I think the actual size on LinkedIn of Marketing Managers should be somewhere around the, like 900,000 or a million. But the targeting only showed me what it showed me so that was weird one for sure. Something similar happened with IT managers. There were only 480,000 IT Managers by job function. But when I combine them by job title, there were 630,000. So all in all, there were three where job function actually caught fewer of these people than job title. But for the most part, it worked as expected, and there were many more under job function than there were under job title. And when I combined all of the data for all five of these job functions, we came out with an average of 55%. Meaning that LinkedIn probably understands 55% of the job titles for these super standard job title positions. In my defense, because these are the ultras simple straightforward job functions and titles that means that the super not straightforward ones, like Marketing Ninja or Sales Expert, probably match at a much lower percentage. But at least with this methodology, I'm comfortable using the stat that LinkedIn understands about 55% of job titles. Now, when you go and look at this data, if you scroll over to the right, you'll notice that I collected the floor bid, the low recommended bid, the recommended bid, and the high bid for each of these audiences that we built on job function and on job title. And I started with job title, because it's usually the smallest and I subtracted the job function audience. So what you get here is any number that is positive, it means that the job title was more expensive, it had a higher either recommended or minimum bid than the job function campaign that it's associated with. And I did it this way because I expect that job titles are going to be more expensive because it's more targeted and because LinkedIn understands fewer of those job titles, and more people are bidding on them, they should be more competitive. And what we found is, on average, a job title's floor audience is 17 cents higher than the job function audience. When you look at the low recommended bid, though, it drops to job titles only being three cents more expensive on average. When you look at the recommended bid that drops to basically zero, meaning that a job function's recommended bid is usually a cent higher than the job title. And then when you get to the highest end of the bid range, on average job title is 12 cents cheaper. And I'll be honest, I don't have a whole lot of faith in the recommended bid ranges that LinkedIn provides, but if this is any sort of clue as to what the auction actually looks like, what the level of competition looks like, for each of these audiences, then that's really insightful to understand that Job Function is actually more expensive when you're bidding high and Job Titles are going to be less expensive when you're bidding low. So definitely go familiarize yourself with the data, get an understanding for it. And of course, please use it to start your own research and share with us what you find. So this conclusion that we came to have LinkedIn only understanding about 55% of job titles, that means that job titles are a pretty tight way of targeting. And that's why we like it, we're glad that there's a tight way of targeting because if we only had to target by job function and seniority, that would be way too wide, way too large of audiences and we love this ability to a super narrow target on something. And this is why it's also ultra important to utilize all of the different targeting types that LinkedIn gives us. Understand how all of them work so that you don't miss any audience members. And again, go back to episode two to learn about those targeting strategies. You can also look at Episode 11, to understand the various targeting options that there are to do a deep dive into how each of them work. And as a reminder, this shouldn't dissuade you from using job titles in your targeting, they still are very valuable. Okay, like I promised, here's a couple of the comments that we got on this post and I wanted to read to you and explain what was going on. So Kyle Reeves said, "I was told by a higher up LinkedIn team that they normalized job titles in order to include less common ones into a more common group as best they can. For example, a Marketing Ninja would be grouped in with Marketing Specialists." And Kyle That's exactly right. That's what we talked about with this super titles concept of how LinkedIn tries to roll up smaller titles into the larger. It's just kind of a black box. We can't see actually how LinkedIn handles this and so I would love a lot more visibility into that. Also Nuno Pereira mentioned, "Are you saying that if I target an audience of 1,000 VPS of Marketing by job title that LinkedIn will, on average, recognize only 300 of them, even if all of them have VPS of Marketing as their current job title on LinkedIn?" And Nuno, in theory, yes, but obviously if all 1000 of them actually put VP Marketing as their job title, LinkedIn is going to understand all of them. The problem is a whole bunch of them have put something other than that, or something in addition to that, who they might be a VP of Marketing in their full time position. But the way that LinkedIn is interpreting what they've said, their job title is, you might have actually 1,000 People who are all considered VPs of Marketing, but LinkedIn only categorizes, let's say, 55% of them. And actually, because I have this data, I can be a lot more exact here. For VPs of Marketing, LinkedIn understands 46.5% of them. So hopefully, that's helpful. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

16:14 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

All right, as promised, here's our great resources. The very first link here is going to be the analysis of the job title versus job function, audience sizes that we did. It's a Google sheet where anyone with the link can view and definitely go check it out. Let us know any questions, thoughts, corrections, whatever you find. You'll also see the link there to the systematic approach to targeting episode that was episode two on the podcast, as well as the deep dive into the different targeting facets on LinkedIn. That was episode 11. If you or anyone that you know is trying to learn LinkedIn ads, point them towards this link. It's the LinkedIn Ads course that I did with LinkedIn, on the LinkedIn Learning platform. It's by far the cheapest and the most effective training course I've found out there. And whatever platform you're listening to this on right now, look down and hit that subscribe button if you've appreciated this. And please do rate and review. If you do leave a review, we'd love to give you a public shout out. Shoot us an email at [email protected] with any thoughts, questions, suggestions, anything like that around the episode. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Ad Saturation

Benchmarking your LinkedIn Ads performance

How the LinkedIn Ad Auction works

Performance Chart

Join LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community for access to all our courses 

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

Click through rates on your LinkedIn Ads don't matter at all, and you shouldn't pay attention to them. Well, I've heard this argument and I totally disagree. We're talking about click through rates and why they matter on this week's LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! My digital marketing beginnings were in Google ads. And for years, I would hear the argument about both click through rates and quality score. People saying they don't matter, you shouldn't focus your attention on them. Just don't pay attention at all. I've seen the same case made for LinkedIn Ads. But I'm here to tell you that click through rates are incredibly important on this platform. Sure, it's not something that you'll want to report to your boss or to your client, quite honestly, they're not going to care. But for you, as an ad manager, it's one of the strongest signals that you can use to spot problems in your account, as well as leverage to get better results. So let's hit it.

First of all, what is click through rate? Well, the simple definition is it's your clicks divided by your impressions. So it becomes a percentage rate. And when you have nothing to compare it to, then it really doesn't mean anything. But if you've listened to Episode 15 of the podcast, if you haven't, feel free to go back and check it out, it's all about benchmarks. And when you have a benchmark to compare your results to, all of a sudden it becomes increasingly important. Plus, you can always compare to past performance, if this is a campaign that you've been running for some time. What I like about click through rate is it really is the easiest way to tell if your ads are interesting to your audience or not. And one of the arguments that I've heard is that your click through rate doesn't matter if you're paying by the click anyway. And sure all admit that. If you're paying by the click, and you're happy with the costs per click that you're getting, and you're spending all the budget that you won't really want to, then you really don't have to care too much about your click through rates. But as soon as you want to scale up and spend more, or if you decide that you want to optimize your efforts to either decrease costs, or improve your conversion rates, this becomes an entirely different story. So I'm here to tell you that your click through rate matters. And you shouldn't dismiss it just because it's front end data. Your click through rate really begins your data story. Of course, it is only the beginning. But hey, we all judge books by their covers, don't we? In order to tell the full story of why click through rates are so meaningful here on LinkedIn, we need to talk a little bit about relevancy scores. And the history here is that back in early days of Google Ads back when it was Google AdWords, they needed a way to prioritize which advertisers ads that they showed above another one. So let's say that you have two advertisers who are both bidding $3 for a click, the platform obviously wants to maximize its revenue and make Google more money. But when two advertisers are both willing to pay $3 for a click, then you really can't tell which one should be prioritized. So what they did is they started looking at click through rates. And if one advertiser had a 3% click through rate, and another had a 1% click through rate, they're both willing to pay $3 per click, but the one with the 3%, click through rate is going to make Google money the same money three times as often. So this became quality score. It's a metric that Google advertisers have had to care about for a long time. Well, it's a really good system. And of course, all of the modern ad platforms all incorporate this to some degree. For instance, on LinkedIn, it's called relevancy score. On Facebook, it's called relevance ccore. On Twitter, it's called quality adjusted bid. I have no idea why they chose that, but yeah, sure, it works. And the effect of what this does is for the platform, it maximizes the platform's revenue. They're going to make sure that those who are making the platform more money, get their ads served more often, and continue getting a boost, making them money. And for the advertisers, if you're doing a great job, if your ads get a lot of engagement from your audience, then it rewards you, you essentially get more impressions and more clicks at cheaper costs than a poorer performing competitor might. Conversely, it punishes advertisers who aren't profitable to the network. And if you're early to a platform, and there's just not much competition there, no worries. A bad advertiser can work for a while. But as soon as competition continues to rise, it'll eventually push bad advertisers out. And that's really what relevancy score, quality score, whatever you want to call it, does. It weights all the benefits to the advertisers who are doing great and punishes bad advertisers. Back when I was focused on Google ads, and this was early days, I know it's probably very, very different now, but back when I was working with it, there were 22 different factors that Google claimed went into its quality score. And it would be things like how often the ads get engaged with and clicked on, for sure, that's a big one. But they would also look at the landing page and decide how relevant it was. And they looked at page load times, and all of these different factors. And then you have the LinkedIn Ads platform that was developed back in 2007. And it had the same mechanism, but it was a lot more nascent, a lot more simple, which is actually good. I think it works in our advantage. I wouldn't be surprised if LinkedIn continues to update and make it more sophisticated in the future. But as of right now, it's still pretty simple. The way that you can calculate how LinkedIn figures out what your relevancy score should be, it's a combination of two elements. It's your historical click through rate. So how people have clicked on your ads in the past, combined with your current click through rate, how people are interacting with your ads right now. Is historical click through rate more important than current? That I don't know, what I do know is that historical is a strong enough element that on accounts where we've had a lot of spend and performance in history, it can be really difficult to dethrone the winning ad. And what that tells me is that one ad has such a high relevancy score, that it can't be dethroned with launching something newer. And the benefits to you to having a high relevancy score are absolutely obvious. It allows you to beat out your competition for impressions in the auction without having to bid as much. So think of it like this, you could be paying 20% less than your competitor for every single click, meaning that you're bringing in leads that are costing 20% less than your competitor. And who wouldn't want to make sure that they were paying 20%, less than a competitor had to pay for exactly the same thing. And all of this because of a silly little metric that you can't even see. And let me back up there, you actually can see it. But I'd argue that it's not ultra helpful. If you go into campaign manager and hit Export, and you generate a campaign performance report, you can scroll over until you see a column called quality score. And first of all, LinkedIn calls it relevancy score. So why in the world is Google's name for it quality score in our reporting, I don't know why. But I digress here. If I look there, and I see that a campaign has a relevancy score of four, and that's a scale out of 10. I know that that's bad. So I'm probably going to want to go into that campaign and make some kind of a change to see if what I did actually improves it. So I come and check back a couple days later. And my relevancy score still says four. So I checked back another week later, and it still says four. And what I want to impress on you is, if this were a metric that were updated every day, or on a regular schedule that we could predict, this would be really useful for us to optimize. We could see something bad or even good, make changes, and then see the results of it. So because we don't know how often this is updated, it really isn't all that useful to us as advertisers. It might be interesting to see, at some point, this campaign had a relevancy score of four or of seven, but it doesn't help us very much in optimization. So you're asking, well, AJ, if we don't use that metric, how can we actually tell how it is we're doing? Well, remember how I said that relevancy score was calculated by basically two different types of your click through rate. So what I recommend doing is go and compare your click through rates to benchmark. And again, Episode 15 of the podcast goes over all of benchmarks. You can basically use your click through rate as an analogy to what your relevancy score would be. So for instance, if you know that the average click through rate on sponsored content is something like .44%, and you're getting a 1.6% click through rate, you could look at that and say, ah, we are three, four times above benchmark that tells us something really, really good. We probably have a very high relevancy score, maybe it's a an eight, nine, ten, something like that. And don't get too caught up in your relevancy score, just realize that it's a mechanism that's there and it might help explain how performance changes or how the platform reacts to your test over time. And by itself, it doesn't mean anything. All it is is a multiplier that either helps or hurts you in the auction. And you should also remember that this is a comparative metric, which means if you have a relevancy score of 10, and your competitor also has a 10. Neither of you really get much of a benefit at all. But of course, you're both going to crush your competitors who have relevancy scores of three and four. So we've talked about how relevancy score gives you a multiplier or a weight in the auction. Let's talk about how the auction actually works on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn. actually released a really good video about a year ago on their YouTube channel about how the auction works, how your cost per click are calculated. So I've linked to that in the show notes. It's only about four minutes long and it's definitely worth your time to help you understand. But basically how it works is that your bid gets multiplied by your relevancy score in the auction to give you a combined score. And then what happens is your combined score, every time a possible impression, a piece of ad inventory opens up, there becomes a little auction in between you and your competitors or that audience. And they compare your combined score to that of your competitors. Whoever has the highest combined score, theoretically pays one cent more than whatever the second place person, the loser in that auction, would have paid. Now I say supposedly, because it sure doesn't seem like we only pay a cent more than what the loser pays. And we've done quite a bit of testing around this. We haven't seen this work, but we assume that what LinkedIn saying here is correct. And it is a second price auction, which is the same model as Google has. So one way that this might work for you is, let's say that you and a competitor are both bidding $10. If your ads have a higher click through rate, chances are you're gonna get shown more than they do. But let's turn the tables here a little bit. Let's say that you're bidding $6 and they're bidding $12. If your click through rate is double theirs, or even higher, it's in LinkedIn best interest to keep showing your ads, even though you're only bidding $6, you're not bidding very aggressively, and your competitor was willing to pay $12. But still, your click through rate was higher, and LinkedIn is gonna get paid more by showing you. So you're gonna end up even with non-competitive bids, getting shown more often at lower costs than really anyone else in the auction. So you can probably see now why we're talking about click through rate being so important, because your click through rate determines what your relevancy score is. And then that determines how much you pay and how much you get shown in LinkedIn's auction. And this is, of course, talking about if we're bidding by cost per click. But if you're using LinkedIn's either cost per impression bidding or automated delivery or max delivery, it changes the scales a little bit, when you're paying by the impression, LinkedIn looks at it and goes, hmm, well, we get paid either way just for showing this ad. So we don't have to worry too much about the auction or too much about relevancy score. So if you are having troubles getting your ads shown, a lot of times we'll either turn on auto bidding, or bid CPM. And it's a nice easy way to bypass the auction. With that being said, if your ads aren't getting clicked on, chances are they're costing you too much and there's a lot you can do to turn that around and actually get better engagement. All right, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we're going to dive into what click through rates do for you in ad optimization.

13:01 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

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Alright, let's jump into why click through rate matters in your ad optimization. Your click through rate really is a good measure of how attractive your ads are. It's really the first warning light of problems all the way down your ad funnel. If you have a bad click through rate, it could be that you wrote your ad copy in a non compelling way. Or maybe the image wasn't strong enough, or it didn't stand out enough to get people to stop scrolling and so they ended up just scrolling right past it. Or maybe people did see your ad, but your offer itself wasn't interesting enough for them to want to click. If I'm seeing high costs per click, and even high cost per lead. Click through rate is going to be the first thing I check to see oh, how are we doing here? It also can rule out your ads as being the problem. Let's say you have a really high cost per lead. If you look at your ads, and they have a click through rate that is several times the benchmark or significantly above it, you can almost rule out okay, well, it probably wasn't the ads, let's go look at the next step. Let's look at the landing page or the form we're using. Do we have good enough social proof on our landing page or featured in the ad? Or did our landing page load fast enough? All of those types of things. And if you get nothing else out of this episode, what I want you to understand is click through rate really ties together with all of the performance in your your account, it leads directly to your relevancy score. So those two are connected. And then that plays in to see how much you're going to pay depending on how you're bidding. So your costs per click are dependent on your relevancy score, and your click through rates. And if you're paying more for clicks, you're going to pay more for leads, assuming that your conversion rate stays static. So these are all connected. And so you as an ad manager, you're going to want to be paying close attention to this. But again, you're not going to want to go and report, I increase click through rates by 30%, to your boss or to your client, they honestly don't care, they are going to care about metrics that are a lot closer to the bottom of the funnel or the money. I should also mention that your relevancy score is really a cyclical kind of thing because when you have a good relevancy score, you'll get placed in better ad inventory, usually higher on the page, higher in the news feed, you'll be the top of the three text ads, etc. And when you're in the better ad positions, you show up closer to the top when people are willing to click. If your ad is four pages down in the feed, chances are the only people who are seeing it are the mindless scrollers. And you don't want them, they're not going to click. And if you want your budget to scale, let's say things are going really, really well and now you want to spend twice as much next month. Well, your relevancy score is the key to unlocking more impressions. Because as you get more impressions that will allow you to get obviously more clicks more leads, and spend more budget. I've found for scale, your click through rate is the easiest lever to pull. If you know that you want to scale up, but as you try, you just end up paying more and not getting too much more then launching new ads or launching new offers that have a higher click through rate is by far the easiest way to get that additional scale without paying way too much for it. In Episode 29, we talked about ad saturation. So if you're not familiar with that episode, go familiarize yourself with it. But I found that your click through rate, especially watching it over time, is the strongest signal that you can have to track whether your ads or your offers are saturating an audience. And the easiest way to do this is to go into your performance chart in your account. That's episode 52, if you're not familiar with that one. And you can plot any campaign or ad, buy click through rate over time. And what you might see is that 30 days ago, the average click through rate was, let's say 0.8%. But over the course of a month, now it's crept down to where it's 0.5%. That's a signal that you continue to show the ad to the same people who've already seen it before and probably aren't going to click, you definitely want to catch this and launch something new, constantly refreshing your account, because you don't want those click through rates to fall over time. Because that factors into your historical click through rate, which can earn you poor relevancy scores. So stay on top of it don't ever sit on your LinkedIn Ads.

18:05 So let's say that your click through rate is high. But your conversion rate is low. Like we talked about before, it could be that your landing page experience or your forms that there's an issue there. But what if they're not what if your ad and your landing page and your forms, they're all pretty congruent, this could be a sign that your ads are click baity. Or maybe you're using salacious imagery that makes people want to click, but it's not a serious interested click, it's a curiosity click. Maybe your ads are a thirst trap, you're featuring a really attractive person in your ad, and someone clicks because they want to see more of that attractive person and they're like, Oh, they're not there on the landing page. I'm going to be done here. But assuming that you wrote your ad, not in a way to trick people. A poor conversion rate usually means that your ads are fine, but your landing page experience is not. But that doesn't mean that your click through rate metric isn't important though, because it really does. It's the first page to your whole story. And whether it's high or low, will help you diagnose issues or spot high performance all the way through your funnel. And of course, you're always going to be wanting to watch for any sources of friction. And you want to remove that friction obviously anytime you can. You really do have to think about your whole strategy and realize that click through rate is just a piece of this whole strategy. And just because your click through rates are bad, it doesn't mean your whole strategy is broken. Dennis Yu, the famous Facebook ads expert, talks about things being a warning light or like a check engine light. Think of your click through rate as really just being a check engine light. It's an indicator that something could be wrong and that it should be looked at but it doesn't mean that the car is going to crash or break down in the next mile. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

20:08 Okay, like we talked about in the episode, you'll see in the show notes down below the episode about benchmarking your performance, as well as the episode about how to use the performance chart. You'll also see the link to the video that LinkedIn released about how the LinkedIn auction works. Definitely well worth a watch. I get asked a lot about courses, I've released a course in tandem with LinkedIn. It's on the LinkedIn Learning platform. You'll see a link down below. It's an incredibly inexpensive course and it's only about an hour and a half. It's fantastic. High quality, great learnings and that's enough, usually to get a new advertiser off the ground. On whatever platform you're listening to this on, look down and hit the subscribe button. We'd absolutely love to have you around for the next episode. And if you like what you're hearing, please do rate the podcast and leave us a review. I'll shout out your review live on air. Well, as live as it is. It's pre-recorded, obviously about a week in advance. But either way, I'd love to shout you out. With any questions, thoughts, suggestions, reach out to us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Brenda Meller's post detailing all the new industries

Oribi Aquisition

Company Engagement Report

New Pages Updates

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

LinkedIn Ads has a lot of options for retargeting and nurturing your prospects. What's worth using and what isn't. We'll talk about all of this in more in this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! You're probably aware that retargeting ads are some of the most powerful ads that you can run, and also one of the cheapest. It's kind of like a digital marketing superpower. So LinkedIn has had retargeting since 2017. But I've never really been all that hot on it for reasons that we'll get into today. But in the last few years, LinkedIn has given us some really great firepower for nurturing our prospects. We'll dive into the different retargeting and nurturing strategies that you can use, even right now, to get the best bang for your hard earned marketing budget buck. First, let's cover the news because there's been a lot this week. In our Account Based Marketing episode that was episode 56, we talked about the company engagement report. This is when you upload a list of company names into your matched audiences and then you can click into them later to see which individual companies have been seeing your ads and engaging with them. Well, this was always really hard to share with your sales team or your ops team. And you can imagine how valuable that might be to get over to sales or get over to maybe your marketing or sales ops, like, hey, these two companies are really engaging with our stuff, right now, it might be a good time to reach out to them. Well, LinkedIn announced this week that your company engagement report is now going to have a CSV export feature. So now you can download this into Excel and send it around to whomever you'd like. About two weeks ago, LinkedIn announced that they acquired an Israeli company called Oribi. LinkedIn's own words, they said, "Through the integration of Oribi's technology into our marketing solutions platform, our customers will benefit from enhanced campaign attribution to optimize the ROI of their advertising strategies. This means that our customers will be able to more easily measure website conversions with automated tags and code free technology, as well as build more effective audiences, all in a way that is privacy first by design." What this tells me is this is a technology that's going to help us with attribution and conversion tracking. Basically, a lot of the stuff that we're losing as cookies go away. So, it all sounds really good on the surface, I'm really excited to see what LinkedIn does with it. Also, I'm sure you've all felt the same pain that we have, which is when you go to select an industry in LinkedIn's company pages, or even on your personal profile, the choices were very limited. I think there were only something like 26 different industries that you could choose. Correct me if I'm wrong on that. Well, something that is absolutely fantastic, LinkedIn reached out and said, Hey, we're expanding our number of industries that you can claim to over 400 different industries. If you are using industry targeting, this may be a huge help to you. But LinkedIn, and I know you listen, I have a huge ask for you on this one. I noticed when going through all of the new industries that we could select, we couldn't select SAAS software, and we couldn't select B2B. Those are two that for the longest time, I've really struggled to figure out how we can effectively target SAAS companies on LinkedIn, as well as those who are B2B versus B2C. If there's any way that we could get those somehow wrapped up in our targeting, or in company page classifications, that would be amazing. You should be able to go right now and start typing any industries that you think you might want to claim within your company page, and LinkedIn will auto populate some of the options there. If you're curious about all 400, a friend of the show, Brenda Miller, has created a post on LinkedIn that lists out all 400 of them. So we're going to go ahead and link to that in the show notes below. If you're curious to check out all the options, definitely check out her post. And Brenda thanks for putting that together. That's a great resource. And then a note from LinkedIn that in June of this year, 2022, the new industries are going to be released in the campaign manager and we'll be able to view or add these new options to any campaign. Excellent news that we're excited for. Alright, excited to jump into retargeting and nurturing. Let's hit it.

First, I think we have to touch on the principle of what nurturing and what retargeting are supposed to be. The concept here is that it usually takes about seven to ten touches with a brand before someone will add the brand to their consideration set where they'll actually consider doing business with you. We know that people need multiple touches with your brand to get them into the funnel. We also know that a lot of us on LinkedIn are doing this with products and services that are extremely high consideration and high costs, which means more and more people have to be involved in this purchase decision. We call them the purchase committee. And so you start looking at, okay, everyone needs seven to ten touches. And there's quite a few people here within the buying committee and so now we're talking about needing a lot of touches on these people in order to secure them wanting to do business with you, or at least considering. So what is a touch? Well, in my mind, a touch is anytime that someone has some sort of an experience with your brand. That could be as low as they saw an ad on their screen and just took note of it and moved on. Others might be a full, they've downloaded an asset of yours, or they visited your webpage and clicked around. I'm wondering how many times you have ads on your prospect screen that they haven't even taken note of they've just scrolled right past. So in that case, we certainly couldn't call an impression, a touch. Just because LinkedIn charges you for an impression doesn't mean that it actually sunk in for your prospect. I like to talk about someone's know, like, and trust factor. If someone's going to do business with you, they need to know you, like you, and trust you. So think about how you build your know, like, and trust factor for any brand out there. Which brands do you absolutely love? And are you a huge fan of? Which ones will you support publicly without needing to be compensated in some way? Think about how you can copy those things that that brand has done for you to your own marketing so you can be doing that for your prospects. An example of how this principle works for me, about 10 years ago, I was really into Twitter, it was really heating up, I was having great conversations and getting a lot of value out of it. But I also noticed that a lot of my friends and industry colleagues would share content on there. But being a very busy professional and not having the time to read every single article that came through my feed, I set a rule for myself. That was if any one or two times that content was posted in the feed, I wouldn't worry about it. But if I saw three or more of the people that I follow, all reference the same article or topic, I would take the time to go and actually read it and research it. What I was doing is relying on multiple sources to share something before I found it worthy of my time. I think the same rule applies, like if you talk about popularity in high school. So if you can imagine one person in high school walking around and telling everyone, Hey, everyone, I'm popular, and they say it 1000 times, that doesn't actually help you believe it. In fact, you might actually believe that that person is the epitome of uncool. On the other hand, if you hear from 1000 Different students that this one student is really cool. She is the coolest girl at school. And even if the people who are talking about it are not the people that you trust, you hear it from enough sources, it starts to really sink in. So we know that when we hear about brands from multiple sources, it's going to help improve our know like and trust factor with that brand, much faster than if they just keep seeing you from exactly one source. In B2B, we know that someone is probably not yet ready to convert at the bottom of the funnel, the very first time they hear about your brand. So then it requires you to continue to warm up that prospect all the way from when they are cold and maybe have never even heard of you before until they are warm enough that they're ready to convert at the bottom of the funnel and become a customer or at least get a proposal or consider talking to someone. That ability to warm someone up is something that we can do through continued advertising. But it's especially powerful when we talk about retargeting those prospects. The lazy marketer will do this by just showing the same ads over and over to the same prospect. And to me, that's the equivalent of the one person in high school walking around and telling everyone how popular they are. It's not going to be believable. On the other hand, if that prospect is seeing you on certainly in the LinkedIn feed, maybe they see you across multiple different ad formats. Maybe they get a message from you inside of their sponsored messaging. This just keeps getting stronger and stronger, the more channels that you're targeting on. So sure, we're going to advocate running all of your ads on LinkedIn because that's all we do, but I also understand the value of making sure that that same prospect is seeing you when they log on to Facebook and Instagram and they see you on TikTok and they see you on YouTube. All of these are fantastic channels, and that really increase your know, like, and trust factor very quickly. And they're not all that expensive. Your job as a marketer is going to be what are the offers that I can come up with that are going to warm someone up and get their attention and nurture them, and maybe even help identify what sort of problems they face so that we can keep solving those in the future. That is a huge job ahead of you. But one that when you solve it, it's pure gold, and it's going to pay off for years and years to come. And as your retargeting and nurturing your prospects, it's important to understand that if you have an offer or ads that aren't performing or aren't converting, then you constantly need to be introducing new offers, and you constantly need to be shaking things up.

10:48 Website Retargeting So first off, let's talk about all the retargeting options that we have here on LinkedIn. First off, we have website retargeting, and this is the one that came out in 2017, which I was really excited about, but it ended up really deflating my sales just because there were so many weaknesses with it. So first off, when you're retargeting just on LinkedIn, you're showing ads to people only when they're on LinkedIn. And as we know, LinkedIn isn't the platform that the majority of your prospects are spending lots and lots of time on every single day. So that makes it a little bit weaker. If your goal of retargeting is to stay top of mind and stay in front of your prospects, then if you're only doing it on LinkedIn, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. When website retargeting first launched, LinkedIn said that those audiences would only store for 90 days. It turns out there was a little bit of an internal mistake where they were actually storing those audiences for longer, it was more like 180 days, which is right on par with Facebook, actually. But when I first saw 90, I went, Man, we're spending a lot of money on our LinkedIn traffic to retarget it and know that when we add someone to an audience, and it's only going to stick around for 90 days before rolling over, it doesn't get me excited enough to actually go and do something about it. Then there was the issue of costs, you know, we were paying $8 to $12 per click. And then when we used LinkedIn retargeting, we were still paying like four to $8 per click, sometimes even more. And so when we talk about retargeting being a good deal, it almost like it wasn't all that great of a deal. Plus, you need to have at least 300 people in your audience. So if I am doing a retargeting audience based off of just people who've clicked on my ads, I have to pay for at least 300 people to make it to my landing page or to my website to cookie them before I can even start advertising. So it was kind of a large hurdle to get over for the smaller advertisers for sure. The larger advertisers no problem. I mean, you get 300 clicks in pretty short measure. But for a smaller company or a smaller spend where 300 clicks per month would be a lot, it makes it a lot harder. So all of that to say that LinkedIn's website retargeting was never all that great value. But now we add to that the fact that LinkedIn's website retargeting is all based on cookies, and after the iOS 14 update, when all Apple devices stopped storing third party cookies, we looked at it and said, Oh, there goes half of our traffic, maybe this isn't all that great. And then add that to the fact that here in the next six to nine months, Chrome is probably going to be treating cookies the same way. So now there goes the other half of your audience. I know you didn't ask, but for my predictions here, I would say that in the next six to nine months, when Chrome does this, we're probably going to be left with audience sizes that are maybe 10 to 20% of what they were before the iOS 14 update. And this for sure isn't a good thing. That means that our retargeting audiences that we've built are just a 10th, or maybe a 20th as effective, but I don't want to paint a picture of all doom and gloom here. For the future. Maybe this isn't going to be a great long term avenue for you. But in the short term, realize that there may still be some value left. There's nothing stopping you from right now, even if you haven't started yet. Go and start building up your LinkedIn website retargeting audiences and get use out of them while you can make hay while the sun is still shining. Okay, so that's website retargeting.

Event Retargeting

Then there's something actually really exciting, which is event retargeting. So you can imagine with website retargeting, the technology that we're relying on is that when someone visits your website, your insight tag fires, and it communicates to LinkedIn who that person is. It allows LinkedIn to see based off of the cookie in their browser on their computer, if they are a LinkedIn member. If they're logged in LinkedIn can recognize them, then LinkedIn will make a note that that person has, indeed, visited your page and now they can put them into some kind of a retargeting audience. This is all based on the fact that LinkedIn as a third party has to be able to identify who someone is on your website and privacy concerns are going to make that a lot more difficult. But whenever someone takes an action on Linkedin.com, of course, LinkedIn knows. That's called event retargeting. So you can imagine someone is logged in, LinkedIn knows exactly who they are, they see one of your ads, they click on it, they convert on it, they watch a video, all of these things are things that LinkedIn can tell immediately. They know exactly who. They know exactly when. And as long as they have the server space on the back end, they're able to track this. This type of retargeting has been going on for years and years on Facebook, Facebook has pioneered it and it's so so good over there. LinkedIn has been rolling out some of these events that you can retarget over the last several years and honestly, they just keep getting better and better. And the most exciting thing I can mention is that LinkedIn just barely released a new one, that is actually the most powerful of all of them. So we'll get to that here in a minute, make sure you stick around. So here are some of the events that we can retarget, we've been able to retarget, those who have submitted a lead generation form. We can also separately track those who have opened a lead generation form. So that means they have taken enough of an action on an ad that it would trigger the form dropping down. So even if they didn't actually fill out and submit the form, you're still getting something from them, which is pretty exciting. But you might say to yourself, ma'am, that's a pretty big commitment for someone to actually engage with an ad like that, like they want to convert. We're not getting very many people into our funnel. Okay, I understand you there. And it's a very valid point. Okay, what about this, we've been able to target people who have watched at least 25% of a video ad. That's pretty cool. So you have these video ads out there. It's a little janky and difficult to set up for sure. But you have all these videos marked as if someone watches at least 25% of this, add them to this audience. Okay, I can still hear you saying, yeah, but 25%. If I have like a three minute long video, again, I'm capturing next to no one, only those are sticking around for 25% of that. Okay, so this one's a little bit more exciting. What about those who have visited your company page? Anyone who's visited your company page, you can add to a retargeting audience. And that, I think is a lot more exciting for sure. Okay, at that point, you may say, All right, well, company page, that means they haven't necessarily interacted with any of my ads, they could have gone to a company page a different way. Okay, I understand there's a little bit of a weakness there. But if you're running an event off of your company page, and someone is marked as interested like they want to attend, ah, we can now add them to a retargeting audience. And that's pretty cool. They've showed enough of an interest in an event that we've put on that they're probably going to be interested in future content as well, around those same topics. That's pretty powerful.

18:21 Single Image Ad Interactions All right, that takes us to the one that I told you, I was so excited about. This is the one that just rolled out. This is single image ad interactions. By the time you're hearing this, you should be able to go into your matched audiences and create a new event. And then if you see single image as one of your options, you know, you have this, I think it's rolled out to everyone at this point. But if not just wait a couple weeks. As you set this up, you have two different options. You can one retarget anyone who had a paid click interaction. That means they took an action that if you were paying by the click you would have gotten charged for. If that's a website visits campaign, that's going to be someone who clicked on your link, which is pretty cool because like we talked about with website retargeting, it's pretty weak when you are sending someone to your landing page. And then you know that maybe only 10 to 20% of the people who make it to the landing page are even going to make it into that audience. Add to the fact that if your page loads slowly, some people may bounce after they've clicked, but when the page doesn't load as fast as they were hoping, then they just leave. So you're left with almost no audience to be able to retarget Well, if you have this set up for single image retargeting, what you can do is anyone who clicked on your call to action is going to be put into this audience, whether they make it to your landing page or not, whether their cookie is recognized or not by the time they make it to your website. So this makes it ultra powerful to be able to retarget those who have clicked on your ads. That is really cool in my opinion. But then they've stepped it up even one more degree, this is a lot closer to where Facebook has it. If you're running a single image ad, you can retarget anyone who had any sort of interaction on that ad, that means a like a comment a reshare. they've clicked on your company page, maybe they've followed your company page from there. This is extremely powerful for noting whether someone has had truly some kind of a touch with your brand. We're doing quite a bit of testing around the single image interaction and click retargeting. So I'm sure we'll have more to share with you later.

20:40 Matched Audiences Let's move on to another retargeting option that we have called matched audiences. Now website retargeting is technically part of matched audiences. But the part that I get most excited about matched audiences for are the lists that you upload. So this is where you can take a list of people who maybe have converted already on your website, and you can upload them to LinkedIn and target them. You can also upload company lists, and narrow your targeting on those companies to get just those who have had some sort of an interaction with your brand in the past. Where you upload a list of contacts, we'll call that contact lists. And there's lots of different ways that you can treat these. You might break up your contact lists by what stage of the funnel they're in. For instance, if you have a list that you know are all cold contacts. Maybe they've had some sort of minor interaction with your brand, or maybe they haven't had any sort of interaction, and you want them to have an interaction with your brand. Then what you can do is upload these into a campaign. And you can promote a more top of funnel type of offer. Something to get their attention and get them to have a positive view of you. Then, of course, if you have a list of prospects, who are maybe a little bit further down the funnel. Maybe these are those who've converted in some way. You can show them maybe more of a mid funnel type of offer. And then maybe you have another list that are further along down the funnel. Maybe those who they're already in contact with your sales team. Maybe you've already given them a proposal, and you're hoping that this deal closes. Well, maybe you can either promote to them more bottom of funnel type of offer, or just stay in front of them long enough to help them make that decision as they're talking to their buyers committee. The kinds of lists that you can be thinking of, if you're not quite sure what you can grab. You can grab a list of your competitors, you can grab a list of your current customers, you could get a list of your past customers, like we talked about, you can have a cold list of prospects, maybe you're presenting at a show. And the show will give you a list of the people who've signed up to attend. Maybe you have a warm opt in list that you can upload and work with. Maybe if you're using a software like HubSpot that has a direct integration into LinkedIn, you can have a dynamic list where as someone is added to your CRM, they're automatically added to some sort of a list for retargeting or nurture on LinkedIn. When you go to upload a list to LinkedIn a contact list, one of the things that they have is an offline events list option. I looked into it because I haven't seen this before and to be honest, I'm not sure how this is different than any other contact list, other than it contains a few extra columns, one about like how much they paid for their ticket, and the ticket purchase timestamp. Because this is an offline event where LinkedIn wouldn't have any sort of vision into it. I'm not quite sure what value you would get out of matching these details, because LinkedIn won't know how much someone paid for their ticket, or won't know when a ticket was purchased. But maybe in the future, this could be used for like optimizing ads towards people who paid more for their tickets. So maybe they're a higher quality prospect. I don't know how this is working, but if you're not sure on how to use this one, and you are using offline events, just upload it as a normal contact list and you'll be good. I mentioned that we were doing some cool research around the single image interactions. And what we did is we went and created a separate audience, for those who have interacted with an ad in the last 30 days, the last 60 days, the last 90 days, the last 180 days, and the last 365 days. And what's so cool to me about this is something that Facebook has done that I honestly didn't think that LinkedIn was going to do. It will actually build these audiences in arrears. What I mean by that is if you go in right now and you set up one of these audiences to target anyone who's clicked on one of your ads for the last 30 days. Yoou know you create the campaign today, it'll take the full 72 hours to build that audience, and then it will actually go and put all of the people who've interacted with that ad in the last 30 days. In that audience. It goes back and grabs them, even from before they have this option, really cool. What I love about this is you can actually go and create all five of these audiences and you can even double them. You know, 30 days of interacting with the ad and 30 days clicking on it, and then 60 days interacting with the ad, and then 60 days clicking on it. You could create 10 separate audiences that you can use. And what I love about this is that you can actually graduate people through these funnels now. So if it's just tracking people who've interacted in the last 30 days, after 30 days passes, they will fall out of that audience, but they'll still be in the 60 day audience. So you could create different campaigns that pick someone up after they've not interacted with your brand in a while and try to warm them back up. It is important to remember that you still need at least 300 unique audience members in each in order for the ads to run, but set them up now, so that they're all ready to go once you have that many clicks. As we went and built these, we noticed that LinkedIn will tell us the number of engagements that an individual audience had. And then after the list processes, it told us a smaller number of people who are now in that audience. And the way that I interpreted that for one of our clients, it said that there were something like 11,800 engagements from that audience as we were building the segment. And then after it was done, it produced a list of 7,200 users. That tells me that, yeah, 7,200 people were responsible for those 11,800 engagements, which means that on average, each person in an audience was responsible for almost two engagements. That tells us a little bit about the frequency that we're hitting them on, which is pretty cool. Okay, we're gonna take a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the general nurture strategies that we can use. The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead, and the ultimate scale. Were official LinkedIn partners and from day one, you'll only deal with LinkedIn Ads experts. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. We'd absolutely love to explore working with you. 27:33 Top of Funnel Okay, let's jump into some of the different nurturing strategies that we can use now that we know about the different tools that LinkedIn has given us to retarget people. I think first we need to talk about those who are top of funnel. So these are cold prospects, maybe they've seen your company at some point, or maybe they've taken some light action. There's a couple different strategies I might recommend. The first and lightest would be, you could put some kind of an offer together that's ungated and show it to them in hopes that you're just going to get them exposed positively to your brand. This, as we've talked about on previous episodes, is a very expensive strategy on LinkedIn, because you're going to pay $8 to $13 per click for people to go to a blog post or go to an ungated asset. There isn't a great way of staying in front of them on other platforms. We know if you send them to a landing page, and you're retargeting on Google and on Facebook, and you've got your LinkedIn retargeting set up, then you'll have a better chance, but it won't be bulletproof, for sure. All of those clicks will add up to something where you're not even asking them to convert. So you may not have that vote of knowing whether or not this is working because you're not seeing conversions come in. You could do a step up, which is you could gate that content. Showing them offers like free guides and checklists and cheat sheets, where they do have to enter in their personal information. This tends to be one of the strategies that we recommend the most for newer advertisers. And then you could take some of these event retargeting, as well as your website retargeting and show similar offers, or maybe even the same offer to those who haven't converted. And this is even stronger because of that new single image event retargeting because we can target those who clicked, but didn't convert, especially if it's like a lead gen form. If they need more warming up, you can always promote a more top of funnel or middle of funnel offer before jumping into a bottom of funnel offer. So what I mean by this is, let's say that you are running someone through a three stage funnel. So there's a top of funnel piece of content like a free guide, then the next offer they're introduced to might be something a little bit higher engagement, like join a webinar or an online event. And then your final step in the funnel might be talk to someone, set up a call, get a demo. Well, if you're running this and you notice that your sales team is talking about these being low conversion rate from MQL to SQL, or the leads just aren't ready yet, you could always insert one more step in there. You can say, Okay, we're going to try to top of funnels, or we're going to try a top of funnel and then to middle of funnel offers, before jumping them writes that bottom of funnel. Now I have to tell you, this is absolutely revolutionary that we can do this on LinkedIn, we didn't used to be able to create these bulletproof funnels, but now we can. We can start building these audiences of just those who've interacted with certain content. It's way cool. The kinds of offers that you might consider for cold audiences might be something like a blog post, or an infographic that or ungated. Or the kinds of things that might be gated could be things like a free checklist, or cheat sheet, a guide, an ebook, maybe even something like a webinar, or an in person event, those are getting a little bit more high engagement and high friction, I get asked a lot about case studies promoting case studies, either for the middle of funnel or top of funnel, or even bottom of funnel. And what I do is I split case studies into two different camps because there's two different really kinds of case studies, I have one that is more of a sales piece, and then one that's more of a guide. So if you look at your case studies, and you say, oh, what this is really saying is, look how awesome my company is, because we've had this success with this awesome client, then that's a sales case study and I would say that is already very bottom of funnel. You're not going to want to gate something like that near the top or middle of your funnel, because the only time someone would actually be interested in that kind of content would be if they're already considering doing business with you and they just want some proof that you are legit, that you are who you say you are. But if you have a case study that's very much like, Hey, here's the problem we face, and here are the concrete steps that we went through in order to get this outcome, and here's the outcome we had, and here were the things we tried, and the things that didn't work and did work. Now you can follow this exact same guide and get exactly the same outcome. You could still call it a case study, but I might also call it a guide or a checklist. And that is actually going to be valuable for everyone, even top of funnel. So take a look at your different case studies and see which of those categories yours falls under. If you're more middle of funnel with these prospects with a list that you're working on, I think you can go to the more high touch, the more high friction types of offers out there. So you might consider a webinar or a sales in case study or an in person event. And then when you get to the bottom of the funnel, that's obviously when you earned your spot to be able to ask them for things like talk to a sales rep, buy now, take a free trial of your software. Really anything that earlier stages in the funnel, they're not going to be ready for yet. So maybe you're thinking to yourself, hey, AJ, should I be setting up some sort of a retargeting campaign on LinkedIn? Should my company be nurturing? The answer is, absolutely, I don't care who you are. Everyone should be running retargeting in some form or another. There's no excuse not to at least get it setting up and building audiences so even if you're not ready to use them right now, you can still use them in the future. Remember with those website retargeting audiences, if you don't have that setup now and gaining audience members, every day that you put off doing that you're losing people in your audience, whereas with the single image retargeting that LinkedIn just gave us, and I hope they roll this kind of functionality out to all of their events, we really can set that up at any point in time, just realize that there is a 72 hour processing time.

33:56 Sequences

So now we have this ability to run people through sequences. We can sequence them by how long ago, they committed some sort of an action, and then graduate them to the next step, once they've either taken a certain action, or it's just been longer than 30 days or whatever. If you're just brand new to this and let's say that some of your lists, you don't have enough people in them to run ads by themselves. What I would suggest doing is stacking your lists. What you might say is in one campaign, one beautiful retargeting campaign, you're going to have anyone who's watched at least 25% of your video ads. And then you add to that anyone who's opened a lead gen form. You can also add company page visitors. And you can do this until each segment of your audience is large enough to run on its own or just keep them combined if you only want one retargeting audience to stay in front of all of them, rather than having to run five or six different campaigns. If you're looking to build an audience as fast as possible, the fastest way to do this is still to run a short video ad, lets say something that is eight seconds or there abouts, and target anyone who's watched at least 25% of that video, then trigger showing them the next ad. That's the fastest way to build a retargeting audience. Now I mentioned ways of retargeting people and interacting with them off of LinkedIn. We call this maybe a holistic retargeting strategy, or a holistic marketing strategy. If you want to retarget on Google when you get people to your website, it's the same minimum that LinkedIn has, you have to have at least 300 people in an audience, but what you do get is access to incredible inventory. You have access to all of Googles Google Display Network, which is like 80% of the web out there. If your goal in retargeting is to stay in front of someone, and keep top of mind, there's no better way than on Google to do that. You get them everywhere that they are surfing around and looking for information. Then you've got Facebook, which last time I checked, the minimum to run a Facebook retargeting audience was like 20 people so much, much lower than LinkedIn and Google's 300 person minimum. That makes it an incredible place to start retargeting because you don't need very many visitors before you can start doing that. Of course, you can do email nurture, which is kind of like retargeting, but once you have someone's email address, you're retargeting them through their email inbox. Which you're obviously not doing through an ad platform, you would do that through your email provider or through your marketing automation software, but it's a great way of just having one additional touch with your brand. We've talked a little bit about how retargeting is taking a hit on LinkedIn with the cookie going away. And it's true retargeting has definitely taken a hit. And this is not just limited to LinkedIn, Facebook and Google are absolutely reeling, trying to figure out what's the best way that they can keep their retargeting technologies working because once those cookies are gone, they lose so many of the ways that they get signals on who's interacting with ads. But I will say Facebook and Google are still the most advanced ad platforms on the planet and if anyone can solve it, it is them. No matter whether you're currently advertising on Google and or Facebook right now, go set up your retargeting audiences so that they're building so that you can do this in the future. Because again, if you don't get it set up, now, you're losing all of those people who would be interacting today. All right, I've got the episode resources coming for you right up. So stick around.

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

37:52 Okay, first of all, in the episode resources, you'll see the link to Brenda Miller's post, where she details out all 400 of the new industries that she's found. If you're curious to see what's coming, or what's already there, go check out her post, you'll also see a link to Lincoln's announcement about the Oribi acquisition. We've also covered quite a bit about the accompany engagement report, but you'll also see a link there where we pulled that information about being able to export those to CSV. And then finally, with all of these new updates to pages, including the new industries, you'll see the link to LinkedIn's announcement about all of the new pages features and updates. If you were any of your colleagues or friends are trying to learn LinkedIn ads, definitely check out the link to the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn. Whoo, saying the word LinkedIn a lot. You think I'd be used to that by now? Anyway, check out that link. It is by far the least expensive and the highest quality training that there is out there. And of course, it is LinkedIn recommended. However you're listening to this podcast, please look down and hit that subscribe button. If you're listening to us on our YouTube channel now since we started publishing to YouTube, definitely follow the channel for new updates there. As soon as YouTube lets us actually run our own podcast channel through it, we"ll be set up on that as well. You've heard me say this a lot, but I want you to think really hard about if you've done it, please rate and review the podcast. I'd absolutely love to shout you out live on the episode. And of course, anytime that you rate and review it really does help us find new members who are also LinkedIn Ads pros who are looking to do this better. With any suggestions or questions about the podcast. Feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Chris Dayley

AJ Wilcox

Investopedia LIs advice for optimization

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

AJ Wilcox You're running and testing your LinkedIn Ads. But how do you know when your test is complete? When something isn't working? How do you know when it's time to pivot? We're covering deep testing strategy on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So we've all been told that we need to always be testing with our ads. Well, sometimes it can be hard to know when our tests are conclusive. Or when it's time to move on to a new test, or even what do we need to be testing? Well, if you test too long, you end up missing opportunities for more learnings. And if you test too short, you risk coming to the wrong conclusion, which can really be costly on your future performance. So this week, we're gonna dive deep, we're going to talk about the different types of tests that you can run, and how to tell when they're complete. Make sure to listen to the end, because I'm going to be sharing my methodology for deciding which tests to run next, after you found conclusive results from your previous test. So first off in the news, I got a chance to talk to a friend who's part of a really cool beta for LinkedIn right now. It's called the audience insights beta. And essentially, what it is, is a really granular breakdown of the audience makeup of the attributes from a matched audience. You can think of it as a really helpful analysis of your target audience, as well as a great tool for understanding the ways that LinkedIn targets better. The way that it works is you'll go into your matched audiences section, and you'll select one of those audiences, then this can be any sort of a matched audience, it could be a website retargeting audience, or anyone who's submitted a form, or anyone who's visited your company page, you get the idea. Then you click a button that says, generate insights and it will open up a dashboard about that audience. And what you get here is a whole bunch of different facets and breakdowns of what makes up your audience. It'll show you your existing audience size. And it will tell you how many of those people fit into different categories. There's interests, so this is where you can find out which interests that your target audience are tagged with. And this can help you with your interest targeting, determining whether to use it, or how many or which types of interests to use. As a side note, I hardly ever use interest targeting because it's such a black box. But now with this, I actually feel a lot more comfortable in finding and using interest targeting. There's organic content, so you can see the trending content that is most engaging to this exact audience. You can see the location, and this is the profile location of where members of that audience are located. There's demographics, there's education, there's job experience. And this gets really exciting because it'll show you the seniority breakdown of your target audience, your job functions that fit within them, your years of experience, and even more. And as you probably know, when you're building a campaign over in the right rail, we get a little bit of an audience size breakdown, but this is really that on steroids. It's a supercharged version of audience Insights. And then as you're exploring here, it's really quick to create a campaign based off of the targeting you're exploring, which is pretty cool. When this feature sees full general audience release, we will definitely let you know more about it. But for right now, I wanted to give you a quick heads up on what's likely coming and how excited we are about it.

AJ Wilcox 3:36 Okay, on to the testing topic. Let's hit it. So first off what is pivoting? You may have heard the Silicon Valley term to pivot. A business needs to pivot. When a business doesn't have product market fit, companies can pivot or adjust their strategies to find the right fit. You've probably also heard the axiom of fail fast, and that originates from Silicon Valley as well. And the concept is that by taking too much time doing the wrong thing, or a less effective thing, you risk so much more than if you were to just make a quick painful one time adjustment and get to that product market fit much quicker. The same risks are present in our ad testing. If you're testing two different ad concepts against each other to the same offer, but that offer is bad, what you're doing is you're wasting weeks of good potential performance that you could have from running a better offer. So definitely, we should always be testing something. And to be clear, not every test will be exactly what you want. Some tests will fail and others will win. And some will just be inconclusive, or some will teach you something but it's just not important. So pivoting is essentially knowing when something needs to be changed, or when to conclude your current test. You can pivot because something is working. You can pivot because something's not working. Or you can pivot just because it's time to want to test or try something new.

AJ Wilcox 5:00 So we're going to do something we haven't done before on the podcast, I'm going to bring on a guest for explaining a certain topic. So please welcome Chris Dayley, CEO of smart CRO, who's going to explain the concept of scientific testing and statistical significance. Alright, we're doing something that we haven't done here on the podcast before, I got to bring in my friend Chris, who is a conversion optimization expert. A longtime friend, partner we met, it's probably been 11 or 12 years ago, maybe even more than that, where we're both doing SEO at the time. And anyway, this is Chris Daly, who runs smart CRO. And, Chris, I brought you on because we're going to be talking a little bit about statistical significance and obviously, this gets into the stats side and the math side of marketing, where many marketers who may have come from the more creative side may not have experience. So first of all, tell us about yourself. And then I'll ask you more of the meaty questions.

Chris Dayley 6:00 First of all, thanks so much for having me on the show, man. You know, I'm one of your biggest fans and so I feel flattered to be on the show. And, you know, like you said, I've got, you know, more than a decade of background in digital marketing, I pivoted to conversion rate optimization about 10 years ago. And I've been running a conversion rate optimization agency for the last eight years, I think it'd be a fun fact, AJ, and I actually started our agencies like within a week of each other. And I called AJ, because I wanted to pitch a company that he was working at. And he's like, Oh, I'm actually not there anymore, I started an agency. And I was like, me too. Cool. So yeah, I've been doing version optimization for about the last eight years. And actually, I hated statistics when I took statistics in college. Probably one of the reasons I'm dropping out of college. But since I started doing conversion optimization, I've actually really fallen in love with a lot of the statistics that because of how applicable it is, and I'm excited to dig into this stuff with you.

AJ Wilcox 7:01 So cool. Well, and the reason why I brought you on, Chris, I mean, every time I'm talking about statistical significance, or anything stats related, it's always parroting something I've heard on one of your, I think I've probably listened to 80 or more podcasts that you've been a guest on, and I've gotten to hear you speak at so many different conferences, and I'm basically just parroting stuff that I've heard from you. So I wanted to bring you on to ask these questions. Because I mean, why parrot what someone else said, why not just go right to the source? So tell us, first of all, what is statistical significance? What's the definition? And I guess why it matters?

Chris Dayley 7:35 Yeah. So well, let me first say why it matters. So anytime you are measuring data, right, like when you're running ads, for example, and you see that one ad has a 50% conversion rate, and the other one has a 10% conversion rate. There's all sorts of questions that come to mind, once you hear that this one has a better conversion rate than the other one. You know, most marketers would want to know is, well, how reliable is that? How much data do you actually have? Are you talking about, you got 10 clicks on both of them, and one of them had five conversions and the other one had two, because that's not a very big data set. And so which makes that data not super reliable, or in other words, there's a huge risk or chance that's involved in saying that one thing is a winner and one thing is a loser when you have such a small data set. And so statistical significance is really a it's a statistical calculation of how confident you are that your results are not due to just random chance, right? Because, again, if you have 10 clicks on two different ads, and one of them has five conversions, and one of them has two, they obviously have a super, super different conversion rate there. But there's a huge likelihood that you might have just had like two people on the first ad that were awesome. And they could have landed on either ad and converted. And so you're not really sure if it's due to the ad, or just due to the fact that a couple of qualified people saw those ads. So anyways, the reason that statistical significance matters is you need to know with certainty that when you say an ad, or in my case, if you say that a variation of a landing page is better, you need to be pretty confident that that result will hold true because there's all sorts of risks that's involved. If you assume that the ad that got five clicks is better than the ad that got two clicks. And you start basing all of your marketing around that first ad, like let's say that that first ad had a video and the second one had an image, if you base all of your future ads off of the fact that you think a video worked better. But it turns out that actually if you had run that test for longer, the image would have performed better. You're going to really screw yourself over in the long run, you're going to end up operating under false assumptions. And so, again, statistical significance is just way to with confidence say that what you think is a winner is actually a winner.

AJ Wilcox 10:05 Oh, yeah. Alright, so one thing I've heard you talk about you like to determine your statistical significance to that 95% confidence? Do they call it a confidence interval? I forget what it's called.

Chris Dayley 10:16 Yeah, confidence interval or P value or whatever you want to call it. There's lots of different terms for it. But yes.

AJ Wilcox 10:23 So why do you run your test to a 95% significance level? Other cases in marketing where you'd suggest a 90% or an 80%? Or do you recommend the 95 for all of us?

Chris Dayley 10:34 Yeah, that's a good question. And let me break that down into a couple things. 95% statistical confidence means that you're 95% certain that this winner is actually a winner, right? And the reason that I like using 95%, as sort of a minimum threshold is obviously 100% would be ideal, right? To be 100% certain, but it usually takes a lot of traffic or a lot of data to get to 100% statistical confidence, unless you have a huge difference in numbers, right? Like, if you have 10,000 visitors that saw one ad, and you have 10 clicks, and you have 10,000 visitors that saw another ad, and you have 1,000 clicks, you'll have 100% statistical significance, because the difference, the discrepancy is massive. But again, if you're testing ads, for most datasets, you're going to end up with like, you know, 10,000 views and 500 clicks and 10,000 views, and 550 clicks. And, yes, the second ad had 50 more clicks, but there's only a 10% difference. And so it's gonna take a lot more data to know ,okay, was that for real? Was there something that fluency not variation? Or if you keep running for long enough, are they just going to even out? So 95%, it's a high enough confidence that there's still a very low chance of calling something a winner, that's not a winner. So there's only a 5% chance that if you say this is a winner, it's only a 5% chance that you're wrong. Right, which is, there's still a chance and it'd be great if there was zero chance, but I mean, my philosophy has always been if you're testing enough, like, if you are constantly running AB tests, on ads, or whatever, yes, maybe 5% of the wins that you called were false positives. But if you run enough tests, you're gonna end up with 95 winners, true winners, and maybe five that weren't true winners. But overall, by and large, you have a very, very high win rate there, right? That's the first thing. A 95%. For me, it's high enough that I feel confident, but it's not so high that it's impossible to reach. 100%, I view as very unlikely to get 100%. So the second part of your question is do you have to go with a 95% statistical significance. And I say no to that, I don't always run tests until I get a 95% and here's why. The closer the data is, so again, if you have 500 conversions on one, and 530 on another, you could be stuck at like an 85, or an 80% statistical significance. You might be stuck there for weeks, because there's lots of things that may happen. And one variation might get a few more conversions one day, which is going to decrease your static and then the next day, you might have a lot more conversions on the version, which is gonna increase your stats and so the statistical significance number is going to fluctuate over time. So I usually pair in or I add in a second rule, it's like my backup rule. So I like to shoot for 95% statistical significance. But if I end up with a variation that has been winning consistently for a period of two weeks, and I still don't have a 95% stat sig, then I will still call it a winner. Because even though you know, I might have an 85% stat sig. If I have a winner that has been consistently performing well, then I will use that longevity of data to sort of support okay, yes, I only have an 80% stat sig here. So there's a 20% chance I might not be calling a winner, but the data looks pretty reliable. Right? Like the test is being consistent. 95% If I can get it, and and if not, do I have consistent performance?

AJ Wilcox 14:23 Oh, that's great. All right. So question for you then. What I love about testing to statistical significance, is we as marketers aren't shooting from the hip. We're not just gut checking all of our marketing, because that can obviously lead you down pretty bad roads. I know a lot of marketers do, but I don't recommend it. It allows us to approach this scientifically and actually be certain that you're learning stuff along the way. But how then do you know when you've reached statistical significance, because the LinkedIn ads platform isn't going to tell you, you don't get to register your AB test anywhere and have it monitoring? What tools do you use or what would you make available to yourself to watch this and grade your AB tests?

Chris Dayley 15:01 Yeah, good question. There's lots of free tools. I mean, if you Google statistical significance calculator, there's tons of free calculators that you can use out there. I was showing you before this call that I've actually just developed my own inside of a Google Sheet, where I just use an API by just pulling all of the raw data from Google Analytics. And then I calculate my own statistical significance. Even though the tools that I use, do calculate it for me, I still like to have my own statistical significance calculations. You can grab tools online, and if you have a way of plugging in the raw data from LinkedIn, then you can calculate it. You can also just go in and like, you know, for example, Neil Patel on whether you like Neil Patel or not, he's got a free tool on his site, that you can just plug in the number of visitors or the number of, you know, like, if it's an ad, the number of impressions you have, and the number of clicks you have, or the number of clicks you have, and the number of conversions you had, or the number of impressions, you have, whatever, but you're going to plug in the number of "traffic", and then the number of conversions for each of your variations, and then it will give you a statistical significance calculation. So I mean, like I said, free tools, easy place to start, if you're not calculating statistical significance now, just go and grab the data from two of your ads and pop them into one of these tools. And it will calculate the statistical significance for you. The one other thing that I'll just say, say, you know, you'd mentioned that like, it's easy to shoot from the hip as a marketer. And statistical significance is a great way of ensuring you're not doing that. It also ensures and it also helps to put some checks in place so that you don't call tests too quickly. Because I know whether you are an in house marketer, or if you are an agency marketer, you always want to show your boss or your client, like you want to show them when these you want to show them wins as quickly as you can. And you want to mitigate the risk, you don't want to be running a test that is losing money for your company or your client for very long. And so the reason that I see people end tests too quickly, is because they're like, Yeah, but if that variation continues to perform that way, it's going to lose us a lot of money, or the opportunity cost is so high, because I could be generating so many more conversions from this other ad. And so statistical significance is a good way of like putting a check in place for yourself. So I always tell my clients, we're at least gonna run tests for a minimum of a week. Even if we see something just like blowing this other variation out of the water, we're still gonna give it a week, because things can change in a few days. And so you want to run experiments for long enough that you see some historical data in there. And the static will help with that.

AJ Wilcox 17:43 What was so shocking to me when we were talking, this has been years and years ago, but you were showing me one of your tests for a giant enterprise company. And you were showing an AB test. And we were looking at this graph over time, and we could see that by like day five of your test, variation B had statistical significance, it was the winner by like 30%, or something high. And then it may not sound high to you, I know you get higher. But then you showed me the continuation of that graph. As the test kept going into week two, all of a sudden, variation, a took over with, again, statistical significance, and it was winning, and then it reverted back to B. So what I love about what you're saying is run the test for long enough, but realizing that stats can be misleading just because human behavior can change. But we really should be, I guess, tracking things that will stand the test of time, as well as just fitting our statistical significance.

Chris Dayley 18:38 And I would say don't even calculate statistical significance until you have at least a week's worth of data. Because if you calculate stat sig on day one of a test, I almost guarantee, you'll get a calculation that says you have 100% statistical significance, because it's gonna be like, Hey, we have five conversions on this one, and none on this other one that will give you a 100% statistical significance. But it's such a small data set, it would be stupid to like call a winner with that small of a data set. So like I said, I don't even look at static until at least a weekend, because it really doesn't mean anything until then.

AJ Wilcox 19:16 Yeah, and especially on a platform like LinkedIn, where every day is a little bit different. I know that a weekend day performs very different from a Monday, and I know the difference between a Monday and a Tuesday. They're closeish, but they're very different. And then you have the difference between a Friday, totally different. So you don't want to run for a partial week, especially to the LinkedIn audiences, when every one of those days has a little bit different of a personality. Love the idea of running for at least a week love the idea of two weeks, so you have to have each kind of day. And I love the idea of making sure that you're running whole days. You didn't start your test mid day one day.

Chris Dayley Yep, absolutely.

AJ Wilcox 19:55 All right. So kind of a fun little announcement here. Chris and I were talking before the call about creating a joint tool that we can then share with this audience. So make sure that down in the show notes, you'll see the link to both of our LinkedIn profiles. Make sure you're following us. So you'll get the free tool when we release it. We don't know how long it's gonna take, I have a crazy idea in my mind that I don't even know if it's possible. But whatever we come out with, I know it's gonna be cool. But Chris, where can people find you? Where can they follow you? Where do you put your stuff out? How do they get in touch with you? Just take us wherever you want us?

Chris Dayley 20:26 Yeah, so the only social media platforms I'm on is LinkedIn and Twitter. So you can find me on Twitter, it's @ChrisDayley. Last name is D A Y L E Y. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm not on Facebook, not on Instagram. And then my company website is smart-cro.com. You know, and again, I focus on website and landing page AB testing. And so if you're wanting to go from testing your ads to testing your landing page, your website, that's definitely something I'd be happy to chat with anybody about.

AJ Wilcox 21:00 Awesome, Chris, thanks so much for enlightening us, we'd love to have you back on the show. At some point when I can think of a something else that we need your commentary on. But thanks again for for just being willing to come on and sharing your abundant knowledge.

Chris Dayley 21:12 I will talk to you anytime you want to talk to AJ. So thanks for having me on the show.

AJ Wilcox 21:15 All right party on.

AJ Wilcox 21:17 So Chris, and I talked about different tools for calculating stat sig. In the show notes, you'll see a couple links to some tools that we've used to calculate that you can try out. And by way of instruction, here's how you'll use them. So what you'll see is an A and a B. And there's essentially a box for before and a box for after that you fill in. And this can be kind of confusing, but what you'll do, if you want to test the statistical significance of the click through rates on two different ads, what you'll do is in the top box, for your ad, a variation, you'll put in the number of clicks. And the bottom box, you'll put in the number of impressions that ad a received, then the same thing for ad B. In the top box, you put in the number of clicks, which is the number of results. And on the bottom, the number of impressions. So the number that it's out of. If you want to test conversions between two offers, it's the same type of thing, it's just in the top box, you're going to put in the number of conversions or leads. And in the bottom box, you're gonna put in the number of clicks, that's going to show you your winner. And the statistical significance. If there is some between the conversion rates, you could take this way further, if you have enough data on, let's say, sales, qualified leads or proposals sent, you could put the same thing in the number of those results with the number of leads or whatever it is you want underneath. Okay, so now you know how to use these tools, go check them out, go try them, and evaluate some of the tests that you're running. So I guess my first question is, how do you know when you have enough data to actually make a decision about your tests? LinkedIn has a section on their website in their help section that we've linked to in the show notes, so you can go read it. But basically, they say, you want to always be testing, which we definitely agree with. LinkedIn says every one to two weeks, pause the ad with the lowest engagement, and replace it with new ad creative. Over time, this will improve your ad relevance score, based on indicators that LinkedIn members find that that ad is interesting, such as clicks, comments and shares, which will help you win more bids. Since bid actually means something important when they say, which will help you win more bids. I think what they're probably trying to say is, which will help you win more auctions. But we'll let them make that clarification. LinkedIn also recommends include two to four ads in each campaign because campaigns with more ads usually reach more people in your target audience, I would disagree with the majority of that advice. What we found is that the learning phase when you launch ads, usually lasts about one to one and a half days. So if you have ads with really poor engagement, after let's say, your first two days, it's usually pretty safe to say, there's something wrong with these ads, we can take action now by pausing them and taking them off the table. That being said, even if click through rates really aren't great. Sometimes we'll keep them running just so that we can suss out the conversion rates because obviously, getting leads and getting a good cost per lead is way more important than the amount of engagement that an ad gets. But of course, we always do want good click through rates whenever we can. I'm also not in a hurry to pause the low engagement ads, since we're always using LinkedIn's option of optimizing the ads in the campaign to those that have the highest click through rate because that's going to send almost all of the impressions to the higher performing one anyway. So having another ad in there, that's just kind of dead weight. It's getting ignored anyway, so I'm not in a huge hurry, but its okay if you want to. We've talked about this before on the show, but I don't recommend including more than two ads per campaign. Since what it does is it it dilutes your AB test. If you're running an ABCD test, but your ad A gets 60% of the impressions and ad B gets 30%. And the last 10% are split between C and D. That doesn't make for a very good test with a lot of data, we would ideally want a lot more data spread around all of those variations. I get it LinkedIn asks us to put more ads in a campaign because it breaks the frequency caps and allows your ads to be shown more often, which will get you to spend more money. But I care a lot more about the performance of ads getting good performance than just spending all of my budget usually. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into what you should watch for to evaluate your tests.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

AJ Wilcox 25:56 if the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns, we'd absolutely love to chat with you.

AJ Wilcox 26:22 Alright, let's jump into what to watch for in your tests. First of all, you want to set your threshold. You want to decide what the parameters of your test are going to be. One parameter you could set is say I'm going to run this test for a certain amount of weeks or months or days, we heard Chris talk about how he wants to run for at least a full week. And with LinkedIn specifically, I would suggest running for at least two full weeks, you do also want to make sure that you are working from whole days, which means you'll want to start your test as close to midnight in the UTC timezone as possible. And then finish it around UTC midnight whenever you're finishing the test. But of course, if you see that the results are crazy different, like you have two offers, where after a week and a half, one of them is converting at 40%. And the other is converting at 6%. You don't have to finish the rest of your time period test as long as the data is there. And you can tell yes, definitively, this offer A that's converting at 40% is way better, you can determine your winner a little bit sooner. Another parameter you could set for your test is say we're going to allocate a certain amount of budget towards this, you can say 3000 Euro is going towards this test. We see a lot of marketers do this because their bosses give them a certain amount and they have to apportion it out and budget it across different things that they want to learn. This is certainly possible, but just make sure that by the time you're done spending that budget, you are running a statistical significance calculator across it to make sure that the results that you got can actually be trusted. Another way that you can set a parameter here is saying how much data you want to generate. So you might say, we want to run this test until we have 120 leads, or 400 clicks or anything like that. Again, you just want to make sure that the parameter you set here for the amount of data you want, is actually enough to make a difference. You may also set a threshold of stat sig between two ad variations on the click through rate level. And that's going to come pretty fast actually, because what you're doing is you're showing clicks compared to impressions across two different ad variations. And you could get that statistical significance quite quickly. You could take that a step further and run a test based on statistical significance at the conversion rate level. So now you're seeing which offer converts better. With even more data, you could do the same thing, statistical significance based off of which ad or which offer gets the highest number of marketing qualified leads. Another step further based off of sales, qualified leads, or proposals or closed deals. Now, if you want statistical significance between two ad variations or two offers all the way to the close deal, you will need to be spending a lot of money, this is in the millions per month in order to get here or you have to have been spending for years. I just want to level set you just in case you're thinking that sounds really fun. But if you're spending, you know $5k a month or something that's probably not realistic, I would stick more to like statistical significance at the conversion rate level. A lot of times we'll end up running pretty much the same ad variations, the same AB test across a lot of different campaigns. And so rather than trying to achieve statistical significance, within each one of those campaigns are we're looking at a small number of clicks and a small number of impressions. Instead, with a simple pivot table in Excel, we can combine the performance of all of those ads that were ad A and all of the ads in the account that are ad B add them all together. And then we're going to achieve our statistical significance so much faster. You can do the same thing with your costs per click. Measure which ads or which offers get a better cost per click. This obviously doesn't mean nearly as much as your leads, or close business does, but it is something you can test. Generally, the ads with the higher click through rates are going to get the lower cost per click. But if you're spending enough, something really good to test is your conversion rates. Which ad gets a higher conversion rate? Which ad variation gets a higher conversion rate? Which offers get a higher conversion rate? Which audiences get a higher conversion rate? These are all things that you can test again the same way with static, if you're getting data back from your sales team on lead quality, or if you have a lead scoring algorithm set up, you can judge your tests based off of lead quality or traffic quality that's coming from a certain audience. Then if one of your audiences is producing a higher lead quality, then you'll know that you can adjust your audience. Use more of the targeting that's winning less of the targeting that's bringing in the crappy quality. One word of warning here, though, is that with any social advertising, one issue that we're always going to face is ad saturation, which means changing performance over time. If you try to run the same test, and you run it for two months, chances are at the beginning of that two months, performance will look pretty good. But then about halfway through the test, you'll see performance falling, and then by the end, it might be abysmal. So if you try to lump those two months of performance together, you're going to get something that looks pretty average or maybe even bad. But what you didn't know is the first two weeks or the first month that it ran, it was really good. And you should want to do more of that. As a general rule of thumb, I found that your ads or your offers will saturate after usually about 28 to 33 days. But how do you know? Well, I like to go into the performance chart and look at campaign performance since the day of launch. And I like to look at click through rates over time, as the same people tend to be seeing your ads over and over and over, or they're exposed to the same offers, every time they're on LinkedIn, they're going to be much less likely to click over time and you'll see those click through rates drop. So with your tests, make sure that you're changing things up enough, or you're starting new tests, before your last test fully saturates and you watch performance drop over time. Sometimes I'll be running a test, and I stop the test not because it's finished, or I've achieved stat sig, it's because there's something else that is a higher priority thing that I want to learn. And I think that's just fine. If the opportunity cost of waiting for a test to finish is higher than the upside of what you're going to get out of learning something from the new test. Don't be afraid to either nix it or put that test on pause. And what you should know is, there are different kinds of tests that you can do. Some are easy, some are hard. But any test that we do that's closer to the money is going to teach us something more valuable. What I mean by that is testing things like ad copy. Sure, you can improve results by 5 to 15%, with different ads and different imagery. But by changing the offer, you can double, triple quadruple your results. By working with and coaching your sales team to get them in the right mindset to nurture the leads that you're generating from LinkedIn, that can improve your ROI by 10, 20%. But obviously, the closer you get to the money, the longer those tests are going to take.

AJ Wilcox 33:36 So here are some of the types of tests that we like to run. There are ad tests and the first ad test that we like to run is same image, same headline, but we vary the intro in the ads. We like to test motivation there. So an example I like to use is maybe one of those makes them feel like the hero and the other one warns them that if they don't take some sort of action, they'll look bad or be disgraced. But you can definitely also do imagery or video ad tests, keeping the intro and the headline the same, but just varying visual. Testing offer against offer. So an ebook against a guide, or a checklist versus a cheat sheet, a webinar versus a case study. These are all good examples of offer tests you can run. What about how often should you fail before you decide that it's time to pivot and change your entire strategy? I'll give up on an offer if I've run three A B tests have messaging against it, and all six of those ads have failed. If that's the case, after our best effort, I'm certain that the offer just isn't that great. There's no amount of lipstick that I can put on that pig and make it look pretty. I guess this is gonna be my rule of threes because the same thing applies if I've tried three different offers in the same kind of vein. And if none of those offers work, that I'm going to guess we either don't have the right audiences or we don't have product market fit or we just haven't figured out what it is that this audience cares enough about. I just got a chance to speak at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego last week. And one of the speakers that I heard said something really interesting. We solve migraine problems, not headache problems. And what that means is your offers, they really do have to solve something really significant, that's causing a lot of pain, because someone's not going to go out of their way to go and sign up for something, or talk to a sales rep about something or download a guide about something that is just kind of a meh problem. If it's a headache, they can work through it. If it's a migraine, you have to stop everything and focus on it. So how do you then determine what your next test should be after you've finished one? If I have a brand new offer, my first test is almost always going to be an intro versus intro in these ads test against the same offer. I want to find out what motivation or how do we call out to them to get their attention best. If I've been running the same offer for more than a month, then my favorite test to line up is an image versus image test. And this is because if people have been seeing the same image over and over for a month, they're going to saturate, they're going to say, Ah, I've already seen that, and not pay attention to it. But if you can change up the imagery significantly, you'll get people to take a second look. And they may realize, ooh, this actually would be good for me. If you know what your audience likes already, you can start to do offer versus offer tests. So use the same motivation, the same callouts, but push them to one offer or another. Let's say you have two different offers. One is a guide that teaches them how to solve a certain problem. And the other guide teaches them how to investigate and analyze some of the results they're seeing. Test offer against offer and find out which is their bigger headache, or which ones their migraine. Maybe some of you have done market research. This is more on the PR side of marketing. But we get to do a lot of this with the level of testing that we can do on LinkedIn. Because the targeting is so good, we can break our audiences up into these little micro segments that act like little focus groups. So maybe you're trying to decide do operations folks, or do IT folks resonate more. Which one is our better customer? Do manager level seniorities interact with us in a different way than chief level or VP level? These are all tests that you can run simply by breaking these audiences up into separate campaigns and measuring their results against each other. The advice that I always give to my team is make sure that you keep a testing journal. This could be a Google sheet, it could be a physical notebook that you keep next to your desk, whatever it is, what this is going to be is a record of every test that you're running, and you want it to have a few things. First of all, you want to put the date. Second of all, you want to put the expected outcome of it. For instance, you might say I'm testing offer A against offer B. My hypothesis, so you include the hypothesis. My hypothesis is that offer B is going to perform better because I think it provides more value. Next you want to write down your parameters. So are you testing for a certain amount of time or after a certain amount of budget. And then lastly, you have to take action on this, you can't just leave the notebook there and never come back. So I like to put something on my calendar. On Friday at three o'clock, I'm going to go back and reevaluate this week's test. I'm going to go back to that testing journal and write everything down. Once you have several tests, you want to share these things, share them with your team. Freak, reach out and share them with me. Anything cool that you learned about your audience, or your offers or pain points, or messaging, these are all valuable things. These are hard fought victories. You need to remember them and share them so that you can then go and create new offers that take advantage of it. New ad copy that takes advantage of those learnings. And then you'll have higher performance from then on out. So I can't encourage you enough. Definitely make sure that you're keeping a testing journal so you can make sure that you are taking advantage of all of your learnings. Alright, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

AJ Wilcox 39:32 Alright, here's our resources from this episode. First of all, Chris Dayley, you'll see down in the show notes, we have links to his website, his Twitter and his LinkedIn. You'll also see the link to my profile as well so you can follow me for when we come up with that really cool LinkedIn Ads, test evaluation tool, whatever we want to call it something that calculates statistical significance ongoing over time. You'll also see the links to two different statistical significance calculators. One on Investopedia and one run on HubSpot as well as the link to LinkedIn advice for how to optimize and run tests. If you are new to LinkedIn Ads, or if you have a colleague who is definitely check out the link to the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn. It's by far the least expensive and the highest quality of any LinkedIn Ads course out there to date. Look down at your podcast player right now, whatever you're listening on, and make sure you hit that subscribe button, especially if you want to hear more of this in the future. If you hated this, I don't know why you're still listening. But yeah, you probably don't have to subscribe, but I hope you do anyway. Please rate and review the podcast and anyone that who reviews will give you a shout out live on air. And of course with any feedback, any questions about the podcast, suggestions, you can reach out to us at our email address [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

Account Based Marketing with LinkedIn ads. Exactly what to do for the best results. Coming right up on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So Account Based Marketing is hot in the B2B sphere. There are so many different companies with ABM offerings, and it's literally become a buzzword in the B2B community. It's really interesting to me because LinkedIn Ads has had the ability to target specific companies with ads since it debuted in 2008. It continues to be, in my opinion, by far the best way to do Account Based Marketing. So on this episode, we're going to go over exactly what ABM is, and how to do it effectively with LinkedIn. We'll also cover what sort of content and offers work well, and the basics of how to segment your campaigns. Make sure to listen all the way to the end, as I'm going to be sharing my top five favorite ABM tactics. Okay, jumping into the news here, you may have noticed that banner at the top of account manager letting you know that there's going to be a new left hand navigation for campaign manager. Well, we got it on some of our accounts and I was pleased to report, since we talked about this in last week's news, that is actually pretty cool. A new addition here is under assets, there's asset history. And that's kind of cool. We haven't had any sort of historical record keeping of anything in the accounts up to this point. So I'm excited to see that. Something else that I really liked about it is it removed the extra step of switching between accounts, which we obviously as an ad agency, who is running LinkedIn Ads, and we're running a lot of them, it's quite a pain to back out of an account and then go back into another one. Well, now it's a very quick click to stay right within campaign manager and just switch accounts. Alright, let's jump into ABM. Let's hit it.

2:00 So first off, I think we have to define what ABM or Account Based Marketing is, because it really has become a buzzword and it's something that CMOs and other marketing professionals throw around, and may not actually know what it means or how it applies to their own marketing efforts. So by my own definition, Account Based Marketing, or Account Based Targeting, or Account Based Sales, it all revolves around the same idea that we are targeting specific companies by name. The way you can think about this is a company can go out and try to acquire as many customers as they want., but Account Based Marketing is all about saying, well, actually, we know a handful or more than a handful of the companies who would be perfect for us, they would be our ideal customers. In that case, you could have a separate effort where you're going after those handful of excellent ideal customers, while still trying to attract the majority of the other accounts, while still trying to attract other business from the rest of the industry. In our case, we specialize in the largest and most involved in highest spending accounts on the LinkedIn Ads platform. And so we know who a handful of those larger players are that we would love to get to work on their accounts. So of course, we want to show ads specifically to them, because any one of those would be a fantastic partnership for us. So my question to you is, who should be doing Account Based Marketing? For me, for a long time I've been telling people, not everyone should advertise on LinkedIn. For some companies, the costs are just too high to make it profitable for them. For instance, if you're a SaaS software that selling for, you know, $100 a month and you don't have contracts, it's likely going to take a long time to recoup any sort of investment. And it may not be possible to show a return on your investment on LinkedIn. But as Account Based Marketing is concerned, I actually do think that every B2B company should be doing it. Because no matter what you do, chances are there are a handful or, like I said more than a handful of companies who would make perfect customers for you. And even if everyone is paying exactly the same amount for your software, you can imagine that there are some brands that would be so worthwhile to have as customers. You could show their logo, you could do case studies about them and leverage their logo, their brand presence, to help elevate your own brand. So you might be willing to take a loss on your advertising, just to bring a brand like that in because it brings all of that credibility, and additional social proof that will help you get a lot more deals in the future. Chances are though, if you're listening, you've already been using LinkedIn Ads and so adding on an ABM element to your campaigns isn't going to be that huge of an addition. And in fact, you're probably already doing it. So let's dive in a little bit deeper. So like I mentioned, back in 2008, LinkedIn let us target specific companies by name. This is back when they had 1000 audience minimum for any sort of advertising. Thank goodness since been lowered down to 300. But even then, as we're talking about ABM, you'll see this is still pretty restrictive. And the way this has always worked is when you go down to select your different audience attributes, you'll see company name is one of the ways that you can target and it's always been this way. In fact, it still is, if you go look for it. And this is great. We still use this quite regularly. The challenge, though, is that, when you use this targeting feature, you're only able to target up to 200 accounts at a time. So let's say that you had an account list of maybe it's the fortune 500. Well, because you can only target 200 companies at a time through this, you'd have to have three separate campaigns. Campaign one targeting the fortune 200, campaign two targeting 201 through 400, and then the third campaign that's targeting just the last 100. You could see how this would be a little bit of a pain to manage and in fact, we've done this for a long time. But luckily for us, back in 2017 LinkedIn released what they called matched audiences. What this allowed us to do is actually upload a list of either individuals that we want to be able to target on LinkedIn or we can upload company names as a list. With this list upload, now we can upload up to 300,000 rows. So you might ask me, AJ, why would you ever want to manually input those company names into a campaign? Well, there are a couple benefits. And this is, of course, if you want to target fewer than 200 companies at a time, then I would still recommend this. And there are two reasons for this. The first is when you manually input them, any suggestion that LinkedIn gives you, it already has a 100% match rate. So if you start typing the name of a company, and it pops up, you are targeting that company, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Whereas with the list upload, you always have to worry a little bit about your match rate and did you put it in the way that LinkedIn wanted to see it, and you won't know until you upload it. The second benefit here is that you'll be able to start targeting that company immediately. Whereas if you upload a list, chances are you won't be able to start using that for about 72 hours. And trust me, I know LinkedIn says it will take a maximum of 48 hours. But in our experience, it is 72 hours. Please fix that. So if I'm ever targeting a list of fewer than 200 companies, I'm probably going to want to input them manually and that's a huge pain. So you might be thinking, AJ, you're crazy, don't do that. Well, I really only have to do it once. Because once you've ever entered 200 of anything, you can always save that audience for later. And then you can go and apply that in any other campaign that you want to. So yeah, it's a pain to put it in once, but once it's in there, you can reuse it again in the future. The other thing is, once you've uploaded a list, you have like 30 to 90 days basically to use that list in your advertising, otherwise, LinkedIn forgets the list. It's a bit of a pain, you have to go back and reupload the list, wait another 72 hours for it to finish processing, and only then can you use it. So working with lists on LinkedIn is really frustrating. But of course, if you're doing a lot of Account Based Marketing, it really is nice to have these lists uploaded and ready to go.

8:29 So if you want to upload your first list, what you do is if you're on the old UI, you'll go to Account Assets, and then Matched Audiences. If you're under the new UI, the new left hand navigation, it'll be under Plan Matched Audiences, you then select Create Audience and then you decide whether you want to do a Company List or a Contact List. Both of them will have a template that you can download into Excel. So because we're talking about ABM here, we're going to talk just about company lists. But of course, contact lists are also great, very much deserving of their own episode. After you download that template, open it in Excel and you'll get to see all of the different headings of the columns that LinkedIn will accept. And so right now, at the time of recording, we have company name, we have domain name like the website URL, we have the email domain, we have company page URL - the URL for how to find this company on LinkedIn, we have stock symbol if they're a public company, industry, city, state, country and zip code. And of course, if you have company page URL, that's probably going to match it 100%. I can't imagine how LinkedIn would not match that, but if you don't just magically have that information from your data source, we found that company name and domain tends to work pretty well here. Then you can upload that CSV file and then wait for like I said, 72 hours until it finishes processing, and then all of a sudden, it will be ready to use in your account and you can start actually advertising to these people. So now that you have this list, you have to go in and create a campaign, or edit a campaign to start using this list. So what you do is when you're in the campaign settings, you scroll down to the targeting criteria. And you'll notice that the first one says, audiences. When you click audiences, there will be list upload and then you'll see company or contact list. Click on the one of your choice and you should see the list that you've uploaded in this list. Alright, so a quick pro tip, you actually don't have to wait until your audience is totally done processing to associate it to a campaign. We know until that list has finished processing, the campaign won't run. But you could still build the campaign and get it associated here so that as soon as it finishes processing, like the second, all of a sudden the campaign will be running. It could save you some time. I will mention here that it's really important to understand that there are two different things you can do with these lists. You can associate a list as either an inclusion or an exclusion on a campaign. And we'll talk a little bit later about why this is important, but it is my firm belief that because of LinkedIns great targeting capabilities, Account Based Marketing is just as much about exclusion as it is about inclusion. Okay, so you've uploaded this company list into your match audiences section. If you go back to your matched audiences section, and you click on the name of that list, once it's done processing, you now have a very powerful dashboard. But we'll get into that a little bit later. What I want to call your attention to is right there at the top, you will see two tabs, one says Matched and it will show a number, the other ones will say Unmatched and show you a number. So I'm looking at a list right now in my account where it says Matched 274, Unmatched 1. So if I click that unmatched tab, it'll now show me the companies that I uploaded as a row in my list that LinkedIn didn't know who they were. So if that's a really important company to me, I can go and recreate a new list and make sure I get it right this time. I could even go to LinkedIn search for that company, get the URL for the company page, and then upload it again. I'm sure that's going to clear and get me 100% match rate. Okay, so now that you know how to do this, we get to start talking about the actual theory here, that strategy about what you're going to do with these lists and how to structure your Account Based Marketing effort or campaigns. First off, you really need to decide how you're going to segment these companies. I mentioned before that you have to have at least 300 people in an audience for LinkedIn to let you run that campaign. So let's say that there's one company that you want to specify, you may even want to call out to that company in the ads, like, hey, IBM, we have a solution for you. Well, as long as there are at least 300 people at that company that you want to see your ads, then you're good to go. You could create an entire campaign focused just on the company IBM and layer your targeting on top. But let's say you're just targeting marketers who are VP and above, well, I know IBM, and this example is a large company, but I don't think that they have more than 300 VPS or above of marketing and so you may have to combine this campaign with other company names. Maybe it's a handful, maybe it's a 1000 other companies, who knows, but you do need to make sure that you get at least 300 people in an audience in order to advertise. So depending on the size of the company, and the number of potential prospects at each of those companies, you can do the math and figure out if you can do this one to one where it's a whole company per campaign, or if you have to include multiple companies in your campaign. If you can do that one to one, it is amazing, because like I mentioned, you could call out to that company in the ad copy and we know that if you call out to accompany in the ad copy, it's going to perform well. Everyone likes to see their company mentioned in their newsfeed. And of course, you'll want to segment your audiences, usually by something. I mean, if you have to combine multiple company names per campaign, you'll probably want to have some sort of a logical grouping there. So for instance, you might have a group of large companies versus full enterprise size, or you might have a list of local companies, you might have a list of companies that are warm, versus a list of companies that are cold. However you decide to organize your lists. You'll want to upload those lists separately and keep track of and because you're likely already advertising on LinkedIn, you have a bunch of other campaigns. What I would do is I would put the term ABM or list or something like that, in all of the campaign names here. And what this does is if you ever want to check the performance of your Account Based Marketing campaigns, you can just go into the search box inside of campaign manager, and type ABM, or type list. And immediately, it'll show you all of your results. Pretty cool. I get asked a lot about, hey, how large should my audiences be when I'm using ABM. You know, if I'm telling you how to run an evergreen campaign on LinkedIn, I'm going to tell you that my preferred audience sizes are between about 20,000 - 80,000. And really, the only risk to having a small audience is it's probably just not going to spend very much. But if it's worth your effort to create it, it's probably worth running. This definitely applies to ABM campaigns. If I have a whole bunch of campaigns that are targeting 300 people, I'm okay with that. I know it's a lot to manage., if you had an account with like 1,000 campaigns, all targeting, let's say the fortune 1,000, that would be a lot to manage. That's a lot of campaigns for sure. But of course, we're talking about small audiences, which aren't going to spend very much, and it's probably never going to get out of control and be impossible to manage. So the moral of the story here is don't worry too much about having too small of an audience size. When you're doing Account Based Marketing, it's kind of the point to have a very focused audience that you can show to. I've noticed a lot of advertisers will go and upload a list and then they'll try to target job titles at that list of companies. And what you need to understand is that job titles are way, way too exclusive to use for ABM, usually. And that's because LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles out there. So it means you're probably going to be ignoring the 70% of your audience that's at each one of those companies, which is not in your favor. I mentioned, don't worry about your audiences being too small, well, it's still a good thing to make sure you're hitting as many people at your target company that are a good fit for your message as possible. So my favorite way to do this, if I can, if this makes sense, is on top of the company list, I'm going to layer on job function and seniority. And this is the most broad way of targeting a persona. But of course, if job function is too broad, you can always narrow in by skill. Skill is the next most broad, and I found that to work quite well. So you could do skill with seniority to get the highest number of your target audience at that company to be included in your targeting. I also get asked a lot about, hey, I'm doing Account Based Marketing, but it doesn't seem to be working, what could be going on? And what I want you to understand is that just because you're doing Account Based Marketing and going after specific accounts, doesn't mean that your performance is actually going to improve. In fact, if your ABM audience is a cold audience to begin with, they don't know you exist, they've never heard of your tool or your company or anything like that, they're still going to be a cold audience, which means they're going to act cold. And on top of that, usually an ABM list is full of larger companies, these big fish or whales, and I know many of our listeners represent these companies. When you're at a giant company, you just have people trying to solicit you trying to sell you all the time. It's so so annoying when I've been in that position. So that means that when you're going after these large companies specifically, you might see your performance drop just because a) they're cold and b) they're tired of being sold to. But this could work in your favor, because it would be exactly the same thing for your competitor. So it leaves a wide opening for you to go in being creative and being strategic. So once you've segmented your companies by list, let's say we're doing something like public companies versus non public, or early stage startups versus medium to large, however you're doing this, you need to decide what sort of offers and what sort of ads you want to show to them. You could decide to do like, hey, we don't have a contact at this company yet so we're gonna show gated content to them and try to find at least one contact per one of these companies to then be able to reach out to. Or you might say, this list of accounts that we're going after, our sales team is actively trying to get in with them, so maybe we're going to show them ungated content, maybe it's a blog post, maybe it's a case study, maybe it's a guide or something that's just purely ungated because you want as many people from that company to consume your content and keep your company top of mind. You get to decide what your priority is there. One way that we've done this in the past is you have different lists for different stages of the funnel. So for instance, you might have a list of company names, who were leads, let's say last quarter, and never closed. You might have a different list who were leads that were generated from this quarter who haven't closed yet. So you could upload these lists into two different campaigns, and give them nurture in whichever way that you would find most beneficial. Of course, that can be a lot of work to manage the lists you have by what stage of the funnel they're in. Then you end up having to compare these Excel sheets between quarters and figure out who dropped off of that list or who's been added to it so that you can re upload those lists to LinkedIn and start using them again.

20:33 So if that sounds like way too much work for you, what I would suggest doing is using a flighting strategy. And the way flighting works is you have an entire audience that you're going to show a specific offer or specific ads for a certain amount of time. And then once you feel like you've probably saturated that audience enough, you can turn those ads and offers off and launch something new. So this is kind of like time based retargeting. But we're not relying on LinkedIn to put people into an audience to target them with ads later, we're showing a unified message to our prospects for a certain amount of time and then we move on and tell them a different story, or update them, take them a little bit further down the funnel. But of course, this isn't nearly as precise. And the reason why is because you could theoretically flight ads for let's say three weeks and maybe there's a big chunk of your audience, let's say 10%, who never even logged in during those three weeks. And so chances are some will come in and log in for the first time during your flighting on your second or your third flight. Flighting is the strategy that TV advertisers and radio advertisers have been using for years and years. It definitely works. It's less precise. But hey, maybe that's okay.

21:52 Your other option is actually to create an automated funnel by using LinkedIn retargeting. Well, we know that your minimum audience size is 300, to even start showing a campaign and so that means in order to even have a second step to your funnel, you've got to get at least 300 people to take an action. With an ABM campaign where your audience sizes are small to begin with, it could take a lot of time to actually build out that audience. I like the idea of using flighting strategy to begin with while you're building those retargeting audiences, and then once those are built significantly, then you could switch your strategy over and use an automated funnel, where you're targeting the group of your audience and then any of those who have taken some sort of an action, then they're removed from that audience and instead, they're targeted in a separate campaign where you're just targeting people who have taken that action. I hope that's clear. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll actually dive into the bidding the budgeting and limitations of Account Based Marketing on LinkedIn.

22:55 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Aads experts.

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23:32 Alright, let's jump into the nitty gritty here. So first off with bidding and budgeting on ABM campaigns, you don't really have to worry too much about a budget, assuming that these are a small audience size. Remember any audience on LinkedIn that you choose, let's say the number looks big, let's say has 20,000 people in it. Well, we know that not every one of those people is going to be logged on to LinkedIn on any given day. And then if you're running sponsored content, you'd be lucky if 1% of those people clicked on your ad. So most of your ABM campaigns, assuming a small audience size, probably aren't going to spend very much, but it's probably a good idea to give them a little bit of wiggle room, set your budgets kind of high just in case. So that's your budgeting, and you just kind of want it out of the way so it doesn't stop your efforts in the midday. But with bidding, you have two different options here. You can either use LinkedIn automated bidding, or maximum delivery, or you can do manual CPC bidding. Both of them can work well. I would just suggest if you are doing manual bidding, you'll want to bid pretty high, like pretty aggressively, because if you can imagine you've got a list of very high value companies here. But of course, the people at those companies are also part of a whole bunch of other marketers lists. Some of them probably have really high performing ads, really good offers. And so in order to win out and have your select few people get shown the ad over one of your competitors. you'll need to make it worth LinkedIn's while. And if you've been listening to me for a while, you probably know that I usually recommend bidding either at the low end of the recommended range, or even significantly below it. But with ABM campaigns, I kind of flip the script and I'll start out by bidding on the high end of the suggested range. Like I mentioned, with the limitations of building any audience on LinkedIn, you have to have at least 300 audience members in order for the campaign to run. So that does make it pretty hard to customize messaging right to an individual company. But if you do want to do that, sponsored messaging ads will let you insert what LinkedIn calls macros. It's dynamic messaging, where you can insert the person's company name, right into the content of the ad. So if sponsored messaging is a good ad format for you, then it can work really well for ABM because you could have a list that you're targeting of 1,000 different companies, but the ad will still show up and say, Hey, we love marketers at IBM, and whatever company they represent, they'll see it in the ad, could be very cool. One of the biggest limitations, though, to using LinkedIn for your ABM efforts, is of course, that you're probably not going to reach these folks outside of when they're on LinkedIn. So if you want to get in front of them around the whole web, yeah, you'll probably have to use one of the many ABM vendors out there, and they can work well. But if you're okay, just hitting them while they're on LinkedIn, you're in luck. Because of that, I also do recommend using LinkedIn Audience Network on any of your ABM campaigns because at least then you'll have a chance at showing them on other sites other than just LinkedIn. You'll reach them a little bit more often, which is cool. And I mentioned that there are quite a few ABM specific vendors out there. And they have a lot of limitations compared to LinkedIn. Of course, the cool part is that they can reach your audience on other ad inventory outside of just waiting for them to come to LinkedIn, which obviously people don't spend a ton of time on LinkedIn on average, but they do have quite a few limitations. Like for instance, they're trying to identify companies by the IP address that they're visiting from. So you could imagine, yeah, for large companies, where if an IP address is communicating, it's coming from one building on a Microsoft campus somewhere. And yeah, you could say, chances are that's coming from Microsoft. But what about all those users who still work for the company, but they're using their mobile phone on the subway, or walking around the city, and they're not on Wi Fi, you lose them there. And then quite a few of these companies also rely on cookies. And we've had this conversation before in previous episodes, where cookies are just really scary right now, because they're going away. So if you're relying on a cookie, tying someone's identity together, you're going to lose that data eventually. I'm going to read off a few of these Account Based Marketing Tools, or platforms. I'm sure these will sound familiar to a lot of you. Across all of our accounts, we've managed, we've gotten a chance to use the vast majority of these platforms. We've used Terminus, we've used Metadata, we've used 6sense, Demandbase, Engagio and they all have their own technology, their own pros and cons so it's definitely worth checking them out. And obviously, I'm a little bit of a LinkedIn nut. So you can take anything I say with a grain of salt here, but I just haven't found any of these ABM vendors that can beat native LinkedIn advertising. Of course, the downside is you're always waiting for them to come back to the platform. If they're not spending a whole lot of time there, you may need to reach them on other platforms. So more often than not, this is a combined strategy of run this on LinkedIn, as well as on one of these other ABM vendors. When you're using one of these ABM vendors, though, you probably want to make sure you have a pretty significant size of lists of companies in order to really make it make sense because they're going to charge you a minimum fee just to work with them. Then of course, the ad inventory itself, because they're showing across like the Google Display Network, for instance, it's not all that expensive. In order to make it worthwhile, you do want to a pretty large list. So before I mentioned that when you click on the name of the company upload list, that there's a dashboard, and this dashboard, I don't know what to call it other than I call it like an ABM Performance Dashboard. What it does is it shows you all of the companies that you've uploaded, along with their performance from your ads, and it's going to always show this to you for your last 90 days combined. There are two different ways that you can break this down. The first is Engagement and the second is Details. So if you click on the Details break down, it's just going to show you all of the details about that company that you uploaded. It'll show you things like company name, industry, company size date added, domain, etc. This isn't a source of information where LinkedIn gives you a readout. They're only going to give you something here if that's what you uploaded. So if you didn't upload stock symbols or the company's domains, it's not going to give it to you back. Probably, what you're going to find the most interesting here is engagement. Under the engagement drop down, it's going to show you the company name, it's going to show you an engagement level by how engaged LinkedIn thinks this company is with your ads, the number of members from that company targeted, the number of campaigns they're targeting that company, the number of impressions that that company was served, and ad engagement, like a click through rate combined from that company. There's even organic engagement, because LinkedIn obviously knows how many people from that company are engaging with your company page, or even your ads, because they've been shared by one of their coworkers. And finally, there's website visits, which website visits is only going to show if you have the insight tag installed on your website. And of course, your users have a cookie on their browser that's identifying them as who they are on LinkedIn, to LinkedIn. That's obviously going away with cookies, going to death. So this is a very cool dashboard. It's something that LinkedIn hasn't made a whole lot of noise about, but I absolutely love this. If you're using company name lists in your match audiences, go check this out now and take a look. See if you can see which companies are really loving your ads, which just haven't been reached by them, and you've got to find them a different way.

31:36 Okay, I mentioned at the beginning that I was going to share with you my five favorite strategies for running ABM campaigns. I'm actually going to throw in a sixth, a little bonus strategy here. So number one, I love to go to the sales teams of our clients, and ask them to give us a list of their sales dream accounts. The companies that they would absolutely love to work with. And of course, it's really not hard to combine all of these lists from a whole bunch of different sales reps, combine them into one list and then you can upload that. Now all of a sudden, sales feels like, hey, marketing is trying to get us what we're asking for. And now sales and marketing, they used to butt heads, but now they're holding hands and singing Kumbaya. It's a great thing. Strategy number two, I actually like to upload a list of competitors names, and then exclude that across all of my campaigns. And what that does, is even if I'm not specifically doing ABM targeting, I'm taking my competitors out of the running here using the company name exclusions. And now my competitors have no idea what it is I'm doing. They're not being shown my ads, they can't click on them to charge me money, etc. My third strategy here is actually along the same vein, instead of your competitors, it's taking your list of customers, and excluding them because your customers are already paying you money. You don't need to pay to show them ads anymore. That'll save you some money, because your customers probably will click. Strategy number four is actually taking that same customer list and showing ads to them intentionally. Here's an idea of when that would be appropriate. So let's say you have a list of customers who their contract is going to be up in the next three months and they're going to be reevaluating if they want to be still signed up, still subscribing to whatever your SaaS software is. Well, now you can target them with product updates and information about the roadmap, what's coming out for your tool, what it's going to be able to do, what new functionality you'll have, all of that. Because they're seeing that, chances are they're going to get excited, or at least a lot more energized about being a customer of yours and when it comes time for renewal, you should see a much lower churn rate. Strategy number five, we actually touched a little bit on, you take a list of all of your leads for a certain amount of time who have been generated as a lead, but haven't yet moved to the next stage in the funnel, or haven't yet closed as a deal. So you could take that list of companies and show ads to them. What I like about this is you don't have to just show ads to the people who were leads of yours, you know that that person is part of a larger buyer committee usually. So now you can broaden your targeting quite a bit and you can try to reach everyone in that company who could be part of that buyers committee. So for instance, if you're trying to sell a tool to a marketer, well, you know, they probably have other coworkers who might be lending a hand or helping in that decision. You might have someone in finance, this deal is going to cross their desk and they've got to sign off on it. If it's small companies, the CEO probably needs to sign off on it or be convinced. So if you can show ads and keep top of mind for everyone in the buyers committee, when it comes time to actually sign you'll get a lot more oh, I've heard of these guys before, they must be legit and signing off versus "Wait, what tool are you trying to buy?" and getting added scrutiny. You don't want that. And here's my bonus strategy, strategy number six. You probably have a list of leads that you've generated. And let's say that you have all of their company email addresses. Well, you want to take my advice here, like when I talked about how you want to target the whole set of decision makers. But if these are a list of individuals, you're not going to be able to do that very well. Well, what we do is we'll take that contact list, and inside of Excel will extract a column for just their company email domain and then we can go and upload that to LinkedIn as a company matched audience list, Voila!, you just took a contact list and turned it into a company list and now you can apply all of those targeting filters on top to make sure you're hitting the rest of the buyers committee, or at least their co workers, other people who could help make this decision. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

36:07 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

36:18 All right, here are the resources from this episode. So if you are looking to advertise better on LinkedIn, or you have, let's say, a coworker, or someone else who's trying to learn and get up to speed, make sure you refer them to the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Ads. The link is right down below in the show notes. It's really easy. It is by far the least expensive and the best course out there. Also, if this is your first time listening, look down at your podcast player and hit that subscribe button on whatever player you're listening on. And please do rate and review the podcast. If you rate, of course, we love to see five stars. It helps other people who are also ad managers on LinkedIn get to hear about the podcast. Anything you have to say please leave it in a review and we'd love to shout you out here on air as well. With any questions you have or topic suggestions, anything like that, you can reach out to us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Email the guest: [email protected]

Coupon Code on Shape.io: B2

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

AJ Wilcox Managing budgets on LinkedIn Ads is so hard. Help! Well, not when you're using one specific tool. Stay tuned to hear all about it on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So the LinkedIn Ads partner ecosystem is still pretty thin, especially when we compare it with those super robust partner ecosystems across all the other ad platforms. So we want to start shining a spotlight on some of the most valuable and useful tools that us advertisers can get used to and get to use for better performance. Today's episode is covering a LinkedIn Ads tool that you may not have heard of, Shape.io. It's a tool for budget reporting, budget prediction, and even budget management. It's a very niche offering, but the things that it does, it does very, very well and it's priced very reasonably. Most advertisers I've talked to haven't heard of the tool, so I wanted to introduce it a little bit to you. Now this episode is not meant to be an ad for Shape.io. I'm a longtime user, for sure, and I do gush a bit in the episode about just how useful we found the app. The recommendations that I make here, though, are my own and shape didn't compensate us to be featured here. Alright, with that out of the way. Let's jump into the interview with Jon.

AJ Wilcox All right, Jon Davis. Jon is a co-founder of Shape. He spent seven years as a PPC consultant, an agency analyst, and a department manager before leaving to build useful apps for other PPC analysts. The origins of shape come from problems Jon saw firsthand in our industry, he focuses on product direction, customer service, and sales for the company. Jon, anything I missed here in the intro?

Jon Davis Yeah, well, AJ, first off, thanks a lot for having me, I'd say a little, maybe just a little bit more about where our company is Bend, Oregon. Really cool town, if you're into mountain biking, or skiing, snowboarding. Or if you'd like to play golf, like I do golf more my favorite hobbies. I've got two little boys that are four and six years old, that take up a lot of my time and not too much else really, truly interesting about me to be honest. My wife is pretty interesting. She is a former professional cyclist for about 10 years. Raced for team USA, has climbed every mountain in Europe on her bike, and has a lot of really cool stories. She ran track at University of Oregon, which is a really big deal for us out here that live in Oregon. So that's a little bit about the personal life and if you want to hear anything really interesting, get my wife on maybe if she ever gets into digital marketing.

AJ Wilcox Love it! Well, I can't say any way that I would have like come across your wife because I have not climbed every mountain in Europe. I was just skiing this last weekend. So that is super cool. I will have to make my way up there to Bend.

Jon Davis Yeah, we're about let's see from our office here about 25 minutes from the bottom of the lift at Mount Bachelor, which is our local mountain here that has a lot of great terrain and a little bit of a bummer this year, low on the snow here in Oregon this year. But Bend is a great town to come in the summertime. Really great weather, no humidity. And I could go on and on and sound like a tourist worker for the City of Bend, but if you like high elevation mountain towns, you should come check out Bend for sure.

AJ Wilcox I do. I like how high elevation and I especially love the no humidity thing. I'm on my way now.

Jon Davis Yeah, I lived in Georgia for about 10 years so I'm ready to never go back to humidity ever again.

AJ Wilcox Oh, I get that. Cool. Well, obviously, I want to have you on here as a tool spotlight because Shape is I think the only tool I know of for LinkedIn ads that does what it does. So do you want to tell us a little bit about what the challenges are that advertisers face and how shapes solves them?

Jon Davis Sure. First off, I'd be really curious. How would you describe what Shape does? As a customer? Are we allowed to say that?

AJ Wilcox Yeah, we totally get you. Okay, so I probably will have said this in the intro. But I've been a longtime user of Shape, right, as soon as you guys got access to LinkedIn's API. I think I was one of the first if not the first user and I'm a big fan. So that being said, yeah. What Shape does it from my experience here is its budget tracking and its budget prediction. You know, for all of our clients, let's say we have 50 clients all advertising right now, at any given time, we can be getting alerts of like, hey, we've spent 48% of our month's budget on like, halfway through the month, and I'll know I'm on track, or we can have it automatically pause campaigns, if it's three days till the end of the month, and we've already spent all of the budget. So it's pretty much an insurance policy against like, spending a client's budget incorrectly. What would you add to that?

Jon Davis Yeah, good job. Are you interested in SDR role or anything here at Shape? That's really our focus is budgeting and helping PPC analysts budget at scale. My background, like you said is in PPC, working as an outside consultant to agency analysts to managing a department of eight analysts at an agency and my background was working specifically in industries like self storage, multifamily housing, senior living communities. Our clients had lots of different budgets in lots of different places, all with managers at that apartment community that had a vested interest in how their budget was being spent. They had a lot of stakeholders. One thing I always say is, nobody has overspent more PPC budgets than me and my career back when I was an analyst. I got promoted to a manager role, but was still trying to manage budgets, and was over my head and things were slipping through the cracks. For me, it always felt like man, this shouldn't be this hard. And that is, you know, really where Shape tries to step in and help. The first version of shape was really focused on, like you were saying, just a pure alerting out to you, hey, you're about to run out of your budget, here's an email alert. Phase two of shape was allowing you to from the interface, when you got that alert went in, saw, oh, man, I need to pause these campaigns, or I need to raise the budget, whatever it is to do that right from Shape and be able to push those edits. So to move out from just being that reporting and alerting tool and then the phase that we're still living in today with Shape is to do a lot of that through automations and layering different automations on there, if you choose. So let's say you've got a PPC client with a $500 a month budget, you've got 10 campaigns across Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, all these places, feeding off that $500 budget, link those campaigns into that budget and when our system detects, you've hit that $500, like you see, will shut those campaigns down, pause them for the rest of the month, wait either to the beginning of the next month, or for more budget to be added and turn those campaigns back on. So really automating a lot of that manual work. I've seen every budgeting spreadsheet template you could imagine working in this space over the years and there's just no substitute for software coming in checking it every hour, every half hour for spend providing predictions, like you say, to help you kind of predict where you're going as well. We really primarily sell to agencies because they're facing that scale problem more than an in house team. We have a few in house customers, which we say are like in house teams with agency dynamics. So maybe they have a lot of franchises they're managing or something like that. But for us, really, we found that PPC agencies are where we have the most product market fit and where people find the most value. Our original name was Steady Budget, before we change to Shape and rebranded. So we've really been focused on budgeting since we released this product.

AJ Wilcox Alright, so this might be leading the witness a little bit, but I'm curious to hear from you. Why is this an important problem to solve? What's the downsides or risks to overspending a budget?

Jon Davis Sure. Yeah, I speak from my experience as an analyst. I knew the client would like kind of care maybe about what the cost per click was, I knew they at least have some interest in click through rate to see like how well their ads were responding. But I knew for sure, they cared about how much they spent at the end of that month, or the end of that cycle. And so for me, budgeting has always been one of those core things that really, clients are really focused on. I've really view a lot of PPC really kind of circles around three main pillars. There's the client, there's the analyst that they've hired, and there's the budget that they both agreed to. And that budget, client, customer, analyst relationship is one that kind of rotates around almost every PPC campaign, I think out there and by kind of like keeping that at the core and organizing all your data in Shape around those budgets, I think it works really well for agencies that that's really the first goal, okay, let's make sure we spend the budget accurately. You've got that confidence with your client and customer that hey, they said they're gonna spend $600 bucks they spend $600 bucks, we can trust them to do that. Now let's focus on more deeper agency client relationship things through communication and writing new ad copy and getting new test set up.

AJ Wilcox I love it. I just want to add on to that. When I very first started B2Linked as an ad agency, I went out and I had to get business insurance and looked at all kinds of different insurances. I realized the most important thing, the worst thing that I could end up doing to a client is overspending their budget. This is spending money that they did not give us permission to spend. So I talked to several insurance agents at the time, not a single one of the policies I was looking at would cover overspending. So I realized I am on my own, it only took one overspending a client's budget before I went, Ah, I get this. This leaves me legally liable here. I think I need Shape.

Jon Davis Yeah, we've been there too. We've researched the same thing from our end, like, hey, let's say servers went out, stuff that goes crazy early on, and there's a hiccup can we get insurance for that? Really it doesn't exist. Early on in Steady Budget Shape history in 2014-2015, I definitely stayed up at night a little worried about that. Now six, seven years in, if we ever get a support ticket, that's like a Shape overspent by budget or there's, you know, some fire like that that comes up, I know for sure that shape did what it was supposed to do, because that's our number one priority as a software. We have to be that insurance policy and every single time somebody or client or customer comes to us, you know, they believe in overspend occurred in Shape, it's every single time user error, or some setting they didn't get changed maybe the way they were supposed to. We really view that as our responsibility to help educate them on that, but from our perspective, I now sleep soundly knowing that we pause the campaigns when we're supposed to pause them, we turn them on when we're just supposed to turn them on. The code is as bulletproof as it could possibly be because we are out there. You know, we're out on the limb saying we're not going to overspend these budgets. Shape processes over a billion dollars a year in ad spend for our customers. And I promise you, we don't have a billion dollars in our bank account right now to potentially cover that overspend. So one thing that we believe 100% is the logic is rock solid because it has to be.

AJ Wilcox Very cool. One technical question I've got for you. I wonder how much will Shape allow a campaign or an account to overspend? And also having API access to LinkedIn Ads myself, I know that the API is kind of weak, it's limited, at least in the past, LinkedIn has limited us to say, you are not allowed to request the same information more than four times per day or something. So realizing that you can only inquire from LinkedIn's API every so often, how much exposure does that allow you or kind of force Shape to not have noticed and overspend since the last time it requested?

Jon Davis Sure, yeah, the good thing is working with them like on the tech side as a software provider, that's then going to license your software out to other providers, as you get a little different parameters and a little bit more often than maybe, you know, going as an individual through the API for your own account. So we have the ability, we're pulling in to make sure that no overspends occur. On a platform like LinkedIn where you're seeing pretty high cost per clicks and, you know, if you get a setting wrong, you can get away from you quick, we're able to really check on that spend at least once an hour through the day.

AJ Wilcox Great. Is there any sort of logic to say, it looks like we're getting close to a budget so we're gonna start checking more often? We're gonna check every 15 minutes rather than every hour?

Jon Davis Yeah, great question. And we do. So as we like, see that percentage of budget remaining kind of tightening up it, those types of budgets will float a little higher up into the queue priority that we have run it through and our logic that's just constantly churning through all the budgets on our platform. So we're trying to check that a little more often as we can as it gets kind of down closer. The other thing is, we've got a lot of previous data on how rapidly the those campaigns can spend so we can make a judgment around, okay, well, we don't have to start dialing up that check just yet, because we got a really good feel for how much this is going to spend based on historical data and with some of our automations we've got a little built in buffer on the underspend side of a couple percent, to make sure that if we err one way or another, we're going to make sure we under spend that budget by a percent or half percent then over spend it by a percent or half percent.

AJ Wilcox I love it. That's fantastic. We've mentioned a little bit about this, but tell us about your relationship with LinkedIn, as well as the other ad platforms. Who do you support? What's your relationship like all that?

Jon Davis Well, my personal relationship with LinkedIn is mostly as a user, somebody out there trying to promote my B2B software, putting How To videos up. It's really been, for our company, one of our most powerful channels to getting new product releases out there, getting some engagement on videos. I've run LinkedIn campaigns for myself and others and have some experience in there, but my primary professional background is with Google Search Ads. That's where I spent the majority of my career before leaving to work on software to solve PPC problems. I graduated college in 2006. In about mid 2007 was learning more about, I was in marketing, I was working in sales making 100 outbound calls a day. I thought hmmm, it'd be a lot easier if people called me and started working on our company website to get optimized for some SEO basics, which back then you could send almost anything to page one with a few easy tweaks, it was a magical time to be in digital marketing. From that time of like 2007, when I realized that these are people searching for products. Here's, you know, this search engine serving up ads for people that want to be shown to those people, it really did feel like magic to me, and I've been in PPC for the last 15 years ever since. So my relationship kind of goes back through the agency world every way you kind of touched the various platforms and Shape in particular, we sync with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, along with the Facebook, you get instagram along with Google, there's YouTube. So for those real main platforms, we go really deep with our integrations, there may be other PPC platforms out there or reporting platforms that have 500 data connections with every possible place, you can imagine pulling in a piece of data, we've really honed in on the top five, eight places that be placing ads for your clients and focused on really deep integrations with those where instead of just reporting on that data, we're pushing back out a lot of automations to all these platforms that we can. And so I think I've tended to live a lot in the search world, so one of the big reason Shape exists is combining search and social kind of into one budget. You know, a lot of these ad platforms don't have too much incentive to really integrate with other data. I don't think it's going to be too soon to where Google is going to be pulling in LinkedIn data. And LinkedIn is going to be allowing them to make like two way changes on a lot of campaigns through their tool. Through the years, there's maybe like backdoor ways in platforms have done it, and you're seeing Microsoft maybe take some steps. But none of the products are really enterprise or agency scale level, they're really meant to kind of help the individual advertiser manage, you know, a few campaigns, not the agency manage 1,000s of campaigns. So that's where one of the big things that Shape allows you to do is pull in all those campaigns from different places, put it under one client, micro group those in the budgets, and feel really good. You're spending your budget allocation where you want to be spending it.

Jon Davis Love it. Any future plans for other platforms, like are you thinking Snap, or TikTok or any of those that you might want to support in the future?

Jon Davis Yeah, so we're always getting requests, for sure. Really, that those are, you named a lot of the next big ones that we're looking at. Snap, Pinterest, TikTok are on our list, and really focused on bringing in new types of Google campaigns that they're finally allowing through the API. So really, where we run into more friction with our customers isn't necessarily bring on a new outside, like TikTok type, but not being able to pull in Google campaigns that they don't allow through the API. So up until like six days ago, you couldn't get any local service ads from Google out of their API and now it's just in beta and we're able to run testing. We're also exploring, there's some kind of data aggregation tools out there like Airbyte, and some other places where you can normalize a bunch of data and we could offer a lot more integrations. We're quickly kind of using that as a middleman, but right now Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, definitely the ones that we're targeting the most right now in terms of moving into those platforms and really as somebody that thinks a lot about our product direction, that's the one thing I really feel good about is a lot of our feature requests aren't necessarily like, hey, we need shape to do this new thing around budget management, it's more, hey, can you bring in these other campaigns and have them do for us what shape does for these other platforms?

AJ Wilcox How mean is that of Google to be like, hey, we'll pass through the API, any information about your spend, except this one ad format, or this one objective? And all of a sudden, you're like, hey, of course, we want to be able to support all this, but the platform itself doesn't let us like, oh, you know, gets my goat. Sorry about that.

Jon Davis Yeah, that's right. And that's one thing that we kind of, look at it. And in terms of we like to kind of look at ourselves as sort of a speedometer that can like accept any spend from any platform and give you, you know, the analyst a really good idea of what speed everything's spending at and moving at, and being able to pull in more channels there is key. Without that data feed and without Google allowing everything to be pulled in, you know, it's a struggle for us to add value. But the new Google Ads API know we're focused on LinkedIn, but the new Google Ads API that just has finally come out of beta and has been released has been a real huge thing for third party software's like us. It's been a lot of work to change every single call over to the new ads API, but Google, I think, can be slow to react in this case, they're finally give it understanding that, hey, if these third party software's like ours are supporting these clients, we need to give them the ability to pull all their spend in these tools because they're building workflows and systems around them.

AJ Wilcox Totally. Alright, what strategies have you seen advertisers use and see great results because of using Shape?

Jon Davis Yeah, I think really, the best way that we help analysts deliver better results is saving them a lot of time budgeting. Time that can be better spent, you know, thinking about how to improve those results, not just how do I spend $22 a day on this campaign or $38 a day? How do I get back on pace? Freeing up that time that you're not exporting a download into Google Sheets, reformatting, emailing, putting a CSV together and emailing out to the customer. Those are really places where we've seen the big savings. Within the app, we've got tools like Budget Pacer, that help people to see maybe opportunities to put more spend into a certain campaign with a lower CPA or a higher return on investment, whatever data you're pulling into Shape. With Budget Pacer, your there's a lot of different tools and dials you can turn to give you sort of like, hey, I want to prioritize CPA or I want to prioritize just raw conversions and get different predictions on what daily budget you should be saying at the campaign level based on those parameters. We see a lot of customers getting great results with Budget Pacer, We will see changes come through that are, you know, so and so changed daily budget to $38.12. And I'm like, Well, I know that was a Budget Pacer change, because I don't think they calculate, you know, $38.12. So we really see good results there from helping people one save a lot of time that they were previously doing manual work out of spreadsheets and workflows that were brutal. You know, as an analyst, I knew like the beginning of the month was always rough for us, because it was like, Okay, this is reporting time, I'm going to go, I'm going to be downloading a bunch of stuff, I'm entering in all these spreadsheets, and, you know, to kind of have a tool that would break that I kind of always wanted when I was in that scenario sort of break out of that kind of cycle and focus on more of the creative side. That's where we've seen the most positive results. And, you know, I think our core feature of pausing campaigns before they overspend is one that kind of eventually gets people don't even think about it anymore. They're they're not even worried about overspending a campaign ever again, where before they came to us a lot of customers that was like you were saying one of their chief concerns that the company was not overspending these budgets they've been trusted with?

AJ Wilcox Yeah, I see what you mean by time savings, can't tell you the number of times that past companies, the CMO would come to me and say, Hey, are we on budget? Like, what number are we going to hit by the end of the month? And if I would have had Shape back then, I could have just looked at the graph and said, but instead I had to export everything by day. And, you know, plot spend by day and figure out how many days left in the month and do a trend line to show it. I'm decent at Excel, but I'm not a wizard. So that kind of report might take me 20, 30 minutes to put together whereas Shape tells you exactly what you're shooting towards. So I love that.

AJ Wilcox All right, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive right back into Shape.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

AJ Wilcox If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked as the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners. And you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns, We'd absolutely love to work with you. All right, now, let's jump back into it.

AJ Wilcox What are some of the results that your advertisers have seen in doing business with you? Have you had any like case studies or anecdotal evidence where they come to you and say, Thanks, you saved my bacon? Or this helped us so much? Or what are some of those?

Jon Davis Yeah, well, I think, you know, most people out there thinking about LinkedIn are focused on LinkedIn. We've got a case study on our site. I don't know if it's company you've heard of, it's called B2Linked? Haha! When we talked to your team about what was life like before Shape or after Shape? What we really found was like just what we were saying your team estimated about 70% of their time that they previously spent on budgeting, which is hours and hours and hours a week. Now, it's just gone. And what we see really across the board with people that are trying to manage a lot of budgets is once everything's on boarded, set up, immediately, all that time that was spent budgeting is now freed up for other things. It's not uncommon for me to hear from an analyst like, Oh, I've got 10 hours in my week back, 15 hours in a week back. Working with larger agencies, we interact with a lot of accounting teams too that are responsible for reconciling ad platform spend at the end of the month. Just last week, an accountant sent me a thing, it's like we've just on boarded shape and now I need to pick up a new hobby because I don't have to spend as much time in the evenings manually entering ad spend that's getting reported on from PPC. Those are really fun for me to hear, because I was that analyst spending hours a day in Excel. To know that now they're able to think about the landing page they're sending the ads to, think about testing this new Google campaign type, and just pulling it into shape and not worrying that it's going to go crazy spend. Those are the things that I think are really fun about PPC and will keep better and smarter people in the industry for longer.

AJ Wilcox Totally. That definitely resounds with me. If we as creative professionals and technical marketers are spending all of our time doing mind numbing, like crap work, busy work, rather than doing what we should be doing, which is developing good offers and good creative and managing the platform. I think it's a great thing. I'm curious. I know Google was famous early on for allowing you to spend more than your daily budget. And now LinkedIn has followed suit, depending on the objective you choose. They can overspend your daily budget by 20 to 100%. Have you found a situation where Shape has caught an overspend and been able to pause it before even the platform itself could do it?

Jon Davis Yes. So one of our core features is really based around protecting against just that from the ad platforms. We have a feature called autopilot and there's two different settings on that. The first setting is let's give a budget a $1,000, here's the 10 campaigns. Let's turn on autopilot and let's say it's a monthly budget, we hit the $1,000 this month, turn it off, wait for the first day ofthe next month, turn it back on. Another version of that autopilot is daily autopilot. What that does is it takes the amount of budget you've got left divided by the number of days and sets a daily budget for those campaigns and when we see that daily budget reached, we take action to pause those campaigns within that day, wait for the midnight start of the next day, and then turn it back on. So let's say you've got your daily budget set at $50. Okay, Google and LinkedIn, they were rubbing their hands are like, alright, 50 bucks, that means 100, I'm ready to go. At about, 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon, you spent your 50 bucks, Shape comes through does the data update says well, you've hit your daily 50 bucks your campaigns off. Now Google and LinkedIn, they can't spend on a paused campaign for the rest of that day and that's been a really powerful thing for us to offer our customers you know, that gives you the ability to go into LinkedIn and even set just like a lifetime budget. And then make sure you've got daily autopilot involved and you're gonna pace on that daily budget for the life of that budget without needing to change those micro parameters from within LinkedIn along the way. So you can change any type of budget into a daily budget if you want to using those systems And that's again, where we view ourselves as that like speedometer, you're saying, hey, Google, hey, LinkedIn, I only want you to take this car 50 miles per hour, I'm not approving you to go 100 miles per hour, like you say, in your conditions, I want you to go 50 miles an hour, we make sure your cruise controlled to hang right there.

Jon Davis That always makes me laugh when platforms act like they can't pause a campaign when it's overspending. Like, oh, we need allowance to spend 20% or 50% or 100% over because, you know, we're gonna throw a whole bunch of ads out there. And we have no idea how many of those are going to get clicked on? Yeah, maybe if you're spending millions of dollars per month, I get it. Like you're gonna have a lot out there. But especially for LinkedIn, where the majority of advertisers I'm guessing, are paying on CPM. It's like, the second your campaign is shown that 1,000th time and you know, it's spent that amount, the platform should be able to stop on a dime. It seems ridiculous, but I'm so glad that there's a tool like Shape that will allow us to override that.

Jon Davis Yeah, I can see where the product design is there. And I can see how and why they can genuinely believe that, hey, giving us that freedom will get you better results at the end of this 30 or 60 day period because we've identified something in this moment, that means we should be spending more, but ut I think that doesn't always make it really easy on the analyst communicate that back through to their clients. And I think as clients sometimes are willing to sacrifice maybe that last morsel of performance to have some predictability around what is this gonna spend on a daily basis, when you know, about the same amount is going to be spent at the beginning of the month, that's going to be spent at the end of the month. And I think in a lot of cases, there's still value to that kind of predictability and to be able to set a setting on budget and have the platform stick to that budget should be an option.

AJ Wilcox I totally agree. And with Google, I totally expect the platform to be able to say, hey, if we overspend right now we'll get you better performance. And I'm okay with that. I don't even think that LinkedIn does claim that if they overspend your budgets, because it's going to perform well. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's just, we don't have faith in our platform being able to shut it off on time. That's what it seems like to me anyway. Tell me about some of the nuances with budgeting, either with Shape or without on LinkedIn Ads specifically. Like any nuances with the platform that we should know about as advertisers, what can you teach us?

Jon Davis Yeah, I mean, I think, from my perspective, I probably have no grand insights there. But I think the one unique thing about LinkedIn versus some of the other platforms is just the sheer cost per click in some scenarios and that can be really challenging when it comes to budget management. If four or five clicks are costing you $10 to $20 a click, especially if you're working with a smaller business, that's a big chunk of change really fast. And, you know, I don't think that's a surprise, obviously, to anybody out there that's been running LinkedIn campaigns, and I think is one of the bigger barriers like to entry for people, you know, making the leap and getting into LinkedIn campaigns. But I think really, what I see in terms of like the nuances around on LinkedIn is just paying a lot of attention to how that bid is affecting your positioning. The magic part for me around LinkedIn is really being able to focus on that bid, get the amount of impressions, make sure you're not like two impressions a day, or 2 million a day, finding that sort of sweet spot in your bids so that you don't necessarily have to always CPA or CPM bid, you can bid more for performance and kind of enter that auction where I think you've got, you know, Google Ads guy in my background, I'm kind of an auction believer, in some cases there. I think if you're able to bid, obviously CPM, you're still involved in that auction somewhere, but you've got a little bit more of a finger on the dial there. So I think being able to kind of set up to make sure you're not overspending and then really kind of hone in where that bid needs to be, is where we see kind of the nuance and LinkedIn over maybe some of the other platforms.

AJ Wilcox Oh, very well said. I love that explanation. So what's your favorite aspect of shape? Just some area of the product that you are really excited about or you think makes the biggest difference?

Jon Davis For me, I still get really excited about the core thing we set out to solve in 2014, 2015 when we were launching the product, and that is, I've got a budget for this month and within shape, you can set a budget for any duration, it doesn't have to be monthly, it can be a one time, it can be a 17 day recurring budget for whatever crazy reason you might need it, but for me, I still get really excited about the fact that, let's say I set up campaigns, and I set a $500 a month budget, I set those campaigns that could run for the rest of time. and I know it's going to spend $500 a month as long as the volume in those campaigns will get the clicks and Google keeps showing the ads, you know, the quality scores don't go down too low or LinkedIn keeps showing those ads, I know in some ways Shape would just manage that likeRobots should. On, off when it should, pace the budget when it should. That kind of core features still leads every one of our sales calls, it still is the core of a lot of our marketing material that we talk about. I think as we've seen a lot of third party software in our space that started around the 2010 to 2015 zone, they were really focused on optimizing your campaigns and how can you spend your $500 a month more effectively, within the search engines are the ad platforms like LinkedIn, where we kind of thought the market was going back in 2014 2015, was that eventually all the ad networks are going to be way better at all that then third party software would ever be. We need to focus on building solutions where the ad networks weren't as excited about solving those problems, like limiting your budget, or bringing in data from multiple channels into one place. So I think, luckily, we haven't had to chase too much on the product and really just continuing to do our core function of pacing and managing PPC budgets, and removing all the manual work and staying kind of laser focused on that. One thing I've admired about B2Linked has been like your focus as a company and being able to really succinctly kind of say, Hey, we're the best and LinkedIn Ads in the world. That's our Jim Collins hedgehog concept. You know, that's our one thing we do great. I feel really lucky to have a company where I can, you know, say we do PPC budgeting, PPC management, budget management X scale better than any other platform out there. That's been a real focus of ours is to stay in that budgeting world and not chase, you know, the next AI algorithm because Google has, you know, I don't even know 5,000 engineers thinking about exactly that one thing and all the data in the world you could imagine and they're just not going to release enough of that data to third parties for us to make better recommendations than they could. So solving those problems and kind of filling in those cracks that the platform's leave open is something that gets me really excited about Shape. New campaign types getting pulled into shape gets me really excited. Being able to now add a lot of these new Google campaigns as LinkedIn keeps testing new types of campaigns and falls a lot of the same way. I get excited when each of those new campaign types get pulled in there. Because it means people now are pulling it in, not worrying about budgeting, focusing on like, okay, is this campaign type the best place or the best channel for me to be putting my clients money?

AJ Wilcox Love it, if I can share my favorite feature? It's the fact that you can create a specific budget. It's not just like, one of our clients per month, we get to know are they going to spend or understand or whatever their budget, but it's the fact that we can group individual campaigns by name and give them their own budgets. So for instance, if we're running ABM campaigns, we could take their three ABM campaigns, group them into one budget on Shape and say, Hey, tell us how we're pacing here. Are we going to spend our ABM budget versus the overall account level budget? So that's one that I think is really cool. I just don't ever see any of the platforms releasing the ability to do this. I feel like you're on solid ground where the platforms aren't going to compete with you to try to take your business.

Jon Davis Yeah. And that's been a real conscious decision on our end. And it's another one of the reasons we haven't really chased super in depth like reporting solutions. Instead, we have a one click integration with Data Studio where that's, you know, your reporting place now to go because everybody's working with data studio now. And they've got every little dial you could ever imagine. We'd be coding on just some new reporting dashboard for the next four years to get up to what Data Studio and some of these other tools are doing today. So instead of like fighting the battle on the reporting front, fighting the battle on the optimization front, all areas where big teams, big companies have a lot of incentive playing both those games, we want to be where they don't want to play. And they don't really want to play and project management and building tools to make it easier on a PPC agency to manage a lot of clients, you know, in a lot of the ad platforms mind, you know, the agency is really just a management fee that's taking more ad spend that could be going to the platform. And so a lot of their products aren't designed with the agency in mind. Our third party software, we can design specifically for the agencies and solve problems in that way that we just haven't seen the ad networks really take on that challenge yet. And it makes sense why they wouldn't. Their focus is on building tools so that an individual advertiser feels like you know what, I can run my own LinkedIn Ads campaigns, I don't need to go to be to links and, you know, pay for them. I think it's good enough, I can turn these few dials and LinkedIn will handle it. You know, that's really the problems they're trying to solve and focused on not how do we help B2Linked to manage 10,000 clients at the same time?

AJ Wilcox Totally, it doesn't seem like it's in the platform's best interest to give their clients tools like that. I would argue that if you're having a good experience with the platform, if the platform feels like it's taking care of your money, they're a steward of it, that you probably want to spend more, you probably want to come back. But hey, you know, Google is one of the biggest companies in the world and they should have enough data to analyze. If they feel like it's still okay, to overspend a budget, then they must get more money out of it, it must be a good business decision. So I like the business you're in, keeping them honest.

Jon Davis I don't think you can ever go too wrong if you just follow the money in the decisions and the product. They're beholden to stakeholders and it makes sense why they're doing what they do, but I think that leaves a lot of opportunity for third party software and companies like ours to fill in those cracks and add value.

AJ Wilcox So true. Give us an idea. We've been talking about the product, give us an idea on pricing. What can any of our listeners expect to spend to get access to these features?

Jon Davis Sure, well, first off, you can get complete feel of Shape, all our automations through a free trial. You can manage up to 20 budget on our free trial for as long as you want to get a feel for it. If you feel like that's limiting you in any way reach out to me personally, I'll help you do a little bigger trial, if you need it. During that time, they let your team get a feel for it. After the free trial, our lowest tier is $299 a month. $299 a month and for that you can manage up to $100,000 of ad spend through your accounts. From there it progresses, you know, every $250,000 in ad spend goes up roughly about $500 a month. It works out to be anywhere from like, .1% to .2% of your ad spend is roughly the Shape fee you could ballpark expect to spend.

AJ Wilcox It's really reasonable. As longtime clients, I can I can attest to that. Not that this is meant to be an ad or anything, but honestly, I want to share the partner ecosystem and I want to highlight which tools we actually think are worth paying for and which aren't. Shape definitely fits squarely in our bucket of yeah, this is definitely worth paying for. We like it.

Jon Davis Thanks. That means a lot for me coming from you and to hear that.From our perspective, we work with small, medium, large agencies, all of them are fighting a battle against smaller margins over the last 5, 10 years, you know, management fees are dropping, clients expect more, for less, and that's where we've tried to keep our Shape software fee as a pretty minor percentage of your overall adspend. We did also set up a coupon code for anybody listening. If you go through the free trial and you decide that hey, shape is for me, coupon code just B2. So B2 and get you 50% off your first three months.

AJ Wilcox Love it. Thanks for creating a custom code for us. That's awesome. I know you'll treat our listeners. Great. So everyone who's considering definitely take Jonn up on that offer.

Jon Davis Yeah, if you submit a support ticket, it will either be me or Nicole, one of my colleagues here answering it so you can reach me [email protected]. Don't hesitate to reach out and answer any questions or I can give a more in depth demo for anybody interested in Shape.

AJ Wilcox Beautiful. Alright, so away from business here or this could include business, too, but I'm curious, what are you most excited about either professionally or personally coming up? Like what's getting you out of bed in the morning?

Jon Davis Yeah, I mean, I think professionally for us, it's really now we've made it through a lot of the hard startup years, the beginning years. We're seven years now and we have a really good belief in our product market fit. And for an entrepreneur, there's no better feeling to get you out of bed than feeling like you've got product market fit. And I think that's the one thing that is really nobody can ever predict if you're going to get it. Nobody knows if you have it before you have it. And the only way to get it is to really try and go out there and knowing that we're building a product 1,000s of people use every day, that's an easy reason to get out of bed and make sure that we're helping them with their jobs. You know, when my kids asked, What do you do? It's kind of hard to explain to a four year old what being a co-founder of PPC management software startup is, but I pretty much just say I help make tools that live in the computer that help make people's jobs easier and more fun. And I think that's really the core of what helps me get out of bed professionally. Just hanging out with my kiddos and seeing what they're going to get into next. We've been doing a bunch of skiing this year and hoping maybe this is the summer they pick up golf a little bit more. And let's see my old 1994 Land Cruiser that I just picked up a little while ago helps get me out of bed to figure out what I'm going to fix up on that next or build that up next for the trail.

AJ Wilcox Sweet. You're speaking my language. I'm just headed out on our side by side the end of this week doing some off roading. I'm not handy enough to fix up my own Land Cruiser, but I'll play in the side by side. That'll be fun.

Jon Davis We'll have to connect up on that!

AJ Wilcox Yeah, it'd be fun. Jon, thanks so much for joining us, sharing about your product, giving us some insights, teaching us about budgeting on LinkedIn and the other platform. So sincerely, thanks for coming on. Anything else you want to share with us or anything else or anything else we should know?

Jon Davis No, I think that'll do it. Thanks so much for having me. I feel like I've gotten to have like a 40 minute plug here so I don't need to plug anything else. Most important thing is if you want to talk to me or reach me about anything PPC related, [email protected] and I'll be happy to talk to anybody that has any questions. It's really fun to get to talk to new PPC analysts see how new teams are doing stuff and if Shape can help them.

AJ Wilcox Perfect. Thanks so much, Jon. Sure appreciate having you on!

Jon Davis Thanks a bunch, AJ.

AJ Wilcox All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

AJ Wilcox Alright, I've got the episode resources for you here. So first off, Jon was so generous in giving us his email address. So if you want to email him directly to ask any question about anything we've covered here, it's [email protected]. You'll also see that down below in the show notes. Next, if you do decide to sign up for Shape, use the coupon code on shape.io of just the letter B and the number 2, that's also going to be in the show notes as well. As a reminder, if you have any colleagues or even you yourself are new to LinkedIn Ads, and you're trying to learn it, definitely check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is in the show notes below and it is by far the most comprehensive, as well as one of the cheapest courses you can find out there and LinkedIn stands behind it. On whatever podcast player you're listening to this on, if you like what you've heard, please hit that subscribe button so you can hear all of our future episodes as we come out with them. You may want to go back and binge a few along the way as well. I'm not judging. If you do like what you've heard, please do review the podcast. Most of those reviews happen on Apple podcasts. But I've heard that reviews are starting to happen on Spotify as well. But really anywhere that you listen, anywhere you find reviews, I would absolutely love to see your review and I'll totally shout you out as well. With any suggestions or corrections. You can reach out to us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Example image of LinkedIn's new navigation in Campaign Manager

NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover.

Did you know that LinkedIn has an analytics tool that you can get professional insights about your website visitors, and you don't have to spend a dime on LinkedIn Ads? It's all about that and more on this week's LinkedIn Ads Show.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics. You know, LinkedIn gives us a really rich understanding of who is interacting with our ads, and actually, who's interacting with us on our websites as well. And they call this demographics and website demographics, both of them being a separate area of LinkedIn. So we're going to walk through all of that. I'm going to give you the pros and cons, what you should pay attention to, what you should be using. First up here in the news, if you're in campaign manager this week, you'll notice a banner along the top of your screen that says coming soon, campaign manager is launching a new navigation experience. So this is cool. This means that LinkedIn is not necessarily changing their toolset, but we are going to see it look a little bit different, we'll have a different and hopefully better user experience. When I clicked through the help article, LinkedIn's help section actually shows a screenshot of what it's going to look like. And it looks pretty good. I'll include in the show notes, a link, so you can actually see what it looks like as well. That means down the left side, now, you'll see plan, advertise, test, analyze, assets, account settings, and company page. Now plan comes first, which tells me it should be the default experience. Under plan, it's going to include your matched audiences and your block lists, if you're using block lists, the LinkedIn Audience Network. Then, next comes advertise. This comes second in the list, but I definitely think this should be first because it's really just normal campaign manager. Then you'll have test, which we've had along the top navigation for a while, it gets you into brand lift studies that you can run, you or your client is spending more than like $90,000 a quarter. Then we have analyze and it says "Gain insights about your website audience with professional data and set up and measure conversions for your ads." I'm just reading into this, but it looks like it's going to be add demographics, which we're talking about today and maybe it's going to be conversion tracking setup, maybe it'll even include the insight tag, I'm not sure at this point. Previously, those things were found underneath assets. The next one is assets. And this one, it says it's going to have lead gen forms and landing pages. When you look into it, landing pages is only if you're using LinkedIn recruiter. If you have a recruiter license, it allows you to create some landing pages for recruiting. Most of our listeners won't have to worry about that at all. Then there's account settings which we expect to have the normal account settings, like who manages what, who has access to the account, all of that kind of stuff, the company page, it's attached to, currency, and the name of the account, I expect all that to be here. And then the last one is company page, it looks like it might just be a link to your company page or maybe it's a link to the settings around your company page. Either one, pretty cool. So I think it's going to take some time getting used to it. I do wish advertise came first in the list because from a user experience perspective, when we log into campaign manager, advertise is the majority of what we're going to be doing so I expect that I just don't know why they put plan first in the list. It does look to me like these sections will mostly have dropdowns with expansion, so that you don't have to actually leave the page to explore what each one of these categories does. So I'm a fan of that. If any of these take us to a different page, I do politely request LinkedIn to have all of them open in new pages so we don't lose wherever we were in campaign manager, that would be cool for all of us who want to get in and explore all the new options here.

Alright, with all of that, we're gonna dive into the meat of this. Let's hit it. So first, let's talk about the paid demographic side on LinkedIn. What this is, is as you're running ads, you can get some demographic data about the kind of people who are receiving impressions and taking action on your ads. Anywhere in your account where you can see your campaign performance, in the upper right hand corner, you'll see a box or a button. This is demographics. As soon as you click that, whatever you've selected down within your campaigns, whether it's campaigns, or ads, or campaign groups, you'll then be able to start seeing the demographics that are within them. It's helpful to note that this obeys your time range. So you can look at your demographics by time. So if you make a big change in your account or a big change in a campaign, you can segment out and look at how your demographics have changed over time. That's something really helpful to see, like the changes I'm making to my targeting over time, are they helping or are they hurting? So as you click that button, it takes you to where it'll show you demographics and then it'll tell you if you've selected a certain number of campaigns or ads or whatever. The default place that will take you is showing you a breakdown by job function. And job function is just the department that someone works in. So as I'm looking through my own here, I can see that it's showing me impressions and clicks and click through rate. And those are just the basics for any campaign that LinkedIn doesn't have deeper dimensions and data on, which we'll get into here in a minute. Then it's sorted by the job function that has the most impressions starting out. So inside of this account that I'm looking at sales is the highest, followed by marketing, followed by business development, followed by operations. But of course, job function isn't the only targeting type to break your your traffic down by so when you click next to where it says display: job function, there's a drop down, and it gives you all kinds of other things that you can display your ad demographics by. There's job function, there's job title, there's company name, there's company industry, there's jobs seniority, company size, location, and then two new ones that we got after the Microsoft acquisition, country/region, and county. Now, because the campaign's I'm looking at here happen to be text ads, the only breakdowns I get are impressions, clicks, and click through rate. If you are analyzing a lead gen form campaign, for instance, it'll give you impressions, lead form opens, open rate, leads, and lead completion rate. Similarly, if you're looking at video campaigns, you'll see impressions, views, view rate, completions, and video completion rate. If you're looking at sponsored messaging campaigns only, you'll see sends, opens, open rate, clicks, and click to open rate. So these are all worth exploring. It's really cool. Now there are certainly some limitations to this. The first is that your chart can only include 300 entities at a time. So if you're looking at campaigns, and let's say you have 320 campaigns in your account, you can only have 300 accounted for here within your demographics. And so you would have to segment something out to be able to see all of your data. Another limitation is, if you wanted to see video stats, like I mentioned, you could see like percentage completions and all that, you do have to make sure that you have selected only video campaigns, otherwise, it won't show you the video stats. Same thing with all the other ad formats, make sure that you go and specifically select just those campaigns within that ad format you're looking at. Alright, so you can see a little bit of demographic data about the people that you're paying to send ads to and that makes a lot of sense, but you might be asking, AJ, what do I do with this? Like, how do I actually use this strategically? Well, here are just a few ways that we use them strategically, to help us manage accounts better. And I'll admit, there's not a whole lot of really actionable information here, unless you see some segment of the population who's coming in as traffic or leads that you don't want, then that's pretty actionable. So let's say for instance, that you're running a job function campaign. And then if you come in and look at job title breakdown inside of your demographics, it's going to show your your about top 20 job titles that have been sending traffic. It's really helpful to look at this to say, are the job titles being represented here? Are they representative of the audience I want to reach? If you see a whole lot here that aren't a good fit for your target audience, there are a couple actions you could take. The first is you could possibly go in and try to exclude those job titles. Or the second is you could say, ah, looks like job function might be too broad here, because it's letting in a lot of people who aren't a good fit. So really, this is a comparison, a measure of how qualified your traffic is. If you're using lead gen form campaigns, for instance, you can actually see how qualified your leads are because it'll actually show you a breakdown of the job titles, or the seniorities, or the company sizes, etc, who are contributing and becoming leads. Many of you may know that as you're building a campaign over in the right rail, you can see a bit of an audience breakdown and here's how this is different. So the one that you can access within building the campaign, where on the right rail you click on where it says show segments, and what it's doing is you've defined a target audience over on the left side from choosing your targeting. And on the right side, LinkedIn is breaking this down by how the targeting you are using breaks down their membership into these different segments like job function, seniority, years of experience, company size, etc. So let's say that you have a really inactive portion of your audience. When you look here at the show segments within the campaign, it's going to show you representative, hey, there's a whole bunch of people who fit this criteria, but then when you actually go to advertise, and you find out, they're not on LinkedIn very often. The actual ad demographics that we've been talking about, they're going to be a lot more accurate. On the flip side to that, you might find that certain segments of your audience are overactive. So here's an example of that. Let's say you're building a campaign, and often the right rail under your segment breakdown, you see that 35% of your audience is made up of chief marketing officers. But you look at the demographics tab, instead of campaign manager. And you see that Chief Marketing Officers are contributing to 50% of your ad engagement. What that's telling you is of all of that audience that LinkedIn thought that you were going to be targeting, you have one really hyperactive segment who they're either more active on the platform, or they're engaging with your ads at a higher rate. And I would argue that's a really good thing, that's going to teach you a lot about who this target audience is. Here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the free website demographics that everyone should be using, whether you're advertising on LinkedIn or not Ads experts.

If the performance of your LinkedIn ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead and the most scale. We're official LinkedIn partners and you'll deal only with LinkedIn ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns and we'd absolutely love to get to work with you.

Alright, let's jump into the free demographics data we get from LinkedIn Ads, I'm imagining that every single person listening right now has heard of Google Analytics, I'm also imagining that a good portion of you have heard of and maybe even used Facebook analytics. Both of these are tools that are free, provided by a platform, giving you some sort of an insight into your engagement, or your website traffic. One very overlooked tool that you have in your arsenal is actually what I would have called LinkedIn analytics. But LinkedIn themselves, they just call it website demographics. It's hidden within their ad tool and I don't hear anyone talking about this, but again, I think everyone here should be checking it out, especially because it's kind of like a ticking time bomb. At some point, this isn't going to be useful to us anymore. I'm guessing. That's my prediction. Okay, so first off, how do you get to this? Well, right along the top navigation, and I know, at some point here in the near future, LinkedIn is launching their new navigation experience. So these will probably be along the left side. But at least for right now, if you're just listening to this, right as soon as the episode comes out, it's along the top. You'll click the button that says website demographics. What this is, is very similar to your ad demographics, but it's showing who is actually visiting your website that LinkedIn recognizes. And of course, for LinkedIn to actually recognize what's going on on your website, you have to have the LinkedIn insight tag installed. In the world we live in right now, where some cookies are still persistent in people's browsers, what's happening is someone comes in visit to your company website, it fires the LinkedIn insight tag, LinkedIn is then looking at the cookies in that person's browser to see if they're currently logged in to LinkedIn. If they are logged in, it understands who that person is and then kind of adds them to this list of the people who are interacting on your website. Then they can aggregate that data here within the website demographics tab, and show you a cool breakdown of the kinds of people who are using your website. Now, the reason that I think that this is hidden right within campaign manager is you really do have to have the insight tag installed. But, I really do wish that this was a separate domain, where it was like LinkedInanalytics.com, and you go and install the Insight tag, you know, it's the same one you'd use for advertising, but you install it, if you have an ad account, it syncs to it so you're always using the same insight tag, it's not going to give you a second one, which would be a real problem if you tried to implement both. Then I think people would use it more. We probably see people talking about it at PPC conferences and stuff. At least so far, I haven't seen people get too excited about the feature, but I really like it. One of the biggest things that I like about this, it's being able to analyze your website traffic by who someone is professionally. This isn't just those who are interacting with your ads, because we expect to get some data on who they are because we're paying for it. This is anyone who uses your website that LinkedIn recommends. Think about it, if you are specifically selling a product to companies of 200 or more employees, but you look here in your website demographics and realize it's made up of a whole bunch of interactions from employees who are at companies with a size of like 11 to 50, then you know that maybe some of the other marketing you're doing isn't hitting the right audience and you could maybe try to adjust that somehow. And, of course, you don't have to pay a dime for this, you don't have to be a current advertiser, you just get to go open a LinkedIn Ads account, which is free, install the Insight tag and then as soon as your website has generated at least 300 people that LinkedIn can identify, all of a sudden, boom, you're getting this data. That's pretty cool. Obviously, the reason why LinkedIn would give us this data for free, is to help us want to buy more ads, I'm imagining that it would work like this, if you're seeing that a lot of the people on your website are not from the titles, or the right size companies, or representing the right industries, you might want to pay for additional people of the right people to get them there. So I'm sure that's what the aim of this is, but again, I think this is super valuable, even for B2C companies to make sure you're getting. As far as I understand this is 100%, based on the cookies in someone's browser. After iOS 14.5, we know that iOS devices, or any Apple device isn't going to reliably carry that browser cookie anymore so we have no idea how many of those people are making it through this. This just got a lot less valuable. Here in the next year, when Google Chrome stops accepting third party cookies, we're going to see another big chunk taken out of here. I wouldn't be surprised if here in the next year or two years, this product is obsolete, but we can sure use it now. I do hope that LinkedIn does something to improve it to save the data.

Now, of course, everyone uses Google Analytics. Google Analytics is really cool to see how people are interacting with your website. So what pages they're viewing, and what they're doing on those pages, where they came from, the technical aspects about them. So what screen size are they using? What language is their browser set to? What part of the world are they from based on their IP address? Google is really cool to see how people are interacting with your website. Then you have Facebook Analytics, which is very much a social breakdown of who is interacting on your website. So you might get information, like, for instance, you can see how someone is engaging with your website, compared to how they engage with it socially. So it'll tell you the number of views that that page got, according to what Facebook can see, but then how many times people have liked that page, how many Facebook members that post reached, and that kind of information. Obviously really helpful if you're doing a lot with Facebook Ads. LinkedIn doesn't really get into the structure of your LinkedIn website demographics, or what I would prefer, they call LinkedIn analytics. It just tells you the amount of interaction you get from each type of professional breakdown from someone on LinkedIn. So like, we've talked about, their job function, their job title, the company they represent, their industry, seniority, company size, location, country/region, and county. It works the same way as your free demographics, you just look for where it says display:, and then you click that break down and choose how you want to see your traffic. Like we mentioned, it requires having the Insight tag installed on your website. Sometimes we haven't quite figured out when this is the case, but sometimes it won't actually start collecting this data until you set up a matched audience. Specifically a website retargeting audience. So the best thing you can do, when you set up a new LinkedIn ads account, immediately go into your matched audiences, it's creating a retargeting segment of everyone who visits the website. And then you're sure to at least get this data on everyone that LinkedIn recognizes from that group. Some of the breakdowns that you can get here are like, you can see the percentage of the pageviews that LinkedIn figured out that were generated from each of those targeting facets. You can see the number of pageviews in the upper left hand corner that this represents. So for instance, on the data I'm looking at, I can see that companies with size 11 to 50, make up 34.2% of my pageviews and then I look in the upper left hand corner, and I can see this is representing 3,156 pageviews and so I could figure out oh, that's a little over 1000 people who represent companies of the size 11 to 50. We can also see a time period change. So it will automatically compare to the previous segment. So if you're just looking at the last seven days, it will show you how that has changed up or down by what percentage compared to the previous seven days to that. And one other really cool thing here that I don't hear people talk about a lot, but you can actually break this data down by any sort of segment on your website that you have previously created. So let me give you an example. Let's say that you took my advice, you went in and created one website retargeting segment that is everyone who came to the website. And then maybe you also say, hey, let's create a segment that just retarget anyone who has made it to one of our landing pages. And then let's say that you do another one that's just anyone who hit one of our thank you pages. This is where they hit only after they've already become a lead. You now have these three different segments. And here inside of LinkedIn's website demographics tab, the very first option, you'll see where it says website audience, there will be a little drop down arrow. You can click that and you can look by each of these retargeting segments. So you can see what's the difference in someone, you know, professionally, who visits the website, versus those who make it to our landing page, versus those who actually end up converting. If you can see the demographics of the people who tend to convert, isn't that gonna make you update your campaigns and go and target more people like that? I think it's a really, really natural way of closing that loop. I mentioned before, this is totally based on cookies, which means it might go away, it might not be useful after cookies aren't helpful, but my hope is that LinkedIn finds a way to update this and get us this kind of data because I don't think this is going to be overly valuable if it only represents like less than 20% of all the traffic across the website. But, certainly I'm grateful for whatever data we can get. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

All right, I've got the episode resources for you. First off in the example image of what LinkedIn's new navigation is going to look like inside of campaign manager, so definitely check down in the show notes for the link that you can see what that's going to look like or you can go search on LinkedIn's Help section for it. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn LinkedIn Ads at a deeper level, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is also going to be in the show notes. It's the least expensive and the best course out there so far. If you like what you heard, please do look down at your podcast player and hit subscribe, if you're not already. I do want you hearing all the new episodes that come out if LinkedIn Ads is in your wheelhouse. And please do rate it. Rate the podcast. Of course we'd love to see the five stars, but if you have anything critical you want to say or you want us to change, I'd love to hear it so feel free to say it in the comments or just email it to us at [email protected]. Please leave a review for the podcast. It helps other people, like you, other ads managers, other LinkedIn ads fanatics, find the show. Of course, we're always grateful if you do that. We'll even shout you out here on the show. Alright, with that being said, we'll see you back here for the next episode. We're cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.