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Show Transcript:

Generation Z is coming into the workforce in droves. How are they using LinkedIn? And how will you market to them? Stay tuned, we'll find out. This is the LinkedIn Ads Show.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, as many of you may know, Generation Z is the massive and up and coming generation. They're shaping popular culture. And they're beginning to graduate out of school and into the workforce. We here at B2inked really wanted to know how the coming generation both thought about and uses LinkedIn so we can see what the future of LinkedIn ads platform might look like. So we've partnered with a good friend of mine, Sarah Weise, who happens to be the CEO of the market research firm, Bixa research. I'm not sure how much I'm able to disclose. But let's just say that her firm is amazing at research. Since she gets to work with brands like a search engine that starts with the letter G, and a payment processor that rhymes with Hey Pal, we went out and interviewed a bunch of Gen Z members. And the results were pretty surprising. We'll dig into our findings, as well as ideas on how you can better relate to them. In the news, the big thing this week was the announcement that LinkedIn was misreporting some of their metrics. And they're going to be issuing some refunds out to their clients. In the article that LinkedIn shared on their marketing solutions blog by someone amazing that I have a lot of respect for Gyanda Sachdeva, we discovered two measurement issues. Here's how we're making it right. And you may have received some emails this week, or maybe it's an email, I don't know, where they're letting you know that some of the accounts that you're on may have had misrepresented impressions or video stats. In the article Gyanda mentions that in August, their engineering team found and then fixed two measurement issues that were causing to over report impressions and video views. She says that these issues potentially impacted about 418,000 customers over a two plus year period. So this sounds pretty serious. But then she goes on to say that more than 90% of the customers who had an impact equated to less than $25 US. So they said that they're committed to making it right, which is awesome. And I remember the same thing happened with Facebook a few years ago, when they were miscalculating video impressions. And I just kept thinking it would have been so easy for LinkedIn to just brush this under the rug and move on. And I absolutely admire the LinkedIn leadership so much for deciding to make this announcement public. If you're anything like me, you read the emails and went, huh. So I'm still waiting to understand more of what they mean and what the process for reimbursement is going to be like. Because I received several emails the first week that said that we need to contact support for the ad credits for every account. And then I got another email this week that was a little bit different, and made it seem a bit more like the credits would be given automatically. And I sure hope so because I have no desire to go and file like 100 different support tickets with LinkedIn just to get less than $25 back. Of course, if you manage a large spending account, the sum could be significantly more. And it could be worth filing a ticket if that's what we need to do. So I'll let you know as I find out. And then if you've been listening to the last few episodes, our contest, our ad performance contest is in full swing. If you go to bit.ly/linkedinadscontest, you'll see the link down below in the show notes. And from now until December 11 at midnight Pacific time US, you can go on and submit a screenshot of an ad, or a campaign, or a campaign group that has really good performance. We're looking for either a ridiculously high click through rate, or a super high conversion rate, or a really low cost per click. And heck, you could submit for all three categories. The winner in each category, though, is going to win something that is absolutely amazing. And I can't tell you what it is yet, but I'm going to tell you all about it when I announced the winners. And if you're a LinkedIn advertiser, be aware that this is something that no other advertiser has, this is going to give you a serious leg up on competition. So if you're looking for ammo to bust ahead of your competition, definitely find a way to submit and win this contest. So go jump into your account now and look for those high click through rates, high conversion rates, and low costs per click. So get it submitted now and I'll help to have your prize given out by Christmas or New Year's, and I can't wait to reveal to you what you're going to be winning. So highlighting a review. Jose Bormey, who's a marketing manager, he said, "I love this podcast. There's an extremely helpful tip on the most recent podcast episode to avoid high cost per click in Q4 and instead use the budget for a big bang to kick off the new year. Cybersecurity in itself is extremely competitive, and these podcasts have helped save me a fortune. Looking forward to 2021 inbound spotlight once again." Thanks, Jose. I speak at the inbound conference every year, and I speak on advanced LinkedIn Ads. And Jose, it sounds like you've gotten to attend one or more of those presentations. So if it's going to be in person in 2021, I'd absolutely love to get to meet you in real life. So thanks so much for the kind words, and I'm so glad that we've helped you save some cash in such a competitive industry. And you, yes, you! I want to feature you. So go and leave a review. Let us know what you like, what's helped you in your jobs or ads management? I'd love to give you a shout out here. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it.

Well, everyone, my name is AJ Wilcox, I run B2Linked.com. We're an ad agency that literally LinkedIn Ads is all we do. Obviously, a huge fan of LinkedIn. And I'm super excited to be with Sarah Weise today who has a great friend. And she is the author of Instabrain, which is the predominant So this is the predominant book for learning about how Gen Z interacts with social media, and how their purchasing which is obviously going to be really important for you. If it's not already, it will be in the in the coming years. Sara, like I said, longtime friend, we speak in a lot of the same conferences, and we actually got together in person before the COVID thing happened, we got a chance to do a lot of like original research, interviewing students, members of the Gen Z community live. And I am so excited to be here today. Sarah, take us away, tell us about the study, and kind of lead us into the discussion.

So I think the study started because as I was going to conferences, and I was presenting about all the social media that Gen Z uses, there was always a question after the conference, like, Hey, I noticed you didn't talk about LinkedIn. Why didn't you talk about LinkedIn? And I would always say things like, Well, it's because it just didn't come up when we were talking to Gen Z. I mean, we did almost two years of research on Gen Z, before I started speaking about it, and I mean, it was all sorts of research, qualitative research and quantitative research and in home ethnography pre COVID, where we would actually go into people's homes and, and hang out with teenagers, they literally spent a year and a half hanging out with teenagers. And I mean, that was fun. And what's really interesting was that it just the topic of LinkedIn never came up. And most of these interviews were fairly open ended, like, show me how you use technology. How are you using technology to do your homework today? Walk me through it. Or like, what are you researching right now? Like, oh, you you're into guitar, and you're into rock music, like, tell me about that. And show me what you're doing and how you're doing that? Oh, you're into this video game? Tell me about it. You know, where do you go to find information on this and watching them switch between devices and between social media apps and diving deep into topics and things like that. But LinkedIn never came up. And even with the kind of older Gen Z's who are now entering the workforce, they would say things like, Oh, I'm looking for a job. And we'd be like, oh, show me how you do that. And they would go to indeed, or they would go to other places, or some of them were using LinkedIn, but it was with like, surgical precision. So they would go in there and they would be like, yep, I'm going to search for a job. Okay, I found something. Okay, I'm getting out now. And it was like, as fast as they could get out of LinkedIn, they were doing that. And so when we got together, AJ, I think I approached you because I was like, Okay, I don't get this. People keep asking about it. I need to have an answer. Let's figure out what you know what's going on.

And I forgot to mention that you are the CEO of a market research company. So just to be very clear here. It was definitely you who approached me, because it never came on my radar to think, hey, I should go and do an original study. Like, definitely not in my wheelhouse.

Yeah, I mean, it originated because we were doing market research on Gen Z for big companies like Google. And some, let's see some large banks and things like that. And what what happened was that we started asking the question to like, how do your new employees like find you? Where are you putting your job posts up and seeing the most Gen Z applicants and we were starting to ask those questions. And LinkedIn was just not coming up that often. And so anyway, so we started digging into it, and we started doing our own research. And what we found was really interesting, it was really surprising because what we found is that over 50% of Gen Z's and you know, across the country, they have a LinkedIn account. I mean, most colleges and universities I would say older Gen Z's like 18 and up, they have a LinkedIn account. In large part because most universities as a part of a career class or a requirement for some sort of career services, tell their students, you need to download LinkedIn, you need to create an account and so they have been asked to create account in some cases required to create a LinkedIn account, and so over 50% have a LinkedIn account, but only something like 4% were using it. I think it was 96% of the people we talked with. And these were Gen Z's across the country in the older Gen Z age range. So from about 18 years old to 24 years old. So really like in college, getting their first job, you know, applying for those entry level jobs. They were saying, This is not something we use.

10:25 What I love is, when we were in person, we were actually interviewing students on the campus of University of Utah. And I think we interviewed like 12 or 13 people before finally someone said, Oh, yeah, I have LinkedIn. And we're like, oh, good, but they show us how you use it. Yeah, yeah. They're like, Oh, I created an account one time, I can't even figure out my password. So it was like those who have it. They're certainly at least not yet not using it.

Yeah. It's interesting, because this is a group that this is, first of all, this is like the largest living generation right now with a big deal type of group, especially for any sort of digital platform that wants to be, you know, a digital platform five years from now, they need to be marketing to and meeting the needs of this younger generation. And especially for for LinkedIn, which is a platform that enables people to find jobs. This is a generation that is entering the workforce now. And for some reason, there is a breakdown between what LinkedIn offers and the perception of that in the minds of Gen Z. And so I almost will say that I think that LinkedIn is failing, its Gen Z customers, because it's not giving them the information they need, maybe the tools they need, the features they need, and telling them about them and educating them on it. Because the Gen Z's we talked to they didn't even see LinkedIn as a social media platform. It was the same as indeed, it was the same exact thing as anywhere else that they would look for jobs.

Yeah. And on top of that, we talked to several students who were actively looking for a job. And so we asked them, like, Hey, how are you looking? Would you consider LinkedIn? And they had this reaction to it like, Oh, well, the kinds of jobs I'm looking for, aren't there, so I'm not even gonna try.

Yeah. And some of the jobs were like internships, like, oh, I need a professional internship. And we were like, Oh, my gosh, that kind of stuff is on LinkedIn. Like, of course, we couldn't say this, because we were conducting like, very third party neutral interviews. But in our minds, we were like, ooh, interesting feedback.

AJ was telling himself like namaste, just keep calm. Expert in all things LinkedIn Haha! Yes.

It was very sad. So yeah, tell us more about like, what are the findings? What really surprised you as you were going through this research?

12:54 I think what surprised me the most is that they don't see LinkedIn as a social media site. Like it is not in their heads anywhere close to what an Instagram is, or even a Facebook is like. They're not using Facebook, as much as say, an older demographics. But they certainly understand that Facebook is a social media platform, they're just not seeing LinkedIn as a social media platform. And they're definitely not seeing it as something that they would use.

Yeah. And this is so surprising to me, because LinkedIn stopped being a job search platform to me back in like 2012. And it's been an actual social media for communicating ever since then. So it seems like LinkedIn is either not branding themselves or not reaching Gen Z with the proper messaging so they even know what the platform is and why they would want to use it.

Yeah. Especially because we were asking questions too, about like, Oh, do you ever like go to the news feed? Do you ever look at articles in your field? Or do you ever communicate with people? Do you try to establish connection with that hiring manager? I mean, they tell you who the hiring manager is, who are you trying to connect with them and start conversations with them in any sort of way? And they just had no idea that that was even a possibility.

14:14 Yeah. Do you have any more insights you want to share? Or should we start going into like the prescriptive stuff like let's

Let's dig into it because I think the biggest finding here is that LinkedIn is not working for this generation, so I want to hear from you AJ, LinkedIn expert, like what features are really would be really helpful to this generation who is looking for a job. And I guess I should add to that, especially now that this is we're in COVID, where months into this, it is really hard for a young person, an older Gen Z, who was just out of college to find an entry level job. Like it is extremely difficult because those entry level jobs, they're being filled by people who are overqualified for them. There. filled by people with many years of experience, who are accepting a lower salary and taking that job because unemployment is high. I mean, really, it's a really strange time because we went from this kind of the one of the largest economic booms in history to just crash bang, people are unemployed don't have jobs, like record levels of unemployment, people are just taking whatever they can find. And that made it so much harder all of a sudden to find jobs. And so I would have assumed that because of that, a young Gen Z, who is extremely digitally savvy, would be like, oh, let me hop on LinkedIn and see what there is to offer. And we're just not seeing that.

Yeah. And first of all, Gen Z, I totally feel for you. I graduated in 2008. And I came out going, yes, can't wait to attack the world and go get a massive salary. And I found every single company was on hiring freeze due to the big economic downturn,

16:00 I love that you're talking to Gen Z, like they're on LinkedIn, posting this on LinkedIn. And you're, I think that's the thing. If you are watching this on LinkedIn right now, you're probably not Gen Z.

Or if you are, you're one of the only ones and you should be very proud. And I absolutely understand what they're going through right now. Because it was tough. I mean, I had a year of digital marketing experience when I first graduated, and it took me three months to find a job for like, $14 an hour.

And if you look at the numbers of Gen Z's right now who are moving back in with their parents, it is just off the charts, astronomical, especially, even if they're still in college, or they're, they've extended their college because they're like, I can't find a job right now so I'm going to like, you know, go for another semester and see what happens.

Especially because it's, it's, um, you know, all virtual now. And I think a lot of them are also helping their parents out with their parents' jobs and things that are going on with their parents' lives, too. That's awesome.

That just strikes me is actually really, really intelligent. It might be like, just necessity is the mother of invention. But I'm like, yeah, if I had a Gen Z son or daughter who was getting ready to enter the workforce, that's exactly like the hustle II'd want to see from them. Just figure out anything you can,

it is a hustle. I mean, I interviewed one Gen Zer recently who said that he had, like, moved. He actually was in LA, trying to like start his career and then had moved back home to New Jersey to help out his parents power washing company, and was doing a ton of like, just manual labor power washing, because that's what his family needed.

17:40 That's fantastic. Good for those people. I know, I'm not talking to you, because you're not here, but good for you.

Never gonna see that. He's not, it's not on LinkedIn. But if we posted on Instagram, he probably would.

Oh, totally repost it just a little 30 second snippets. Haha!

Snackable content. Haha!

Yes, we'll break down only the most valuable stuff, just obviously, all of it. So we can kind of get prescriptive here, we can talk about the things that we think Gen Z could do, which obviously, we're not talking to you Gen Z, but maybe parents of Gen Z are watching. These are the things that you can help your your children understand and kind of give them a boost into the workforce.

So I think the first thing that I would point out that I think is like the biggest no brainer about it, is if you have a son or daughter who is looking for a job right now in a really competitive environment, and they're not on LinkedIn, the ability to go viral on LinkedIn organically right now is insane. Um, basically what happens is anytime someone hits, like, comment, or share on your post, It then goes to a portion of their followers. And so the more people that are liking and engaging, the more people LinkedIn, start showing it to that aren't even in your network.

So that's so big because being an influencer is like the be all end all for many in this generation. Like that is the goal, to get their ideas and their brand, because they really do think of themselves as an online brand to get that out into the world. Yeah, I don't think that they understand how, how easy it is to be a thought leader. And, and organically grow on LinkedIn.

19:22 And that's my point really, for for this is like, I mean, you think about the kinds of thought leaders who are bubbling to the top on LinkedIn. I mean, there's 30, I could name off who are HR experts, there are 50, who are sales experts who are just sharing stuff and trying to become well known. I don't know any Gen Zers, who are talking about the experiences they're having being authentic. I mean, for a generation who totally understands the value of becoming an influencer, the landscape here is totally ripe, for someone of this generation to come in and run it on LinkedIn.

It's a lot different than the social media that they have right now because a lot of them are maybe doing YouTube videos or on Instagram, or you know even doing TikTok little 15 second TikTok things. And that's happening on video. And LinkedIn platform is just not set up for many. I mean, even doing this interview alone, we had so many tech difficulties getting Restream to work and getting like LinkedIn video platform to, to play nice with the LinkedIn live on an interview with two videos connecting, like to the point where we're just like, screw it, let's do this on a zoom video. And we'll post it afterwards, which defeats the whole purpose of LinkedIn Live. And I also think that LinkedIn needs to take some responsibility here and say, our features are not set up for the types of video sharing that Gen Z wants to do, that they are accustomed to doing on other platforms.

20:55 Oh, yeah. And the way that video works on LinkedIn, if you don't already know, you can attach video to it. So we could upload this as a native video, which I'll probably do, if it's less than 30 minutes, I think that's the limit for uploading video. For going live, they don't have a very, there's not a native ability to just like, hit it and go live, you have to use a third party, which means you're looping in all of these other technology issues, which is why we are not doing this live right now. So it adds a lot of complexity to it. Where this is a generation who is just there used to just hold up your phone, start recording yourself.

We even tell when we do market research for companies, when we're doing product research for companies, we will even tell them if Gen Z can see your technology or notices your technology you're doing something wrong. Because it needs to be invisible. Like it needs to feel completely seamless, like oh, yeah, I just pushed the button. And yeah, of course that worked. So this whole let's let's connect through a third party thing. And I have to figure that out. I need an account. So I have a phone call with somebody at Restream. They don't hop on the phone. So I mean, just all of this contributes to like not a great experience for this generation.

Yeah. And no knock on Restream. Because I actually love Restream.

22:17 Yeah, I think Restream is great. I think the reason that it didn't work for us is because you were trying to you've got like a computer, a DSLR hooked up, wires connecting, and there was some sort of delay with the video and audio. So I don't think this is a knock on Restream at all. I think this is a knock on LinkedIn, not natively offering the ability to just like, plug and play, like put a zoom conversation or do some sort of thing. Like I almost feel like they should have a studio in LinkedIn, LinkedIn platform, you can put two people in there and have a conversation like we're having right now and do it live? Like, why are we doing this on Zoom and Restream even just to get it into LinkedIn live,

And the same solution that they could create, that's just two people talking, they could create a zoom competitor, where it's like, hey, don't even log into zoom, have all of your meetings on LinkedIn with your colleagues, like seems like a missed opportunity here.

Yeah, and and that's a perfect platform to do it on. Because people are on LinkedIn for work. It's not like they're on Facebook all day like while they're working. You're trying to close down Facebook as much as you can, or, or Instagram or anything else for especially for older people. LinkedIn is the professional network that that I think most people over over 25 years or just people in general use for professional reasons.

Yeah, totally. And so if you are the parent of a Gen Z, who's looking to go into the workforce, maybe you can help convince, I know, Gen Z may not want to be convinced of this. But you can help convince them like, yeah, the video stuff is harder, but because no one is doing it, there's a huge opportunity for you to cut through the clutter and become an influencer quicker, and be comfortable with text like you're comfortable sharing text and pictures as well, until video gets comfortable with where you're at.

24:10 I think one of the other findings that we saw that kind of surprised me. I mean, I guess once I thought about it, it was not surprising at all. But it was the fact that the real one of the reasons that Gen Z struggles with LinkedIn is that they go on LinkedIn. They see all these thought leaders, they see these people with great resumes because they've got 20 years in the industry or whatever it is. And they're like, Oh, my resume doesn't look like that. Like my summer internship where I got coffee for people or my like, I was a checkout person at a grocery store or I was a camp counselor. Like they're not seeing their experience as relevant to their resume. And that's in large part because of how they think of social media accounts. So they do think of it, you know that like most Gen Z's have five or six Instagram accounts. And a lot of people think that they're fake Instagrams and not real Instagrams, but they're not. They're actually, like, they're all real, legitimate accounts. They're just for different slices of their personality. And they're curating these little pockets, these little brands for themselves within each account. So if you're a Gen Xer and you're into photography, you might have a photography account, where you just follow photography and post photography, things. And you might also be into like a YouTube celebrity, so you're gonna have a fan account for them. And then you're gonna have your normal account, your school account where all your friends go, and then you're going to have like a separate account called you called your spam account, where like, it's just for your close friends, where you can be a little more real, because none of these are fully real. It's all just like little like curated slivers of their themselves. And so when you translate that to a job, they're going, Oh, I want to get a job in marketing, or that I'm wanting to get a job in HR, I want to get a job in this field, whatever the field is, and they're saying, none of my past experience tells that curated story to get me that job. And they're not seeing the connection between hey, the fact that I was a camp counselor actually taught me a lot of teamwork, because I'm planning and project management because I had to coordinate with other counselors, and I had to plan activities for the kids. And I had to do this, and I had to do that. And they taught me responsibility, and like, they're not seeing the connections between what those early jobs actually teach them, and how that is actually very relevant to a future career and an entry level position. I mean, if I see an entry level person who has had a job, as a grocery store, checkout, I know that they have good people skills, I know that they have good customer service skills, I know that they could basically make small talk with anybody, and that they listen, and they take directions and like, you know, just a lot about them based on an entry level job, even if it is not applicable to the job that they're applying for. But they don't see it that way. And they can make change. Yeah, absolutely. Mental math. Sure. Maybe. I don't know, with all the cash registers that just give it for you now. But yeah, I mean, I think that we also have to do a better job as you know, as parents and you know, as parents who are listening to this and talking to your, your Gen Z kids about, you know, when they put their resume on LinkedIn, or even if you're a school and listening to this and saying, what am I going to teach to the students in this career class, one of the things is, please list everything, it is relevant. And the fact that they can distill if they can say, I learned teamwork skills, because I did this, this and this at that job, that's even better. And also, like, I wish that they could do some sort of video resume or something instead, oh, yeah. Again, back to the video, because Gen Z's will talk about themselves and their goals and what they want to find in a job very quickly on video. Writing is another whole thing.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, if you can read a resume written out of emojis, like, Gen Z is gonna do great.

I don't know. Haha!

28:25 Yeah, writing skills, probably not quite there yet. But I just, I learned how to spell a word right last week. So we can still keep learning. So if you've got a Gen Zer, you can help them you can help them understand. First of all, like, hey, being an influencer is possible on LinkedIn, no one else is doing it. And here's how you have to do it on LinkedIn. So I know this is a little bit less comfortable for you in the rest of the social media use, but it's writing things and sharing things, and leveraging video that may not work quite as smoothly. If you can help them with that, that's fantastic.

Transcribing the video on otter.ai and then putting it out there.

Yes, and then help them understand help them think through past experience. If they look at LinkedIn and go, man, all these other people have like CEO of this and 18 years of experience in that I'm not worthy with my grocery store checkout profile, help them understand like, point towards the skills that were built, and not necessarily what they think of like, you know, oh, the job title of ice cream scooper. Sorry, I'm not worthy. You are worthy! Figure out the skills that make you interesting, especially to those who are hiring for the entry level positions.

29:38 I think also there's a lot of kind of partnerships that I see for LinkedIn, with colleges and universities, because these colleges and universities are already telling their kids, hey, you are required to or you should create a LinkedIn account and they're doing it. I mean, the numbers show that they're doing it because they're being asked to do it. So why isn't there subsequent education that says, okay, now that you have an account, this is how you do it. And it's almost on LinkedIn to like, LinkedIn should know, based on the profile, how old the person is, like the personalized profile, they should know to show a video on how to customize your profile, instead of just walking them through like, the little checklist of your 80% complete, or whatever it is like they should actually do a video series maybe on LinkedIn learning or something like that, that's free to anybody who is in a certain age range, looking for an entry level position, and has recently opened an account to follow up and actually get that going.

Yeah, maybe even consider, like some kinds of suggestions where someone puts like, common titles like grocery store clerk or babysitting, it might pop up recommendations and say, other people who have this experience have phrased it like this and have used these points from skills they've learned. So you'll maybe even consider some of those. If it's not a video, maybe it's dynamic pop ups.

Yeah. And also, the email is one thing we found in our in just couple years of Gen Z researches that email marketing is not dead for this generation. I mean, a lot of people think that this generation, they assume that this generation doesn't check the email, but they're actively checking email. So an email campaign from LinkedIn to people in this generation would work like where it's like, hey, you know, for the next week, every day, we're going to give you like a five minute task to do on your LinkedIn profile to make it better, that would work.

And make sure to appeal to their egos, because every child of this generation has been told that they are made of gold.

They are special.

I love it. And I love the idea of of the college partnerships, I mean, for LinkedIn, to go into junior colleges or state universities, and work to make sure that not half of all students end up leaving with a profile, but 100% have them. They have a presence on campus, they have events they've put on together and sponsored together to help educate people like not only create an account, this is how you can use it. I mean, it's not going to reflect on next quarter's stock results. But it will like four or five years from now, I'm sure it'll do massive things.

32:29 And imagine if you started your LinkedIn profile, and like started recording the project, you worked on everything when you were 20, instead of when you started the company, when you're 30 or 35. I mean, just just imagine that like, how much more like meatier your profile would be?

Yeah. And when I was searching for a job in the middle of a recession, no one was hiring. I was ashamed. And I didn't want to talk or share anything about it. Because I thought like it was a reflection on me as a failure. But especially with this generation, who has watched influencers, they understand the value of being authentic. And maybe it's offensive, but at least they see that there's value in showing your authentic self, someone who goes through and starts, like cataloging and showing what their experience is of like, hey, I'm job searching like this. Oh, man, I guarantee you would find a job so fast, when people are are seeing the hustle that you're putting in, and your control over media.

33:27 Yes, and the documentation of it and stuff like that. If I saw somebody who could really do that, and was hustling like that, I would immediately think, wow, they will hustle for my company if I hire them.

Absolutely. And that's what you want. Like, that's the only thing I'm looking when I hire for someone, I just want to see drive. If you are driven and hungry, I can teach you anything about LinkedIn Ads.

Generation is hungry to begin with. I mean, remember that, unlike Millennials, who grew up in a boom, this generation grew up in a recession. These are post 9/11 kids. I mean, they grew up in a time of war and recession, and they are hungry for work to begin with. I mean, these are kids that with millennials, they were like, oh, I'll take a year off and explore Europe and backpack and find myself and, and that we're not seeing that in Gen Z, like this is a generation who has entrepreneurial. 61% want to start their own businesses when they come out of high school. And it's amazing to me. In addition to that, they're valuing traditional education and they understand, okay, I want to start my own business, but I have a lot to learn to do that, which is a really interesting finding that they they're entrepreneurial, but value traditional education as well. It's not the tradition. It's not that entrepreneur, that millennial entrepreneur, like, Ah, forget this college. I'm just gonna drop out and I'm pretty smart. So I'll make it. Yeah. other entrepreneurs have done it.

33:48 Is there like something we pin on this generation that feels negative? Like do we talk about Gen Z like they are because I'm on the elder side of being a Millennial, but I very side with Millennials. And I was afraid to admit I was a millennial for years because everything I read was Millennials are lazy and entitled.

And they eat too much avocado toast and they can't buy a house. Yeah, there's all of that too. And I'm with you, AJ, I'm a few years older than you. When you said when you graduated? I was like, I'm older, but yeah, I'm in this. I'm actually a microgeneration between we talked about this this microgeneration between Millennials and Gen X, where we didn't grow up with high speed internet in our homes. So we actually behave more similarly to Gen X than we do to millennials. And it's kind of an interesting microgeneration. And I wonder if there's gonna be some sort of microgeneration here now, that's like the COVID generation or something like that. I mean, they call that micro-generation the Oregon Trail generation because they're the kids that like, grew up with the big floppy disks where you're like sharing a computer at school with like three or four other kids and you're like walking across the country and dying of dysentery, shooting squirrels, you know,

I ran out of ammo again. No, somebody stole my horse! My oxen. Haha!

I loved Oregon Trail.

36:16 So I mean, I wonder if there's going to be a similar microgeneration here of like the kids who are the young adults who were trying to find a job during COVID.

Yeah. Oh, I totally think there will be. I am so glad, just as an aside, I'm so glad that I was alive for COVID. Because if you would have told me like 10 years later, or 10 years earlier, like there's this thing that we live through, and the whole world stopped, and everyone started wearing masks like, I would not believe you. So I'm glad we experienced this. And for people to have their formative years during it. I can't even imagine what that's like.

Yeah, I'm interested in too. And how this is affecting Gen alpha, which are the kids who are under 13, who today are for the first time like I'm sorry, you can't be in school.

37:05 Yeah, you can't be in school, you have to homeschool and we don't have a device for you, but figure it out kids.

And depending on what here you are as an alpha, like, I've got four alphas in my house. And there's a whole year that they pretty much took off of school. Like it wasn't the same curriculum. Like, are we going to have a whole generation where this year knows nothing about geography?

I think? Yeah, I absolutely think we will. I mean, that happened to my daughter at the end of last year, when we started homeschooling, I realized in the summer, because we did it like a math assessment for her like, Oh, these are the things you should have learned in third grade. And she missed math, basically, all the things that you learned at the end of third grade math, she just was really weak on them. And I was like I was there I was homeschooling you. I know you did this, I know you learn how to convert fractions. And yet, and yet she was really weak in it. And I think that there's gonna be a really big gap to between kids who were at a public school, where they were had to be home for a whole year, and the kids who started back this year, in private school, like there's gonna be a huge gap in terms of the kids who don't have just missed a whole longer period of time than the kids who were in private schools and able to go back in person because they were small class sizes.

Oh, incredible. This will be so much fun to watch. I know we need to wrap up. We're out of time. But thank you so much for getting together, cooperating on the study together. This is amazing.

I will say all the research we'll post a link to it, but it is posted on the Bixa Research blog. So if you want to see the the findings of the research, the major findings, it's all written out and handed like in a story. Yes. With bullet point findings so that you can actually go ahead and get some of this data and use it. And you know, if you're creating your own products, too, I mean, even if you're in marketing somewhere else, it's super helpful to understand what we're critiquing LinkedIn for here related to Gen Z. And I bet there are some similarities with your company, too.

Oh, yeah. And if you're listening to this on the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast, we'll put it in the show notes below, taking you right to bixaresearch.com. So Sarah, thank you so much for doing this. This is amazing. I am in awe of information that you so effortlessly throw out there every time we talk.

39:28 Oh, and let me give you a freebie too! Okay, so if you would like a free chapter of Insta brain, you can go to bixaresearch.com. It'll be in the show notes or in the comments if this is being posted to LinkedIn bixaresearch.com/freechapter. And you'll get a free chapter of Instabrain, the new rules to marketing to Gen Z and you'll also get a PDF of the like top ways we do research for Gen Z. So if you're thinking about really getting to know this audience, which you should be because it is the last just living generation right now and they're entering the workforce and they contribute to $655 billion a year in purchase power. So you should be thinking about them as your customers, as your employees, everywhere. They will make you not go out of business! So, you know, when you are ready to do research, this PDF will tell you like the techniques that are really working for them right now.

40:24 Awesome. Thanks so much for running the study. This information was incredible. I know everyone listening you're gonna love the article. It the in depth research. The data behind it, Sarah was the mastermind and I was merely a contributor.

Oh, he's not getting and giving himself enough credit for that. I never do.

Also, thanks so much, Sarah. And thanks for everyone for watching slash listening.

Oh, are you a waiver? I recently read a study on people who waive versus not waive on zoom calls at the end.

Really? So what's the difference? Like what does it mean something about your personality?

Yeah, it's like people, some people are just totally over zoom. And they're like goodbye.

Yeah, so yeah, that was your little easter egg, then do your podcast random. Waiting bowl. Do you wave or do you not, you'll notice it about yourself next time you're on zoom.

So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed our banter on the findings from this research. 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.

41:45 All right. So here's some great resources. First of all, the link to the contest, bit.lylinkedinadscontest. All in lowercase. That's where you can go and submit to hopefully win this contest. Again, so excited to tell you about what you're going to win The article that LinkedIn published from Gyanda there about how it's fixing the ads over reporting, the links right down there in the show notes, you can go and read that for yourself. And then of course, the actual write up all the original research, you can find on bixaresearch.com. The link right to that blog post is down below as well. If you're just getting started on LinkedIn ads, or you have a colleague or someone who is check out our ads course on LinkedIn Learning the links right down below for that. And it is by far the cheapest and the most complete training on LinkedIn Ads that there is out there at the moment. So check it out. super inexpensive, again, a lot cheaper than hiring me to come and train your team. Definitely hit subscribe on your podcast player right now. Please give us a rating and I'm hoping you'll give us five stars. But if not tell us why. And then definitely leave a review. I'd love to give you a shout out here. With any questions, any feedback, any thoughts, topics, and anything you want to discuss. Hit us up at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources

Enter the Contest! bit.ly/linkedinadscontest

Download the B2Linked Onboarding Checklist: https://b2linked.com/checklist

New Company Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/setup/new/

Episode 02 - Targeting Strategies

Episode 10 - Offers that Convert

Episode 17 - Lead Gen Form Ads

Episode 38 - LinkedIn Insight Tag

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

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

Show Transcript:

Looking to get started with LinkedIn Ads, but just don't know where to start? I got you. This is the LinkedIn Ads Show.

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

Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Every new ad channel I dive into feels super daunting to me. There's so much familiar, but there's so many other things that are proprietary to just that platform. And it brings me so much anxiety. So when I started advertising on LinkedIn back in, like 2011, I did about everything wrong. And I wasted a bunch of time and a bunch of money. And I wanted to give you guys the resource that I wish I had. When we bring on a new client, we give them our eight point checklist that contains everything that we need in order to get started advertising. On this episode, I'm going to walk you through that checklist, along with full explanations of the what and why for each of them. In the news, our high performing ads contest is totally in full swing, you guys and gals have some amazing campaigns and results. So please keep the entries coming. This is incredible. Of course, the link to enter with all the rules is down in the show notes, you can just click that link, but it's bit.li/linkedInadscontest. For those of you who don't know, here's the contest. From now until December 11, 2020 at midnight Pacific time, you can go on and submit a screenshot of an ad, campaign, or a campaign group even that has really good performance. We're looking for either really high click through rates, or conversion rates, or a really low cost per click. The winner in each category will receive something amazing. And if you're a LinkedIn advertiser, I know you're going to find this to be fascinating, but I just can't tell you what it is yet. I do promise that it's going to be something that no other advertiser has, you'll be totally unique. And you'll be armed with something that you know your competitors don't have. So go right now, I know you're probably on a run, at the gym, in the car, but go right now. Pull over if you need to and go and start checking out your account and see if you have some ridiculously high click through rates, high conversion rates, or low cost per click. Submit now and I hope to have you your gift by Christmas or New Year's, and I just can't wait to reveal what you'll be winning. For our reviews highlight. Lindsey Danielle says, "AJ is a LinkedIn ads wizard. The most informative and actionable digital ads podcast for those looking to advance their expertise, skill set, and test new strategies on the platform. AJ is down to earth, conversational, and truly cares about helping you improve your LinkedIn Ads. He tells you how it is in a digestible fashion. So you leave with truly actionable insights to optimize your campaigns. Highly recommend I wish I had started listening sooner." Lindsay Danielle, thanks so much for the awesome review and the kind words, I do wish you'd started listening earlier too. But now you've got a whole ton of episodes to binge. You're welcome.

3:03 And to everyone else. You! Yes, you. I want to feature you here. So leave a review for the podcast on any podcast reviewer thing that you find. And I would love to give you a shout out. All right. With that being said, let's hit it.

3:17 Account

Now to start a LinkedIn Ads account. The first thing you're going to need is an account. It sounds pretty obvious here. But you may already have an account out there that you need to get access to. Or you might have to create one from scratch. So here's how that works. If you already have an account, you'll just need to get access from someone who's an admin on the account. And if that person has what are called account manager permissions, they can add you by going to the gear icon in the upper right hand corner of campaign manager. They click on manage access, then edit, then add user to account. Then type in your name, select your level of access, and then hit save changes. And it's that simple. And now you'll have access to the account. For this person to grant you access, you don't need to be connected to that person. And there are five kinds of access that you can give someone. The first is account manager. And this is full administrative access, where you can create, edit pretty much anything in the account. That means campaign groups, campaigns, and ads, along with the added bonus here that you can either add or remove or change rights for anyone else on the account. The next is called campaign manager access. And this person, you're an editor basically, you can create and edit pretty much everything in the account, except you can't do anything with the other users on the account, so you can't add or remove someone or change their rights. The next is called a creative manager. and creative managers can't edit or change anything to deal with a campaign, but they can create new ads. So this might be what you want to give someone who's not actively managing the ads, but maybe they're launching and creating new creative for you. The next is viewer. And a viewer can see everything in the account. They can see the targeting, bidding, the ads, even the performance metrics, but they just can't make any changes. Even something as simple as hitting pause on a campaign, a viewer can't do. And the fifth and final level here is basically an account manager, it's a full admin. But one admin of an account is the billing admin. Here, you have all the same rights as a full account manager, you can edit, change, view, whatever you need to, but you also get the one added privilege of updating or changing the payment details in the account. And usually, that just means the credit card. What's interesting here with the billing is that if you change the credit card at all in the account, if you add a new one, replace it, or switch who the billing admin is, instantly your campaigns all shut off, and it goes down like there's no payment. So anytime you make a change like this, be ready for it. And you've got to go and pop that new credit card right back in there. So that's if you already have an account. But what if you don't have one already? Well, you'll want to go to linkedin.com/ads. This is the easiest way I found to get there, you click on the button that says create ads, and then you follow the prompts to create the account. And then you can follow the instructions we talked about before for granting access to others. You can also access your campaign manager by just going to linkedin.com. and look in the upper right hand corner on desktop. Sometimes you'll see an icon that says advertise. And sometimes you just click on the I think it's the nine dots button that shows all the stuff to deal with work and advertise may be in there. Once you've got your account, and you get to the dashboard. My recommendation is to bookmark that page and stick it right in like your browser toolbar. So it's easy to access. Because there's nothing worse than coming in and doing exactly the same three clicks a whole bunch of typing to get there, when you should just be one click away.

7:02 Company Page

Alright, the next thing that you need is when you create an ads account, it'll ask you which company page you can attach your ads to. And this is because sponsored content ads, which is the halo ad format, as I call it, it's where most people should start, those ads live on the company page. And that means that if you don't have a company page, you can still advertise, but you'll only be able to use the text ads and sponsored messaging ad formats. And I believe you might still be able to run dynamic ads, the ones that are called spotlight ads, but definitely not follower ads. Don't quote me on that, though. But because sponsored content ads are so good. Of course, I'm assuming here that you'll want to use them. So that means you'll either need to create a company page or get access from someone if you already have one set up and you just need it. So creating a new company page, the link is down below in the show notes. But it's linkedin.com/company/setup/new. And you just go through and answer a few questions. And sure enough, you'll have a company page. But what if you already have one, but you just need access. So for this one, you do need to be connected to this person on LinkedIn in order to pass access. So make sure you go and connect with that person first, then they're going to actually navigate to the company page. And the easiest way if you don't bookmark this is go and search for the company name in LinkedIn. And it'll pop up as a suggestion. Or if there's too many like it, then you may need to go ahead and run the search, maybe even select it down to just searching by companies, but then you'll usually be able to find it. Then this person's going to click on admin tools, and then manage admins, and then search for your name there underneath the section of designated admins, you just start typing their name, and it should pop right up. If you just recently connected, you might need to refresh this page in order for you to show up. Now I am telling you to get added as a page admin and your boss or client might be uncomfortable granting you a full admin access here, but I'm going to explain why you actually need this. You can still create ads with a lesser right. And that right is called sponsored content posters. But once you create an ad and you make it active, it's going to go into a review queue. And as soon as it hits the review queue, you can't do anything to pause, activate, anything like that. Basically, the only thing you can do is pause the campaign it's in. It's basically wanting to sit there until LinkedIn approves it. And then you can do something with it. And of course, currently, there's no notification when an ad actually gets approved. And so you might be sitting there every half hour hitting refresh, trying to catch this thing. A couple times I've hit publish on an ad and then went, oh crap, there's a spelling error in there, and I've got to stop it. And if you're just a sponsored content poster, then you can't do anything about that that thing is going and it gonna spend some money unless you catch it real fast. There's a little known trick, though that we use. If you're an actual page admin, you can actually go in and delete the ad. And when you delete the ad from the company page, it totally pulls the rug out from underneath that ad in campaign manager, it'll just say ad deleted. And you don't have to worry about it actually going live. To do this little trick. As a page admin, you'll go to your company page, and you'll scroll down to the section called updates. And it'll say filter by, and it defaults to filter by page updates. But if you click that, you can tell it to do direct sponsored content. And then that will show you all of your ads that are not visible to the company page followers. When you find the offending ad, you can click the three little dots in the upper right, and then just click delete update, and then it's gone. And you can go and fix your mistake and relaunch. So I get asked all the time about the difference between direct sponsored content, and a sponsor company page post. I think I can illustrate the difference here by telling you a story about when sponsored content very first came out. I was running an account with 600 campaigns. And I'm sure you all know my strategy, we always launch an AB test in every campaign. So it meant I had to launch 1200 sponsored content, one at a time, it was terrible. And I did it in the middle of the night, because what would happen is when you create a sponsored content, at least back then, you were publishing it as an organic page post and sponsoring it at the same time. And so we had a bunch of company page followers, who if they were following us, they might be really annoyed by watching 1200, nearly identical ads come across their screen. So that's why I did it in the middle of the night. And I just pleaded with LinkedIn, please, please, please let us do the equivalent of what people on Facebook had as dark posts. And this is where you get to create ads that your company page followers don't get to see. And then within a year, they released direct sponsored content. And I can't tell you how excited I was for this. I was actually the first person to ever use the direct sponsored content because I was willing to stay late on a Friday night, because I've been waiting for this thing for so long. So what they are, they're sponsored content ads that are hidden from your company page followers, nothing more, nothing less. So don't overcomplicate what direct sponsored content is just because the name direct sponsored content is way too complicated. Alright, so let's say that you can't get rights to your company page. But you still really want to run sponsored content ads? Well, one thing you can do, you don't even need any sort of access to the company page for this, you can sponsor existing company page content. On Facebook, we call this boosting posts. And as an aside here on Facebook boosting posts is fantastic. What you can do is you can take the ad ID of an organic post that already has some social proof, some likes and comments. And then you can go and create an ad out of it with a unique tracking URL. And it keeps all the social proof. So really, you get the best of both worlds, you have your social proof. Plus, you have the ability to track all the way down to the individual ad level. It's amazing. On LinkedIn, it's a little bit tougher though, because when you go to create an ad, it always starts with zero. On LinkedIn, it's a little bit different and you really have to weigh your pros and cons here. You can create a direct sponsored content post with its own unique tracking URL. And this will allow you to do tracking all the way down to the ad level, which is amazing. But of course, it starts with zero social proof, no likes no comments, it looks brand spanking new. On the other hand, you can go and boost a company page post. And maybe it's already got some likes and comments from just running organically on the company page. But then you can't customize the URL. And so once those leads get into your CRM, you actually can't tell whether that person came from an ad, or from your company page followers or maybe even virally. So you get to make the choice between having a good tracking URL for proper attribution, or having social proof that you know is going to help boost the ad a little bit. Me personally, I go with the tracking URL, proper tracking and attribution is paramount to us showing our value to our clients. And so we give up that social proof. But man, I hope LinkedIn at some point rolls out the same kind of thing that advertisers get on Facebook. And every so often will talk to a client who has a company page, but the person who created it is no longer with the company or they're not on good terms and they can't get access. If this is the case for you. You can just go right to LinkedIn support, you let them know, they'll basically email you on your company email so they can tell that you actually do work there, and then they'll give you access. Here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the rest of what you need to do in order to get your account off the ground.

14:58 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn Ads experts.

15:08 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you than B2Linked is the agency you want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners and you'll only deal with a LinkedIn ads expert from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com, to chat about your campaigns. And we'd love to work with you. All right, jumping right back into the other pieces that you need to actually launch your LinkedIn Ads. And some of these things are going to be optional, but I'm going to dictate to you based on an optimal launch, and recommend that you do all these things.

15:45 Tags

So once you have an ads account, the first thing that you should do is go and get your LinkedIn insight tag from the account and get it installed on every page of your website. Go back and listen to Episode 38 to go into a lot more detail on this tag, what it does, and what benefit it brings.

Audiences

Then, as soon as you have this tag on your website, you can go into account assets matched audiences, and then set up a retargeting audience so it's building. Because even if you're not going to want to immediately run retargeting, you really are going to want to have an audience when you do want to. One note here, Facebook builds audiences retroactively. So you can install the pixel today and then up to 30 days later, you can go and set up an audience and Facebook will remember who visited the page in the last 30 days and add them to that audience. LinkedIn does not do this. LinkedIn is only going to match audiences once the insight tag is there. And you've set up a rule you've set up a retargeting audience, so it can start collecting. So get that early, get it now. The next thing is you're going to want to figure out how you're going to track your conversions. And there are really three different ways to do this. If you have the insight tag installed, you can set up conversion tracking, so that when someone lands on your thank you page, it will fire a conversion there. And this is by far my favorite way. But if you don't have a thank you page, and you want to track an event, like a button click, you can still do that, it requires someone with some JavaScript prowess. But when you go to set up a conversion, you can select it as an event conversion. And then follow the instructions to get that affixed to a button or whatever. But if you don't want to send the traffic to your own website, maybe you don't have a good landing page for this or maybe your website isn't great for mobile traffic and you know a lot is going to come from LinkedIn, you can use LinkedIn lead generation forms. And that's right within the ad itself. When someone interacts with it, a form appears with pretty much everything that LinkedIn knows about them auto filled prefilled. And all they have to do is just hit submit, which is pretty awesome. But of course, you'll want to make sure you set up an integration with your CRM, or marketing automation platform. So those leads go immediately into a system and you can take action on them quickly. Check out Episode 17, where we go really deep into the use of lead generation forms. But, if your CRM or marketing automation system isn't HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, then your lifesaver is going to be the zapier.com $20 per month plan, because it can handle pretty reliably leads coming from LinkedIn and pushing them into about any system that you've got. The next thing you want to do is have a good idea of who your ideal target audience is. Because if you don't know that, you're going to be a little bit aimless, as you go through all the targeting options and wonder what to choose. The way I like to do this is I'll go and pull up like five to 10 LinkedIn profiles for my ideal customers. And maybe I'll go pull up three to five ideal company pages. And I'm going to look for commonalities like similar titles, or skills, groups. And then on the company page, I'm going to look for similar company sizes or similar industries. And this is going to help me define my targeting. When you actually go to start building this targeting, go back and listen to Episode Two on our B2Linked targeting strategies, as it's pure gold, if I do say so myself.

Imagery/Video

And of course, to create an ad, you'll have to have some imagery, or maybe you're running video ads, so you'll need that video asset. If it's imagery, you want to make sure you've got 1200 pixels wide by 627 tall and stay away from the blue colors. If you look at the opposite of blue on the color wheel, it's orange, so stick to oranges, greens, reds, anything that is going to make your ad stand out. And if you're running video, make sure you use subtitles because the vast majority of people who see the ad and watch it are going to watch it with the sound off. And please do keep it short. If the ads too long, no one will stick around to the end. It sure doesn't hurt to have an idea of what you might share in an ad what you might say. And one of the next few episodes that we come out with Here is going to be an episode on how to write the perfect ad. So listen for that for sure, but have in mind something that maybe some points that you want to write. And that's going to make your job a lot easier when you actually go to stick that image on there that you already have, and write some ad copy.

20:15 Your Offer

But now we go on to by far the most important choice that you'll make in advertising on LinkedIn. And this is your offer, your call to action, what your ads are actually going to ask someone to do. Go back and listen to Episode 10 on offers and calls to action that work on LinkedIn. This is one of our most if not the most downloaded episode. It's a classic and it hasn't aged a bit.

GA & Other Analytics/Tech Tags

Then there's some additional tech that you're probably going to want to have installed on your site to make the best use of this traffic. So the first is Google Analytics or some kind of analytics package. And analytics package is so nice because it can tell you so much more about your ads, then you can learn by just looking at the initial stats. I would also suggest installing the Facebook custom audiences retargeting tag, the Google remarketing tag. And if you're feeling really ambitious, check out things like Korra and Twitter for retargeting, they can be quite good as well. I recently heard about Microsoft Clarities product from Mark Gustafson of 900kings.com, so Mark, thanks for the tip. And that one's really cool. It's like a Microsoft addition to your Google Analytics. And it's got some really cool data it shows. And of course, it's free, so check that one out. And of course, for installing all these tags, you can have your web developer, do them all one by one, or you can install a tag manager like Adobe or Google Tag Manager. And that'll give you one web interface where you can just paste all of these tags, and then publish them right to the website. I love tag managers.

Lists

And one of the most amazing things about LinkedIn ads platform is the lists upload, what they call matched audiences. And this is where you can upload lists of either company names or individuals that you either want to target or exclude. Now, right at the beginning of a campaign, the first thing that you want to do is go and get those lists created and uploaded. Because LinkedIn says they take 24 to 48 hours, but realistically, a lot of them take 48 to 72 hours. So if you want to launch quickly, get those lists uploaded ASAP, so that by the time they're done finishing baking, then your ads can launch.

Credit Card

If it's a brand new account, you'll see a nag bar at the top of every screen that lets you know that your credit card isn't entered and so you won't be able to advertise yet. So you'll first want to go in, just follow the navbar or go into the gear and then billing center and just follow the instructions there. But then in order for your ads to actually go live, you have to have a campaign where you've fully activated, that means the credit cards in, you've gone through the launch process, it shows you a recap of the of the whole campaign, you approve it. And then it shows a little rocket ship launching. As part of that process, you need to create an ad and you actually submit the ad to go live. And then we found that most ads take an average of three to six hours for approval from LinkedIn. So you may hit launch, but you might not see any stats, it might not actually be running for, you know, three to six hours, maybe even up to 24 hours. And then of course, once your ads are launched, go listen to our other episodes, binge them over a weekend if you need to. But of course all the other episodes, we're teaching you how to actually set your bids and budgets, how to run AB tests, and how to think about targeting and optimizations. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

23:52 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

Resources

I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that B2Linked sends out a LinkedIn startup checklist to our clients. We actually put together a pretty PDF of this. And so here in the shownotes, if you scroll down, you can click on B2Linked.com/checklist and you can download the free checklist there. Also in the show notes, you'll see the link there for how to create a new company page, along with several of the other episodes that I mentioned here as being ancillary. But I really want to point out the contest here, please go click on the link for the LinkedIn ads contest and submit screenshots of your best performing ads or campaigns. We've got some great entries so far, but you can still win. And I've got awesome things to share with you. And I just can't tell you about them yet. But I'm so excited. I'm brimming. And of course, if you are just getting started with LinkedIn ads, go check out the course that I did with LinkedIn learning and the links right there in the show notes. It's ultra cheap. It's one of the best courses out there. You just can't go wrong. And if you've liked what you've heard today, click on the subscribe button on your podcast player and make sure that you're hearing all of the new episodes because we've got some killer episodes coming up for you and I couldn't be more excited about it. And if you found value, please do rate and review the podcast. If you leave a review, I'll totally shout you out here. And then of course, with any ideas or questions, reach out to us at Podcast@ B2linked.com. And we'd love to hear from you. We always love feedback from our loyal listeners. All right, with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources

Episode 02 - Targeting Strategies

Episode 06 - Bidding

Episode 26 - Why so expensive?

Episode 29 - Saturation

Episode 32 - Covid

Episode 37 - Seasonality

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

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

Show Transcript:

You're watching as your costs keep climbing and climbing on LinkedIn Ads. And you're like, "Oh, come on!". I'm going to tell you how to combat it and even reverse it. This is the LinkedIn Ads Show.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So you're just advertising along minding your own business. And every month, you're watching your efficiency decrease. You hate reporting to your boss, or your client that your performance is just declining month over month. The platform is definitely going to keep getting more and more competitive, so you've got to do something totally different to get off of that train of just declining performance. But there is hope. There are things that you can do to fight that drag on your performance and even reverse it. So that's what we'll be covering today. In the news, there are a lot of changes afoot, and I'm super excited. Eliot Shiner from Bind Media. He tagged me on LinkedIn, about LinkedIn releasing bulk tools, which is super cool. In the post that he shared, he was looking at an account that had these bulk ads features. And certainly not everyone has it yet. This is probably very early in the rollout. But watch for it, he said that you can do applying saved audiences across multiple campaigns. So that's pretty cool. You can change campaign bids and budgets in bulk. You can download audience strings to build new audience combinations. And the last thing he shouted out was you can adjust campaign settings such as audience expansion or the audience network. How cool would that be to be able to go into an account and just bulk unassign audience expansion from every campaign and just instantly fix an account. Elliott, thanks so much for tagging me in that one. Another really cool improvement was brought to my attention by David Rosendahl from Southern California. And, David, I know you're a listener. So thanks so much for bringing this to my attention. He found out that LinkedIn rolled out and a way message that you can set in your messaging on the app. And this is only available to premium users on LinkedIn, so you got to be paying for a profile to get this. And we definitely see more and more features rolling out like this. And they're trying to dangle as bait to get someone to upgrade their profile. And of course, LinkedIn had to roll this out a week after I got back from vacation, so I didn't even get a chance to use it. I have an out of office set on my email when I'm gone. But people on LinkedIn, just think I'm a jerk that doesn't respond from what I can tell everyone with premium has this option in their app. So check it out and see, I can't wait to go on vacation again and set an out of office on my LinkedIn messaging as well. This week, LinkedIn also released something really freaking cool. This is a feature that I've just been calling the ABM dashboard. But LinkedIn actually released this to a portion of accounts. And they're calling it the company engagement report. Most don't have it yet. But it's like most rollouts, where it's probably rolling out weekly, for a quarter or a sixth of the population every week. And we checked a bunch of our accounts that are running ABM, and we only had two accounts so far that had access to this. And you can read the official news about this release by just checking in the show notes down below, I have the link to the official release. But I had to hunt around a little bit to see if I even had it in my accounts. So here's what you do. Inside of campaign manager, you go to account assets, and then matched audiences. And then from your list of matched audiences, any of your company match lists that have a hyperlink on them, click on it. If you don't have access to this yet, it will just go into like an edit of the list itself. But if you do have it, it'll take you right to the company engagement report. And this is so cool. What it shows is all of the companies who've engaged with your ads, they give a basic engagement level. So like from low to very high or unavailable if that account hasn't interacted with you at all. There's a column for the number of members that were targeted by your ads who belong to that company, a column for the number of campaigns, I'm guessing the number of campaigns that would target someone from one of these organizations, the impressions, the ad engagements, the organic engagement, and the website visits that resulted from each of these companies that you're going after in your ABM list, the time range is stuck at the last 90 days. What I love is there is a company name search field. So let's say that you have thousands of people on your ABM lists, and you're curious just to see one like, hey, I want to see if JP Morgan visited our website or interacted with our ads. You could type in JP and then it automatically filters everything for you. You can also change the columns. So by default, it's going to drop you into engagement. But you can change that to details. And then it gives you basically a rundown of each of these accounts. It'll tell you their name, what industry they're part of, what company size they are, and the date that they were added to this list. The report is paginated. And it looks like about 50 will fit on each page. So I'm curious if any of you have access to this. And let's say you've uploaded a list that hits their maximum of 300,000 company names. If you have 50 at a time, are you going to have pagination out to, you know, the hundreds, it'll be interesting to see if they have a limit on the number of companies they can give you feedback for. And Jay, one of the product managers at LinkedIn who actually was responsible for this rollout, he mentioned to me in a comment that much of this was driven by the insight tag. So this is really cool to see the combination of metrics that LinkedIn can see from campaigns you're actively running, and accounts that they recognize how they're interacting on your website. So if you don't have this yet, watch for it over the next, let's say four to six weeks until all of us have it. And you can get ready for this by uploading an ABM list whether or not you plan on advertising to them, because I think there's still going to be value here organically. And then make sure that the LinkedIn insight tag is on your site.

6:03 In personal news, I'm doing a deep reorganization of my office right now, you guys all hear the stuff that comes out of my brain, but you hear it after I've spent three plus hours organizing it. So imagine how cluttered it is up there. My office organization mirrors the organization of my mind, I feel like the classic mad scientist, but instead of beakers all over my laboratory, I have 113 browser tabs open in Chrome and piles of stuff in my office that I keep below the sight line of my webcam. Okay, so AJ is telling you something about his organization? Why does that matter? Well, I'm redesigning my office to be a studio. And the reason why we have a YouTube channel, and I've put out some videos that I'm really proud of. But to create those videos, takes literally hundreds of hours. I'm a little bit of a perfectionist, and I hate putting something out there that I don't love, and doesn't have all the most amazing animations. When I go to create a video. The problem is I'm spending so many hours setting up cameras and setting up lighting equipment, and trying to make sure everything's perfect that I run out of time, and I can't create the content. So the thought here is that I'm going to be able to create video content very quickly, I have the lighting and camera set up in my office as a studio. And you guys, there is so much that I'm excited to share with you. But because it takes so long to create video content I haven't been able to before. But I'm hoping now even if it's like quick three or four minute YouTube videos where I show you something, I just want to get it out. And stay tuned, we'll even try an episode or two of the LinkedIn ads show as a video podcast to see how that works.

7:40 Contest!

And like we talked about last week, we're running a contest. And thanks everyone who made suggestions about the kind of contest, you guys gave us some great ideas. Now this contest is live as of the release of this episode. So go and do this today. Scroll down to the show notes. Or if you don't have show notes on your podcast player, you can just go to the URL bit.ly/linkedInadscontest, all lowercase. Okay, so I've told you how to get in. But I didn't tell you what the contest is all about. So here's the contest for now, when you're listening to this, hopefully it's not too much later for now until December 11, 2020 at midnight, Pacific time. And now I made it myself, I put it in Pacific time. But because we're LinkedIn advertisers, I totally should have made it in the UTC timezone. So this is an ad performance contest, you can go on and submit a screenshot of an ad, a campaign, or a campaign group that has particularly great performance. We're looking for either a ridiculously high click through rate, or a crazy low cost per click, or a mammoth conversion rate, you can submit multiple times. So if you have multiple clients you want to submit for, go for it. And the winner in each category will win something truly amazing. If you're a LinkedIn advertiser, I know you're gonna find this fascinating. I can't tell you what it is just yet. I'm not going to spoil the surprise. But I can promise you, it's something that no other advertiser has, you'll be armed with something that your competitors do not have, you'll have a major leg up on them. Okay, that's all the hints I'm going to give. So get it on your to do list or your calendar or whatever it's going to take to do this, but go and jump into your account or accounts and look for those high click through rates, high conversion rates, or low cost per click. So submit that now. And then I will have your gift to you before Christmas or New Year's this year. Guys, I'm so excited about this, but I'm going to shut up about it now. The last little piece of news here. There are more changes in campaign manager coming and you probably don't have them already. But watch for them in the coming weeks or months. There's functionality coming like being able to share audiences between accounts, which is really cool. Especially for those large companies who have multiple ad accounts running, maybe different business units within. And a huge thanks to Mark Gustafson from 900Kings.com for pointing that one out. And a huge thank you to Dominik Hemeli for this review, he left on the podcast, he says, "Just listened to the episode about LinkedIn campaign goals and I think I learned more about LinkedIn advertisement listening to that compared to any conference or workshop in all of 2020. Simply amazing, and I will test all of the recommended hacks, keep it up and stay safe -DOM. That's what we're going for Dominic, all value and no fluff. So thanks so much for getting value out of it and continuing to be a listener, keep the reviews coming, guys, I would love to feature you. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it.

10:44 Costs are Rising on LinkedIn Ads

Costs are rising on LinkedIn Ads. And from the very beginning back in 2007, they started really high, they've always been high, but they're going to keep getting higher. This is the nature of all ad platforms. They're all based on competition. And at the beginning, when not everyone has adopted them, yet, competition is going to be lower. Like when I started advertising on Google, the floor bid was five cents. And that dates me a little bit. But what happened is people got on and tried it, the early adopters, and it worked so well and it produced a return on their investment. So they went and told their friends, and then they all tried it. And then as the cycle happens, adoption continues to roll out until prices go up. And those prices will rise until the platform starts pricing some people out of the market. Because I guarantee you, there are some law firms out there who are saying, Man, I'm just getting started on Google and I have to pay $320 for a click, ah, I'm gonna go and advertise elsewhere. With LinkedIn specifically, it's always been a platform for the sophisticated advertiser. Costs per click are high, they started high. And so marketers who didn't have visibility into the actual lead quality, the marketing qualified lead stage, the sales qualified lead stage, or whatever you call it, they see that their costs per lead are really high compared to other channels and then they quit. But sophisticated marketers, on the other hand, I'm guessing everyone listening here is one of these, you're not just watching your cost per lead, but you understand that there is value in targeting only the most highly qualified prospects. And because the quality of the prospect on LinkedIn is so much higher than other channels, you guys find that it's worth it to continue advertising, and then even scale up those efforts even if at the very top engagement level, it looks expensive. Back in 2011, when I was brand new to LinkedIn Ads, the majority of marketers didn't rely on closing the loop with their CRM, we didn't even have conversion tracking back then it was going to take a lot of years before we got that, but then synching with your CRM, this was technical, and in a lot of cases, it was prohibitively expensive. But now in 2020, it's really rare to come across a B2B marketer who isn't at least moderately armed with a tech stack and an understanding of lead quality. Marketers are getting more sophisticated, we're catching up, which is amazing. And more people coming to the platform to advertise, it introduces additional competition. But this competition can be balanced out, as long as more LinkedIn members come and spend more time on the platform and that creates new inventory, it tends to balance out. And that's really how it was from like 2014 to 2018, cost per click on the platform stayed about the same that whole time. But currently, we're seeing that for most audiences. advertiser demand is outpacing the growth of LinkedIn audience and their usage. And just an idea here, maybe it's because of all the mass organic outreach spam, it's making people not want to spend as much time on LinkedIn. If you're doing it, please stop, it's hurting everyone. If you haven't listened to Episode 26, on why LinkedIn Ads are so expensive, make that a high priority. Get that into your "to listen" list. So let's say that you're advertising on LinkedIn, minding your own business, and you start to notice your costs are continuing to rise. There could be a lot of reasons for this. Of course, we've spent a lot of time talking about competition, it could be competition on the platform. And you have to picture this competition as a force like inflation is. It's going to keep going steadily, and you just have to plan ahead for it. And here in the US, we plan on inflation being a little over 3% per year in the US dollar. So what that means is if you have money today, and you hide it in your safe or in your mattress, that money is going to be worth 3% less every single year because of inflation. It's the same principle with advertising. If you keep doing the same thing that you've always done, it'll perform progressively worse as time goes on. But it might not all be about competition, there could be an element of saturation in there. Saturation is when your audience has already seen your ads or your offers before and so now they're less likely to click on it. Check out Episode 29, where we went way deep into saturation and how to stop it. It could also be a lack of novelty, I guarantee the first person to ever advertise a free consultation was probably inundated with cheap leads. But after that caught on and everyone started offering a free consultation, it really lost its novelty. And now you just assume that everyone has a free consultation. So you stop acting on ads where that's the call to action. So this just goes to show if you're still using the exact same tactics, or offers or approach to ad creative that you were using last year, or even the year before, that could be the reason of rising costs and dropping performance.

15:55 And that dovetails nicely here into the next one, which is you're probably getting lower performance, because you're getting lower click through rates. For whatever reason, people are losing interest in your ads. What happens is they stop clicking on your ads or engaging with them. So your click through rate drops a little bit. And then LinkedIn sees that people are less interested and they then award you a lower relevancy score. So now you have a worse relevancy score, which means every auction for an impression that you go to approach, you're at a disadvantage now. With the same bids, you're going to win fewer auctions, so you'll see less traffic, and you'll also pay more for that traffic. But if your boss or your client is telling you that they want to see performance continue to increase. Well, now you have to bid higher to compete. Again, we go a lot more into depth about that on the Episode 26, Why is LinkedIn Ads so expensive? And like we talked about, just recently on the seasonality episode in Episode 29, if you're advertising in the end of November, or during December, and you're saying, man, why are these North American audiences performing so poorly? or why do I have to pay so much for them, there could be seasonality happening and then if you just wait and be patient until January, or even pull back and then reinvest the money that you would have spent in January, which is what I recommend, then just that knowledge will help you perform better. Something else that's driving competition is that as you learned from Episode 32, where we talked about the COVID report, people are bidding wrong, and they're bidding too high. And what that's doing is it's driving up competition for everyone at an exponential rate. This isn't a problem with the listeners of this podcast, because you've heard me on so many episodes talk about bidding correctly. And that's episode six. By the way, if you want to go back and learn deep on that. But in short, don't use auto bidding unless there's a good reason to like your click through rate is really high, or you need to force getting traffic, because auto bidding is really just max bidding, it's giving LinkedIn your wallet and saying take whatever out of it you think you'll need. And when you are using max CPC bidding, don't follow LinkedIn's bid recommendations unless you've tested lower and you need to increase in order to get enough traffic. 99% of the time, you should start bidding significantly below the range that they recommend. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into what you can actually do about rising competition.

18:23 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

18:33 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 $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners and you'll only deal 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.

18:58 What To Do About It

All right, let's jump into what you can do to combat or even reverse this increasing competition that slowly and painfully killing your LinkedIn Ads channel. Keep in mind that sometimes it's the little things that make a difference. So look for these small advantages that you can build and they'll add up. For instance, something so simple as making ad copy improvements, we find through ad copy testing, that we can increase or decrease performance by five to 15%. So let's say you spend some time testing ad copy, and you find that you can raise the click through rates by 15%. It may not be massive, but it's going to do something for you. And those efforts will add up. For your ad cop, remember that people on LinkedIn are valuable people, and they're in a hurry, and that this is interruptive advertising. You need to get right to the point and get to the value as fast as possible. Having your value right front loaded at the beginning of the ad is going to do wonders for you and you might be able to see your click through rates. increased by 30, 50, 100%. And a different example here, I once had an ad that was getting a 1.2% click through rate. And another one in the same campaign was getting a point 7%. So almost half. And this was the same offer, but radically different approach to messaging. I looked at that and said, Okay, I'm going to pause the lower performer, because obviously people don't care about it. That is, until I saw that the lower performer was only costing $1 more per click, but was converting it over twice the rate. So I ended up reversing, I paused the better performer by click through rate, and ended up letting the poor performer go and take all of the impressions. So click through rates are certainly not the end all be all, and you'll need to pay attention to how they affect conversions, but this can help. Generally, a higher click through rate is going to reduce your costs. And win you more impressions at those lower costs. We mentioned episode six about bidding more efficiently. If you're bidding correctly, you're bidding the right way to minimize your costs on LinkedIn, you can pay less for every click, or every impression, or every view, every send. You'll naturally get more clicks and leads for your same budget. And like we mentioned, there are so many people who are bidding incorrectly, that they're pushing costs up for everyone. So please tell your friends. Something else you could try, maybe you're targeting mostly by one type of targeting, and you could test some additional alternative targeting. Maybe you're testing by job title. Well, did you know that job title clicks are some of the most competitive on the platform and that campaign manager only understands about 30% of job titles. What this means is you may be able to use an alternative form of targeting going after this exact same audience. And you might find the ability to either scale or reduce costs by adding that in. If you're only using job title, consider using some additional targeting like job function with seniority skills with seniority and groups, maybe Episode Two goes into our whole targeting strategy. So check that one out. And of course, if you can find additional targeting that gives you more reach for less money, that will give you a nice bump in your performance. And we've talked here before and especially in Episode 10, about how so much of your performance relies on how attractive your offer is. Now, I know that it's significant effort for you as a marketer to create a new offer, but it can make all the difference in the performance of your ads. A good lead magnet will increase your click through rate and decrease your cost per click and increase your conversion rate. These are all three amazing things that will culminate in a much better report to your uppers or your clients. Honestly, the offer can make the difference between fighting to get leads, or having so many that you end up lowering your budget so the sales team can catch up. But because offers are so hard to create, sometimes it helps to know that you don't even have to change the offer, you might be able to just change the title. For example, here, let's say that you have a guide that's really valuable. And I'll make something up here. Like we'll call it the buyer's guide to more effective SAS software. And you're targeting it towards IT managers. Your ads might be playing to the fact that it's a buyers guide, and it's going to help them make better decisions on the software that they decide to purchase. So you end up getting click through rates that are kind of ho hum, like, let's say 0.5%. And maybe your conversion rate is okay at around 10%. So you as a sophisticated marketer, you dive into this guide, and you find a stat in there. And I'm totally making this up. So this is not a real stat. But it says 26% of companies replace their SAS software within three weeks after buying for a competitive product. So you say that's interesting. And you go and change the title of this guide to 26% of SAS purchases end in regret. And then you change the copy on the ads to focus more on this interesting stat. And you're focusing on a different motivation here, all you had to do was change the copy on the PDF, and maybe change some wording on an image in your ad. And that's it. And these are small changes, but now your click through rates could be over 1%. And your conversion rate may spike to 15% or higher. So you'll see why I love this strategy, so much. Simple changes to just repurpose the same piece of content in a different way or to a different motivation. Something else you can do is you can refresh your creative more often. And so much of the time we see that little creative refreshes here and there will give you a temporary bump for a few days. And I don't know how to describe why this is. Maybe it's just because there are more people who are interested in seeing something that they haven't seen before, something that's new and novel. And of course you can always cut inefficiently spending audiences offers or ads If you do if you cut the worst performers, this will, of course, leave more of your budget for the high performers and give you a nice performance bump that I'm sure you'll appreciate come reporting time. And for the love of everything that is good and holy, please disable audience expansion on every campaign, you control. We've talked about this so many times over the last 40 episodes, but it's poison, and you should avoid it like COVID-19 without a mask.

25:27 These next two suggestions are a little bit more strategic. But follow me on this. The first is get ahead of your competition, whatever they're doing, try something different, and even drastically different. If you can get ahead of your competitors, you will easily outperform competition as it continues to rise. In fact, you will contribute to the competition getting harder, and their costs continuing to rise because your ads will have pushed them lower in the auction because you're doing something innovative. And that dovetails nicely into my other suggestion here of push the envelope, try new things. I'll never forget one of our first clients that had an image that was a comic strip. And I insisted to him that it was totally unprofessional, and it wouldn't play well on LinkedIn. It's not the right audience. Well, the client insisted that we should try it. And so I did it begrudgingly. And boy did that shut me up. It ended up being one of the best performing ads that I had ever seen to that point. I've seen similar things with ads that are maybe cartoons or other visuals that quote aren't a fit for LinkedIn. And that's really the point. If something stands out from the rest of the content on LinkedIn, it will get an outsized amount of attention. And as an advertiser, you are rewarded by increasing the attention you get on your ads. Alright, I've got the episode resources coming right up for you, so stick around.

26:57 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

27:08 Resources First off in the show notes, you have to click that contest link. It's bit.ly/linkedInadscontest, all lowercase. Go down, hit it, and submit those high performers, because I guarantee you're gonna love the gift. There's also links to the episode that we mentioned in here, Episode 29 about saturation, Episode 26 about why LinkedIn ads are so expensive, Episode 37 just a few ago, on the seasonality of LinkedIn, why some months cost more and perform less than others, Episode 32 about the effect of COVID on LinkedIn pricing, Episode Two on targeting better, and Episode Six all about pricing and how to bid right on LinkedIn and not increase competition for yourself. And of course, we're very proud of this podcast. The B2Linked team works very hard to do this. But we also realize that a course might be interesting for someone who doesn't want to binge listen to 41 episodes. So check out the link to our LinkedIn Learning course. It is by far the best and cheapest course out there for helping someone get up to speed quickly on LinkedIn Ads. Look down at your podcasting app right now and hit the subscribe button. Make sure that it's lit up because I want you to hear us the next episode that comes out. And of course, please rate the podcast. I would love it if you give it five stars. But if you don't, just tell me why. And please do leave a review on whatever podcast player or service you use. I would love to read those. My heart is just warm every time I read someone who's getting value out of this. And of course I want to shout you out and return the favor. With any questions, suggestions, or even just to say hi, 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.

Show Resources

Episode 06 - Bidding

Episode  10 - Calls to Action

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

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

Show Transcript:

You got a coupon code for a $50 or $100 free advertising credit on LinkedIn. And you want to know how to maximize it. I got you.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! We've all seen coupon codes appear from time to time for LinkedIn Ads. Today, we're going to talk about how to get them, how to use them, and then, of course, how to spend that money effectively. In the news, our agency B2Linked just turned six years old. And I'm so proud and excited. In business years, we're no longer a toddler. So that's cool. I'm so proud of our B2Linked team who will stop at nothing to ensure that our clients have success on LinkedIn ads. We also just hired four new account managers here in our Utah office. And we're excited to grow with them. No joke, we got the best and brightest. And I'm honored that they'd see the vision and would agree to join us on our mission to help companies save money on their LinkedIn Ads, and get more leads than they ever thought possible. To celebrate, I have something really cool to give away. So we're going to be doing a contest in the coming weeks. So make sure you're subscribed and pay attention. On a completely unrelated note, if any of you have an idea for a contest, that would be rad for a bunch of LinkedIn Ads fanatics, please email us with ideas. No, but seriously, I've got something really cool to give away. And I can only give away a few. So I definitely want your ideas, we're going to have an awesome contest. I also love to just share things with you that I've found during the week about LinkedIn Ads, and just geek out with you. So I hope you appreciate this. One of our clients showed us a trick this week to delete campaigns from campaign manager, and I was absolutely floored. Now, this is definitely a bug. And as soon as I get a chance to reproduce it in several accounts, and figure out when it works and when it doesn't and see if there's differences by ad formats, I'll tell you all about it. But for right now, I'll just tell you, it's possible, it's a bug, and it's super cool. This week, I also came across the first ad account where text ads were more expensive than sponsored content. Now, because text ads floor is always $2. If you've chosen the US dollar as your currency, but in less competitive markets, because the sponsored content floor is variable, it can go even lower than $2. In this case, the sponsored content floor was $1.10. And text ads were $2. So it's sad, but we ended up shutting off all the text ads, and completely invested all the budget in sponsored content. It was way weird that it worked out that way, but it totally did. I want to shout out a podcast review here. Jadin Press, who's a phenomenal social marketer, as well as developer, he said, "I've periodically found and read numerous blog posts by AJ since I started running LinkedIn ads two years ago, and have more recently been listening to the LinkedIn ads show podcast and can confirm it is fire." Jaden, I'm so glad that you've been getting the value out of this that I'm putting into it and intending. So thank you for being a listener. And I'm so stoked to see what you end up creating. And you, yes, you I want to feature you. So go and leave a review on any podcast service you can find and I would love to shout you out. With that being said, let's hit it.

3:36 Coupon Codes

Dan Gingiss, who is a friend and a speaker at many of the same conferences that I speak at. He's the host of the Experience This podcast, which is all about user experience. And he just asked me recently, "so I got an ad from LinkedIn for a free $50 in ad spend coupon and I took it because hey, it's 50 free bucks. So here's my million dollar question for the expert on LinkedIn Ads, "How should I spend the $50 to result in the greatest possibility of me wanting to invest more in LinkedIn Ads?" Dan, this is a fantastic question and I can't wait to go deep on this. For those of you who may not know, occasionally LinkedIn will send out offers or promotional codes. And of course, this isn't unique, as Google has been giving away free money for Google Ads since I think before I was born. But with LinkedIn, the challenge with these coupon codes is that because the clicks are so expensive. If you're not following the strategy I shared in episode six on bidding and budgeting, you'll only get a handful of clicks for your budget, and it really won't teach you anything. That being said, it's certainly not life changing money or anything, but money is money. And at the very least if you chase down one of these codes and apply it in your account, your boss or client will likely appreciate your interest in saving them a few bucks. So how do you get them? Well, I asked a couple friends at LinkedIn to see if there were any channels that I had missed and there are a few ways to get these coupon codes. Of course, Dan, who asked this question, he ended up seeing this in an ad. So it looks like LinkedIn is advertising to some professionals about this free coupon code. So that's one way of getting it. So the most common that I hear recently are because LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is an advertiser on a lot of podcasts. And I've heard these promotions on shows like The Tim Ferriss show, and a whole bunch of others. And as part of this promotion, they offer a coupon code for free advertising. And I would imagine with some clever Google searches, you could find mentions of this in podcast, show notes pages, and find the link in there. When you click on the promotional link, it usually goes to a web page where you enter in your email, and then shortly, LinkedIn will send you a coupon code, and then you can go and apply that in your account. LinkedIn also said that they offer a promo code in what they call global acquisition email campaigns, who are targeting prospective customers. So I think you have to ask yourself, how do you get on LinkedIn's radar as a prospective customer. A few ways I can think of and of course, I don't know this for sure. But maybe consider creating a company page for a company that isn't yet attached to an ad account. Maybe you could sign up for a webinar from the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions team, and list an email that isn't currently attached to an ads account. Maybe you could even fill out a lead form on LinkedIn somewhere, I don't know, but it certainly could be worth poking around a bit to see if you can get on one of those campaigns. And this is one I didn't know, they said that in the EMEA region or Europe, Middle East and Africa, LinkedIn reps can offer coupon codes to existing customers to incentivize them to try new features. So if you're in the EMEA region, ask your rep and see if there's anything cool coming up that you could use a coupon code for. All right, we're gonna take a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the best strategies for how to actually spend that sweet, sweet coupon cash.

7:04 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 $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and we don't have a sales team so you'll deal only with the LinkedIn Ads expert from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com, to chat about your campaigns. Or heck, just let your MLM downline know. No matter how you get in touch, we'd love to work with you.

7:45 Redeeming the Coupons

Alright, let's jump into redeeming the coupons and actually how to use them. In the past, to enter a coupon code, you had to be the billing admin of the account, but that since changed. So what you do is you log in to campaign manager, and then you click on the little gear icon in the upper right hand corner of your screen, and then click on billing center. Then about halfway down the page, you'll see three tabs. The second tab says coupons and credits. Once you select that, you'll see a button that says redeem coupons. When you click that it will pop up a box that lets you enter in a coupon code and as soon as you select it, it will then spend that money first and then it will continue spending your credit card. Now if you're already advertising on LinkedIn, of course, you're just going to keep advertising and you'll use this coupon code to just augment what you're already doing. But let's say that you're not already advertising. And you're like Dan, who just got this coupon code and wants to give LinkedIn Ads a shot. So this is the strategy I would recommend. First of all, create a new campaign that's using the website visits objective. And then when you get down to the ad formats, choose text ads as your ad format. And this is of course, because text ads have the lowest bid floor. So what you want to do is bid by max cost per click and bid all the way down to the $2 minimum floor. And what this will do is it will stretch your $50 or $100 coupon code the furthest it will go. That means with a $50 coupon code, you'll get 25 clicks out of it and $100 coupon code you'll get 50 clicks out of it. And whether this takes one day to spend that or two months, just let it ride until it finishes. Obviously with a $2 bid when you're bidding all the way at the floor, you're not bidding very competitively. So LinkedIn is not going to want to show your ads a whole ton unless they perform really well. And then as for the offer, you'll want to point these ads towards something that you know has the highest conversion rate that you own. And that will give you the highest probability of actually getting some conversions from these 25 or 50 clicks. Think about things like guides, ebooks, checklists, and go and listen to Episode 10, all about offers and calls to action, to look for some ideas. If after a few days, you find your click through rates are over .085%. That's a good clue that you could switch your bidding to CPM and it will stretch even further. If you do this, you'll see your cost per click actually drops below $2. That sounds like a win to me. And for your targeting, you'll want to make your targeting as tight around your absolute ideal target audience as possible. And this is because when you see these leads come in, it would sure be nice to see some golden prospects in there, people representing companies that you would absolutely love to work with. That could mean using an account based marketing audience where you're specifying a company list. It could be using tight targeting like job title, or even groups targeting, maybe groups with seniority. And of course, if you haven't heard it before, make sure you uncheck the box that says enable audience expansion. It's absolute poison, and you should avoid it like COVID-19. And voila, if you get two to four conversions from this $50 coupon code, and they are from your absolute ideal target audience, chances are that you'll want to put your credit card in permanently and keep going and you'll want to scale up. And just as a little insurance policy for you, you might want to set a lifetime budget of $50 or $100 on that campaign. And that way, you'll ensure that it doesn't continue spending on your credit card more until you're absolutely good and ready. So that's my suggested strategy on how to best utilize a very small amount of free ad credit. I'd love to hear how you'd use it, though. So email us at [email protected] and share with us your strategy. The biggest limitation of these coupon codes that we found is that most are only one use per ad account. So once you've redeemed one in your account, you won't be able to use another one later on. So of course you can be a great guy or gal and hand one of these codes to a co worker or a friend or a fellow business owner. Or you can open up a new ad account. Either way, that's how you'll want to work around those limitations. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming up. So stick around.

12:30 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Resources

All right, two of the episodes we mentioned during this podcast, you'll want to listen to episode six on bidding and budgeting. If you look down in the show notes, you'll see a link right to that. And then Episode 10, we mentioned all about your calls to action and offers. Those are two of our most popular episodes and if you haven't listened already, you'll definitely want to listen to those. They are not outdated. If you or anyone you're working with is actively looking to learn LinkedIn Ads, check out the link in the show notes to our course on LinkedIn Learning, all about LinkedIn advertising. It's one of the best LinkedIn Ads courses out there and the price is right. It is just a small fraction of what it would cost to hire me to come and train your team, so it's definitely worthwhile. And then when you're done, you'll get the certification to add to your LinkedIn profile, saying that you finished the course. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. So you're hearing us in your earholes every week. And then please do look down at your podcast player and rate and leave a review for the podcast. If you review us all shout you out here on the podcast so I'd absolutely love to do that. And please tell a fellow LinkedIn Ads fanatic about the podcast, if they haven't heard about it already. Of course, I'd love for this podcast to be your secret weapon, but don't let it be too secret. Share it around. With any suggestions for topics or questions for us, reach out to us at [email protected] And remember to send ideas for a contest we could run because I really want to give you guys something way cool. All right, with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

Episode 14 - Low Budgets

Episode 22 - How to Scale

Episode 15 - Benchmarks

Episode  10 - High Performing Offers

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

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

Show Transcript:

Your LinkedIn Ads are performing well, but your boss or client isn't giving you much budget. This week, we're making the case for scaling on the LinkedIn Ads Show.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So we highlighted someone back on the q&a episode, her name is Felicia Gheorghe, and she asked this question and I thought it was definitely deserving of a more detailed dive. I tend to recommend some pretty large numbers in budget and spend. And so she asked, "Hey, I'm struggling with really low budget over here. What numbers do I bring up to justify and convince that scaling up and add is necessary?" And this is a really good question. Because when we're faced with really small budgets, and our boss or our client won't give us additional, we really do have to build the business case around, "Hey, this really is performing well, you should feed it while it's working." So we'll get into all of that today. In the news, I just got back from vacation and so I'm struggling to record this at like seven o'clock at night. I think I just decided I'm never going to take another vacation again. But a nice little piece of news, B2Linked just turned six years old last week, so Happy Birthday to us. And a friend of the show, Kylee Lessard, who's a product marketing manager at LinkedIn. She shared a poll last week and I wanted to just share the results of this because I thought this was really interesting for everyone. She asked, "What kind of stories content do you want to see from brands on LinkedIn?" And the options were info, like news events and products. Educational, like data, insights, tips, tricks. And people, employees and culture. And then there's another other category where people could vote in. And I personally think that educational content, like data, insights, tips, tricks, would be the most interesting content to me. So that's what I voted for. And as soon as we can see the results here, 57% voted the same way I did. People with employees and culture came in second place with 26%. And news and info came in a measly 13%. And I think this answered perfectly a question that I've had for a long time, which is, in a business to business context, what sort of content do you put in a stories, ad or even in a company's story. So based off of this poll, I'm going to start with more of that educational content. Thanks, Kylie for hosting that poll. And a friend this week, who is part of the alpha for stories ads, he shared something that was a little disheartening to me, but it's probably not in its final revision. He said that when you're part of the alpha, you don't bid for stories inventory separately from a separate campaign, you do it as basically a checkbox onto a sponsored content campaign. So if you have something that sponsored content running, then this would just be another Inventory slot that you could stick sponsored content into. Personally, I think that would be a terrible user experience, if that were to continue. So I hope we get our own inventory with it. And then from an advertising perspective, I really hope that we're getting our own inventory and we can bid specifically for it, because that means low costs get in before the competition happens. So we'll see in the beta or when it finally comes out for release, I'm crossing my fingers that we get a really low floor bid so we can really start talking about the great deals that can be had on LinkedIn. I wanted to highlight a review from CRBladen, who's in Great Britain. He said, "He speaks my language. I love ajs podcast. He's super knowledgeable and give sound and strategic advice for LinkedIn marketers. As a freelance LinkedIn marketer, it's great to hear someone geek out over LinkedIn Ads and share my passion for the platform. Thanks, AJ." Hey CRBladen, thanks so much for saying that. I will geek out with you anytime. I would love to feature you as well, talking to you listener, to leave a review on whatever podcast platform you listen to. And I would absolutely love to give you a shout out. All right, with that being said, let's hit it. So diving into this issue of starting with a low budget and then wanting to prove out the model so that you can scale, it's really helpful to have listened to Episode 14. That's all about basically how to have success with small budgets. So feel free to pause this one, and then go and binge listen to Episode 14 and come back or quite honestly, they're okay in reverse as well. So to me making the case about taking a smaller budget and growing it either to my boss or the company's owner or the client, it all comes down to confidence. And I certainly don't know all of your individual situations because everyone's situation is different. But I've talked to some who have low budgets because maybe one they've been burned by an agency that's done bad work, and so they're Trying to lower their risk, Two maybe they have money, but the Exec team needs to see the quote unquote, results, before going all in. Three, they don't understand how digital marketing works. And then it's our job to educate them on investing enough to make sure we have a sizable amount that tells us whether or not it's working. Or number four here, they just don't have the money to invest. And I know this is a hot take, potentially, but I don't think it's our job as marketers to change the financial culture of the company. So if you really feel like your growth is being stifled because you're killing it on LinkedIn Ads, and you want to scale, but you just can't make a case for them to grant you more budget, then I would say it's not your job to fight that battle. And it might be better just to drop the client, or maybe even switch companies if your internal. And I know this is a LinkedIn Ads podcast, but the nature of LinkedIn ads is really high risk. First of all, it's expensive. And so any mistake you make is automatically an expensive mistake. And then also the traffic is more mid to top of funnel. So it's these long sales cycles, and people just aren't ready to make big commitments yet. And so if you have an executive who's looking to see quote, unquote, results, for my experience, that usually means that they're looking for a return on their investment, which isn't going to happen fast with LinkedIn Ads 99% of the time, because it's specifically for longer sales cycles. It's catching people outside of their level of intent. So the risks to you as a marketer in going out on a limb to fight for additional budget, just because you have confidence in the results, it puts you at risk of really looking bad to your boss or bad to the client. And certainly that's scary. That's something that we really need to consider. On the flip side of that, though, I do think that you as a marketer have the responsibility to first of all, be aware of the financial situation of the company, and the number to be aware of the financial culture of the company, so that you don't stick out like a sore thumb by pushing them to increase budgets, and then end up losing your job or looking bad or leaving a bad taste in someone's mouth. And based on that, you definitely want to pick your battles, because maybe your company has the money. And you know that LinkedIn Ads has the best potential for the highest quality leads, and you need to fight to change your executives minds. Or maybe your company doesn't have the money to scale. So you decide to sit back and just keep doing the best job you can, even with a low budget, even if you are highly confident that it would scale. So if it's a battle you want to fight, then absolutely go for it. But your relationship with the exec team, I feel like is super valuable. And LinkedIn Ads is a high risk platform by nature. So guard your reputation and guard your job before you go on a fight just to increase your budget. So if you're looking for the formula on how to scale, definitely go back and listen to Episode 22. It's all about how to take good results and scale them up. But what we're going to cover today is how to identify whether there's something there that's worth scaling, and really how to analyze your traffic, your conversions, your lead quality. So we're gonna dive a little bit deeper in here.

8:20 Case Study

I want to share a case study from a client that we worked with. And the company is called pilot.com. And they provide SAS software for bookkeepers. And our partners, they're ultra sharp marketers, which is always a plus. They were spending a really healthy five figure per month budget. And they were spending that with us for many months. And then suddenly they came to us and said that they wanted to increase their budget by nine times overnight, ASAP. Well, scalability and efficiency are kind of our thing. So we did this with a plone. we rebuilt the account structure to sustain that kind of growth, which if you're curious, go back and listen to episode seven on how we do that. And we were totally successful at nine xing the budget overnight. And it was incredible. We stayed perfectly within the efficiency thresholds of the cost per MQL that we needed. So I'm sure patting myself on the back. And I'm telling myself this story that we did such a great job at managing the ads that they went and had an internal meeting and started comparing to the other channels. And they were instantly blown away when they saw the numbers that LinkedIn Ads performance was so mammoth compared to the others that they realized they needed to suddenly nine x their budget, but the truth probably is more than if we would have been paying attention to the signs along the way. We could have been a lot more proactive in suggesting smaller budget increases early on, and we could have taken advantage of the faster growth opportunities as we saw them and gained confidence in their LinkedIn leads. We're definitely not a salesy type of organization. We're not pushy to our clients. So we're the last ones who are proactively, going to our clients and saying you should spend more. Because as an agency, I feel really dirty suggesting that because as clients spend more, we make more. And so it seems really disingenuous. But if we would have done that, if we could have taken advantage of the three to six months beforehand where we could have made smaller gains, I think we would have been further ahead than if we just waited for this realization that the LinkedIn leads are gold. And we should suddenly nine x our traffic and have that drop like a ton of bricks.

10:30 Comparison

So as you're running your campaigns, what you first want to do is take a look at your metrics. And it's pretty easy to see that the top line performance and engagement metrics, but I know you you're a sophisticated marketer, and you're going to go deeper than that. You're going to dive into your CRM and pull out your cost per MQL, cost Per SQL, cost per SAL, cost per proposal, cost per closed deal. And then what you want to do is compare your numbers to the benchmarks that I shared in Episode 15. And if you know that you're significantly above benchmark in everything, your confidence should be really high that you're on the right track. And that given a higher budget, you could probably do a great job. And as soon as you start looking at those bottom of the funnel types of metrics like MQLs, SQLs, closes, you'll definitely want to compare this to your other marketing channels. Because let's say for instance, your cost per SAL on Google is like $3,000 and on LinkedIn, it's 2000, there'd be a really good case to be made for taking budget from Google. And I think you also need to realize that your account is in a constant evolution of your ammo that we've talked about before. It's your audiences, your messages and your offers. And I'm sure that you know that your cost per MQL, cost per SQL, and deeper, these are lagging metrics. And so if you look at them now, they'll tell you the story of what was happening in the account weeks or even months ago. So as you evolve your offers and messaging tests, there may be significant room for improvement, that just given a little bit more time to bake out, you can actually realize, and I've said this before, but my recommendation is don't compare with Facebook on like a cost per click, or click through rate, or cost per lead level because LinkedIn is significantly more expensive and the targeting is so much more precise. If you do compare and start robbing LinkedIn of your budget, just because Facebook is cheaper on a cost per lead basis, you'll likely end up cheating yourself out of the real value of LinkedIn, which is the lead quality. And similarly, don't compare your results with Google ads if you're looking at just cost per click, click through rate and CPL because search channels score really high in intent, which makes sense because you're targeting the people who are already looking for what it is you do, but they score really low in the budget and authority categories, which tells you if someone is actually able to purchase from you, and do they have the authority to do that. They're fundamentally very different channels. And they tend to actually work really well hand in hand, rather than head to head. Okay, here's the quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the order of confidence for scaling.

13:19 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 $130 million on LinkedIn ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and we don't have a sales team so you'll deal only with LinkedIn ads, experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com and we'd love to chat with you about your campaigns. Or heck, show up to our offices on horseback. No matter how you get in touch, we'd love to work with you.

14:00 Order of Confidence For Scale

Alright, let's jump into the order of confidence. And what I mean by order of confidence is, as you're advertising, you're going to amass certain metrics. And then based off of how good those metrics are, it will probably give you more confidence that either what you're doing is working, or it's not working, and you should change tactics. So if you're looking at your ads, and you're looking at just the impressions number, what does this tell you? Well, really not very much. Your bidding really qualifies the ad to be worth LinkedIn's while to show to people to give it impressions and that's not very confidence inspiring in my book. But then you go to the next rung down and we start looking at click through rates. Now definitely compared to the benchmarks that we laid out in Episode 15. And that will tell you whether you're being successful at crafting a message that people are either more or less likely to click on. And this is great, but it also doesn't make a strong case for getting additional budget to scale. You've just proven that you can write something that people want to click on. So now you're looking at the conversions or leads number. You're generating conversions and leads and that's great. It means you're offering something that people actually want. And this is quite a bit more inspiring. Similarly, if you're looking at your conversion rate, you can find that you've got enough conversions coming in that you can start to feel confident in how effective your offer is, at getting people, especially cold traffic to reveal themselves to you, to fill out a form. If you have a 12% conversion rate, that tells you that one out of every eight people that you engage with on the ad will end up converting and that feeling is a lot more confidence inspiring to me. You can also now calculate based on your cost per click, what you can expect your cost per lead to be. If you divide your cost per click by your conversion rate percentage, that will tell you what your cost per conversion is. So if you know what your max cost per lead is, and you know what your conversion rate is, you can use basic algebra to figure out how much you're able to bid for traffic, and still stay underneath your goal cost per conversion. So let's say that you have a 12% conversion rate. And you've determined that you want to stay under $120 per conversion. So in this case, we're trying to solve for cost per click, so that's our variable. We're going to divide that by 12%, or .12. So let's say that you have a 12% conversion rate. And you've determined that you want to stay under $120 per conversion. So again, this is basic algebra, so try to follow along. Because good crap, this would work so much better if you could see this So our formula here is your cost per click over your conversion rate equals 120. Our conversion rate is .12, or 12%. here. And so if you evaluate that, you end up multiplying both sides by 12%, you end up with a max cost per click of $14.40. And so in that case, I would go and set a manual bid of maybe even up to $14.50 or $14.75. So I'm going to land somewhere around there. And like I said, that's pretty confidence inspiring. But we can go deeper here. If you're looking at the MQLs or marketing qualified leads level, now you're seeing that your leads are actually turning into marketing qualified leads. For most B2B organizations, this means that the lead quality is high enough for them to qualify to move on to have someone in the sales department take a look at them. And this is confidence inspiring, because you at this point, you know that your targeting is good, you know that your leads aren't garbage, they're passing that initial threshold. The next step is really looking at lead quality and this can be either anecdotal feedback that you get from a sales team, or you have a lead scoring mechanism inside, let's say, your CRM or marketing automation system. When you get enough leads, that you start to get feedback on their quality, this gives you a lot more confidence in your LinkedIn ads performance. And I've also found that anecdotal feedback, even if it's not statistically significant, it can sway sales teams, or sway executives, simply because this is a second voice, a second testimony that what you're what you're saying is true. The next stage is SQL or sales qualified lead. And every B2B company has different names for these stages so this is just the basics. But, you might call it an SAL, you might call it a BPO, whatever you call it, it's just the next qualifying stage. And this stage is actually my favorite stage to track and for marketing to be held accountable to because it incorporates both the lead quality, because it incorporates both the lead quality from my targeting, as well as the cost efficiency that we're driving. At this stage, you're starting to see your leads be qualified in the sales process is having promise. And these could start leading to close deals and this is amazing. This really gives me the ultimate confidence in my advertising efforts. Because now I can present a cost per SQL and an SQL conversion rate. And I can go to the executive team or I can go to the client and inspire a lot of confidence in additional budget, especially if you can say, oh, and in the last few weeks, we've made some big additions to the platform, and it's likely going to do even better than that as the database out. And of course, if you're a big spender or you've just been driving this traffic long enough, you can start to see proposals come in when your leads start getting proposals at volume. And let's say they have a near 50% chance of closing. This gives excellent confidence that actually efforts are turning into a return on investment. Even if it takes that deal, three months to go from proposal to close, if you've got 10 of these things, and you know that they have a 50% chance of closing, that might as well be money in the bank. But of course, what every business owner wants is closed deals. And so when you start amassing enough data, that you can generate closed deals, and track them at some kind of volume. I think that's all the confidence that you'll ever need. But of course, we definitely need to talk about limitations, because not every audience is scalable. Not every offer is scalable. So let's jump into some of the things that might stop you from being able to scale. The first is your audience size, let's say that you want to scale and you even have the budget. But if your audience sizes are too small, you just won't be able to spend more budget on them. And as you implement the things that we learned for Episode 22, all about scaling, you might find that you've already hit this level of diminishing returns, because your audience just isn't big enough. And unfortunately, this is just kind of the way it is, it's possible that you've already found the optimal amount of scale in your account. And that's actually good to find out where your limitations are.

21:12 Limitations

The next limitation, though, is a lot easier to deal with. And this is your click through rate. It might be that everything you launch has click through rates between, let's say, 0.4%, and 0.5%. So even if your audience is nicely sized, because so few people are actually clicking on your ads, you just can't generate enough traffic to spend what you want. In this case, the limiting factor for you is most likely your offer itself. Go back and listen to Episode 10 to learn all about offers. If you can go and create an offer that is so attractive that all of a sudden, every ad that you write gets a click through rate of 1% or higher, this will instantly give you opportunities to double your traffic, and even drop your cost per click significantly. There was one notable case where we had two different ads, both going to the same audience. One was getting a click through rate of like 1.3%. And the other was getting like 0.6%. And so I looked at that and said, "Wow, the ad that's getting a 1.2% click through rate is obviously a much better ad. Let's scale that." But then as soon as we started looking at the conversions that were coming from it, we found that the ad that got clicked on less the one with 0.6% click through rate ended up having a conversion rate that was three times higher. So we paused that high performing ad, even though it was amazing at getting people to click because conversions are so much more important. Remember as advertisers, the closer you can get to the money, the more valuable your decisions and actions are. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

22:59 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

23:10 Resources

If you haven't already, check out Episode 14 all about low budgets. And then Episode 22 is all about how to scale up effectively and efficiently. We mentioned account structure, which Episode Seven goes into. And then you should definitely listen to Episode 15 all about benchmarks to let you know if you're doing a good job, or if you're totally falling off the horse. And of course, a classic, one of our most popular episodes Episode 10, all about crafting the right offer and the right call to action. If you are one of your colleagues is looking to learn LinkedIn, point them towards the LinkedIn Learning course on LinkedIn advertising. I am the humble author of that. But I can say it's a really surprisingly good course especially for the price that LinkedIn Learning charges for which I think is $25 or free. You'll see the link right down below in the show notes where you can click right to it. Also make sure to subscribe on whatever podcast player you're listening to right now. And then please do rate and review the podcast. If you review, I'd love to shout you out. With any episode ideas or feedback, hit us up at podcast at B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

Install event tracking tutorial on YouTube

How to set up event tracking in Google Tag Manager walkthrough.

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

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

Show Transcript:

LinkedIn Ads conversion tracking is confusing and technical, and hungry and delicious. I must be recording this around dinnertime. This is the LinkedIn Ads Show.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Conversion tracking is something that I get a lot of questions on. How do you set it up? How do you troubleshoot it if it's not working? How do you track separate conversion events through the funnel? So the whole episode is all about that. We'll cover the basics and we'll go super geeky deep because I'm sorry, I just can't do it any other way. In personal news, I'm on vacation this week. So this is obviously recorded before then, we're headed to Southern California. And I have to say COVID vacations aren't very much fun. My wife and kiddos absolutely love the beach. But my poor ginger skin doesn't. So wish me luck, and sunscreen. I wanted to highlight a review from Abby Kelsey, who's a social media and branding strategist. She says, "Hands down the best podcast for LinkedIn Ads. After listening to just a few episodes, I was able to optimize the campaign, reducing the cost per click from $14 to $15 down to $4 to $5. AJ is great at simplifying strategy. I look forward to every new episode." Abby, thanks so much, I'm so glad that our advice was able to help you get your CPCs down that much. Because as you know, when you reduce your costs down to a third of where they were, then your ROI can be three times as much. So great job to you and actually taking the advice and making changes in your account. And you, yes, you! I want to feature you as well. So go and leave a rating on whichever podcast app that you like or prefer that or that you know, has ratings. And I'll love to shout you out and share your experience with the general listeners public here. All right, with that being said, let's hit it.

2:02 Conversion Tracking

I remember sitting down with the VP over LinkedIn Marketing Solutions back in 2014. I remember this conversation very well. He asked near the end of our discussion, if I had a magic wand and I could wave it and change any feature or add any feature to LinkedIn ads, what would it be? And I told him conversion tracking. He sat back and folded his arms defensively and asked, "Okay, why do you think advertisers would want that?" From his reaction, you could totally tell that he and the product team at that time had already discussed conversion tracking many times. And they had already come to the conclusion that it was a feature that they didn't need. I explained that all the popular ad platforms had conversion tracking. That it really was table stakes as a feature at this point. And I also knew of affiliate marketers who worked out of their moms basements that had built their own tracking tag. So it really couldn't be that hard. He explained that according to LinkedIn, the most sophisticated advertisers had already devised systems for tracking conversions, and the less sophisticated ones weren't even asking for it. I agreed that we'd already implemented our own workarounds. But that having conversions in the platform would allow us to pivot faster rather than just exporting add data to excel and marrying it up to conversion data later on. It's not a horribly long process, but it did take time. And it wasn't nearly as immediate as if we had conversions just right within the platform. And to LinkedIn, of course, when advertisers can pivot faster, it means finding success quicker, which leads to larger investments in ad budget. So it made a lot of sense to me. Now, I must have been incredibly convincing to him, because LinkedIn, of course did implement conversion tracking a short three years later. But the principle stands, the more visibility you have into what works all the way down the funnel, the faster and with more confidence you're going to move. Having conversion tracking directly within campaign manager means that you can monitor whether a new offer is converting within hours of launching the ads. It really adds confidence that you're spending your precious dollars, where they're being best used. Most of us experienced marketers have probably felt the searing pain in your stomach when you launched everything perfectly. And then realize hours later that there was some crucial piece that you left out and either wasted a bunch of money, or made you look like a moron to your boss. Heaven knows I have. Conversion tracking allows us to keep tabs on an account and have the confidence that you're not wasting money or going to look like a moron to your boss or client.

4:32 How Does Conversion Tracking Work?

So how does conversion tracking technology work? Well, it really is a simple technology. The way it works is that you tell the ad platform a web page that the only way that someone could get to it is if they filled out a form or converted. Oftentimes, we call this page a thank you page or a success page. There's no link to it from the website. There's no other way to get there. It's what we call an orphaned page. And then you make it so as soon as someone submits the form, it redirects them to that thank you page. Then when the ad platform sees that one of the people that referred hit that page, it knows that someone filled out a form and gets to call it a conversion. So how does LinkedIn know what the members doing when they're not on LinkedIn anymore? The answer is the insight tag. This is a piece of JavaScript code that you put on all the pages of your website. It's really similar to Google Analytics code. And it's going to track all the basic activities of a visitor, and it radios them back to LinkedIn, like a second set of eyes for LinkedIn to see what happens to their traffic after it leaves. It also places a cookie in the visitors browser to identify them. And consequently, this is also why LinkedIn doesn't report a conversion, when you click on the ad preview to convert, LinkedIn knows that this ad wasn't actually served to you because your browser doesn't have the cookie. So it knows it's not really game time yet, and doesn't need to report that conversion. And then it gets really simple. LinkedIn knows from the cookie who the visitor is, and which ad they clicked on, or even saw, which we'll talk about later. And then they made it to the thank you page. Easy peasy, jot one down in the conversions column. So of course, you're going to need the insight tag installed.

6:14 Set It Up

Here's a quick rundown of how to set it up. Inside of campaign manager, you go to account assets, and then click insight tag. I won't belabor you with all the instructions, just follow whatever instructions you see on the screen to get access to your tag. And then once you havenit, you want to install it by having your web developer or if you're geeky like that, it can be you. Go and paste that JavaScript into the head section of the HTML on every page of your website. For the uninitiated, you can paste it into each page manually, but that's obviously a huge pain, especially depending on how many pages you have. The better option is to place it in your website's global template, which is just one piece of code that loads on every page of the website. If you can do that, it's a one and done. But then the even better way to do this is through a Tag Manager like Google Tag Manager, which is free. This way you put the JavaScript code for Tag Manager on the website once or have the web developer do it. And then you've got this interface where you as a marketer can log in anytime you want. And you can paste all of your tracking tags whenever you want, then they're going to magically populate across the whole website. So you can throw your LinkedIn insight tag, and your Google Analytics tag, and your Google ads, and Facebook ads, and Twitter tags, everything you want, you can change in and out. Once the tags installed, it starts sending signals to LinkedIn. And that's whenever a LinkedIn member loads a page of your website, the JavaScript fires, and it radios that information back to LinkedIn. And then back in campaign manager, LinkedIn will show you your domain name with a green light showing that it's actively receiving signals. If it's still showing a red light next to your insight tag domain name, then there's probably something wrong with the way that the tag was implemented. So check on that. Once the tags installed on your website, then you go into campaign manager and set up your conversion. This is that part where you define to LinkedIn, which web page when someone lands on, it means that they converted. So you go to account assets, then conversions, and then click create a conversion. Name something descriptive of the conversion like contact form lead or content download. And then in section one with the settings, just take all the defaults for now. Section two, select all the campaigns that you would want to actually be tied to this conversion event. And I say pick them all, why not. And then section three is the most important part. This is where you tell LinkedIn which page or pages to count as a conversion. And there are three different ways that you can define what this page looks like. There's equals, starts with, and my personal favorite, contains. So with equals, you can say, hey, here is the exact single URL that anytime someone lands on this, nothing extra after it or before, it's just this URL, then you know they converted. Starts with would be if you have the beginning of a URL that does stay the same, but maybe some dynamic parameters at the end can change. And then contains, this is where you get to pick one element of the URL that's common among several pages. And it doesn't matter if the beginning or the end changes. As long as it has this one piece, then you know, it's a conversion. And that's really it create the conversion. And if you set it up correctly, it should be tracking conversions from here on out. Now I know what you're gonna say. You'll say I went to ask my web developer to have our lead form redirected to a thank you page and he laughed at me and then announced to the whole team that I just asked for a thank you page. He asked me if I got stuck in the 90s and if I still code HTML in tables. He even went and slashed my tires in the parking lot and put his lunch leftovers in my garbage can every day, so it would smell. And then he even blatantly refused to help, and told me that I have to find another way because that quote unquote, just won't be possible. Trust me, I feel your pain. We've all been there. Now there is a way around this, which we'll cover here right after the sponsor break.

10:24 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

10:34 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 $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and we don't have a sales team, so you'll only deal with LinkedIn AAds experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of bt linkedin.com, to chat about your campaigns. Or heck, send the intention out to the universe. No matter how you get in touch, we'd love to work with you.

11:04 Event Based

Alright, let's jump into what to do if you just have no choice, but to have a form on your landing page that when submitted, that URL stays the same in your browser and it just pops up a modal saying thanks. We'll reach out to you shortly. Now if this is the case, it is still possible to track conversions. And the way it works is this, LinkedIn will give you this little snippet of code that you can attach to a button on your page, that as soon as the button is pushed, it executes the JavaScript and sends a conversion right back to LinkedIn. So sounds simple, right? Well, for me, as a non coder, I don't know hardly anything about JavaScript, it really isn't. This isn't just a piece of HTML code that you can paste on into the page, it's JavaScript, and it breaks my poor ginger brand, just thinking about it. If you have Google Tag Manager installed, this is a lot easier. And you don't need to go and start a war with your web developers. in the show notes below. I've linked to a helpful walkthrough video by my friend Joe Martinez of Clix Marketing. That's right, Joe, I just named dropped you. I've also linked to a great written guide by Brandon Green on the B2Linked blog, if you'd rather work with a post that you can follow along to rather than a YouTube video. The way it works is this, when you're creating the conversion, you click the option, use an event specific pixel to track when there is no unique URL, for example, a button click. Then as soon as you create the conversion, it will give you this little snippet of code to attach to the button. If your developer is worth half the lunch, he keeps dumping in your trash can, he'll know exactly what to do with it when you send him the code and point to the button that you wanted to attach to. But remember, you do still need the global Insight tag across your whole website anyway. So this doesn't replace that. The reason why web developers feel so strongly about this is because redirecting to a new page, just to show success is the old way of doing things. And they claim it's not the best user experience. But I'm a fairly technical marketer. And if I can create a thank you page in raw HTML from scratch, but I can't figure out how to set up event tracking without Google Tag Manager, I'll tell you what I would recommend. I can troubleshoot thank you page conversion tracking perfectly, but I'm absolutely useless setting up event tracking, without looping in a web developer. So sure, I'm advocating an old way of doing things that provides a poor user experience. But there is one big benefit of using thank you pages. And that is thank you pages are the most underutilized real estate on the whole internet. Think of this, someone just filled out a form and gave you their contact info, maybe because they wanted to download a piece of your content or join a webinar. They've already identified who they are. And you can use this opportunity to cross sell or upsell them on something. So let's say you're pitching people to join a webinar, because you know, that's what they're willing to do. But what if you had a call to action on your thank you page that said, great, you're signed up for the webinar. By the way, if you haven't already, grab a time on our calendly and we can walk you through something? Sure, not everyone's going to take you up on that. But if anyone does, you just took your lead from a content download to maybe even an MQL or an SQL just like that. So if you're using thank you pages, definitely try to leverage them a little bit more to help get multiple conversions happening.

14:27 How Other Channels Work with Conversion Tracking

The way that conversion tracking works on LinkedIn is pretty similar to how other channels are. Facebook conversion tracking is a lot more complex because to set it up, you actually have to modify the base tag on any page where a conversion occurs. At least the last time I did it, the documentation sucked. And so it was really confusing, but it is very cool because it can pass dynamic signals back to Facebook, like for instance, the purchase amount from an ecommerce store. So if you're running Facebook ads for ecommerce rather than than just saying, oh, the average order value is about $30, it will actually pass back the exact amount. So at the end of the day, you can see exactly what your return on adspend was. Google Analytics, goal tracking is similar to LinkedIn, where you put the tag on every page, and then you go into the interface and tell it what counts as a conversion action. It's much more full featured, and a lot more confusing, too. But one really cool feature it has that I really wish we could do on LinkedIn is that when you define a conversion, you can click a button, and it will tell you what the conversion rate of that page would have been in the last seven days, I think it's seven days. So basically, if you're setting up a conversion, that isn't going to work, because you messed something up, you can know right, then without having to launch it, and then watch and see that conversions aren't happening, and then go back and try to fix it. So please, LinkedIn implement this to help us understand when we create a conversion, whether or not it's working immediately.

15:57 Is Conversion Tracking Not Working? Check These Things.

So what about if your conversion tracking isn't working properly? Well, here are my steps to actually check and make sure every step of the way and find out what's broken. First, go and make sure that your insight tag is installed on the landing page. If it was pasted right into the HTML, that's really easy. You just go inside your browser, when you're looking at the page. On PC, you just click Ctrl+U that shows you the source. And then Ctrl+F allows you to search on the page. And you can just type in the word LinkedIn and search through. And as soon as you find the actual insight tag, verify that it matches the insight tag that LinkedIn gave you in campaign manager exactly. And I'm telling you, it has to be exact if it's missing a comma or something, it won't work. Now, if the tag was implemented through Tag Manager, this is a little bit harder, because you won't actually see that tag in the HTML. So I use the ghostery plugin in Chrome, because it'll show me what's happening with the JavaScript on the page, which is exactly where Google tag manager or any other tag manager is going to put it. My geeky friends telling me that this is because it's on the event layer in JavaScript, I have no idea what that means. Step two, go and do exactly the same thing on your thank you page, open up the source or ghostery, look to make sure the tag is there. And if your tag is in both places, you're looking good so far. Step three here is go and actually check and make sure that your conversion was set up properly in campaign manager. So you go back to account assets, conversions, and then make sure that the thank you page is entered into the conversion settings in campaign manager. And sometimes just to be sure, I'll stack the conversion triggers, like maybe one line says it starts with B2Linked.com/thank you. And then you can add an or and I can say, or it just contains the word thank you. And then if one of those two wasn't set up properly, maybe the other one will still pick up the conversion. That's like my little conversion insurance policy. Step four here is that just realize that conversions can take like two to four hours to register inside of campaign manager. So give it a little bit of time, if a conversion just occurred, and you're watching it, you don't see it, don't just assume it's broken, wait two to four hours. And unfortunately, there isn't a great way that I found to test conversions in LinkedIn, you really just have to set it up and then watch and campaign manager with high hopes while you wait for conversions to start displaying. So if anyone knows of a way to do this without just sitting around, crossing your fingers and hoping, please let me know, I would love some kind of trick or hack around this. Now, sometimes your conversions you might see are double counting, maybe they're counting more conversions occurring, then you're actually getting leads in the CRM for and this is often because you defined a URL in your conversion and campaign manager that has something in common with another web page. Or maybe there's a sub page that someone can click on from your thank you page that adds into the URL. So every page load after that counts as a conversion. Like, for instance, if we had B2Linked.com/thank you/epic, or something like that loading that epic page would count as a second conversion after they hit the thank you page.

19:19 Some Things to Watch Out For

Now some things that you'll want to watch out for. If you're watching your conversions column within campaign manager, be aware that this number is a liar. It counts both post click and view through conversions. So I'll define what these are. Post click conversions actually means that someone clicked on my ad. And then within the clicks window that you set in the settings of your conversion within campaign manager, the default 30 days, they ended up on that thank you page. So they clicked on your ad, and they eventually converted within 30 days. That one makes a lot of sense to me. But then view through conversions are simply when your ad registered an impression on their browser and then they ended up on the thank you page through some other channel, you literally have no idea if the impression even had an influence on their converting, they could have just scrolled right past your post and missed it entirely. So all of our client reporting is done with the post click conversions number, rather than just using the easy conversions. Because I'll tell you, nothing is more embarrassing if you're a highly specialized LinkedIn ads agency than when your account manager reports the client that there were six conversions. And the client says, Oh, I only see four in the CRM. And then you realize that you just read the conversions column. And it added in the view through conversions, or so I've been told.

20:41 Other Cool Uses of the LinkedIn Insight Tag

Conversion tracking isn't the only thing that you'll want to use the LinkedIn insight tag for. Once it's on the website, it enables two other cool features. The first is the free web demographics that LinkedIn provides. And it should have been called LinkedIn analytics to pair with Google Analytics and Facebook analytics, because it is a free analytic tool to understand how people are using your website. But once it's installed, you can see a breakdown of the makeup of your website users. And these are from any source, even unpaid. You can see if your website traffic tends to be of a certain seniority, or even which companies tend to be frequenting your website the most. The other great benefit to your insight tag is it enables website retargeting. So now you can set up something like, hey, if someone visited any page of our website, follow them around and remind them to come back and convert.

21:33 Cool Conversion Hacks

Now there are a couple of cool little hacks or tricks that I like to use with the conversion tracking here. The first is if you have multiple conversion events, like let's say you have a white paper and a webinar, I don't want to go and create an individual conversion for each one of those. Because that means every single new piece of content that we come out with, we have to go and create a new conversion for. And that's just a lot of work and it's probably something that you're going to forget. And then you'll lose the conversion tracking until you fix it. So instead, I create a convention on all of my assets, that maybe they all have a separate thank you page. But I put something in the URL in common among all thank you pages. And maybe that's just the term thank-you. And so it doesn't matter in the future, how many different assets we run, as long as all the thank you pages have thank-you in the URL. This one conversion event that I set up where I said it contains thank-you, call that a conversion, it's always going to work. So that'll save you some time. Another little hack here is it's kind of hard if you have a funnel, where someone can convert multiple times down your funnel to actually see all the different conversions. Just by default, LinkedIn is going to show you the conversions column. And you can go to break down and break it down by each individual conversion. But I found a way I like even more. In the conversion value. When you're setting it up. You get to tell LinkedIn how much you think each conversion is worth? Well, if I had a two step funnel, something like a webinar, and then that triggers a phone call. What I'll do is, if someone signs up for the webinar, I'm going to say that's worth one cent. And then if someone signs up for the phone call, I'm going to say that's worth $1. And then when you go to your columns, and you look at just all of your performance by conversions, you'll see one column that is your conversion value. And let's say it says something like $3.12 cents, you can look at that intuitively and say, oh, that means 12 people converted on the webinar, and then three of them turned into phone calls to our sales team. So that's a cool little hack that we've found when you have multi step funnels that you want to track quickly and easily. All right, I've got the episode resources coming up for you. So stick around.

24:03 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

24:14 All right down in the show notes links, you'll see the YouTube video about how to install event tracking by Joe Martinez. And then you'll also see the guide the blog post on B2Linked.com that walks you through how to do it if you want a written guide as well. If you're new to LinkedIn Ads, or have a colleague who's getting trained or something like that, definitely check out the course the links down below as well. And that's on LinkedIn Learning. So it's either $25 or free, depending on your subscription to LinkedIn. Also look down at your podcast player right now. Make sure that subscribe button is hit so that you never miss another episode like this. And if you liked it, please do rate and review. And if you do leave a review I'm going to shout you out. And then of course with any suggestions, feedback, or just telling me how you don't like gingers. Email [email protected] and we'd love to hear from you. With that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

Ep 26: Why LinkedIn Ads Are So Expensive?

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

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

Show Transcript:

Q4 on LinkedIn Ads, what I affectionately call the yearly bloodbath. Winter is coming, prepare yourselves.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So Q4 of 2020 is coming up. And every year, it's an absolute bloodbath on LinkedIn Ads, I'm going to walk you through the market forces that cause it. And then what you can do about it, as an advertiser. We'll also take this opportunity to dive into the seasonality effects during the whole rest of the year. So strap in, and let's get to it. Highlighting a couple reviews here on the podcast. David Rosendahl on LinkedIn actually put this in a LinkedIn story. And I had to grab it as an example. He said, "Hey, I'm out on a bike ride listening to that podcast, I just took a screenshot of. If you're into LinkedIn ads, and you're looking to run them more effectively for yourself or your company, listen to this podcast. Man, it's a good one, a good show. The guy knows what he's talking about. And I highly recommend it. So go check it out." David, thanks so much for the kind review and shouting that out publicly. It means the world to me. A user by the name of Notdeeplyreligious, which I giggled about, left a review that said, "Easy to understand and generous with the info. I've watched my share of YouTube videos on LinkedIn Ads, and even took a Udemy course, listening to AJ has been by far the most helpful. He's clear and detailed, but not overwhelmingly. So it's obvious. He enjoys his craft, and feels it's his duty to impart valuable knowledge. I'm sure it helps attract clients, and why not, I appreciate a master who enthusiastically spreads the word, he certainly helped me". Notdeeplyreligious, I can tell that you go super into things, I'm so glad you've been diving into Udemy and YouTube to get info on LinkedIn Ads. And I'm so grateful to be a part of that knowledge seeking. So thanks for leaving such a great review. And to everyone else, I want to feature you here. So please do go and leave a review for the podcast. And with that being said, let's hit it.

2:16 Seasonality So first, I think we need to define what seasonality is. And what this is, is over the course of the year, there are a whole bunch of different market forces that will change your advertising and really noticeable ways certain of these forces will change the costs. So it sometimes the year your cost might be higher, and others might be lower. You might also find that certain times of the year, your engagement rates go up and down, and maybe even your lead quality can shift. And all of this is an interplay between supply and demand. So we're going to be taking you back to Econ 101 right now. But for our purposes here, when we talk about supply, we're talking about the traffic on LinkedIn, the supply of people logging into the platform. And then when we talk about demand, we're talking about advertiser demand, meaning us as advertisers bidding for that traffic and trying to win. So the way it works is that when demand stays the same, which means that nothing has changed for advertisers, we're still the same number of us. And we're still bidding the same amounts. But then supply increases, like more people coming in logging into LinkedIn, then prices for everyone fall. And then conversely, if the number of people on LinkedIn stays the same, so we don't have new people coming and spending more time on there. That's our supply. But we have more advertisers coming onto the platform. That's our demand, that's going to cause costs to increase. And when I started bt linked about six years ago, I watched a period of about four years where prices stayed relatively the same, which was fantastic. I got to tell people for four years that the average cost per click on LinkedIn was between $6 to $9, depending on competition. And we did see a lot of new advertisers during that time, so of course, there was additional demand. But I think what balanced it out is the supply, the members on LinkedIn. People were coming to it in droves. They were finding more and more benefit in being on LinkedIn. So they would come in larger groups and then they would spend more time, which is creating additional ad inventory for everyone. And so even though advertisers were coming in finding a lot of success on the platform, then they weren't paying more because the users were really balancing that out. And then in late 2018, came the 35% price hike that we saw with the advent of objectives. If you want to learn more about that, listen to Episode 26. That goes all into why LinkedIn Ads are so expensive. And then add to that the release of automated bidding and the ridiculously high suggested bid ranges. And basically since then, we've seen costs really go on an upward trend. Costs on LinkedIn are higher than they've ever been, and are climbing quickly. And this is on a platform that everyone was already complaining, even when it was brand new, that it was too expensive to begin with. So you as advertisers, if you understand the market forces that are at play on the platform, you can take advantage of it and counter those forces to make sure that you're always getting the very best performance, no matter what time of year. The biggest part of seasonality that I have to bring up is what happens during the November and December timeframe in North America. We found that in North America, which makes up the majority of LinkedIn advertisers on the platform, that November and December are a total bloodbath. Starting from about Thanksgiving in the US all the way through the end of the year, there's a whole bunch of market forces that really make this not an optimal time to be advertising. What you'll notice is, number one, there's a bunch of big brands that are pushing really hard to blow all their budget because it's a use it or lose it budget. So they have till the end of the year, it also happens to be the end of a quarter, and the end of a month, which are all big times where marketers and sales folks are getting a lot of pressure. And what this does is it increases advertiser competition, which in our little econ graph here is the demand. And so we see costs per click rise, cost per click cost per impression, whatever it is you're measuring, competition goes up. And so prices go up. At the same time this is happening, we see people checking out to go on vacation. And what that does is it decreases our supply inventory. People aren't logging into the platform or spending as much time on it. And so since your inventory decreases, and people are bidding just as high, if not higher, that makes costs per click rise even more. So with these two forces, you'll see your costs per click going up significantly, and your traffic dropping. But then there are two really big nails in the coffin for me, that happened on the other side, once you land a lead, most of your customers budgets will be spent and spoken for through the whole rest of the year. So people really aren't considering new solutions. And of course, sometimes this works in your favor, because someone has a use it or lose it type of budget. And they have some leftover, and they're looking to make a purchase before the end of the year very quickly. So sometimes you can still get deals during this time. But for the most part, this is really depressed, it leads to people being less interested so your perceived lead quality goes down, your conversion rates go down. And then every sales team will tell you the same thing every year, all the leads that you generate in November and December will all say "Let's pick up the conversation after the first of the year". And of course, everyone has good intentions with it, but no one's going to remember what salesperson they were talking to a month and a half ago or six weeks ago so they tend to forget about your company and so your overall lead quality goes down. So during this period, you have costs that go up, and then lead quality that goes down. So if you're tracking what your cost per sales, qualified lead is or your ROI, it's looking real bad during this little period here. So because of all these market forces, it basically means that you'll likely see your costs go way up, sometimes 40 to 50%, just during these two months. But don't be discouraged, all is not lost. Right after the sponsor break, we'll dive into how you can take advantage of this for the best performance of the whole year. The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

8:37 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linnked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead. We're official LinkedIn partners, and we don't have a sales team. So you'll deal with a LinkedIn Ads expert from day one, Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. Or Heck, send it via Pony Express. Our mission, no matter how you get in touch, is to make you look like the hero.

9:09 Best Time of the Year for LinkedIn Advertisers All right, let's jump into the best time of the year for LinkedIn advertisers. So I'll throw this out. I am deeply religious. So I do say this as a joke, but January 2 every year is my Christmas. And that's because all of those market forces that made November and December just a terrible time to run LinkedIn Ads, that entire script flips when you jump into January. Now I say January 2, just to talk about after the first of the year. But in 2021. This year, it's going to be January 4, because the second is actually a Saturday and obviously, no one's going to be going to work. But here are the market forces that make January so amazing. It's the beginning of a new month, a new quarter and a new year. So there's going to be low demand from other advertisers meaning less competition and some of the cheapest clicks that you'll get the entire year. Then on the lead quality side, you have this low cost to get in with people, but now people are back from vacation. They have new budgets, fresh initiatives, they're thinking about making a big difference for the year. So they're going to come on LinkedIn and spend more time, they're gonna be a lot more interested in new and disruptive ideas and products and services. This will be the time of some of your highest conversion rates of the whole year. And then as soon as your sales team gets a hold of these leads, nothing is on their calendar yet, because it's brand new in the year, they haven't gotten slammed yet. So you'll see high lead quality and high conversion rates from like an MQL to an SQL kind of stage. Lots of people are thinking, hey, it's a new year new you. So they'll spend a lot of time on LinkedIn potentially looking at new roles, looking just to make a big difference in their life, along with their new year's resolutions. So January, in short, it's amazing. The lowest costs, highest conversion rates, highest lead quality. So my recommendation every year is to prepare everything in like early to mid December, so that you're all ready for a January 2 launch. And of course, you want to hit it really hard in January with really high performing creatives. So you might even run a little bit of a test in maybe late November or early December, just until you find some creative and an offer that you know is going to work, that way there's so little risk when you hit the go button on January 4. And of course, we have to mention what I call the summer lull, we see something similar to the November and December lull. But it's during the summer in the US. Presumably This is due to people taking vacations and mentally checking out, which is going to decrease your supply and if all advertiser demand stays constant, that's going to raise prices. And of course, us as advertisers, we are still advertising during that time, we may go out on vacations here and there. But the demand is going to stay pretty constant. But with that supply decrease, obviously that's going to bump your costs up a little bit. And then on the sales side with these mentally checked out people. And of course the example that you will probably see all the time, I need to loop Carla in here, but she's in the Bahamas this week. So let's push this to next. Those tend to lead to lower lead quality and depressed conversion rates from like an MQL to an SQL stage. In general, the way it looks on the platform is Q1 is going to be the best of the whole year, Q2 looks pretty good. It's kind of riding on the success of Q1, Q3 is pretty good other than just that summer lull. And then Q4 is great until Thanksgiving in the US happens.

12:45 What You Can Do So let's talk about what you can do about this to combat these. Well, you can plan to slow down your spend in November and December to compensate. We have a ton of clients who either scale way back during those months, or even fully pause their accounts after Thanksgiving, and then push all of that budget to go hard at the beginning of January. For those of you who've been listening for a while this won't come as any shock. But you should not be using automated bidding, or bidding within the recommended bid range, unless you absolutely have to. Automated bidding starts making sense when your click through rates are like three times the benchmark average. And you should only be bidding up if you're not getting enough traffic. So if you have a really competitive audience, and lower bids aren't cutting it, then yeah, you'll probably start to creep into the recommended bid range. But the reason why I'm telling you to avoid these things is automated bidding is where LinkedIn basically sets its own price. It's kind of like give us your wallet, and then we'll take whatever out of it we think we need, which basically makes everyone bid really high. And as the majority of advertisers are bidding high, it pushes the price of the auction up for everyone else too. And then those unrealistically high suggested bid ranges, those are hurting everyone too because it pushes competition up way faster than it should. As new advertisers jump in and they're taking the platform suggestions because they don't know better yet.Advertisers who spend inefficiently, don't get a return on their investment, then they end up cutting their spend for next month. And then LinkedIn sees them as a turned advertiser, someone who came in, tried and quit. So having the majority of advertisers using the default automated bidding, or bidding within the suggested bid ranges, even on small budgets. This hurts everyone, LinkedIn included, and it makes us all pay more. Just this morning, I was looking at graphs of some clients that we've been running some very large accounts over the last four years. And we noticed that in 2017 and 2018, we saw costs really rise in November in December, and then in 2019, it stayed flat and even improved. And this is because we took our own advice. During that time, we bid all the way down to the minimums, we bid all the way down to the floor, and we pulled budget back. And we saved that budget for the beginning of Q1. This podcast is coming out in mid October. So I'm giving you some time to prep, make sure you let your boss know, you let the CEO know, you let the board know that you're going to try to go light over the next couple months, and then push hard at the beginning of January. And of course, 2020 and 2021 will likely be very affected by COVID. So it may be very different than in past years. I know with this year, the summer travel season in the US and pretty much everywhere else, there weren't nearly as many people traveling because there wasn't anywhere to go or anything to do that didn't involve being shoulder to shoulder with people. And so the summer lull was likely a little bit smoother than it normally would be. And I do think that COVID will likely affect the 2021 summer as well, unless a miracle happens and everyone's vaccinated and the world goes back to not crazy times. This year holidays in North America, we'll likely see the same depression. But maybe we'll see fewer people traveling and more people spending time on LinkedIn. So maybe the effect will be a little bit less. But we'll see. I'll start running these analyses in February. Thanks for sticking around. I've got the episode resources for you coming right up.

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

16:33 Resources All right, I've got a few great resources for you. For more on LinkedIn pricing, definitely go back and listen to Episode 26. That one will give you the best look into pricing on LinkedIn that I've seen yet. If you're just now getting into LinkedIn Ads and could use a course, go and check out my course on the LinkedIn Learning platform called LinkedIn Advertising. It is incredibly detailed and incredibly inexpensive compared to if you were just to bring me in to train your team one on one. You will not be disappointed by the either $25 are free if you have a premium account on LinkedIn. If you liked what you heard today, make sure you hit the subscribe button on your podcast player right now. Don't worry, I'll wait. Yeah, just kidding. Make sure you rate and review the podcast as well. So leave a review and I'll be happy to shout that out. And then also with any suggestions you have for the show any topics you'd like covered or any questions you've got 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.

Show Resources:Split test calculator

Ep 07 - LinkedIn Ads Account Organization

Ep 15 - Benchmarking Your LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

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

Show Transcript:

Bro, do you even test? Yeah, we're talking AB testing your LinkedIn Ads today. Let's do this.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. LinkedIn Ads provides the absolute best testing ground for learning about your audience and your account. No other ad platform can match it. And over the years, we here at B2Linked have honed our account structure and testing strategy. And I'm about to reveal it all for free. The only thing I ask in return is that you ship me bottles of your local root beer. I'm just kidding. It's truly free. But I wouldn't hate on receiving root beer shipments. In the news, LinkedIn launched its new site redesign on desktop. And this probably went out to a third or a fourth of all LinkedIn members. So chances are that most of you by now have it. But I'll tell you, it's not a huge departure. It's very much a redesign, but not necessarily adding any new functions or really changing anything, except making the whole background gray and having rounded buttons instead of more squared off buttons. I'm kind of ambivalent on the whole thing. But I do appreciate how it doesn't really look like Facebook all that much anymore. It sure seemed like they were going pretty Facebook there for a while. Along with this release, LinkedIn released LinkedIn stories. So again, maybe most of you who are listening right now have this, I was part of that initial test group with LinkedIn stories. But quite frankly, I'm really scared to actually hit the button and release my first story, because I haven't ever used them on Snapchat on Instagram, or anything else. Stories is totally a new format of sharing for me. And I'm really excited to see how business to business does these well, because I really don't even know where to start. Maybe by the time you hear this, I'll have created my first story. The part that I'm most excited about with LinkedIn stories is if you listened to Episode 16, with Ting Ba from LinkedIn, she alluded to the fact that we were going to have stories first, and then we would have stories as an ad product. And every time I talked to someone at LinkedIn about stories, I asked them the same question, which was, is stories inventory exactly the same inventory as the newsfeed or does it have its own inventory? And the reason why I'm so curious about this is because when LinkedIn releases a new ad format that has its own inventory, what happens is that inventory all starts with zero competition, meaning a lot of times we get significantly cheaper traffic for sometimes a year or two. So I love getting new ad inventory. And sure enough, what I found out after stories released, this is its own inventory. So it starts with a fresh auction at zero competition. So as soon as these ads come out, man, I want to be the first one to launch one. I wanted to shout out a couple reviews here, both of them on Apple podcasts. Sydney&Marketing says, "It feels like cheating. There is so much valuable information that is shared. It feels like it's breaking the rules. His podcasts are beyond helpful." Sydney in marketing, thank you so much for leaving a very kind review. The next one is from Jaston on Apple podcasts as well. He says, "What a digital marketing podcast should be. The Golden Age of podcasts has arrived. And there are so many great marketing podcasts. But few are as valuable as AJ Wilcox's LinkedIn ads show. I have known and followed AJ for a number of years. And I was excited to hear that he had launched a podcast, especially on such an interesting topic as LinkedIn Ads. AJ is the pro of LinkedIn Ads. And so it just makes sense that he would find a way to easily communicate all the latest trends, info and insights. What I most appreciate about the podcast is that it jumps right into the applicable information around LinkedIn and applicable information around LinkedIn Ads. My favorite information that's been shared are LinkedIn Ads Roadmaps, Mommon LinkedIn Ads Media, Common LinkedIn Ads Performance Metrics, and the Best Ways To Get LinkedIn Ads To Perform. If you have interest in running LinkedIn Ads, then I highly recommend the podcast. If you are simply interested in hearing great discussions around digital media, then I think it has a lot of value. Thanks for the great podcast AJ." Now from the username Jaston. I know that this is Josh Aston, and he's the founder of above the Fold Digital. He's a fantastic senior marketer that totally understands the process from driving traffic all the way down to analytics and CRM integrations. He's the real deal. So Josh, thank you for the kind review. I also want to let you know that I regularly rope in the team here at B2Linked to pull research and help inform the topics that we bring up. So a big thank you to the B2Linked. I know AJ will Cox gets a lot of credit in the reviews and online. But this is very much a joint effort. So thank you to the whole team, I don't want you to think that I'm hogging it. All right, I want to feature you. So please do leave a review wherever you leave podcast reviews, Apple podcasts, Stitcher, anywhere, I'll find it and share it out and give you a shout. All right onto testing methodologies. Let's hit it.

5:23 Testing Approach Now when I say AB test, I actually don't mean testing in the same exact way that you would think a strict AB test is, I'm basically just talking about testing two things against each other. We try to do this in a smart way. So that we're comparing things that actually will tell us a result that we're looking for. And we try to keep the data as pure as we possibly can. I say this because one of my favorite AB tests, which isn't a pure AB test is where you test one offer against another offer. So let's say that you have a webinar coming up. And then you want to test that against a report or an E-book, you wouldn't call this a pure AB test, because both of these offers are very different. So you're going to have different imagery, different ad copy. But because the offer makes the biggest difference in your conversion rates, I still think this is super valuable. So if our clients have multiple different pieces of content or offers, that's probably the first test that we'll do. But then once we found a winning offer, we'll start doing pure A B tests. And these will be the same offer with ad versus ad. The first thing I like to test in the actual ad copy, if they're both going to the same offer, is intro vs. intro. And there are a few flavors here, you can have two different calls to action. So you can test which call to action gets people to take action. You can also test pain point against pain point, or motivation against motivation. And this can help you understand what your audience responds to best. What are they most motivated by? Is it fear based or aspirational? Is it statistics or clickbait, whatever it is, you can find that out with an intro vs. intro test. The next thing we'll test is headline vs. headline, I wouldn't do a headline vs. headline test until you've already tested your intro. Because that generally has the biggest effect on your click through rate. Then as soon as we see performance for an ad version starting to decline, then we'll do an image vs. image test where we take the best performing intro and headline and test two different images and see if we can find what kind of image catches people's attention best. And then let's say you settle on the best combination of intro, headline, and image. You could even go really advanced and do a landing page vs. landing page test, same ad copy going to two different landing page experiences. So you can test what elements of the page are getting people to convert better or worse. As you're doing these tests. Go back and listen to Episode 15 on benchmarks, because that's where you'll learn what benchmarks to watch for. You know, let's say you have two tests and one is outperforming the other, but if they're both performing below LinkedIn's average, then you might want to end the test early and scrap it. And there are several different metrics that you can watch to see how your ads and offers are doing. And I'll start from the least impactful metrics, and then we'll work towards the most important.

What To Look For:

8:27 Impressions So the first is impressions. If you see that one ad is receiving more impressions than another, what that teaches you is basically what LinkedIn thinks of the ad. If both of your variations are getting a similar amount of impressions, then you know that both have a similar relevancy score. And so LinkedIn is giving them traffic evenly. LinkedIn doesn't see a big difference in click through rates. And that's okay. The next metric to watch is actually your click through rate. And this is how you can tell what ad copy and what motivations are good at getting the customer's attention. Again, if your click through rates are similar, let's say one is a 0.8% and is 0.75%, those are so close I wouldn't say oh, yeah, let's do whatever got 0.8%, they really could be similar. But if one is a 0.4% and one's a 1.2%, you've got a winner.

Cost Per Click The next is watching your cost per click, because your cost per click really is a combination of both your audience competition, how your bidding, and how your ads are performing. And so especially across audiences, if you see significant changes in your cost per click, that teaches you something about how either that audience is responding to your ads, or the increased level of competition among different audiences.

9:48 Conversion Rate Next is your conversion rate. Your conversion rate is going to teach you how effective your offer is at getting people to take action. How attractive it is. We see really good conversion rates on LinkedIn of being 15% or higher. So compare that against your variations and see how you're doing and and which one wins.

Cost Per Lead The next is your cost per lead. And that is how much of an outlay and cost it requires to generate a lead, a conversion, an opt in, really whatever it is that you're going for. If you're spending a lot, or have been spending for a long time, then you could measure your ad differences by cost per lead, and tell which one is better at getting people to convert. So if you are testing things like ad copy, image, someone's motivation.

Click Through Rate The things that you're probably paying attention to, are going to be the click through rate. And in order to get enough data about your click through rates to make sure that they are significant, we found that that's usually, at least if you're in North America, you're usually going to be spending between $300 to $1,000 across those two ad variations. Make sure that you get enough volume so the results really are significant here. If you're paying attention to the cost per click across your tests, you probably want to spend about the same amount that same $300 to $1,000, but make sure that this goes over at least one calendar week. And that's because costs per click can vary significantly by day. So you don't want to have just a partial week and then have a messed up data set. And your cost per click will also vary as your ad performance adjusts over time as well. Now, if you've got larger budgets, you're probably going to be paying more attention to the conversion rate. And this is where I highly suggest that you get to because the conversion rate of your offer is a much better predictor of how well your your ads are going to be performing than any of your ad copy. It's deeper in the funnel and therefore more impactful. Your conversion rate is really going to vary based off of the type of conversion that you're promoting or call to action that you're asking for. If you do what we recommend, which is starting with a content offer, something like free gated content, you will likely average between about 10 to 15% conversion rates. And those conversion rates at average costs per click within the first thousand dollars in ad spend, you should have a good feel for an asset, whether it's an ultra high converter, or a total dog or somewhere in the middle. And then by the time you've spent about $5,000, you'll likely have statistical significance on your cost per conversion, and your conversion rates all the way to the 95% confidence interval. And this should tell you whether that offer is really hitting the mark or not. And if you should do more like that. Also, this many leads should give you a pretty decent feel with how the sales team is measuring and responding to the lead quality. And it should be a high enough quantity of leads that your conversion rates from let's say, marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead actually become meaningful. And of course, remember that the value behind LinkedIn ads is in the lead quality. So ultimately, how they result in those lower lead stages is really what matters. Now, if you're pushing people right to what I call a high friction asset, like right to a demo request or a free trial, or talking to sales, or buying something that will likely average somewhere between about 1.5% to a 4% conversion rate. And because that conversion rate is so much lower than if you were going to be releasing content, you'll have to spend significantly more to reach the same levels of significance. So keep that in mind, you might spend $5,000 to reach significance around content assets. And you might have to spend $25,000, to get the same thing around demo requests.

13:55 Statistical Significance Now I've been talking about statistical significance and it really is important to define it for our purposes here. What it is, is a statistical measure that's mathematically complex. And the output is kind of confusing. One time I built it manually in Excel and now I only use online calculators. But what it really boils down to is the difference between your two test variations that you're running is unlikely to happen by chance. Or in other words, that the winner of your test is actually the winner and not just a statistical anomaly. For AB tests in digital marketing, I use a 95% confidence interval, which is pretty high, but it's not the highest you can go. And what that would mean is we're 95% certain that the winner of the tests, the one that appears to be the winner is actually the winner. So if you need to make decisions faster, or maybe you have a lot less data, you can get to statistical significance faster. If you use something lower like a 90% confidence interval. If you want to calculate this, there are hundred online calculators if you just Google it. But my favorite so far is splittestcalculator.com. And if you scroll down to the show notes, you'll see a link to that. It makes this process super straightforward. So if you're testing the conversion rates between, let's say, two different assets, what you do is you take variation, one's number of clicks, and then you input variation two's number of clicks, and then down below, you put variation one's number of conversions, and then variation two's number of conversions. When you hit calculate, it'll tell you the conversion rate, and whether or not it's significant to that 95% confidence interval. And statistical significance is really hard for me to say. So from here on out, I'm just going to call it stat SIG. That'll be a lot easier on my tongue. So if you're testing the stat SIG around your click through rates, just put impressions in that same calculator instead of clicks, and then put clicks instead of conversions. The surprising way that stat SIG works is that your results will oscillate in and out of statistical significance quite regularly. So you want to make sure that you don't call the test too early. To keep from doing that, you may want to set an amount of spend that you're comfortable with as part of the test. And in statistics, we call that a horizon. So then go and check for significance as soon as you hit the horizon. And that should help protect your results, making sure you don't choose the wrong variation. And right now, I'm thinking through a way to have a live significance calculator for our LinkedIn Ads, so we can track when results become significant. And when they've oscillated out. So if anyone's done anything like that, reach out, and let me know I'd love to chat with you about that. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into exactly how we structure and account for testing.

16:52 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

17:01 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 $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and everyone you talk to here is a LinkedIn Ads expert. So you'll get the very best advice with no sales pitch. We're official LinkedIn partners, and we're the only LinkedIn Ads agency confident enough to share all of our secrets publicly on a podcast. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2linked.com, to chat about your campaigns, or heck send a postcard, our mission is always to make you look like the hero. Alright, let's jump into a bit more of a b testing as well as all reveal our secret sauce and how we structure accounts for testing.

17:43 There are a whole litany of AB tests that you can run. So depending on what it is that you're testing, here's what you can expect that to affect. So if you're running an image test, expect that to alter your click through rate. So if you're testing images, one against another, don't watch for the difference in your conversion rate, your conversion is so far away from the image that you probably won't see that much of a correlation. So watch your click through rate there. Images are much better at getting someone's attention, leading to a click. The next is if you are doing an intro or a headline test, because this is ad copy, it will very much affect your click through rate. But depending on the call to action, and how valuable you write the ad copy to be, you can actually affect conversion rates from here. So maybe test against your click through rate as well as your conversions. If you're testing differences on your landing page, or even on your LinkedIn lead gen form, you'll see those results directly affecting your conversion rates. And then if you are testing your offers, the offer itself really permeates through the entire funnel. Because a really attractive offer can make for some really attractive ad copy, teaching you about click through rates. Because a really good offer is really easy to write really good ad copy around. So you'll see that effect in your click through rates. But then, of course, the offer really is what it is that you're calling someone to action on, you're telling them this is what I want you to do. And so that will also influence your conversion rates. Back when I used to run a lot of Google Ads, I ran quite a few of what I called AAB tests. So what I would do is come up with an A and a B variation. But then I would launch an exact copy of the A. So there were technically three ads in that ad group, but two of them were identical. And the reason that I did this is because I could look at the difference between my identical ads. And that would help me understand how much variance I could expect in my data. So for instance, if click through rates were close, then I could assume that measuring my AA against my B would be a worthwhile pursuit. But if click through rates were very different, I knew I really couldn't trust the difference between my A and my B nearly as much. Now I'm ashamed to say that I don't do very many AAB tests on LinkedIn. So if you are currently running these, please reach out and tell me about it. I would love to see those results. All right on to the exciting stuff.

20:14 B2Linked Approach So what I'm about to present to you is the official patent pending. Patent is really not pending. The B2Linked approach to an account setup. We've honed the SAM account testing strategy over the years and it has worked really well for our AB testing and pulling insights out. What we do is we take the target audience, and we break them into small micro segments. Go back and listen to Episode Seven, if you haven't already, and dive into how that works. Then what we do is we launched the same A and B variations into each of those separate campaigns. So each campaign is running its own AB test. But it's the same AB test that's running in every other campaign across the account, get it? Now, because the whole account is running the same two ads, at any point in time we can roll all the results up to the whole account level and look at the difference between A and B variations, totally ignoring the fact that these are all across multiple audience segments. At any point in time, you're only 35 seconds away from getting this data by hitting export from campaign manager, throwing into Excel, creating a pivot table, and boom you're looking at it. And because each campaign is running the same ads, we can measure the difference between each of those campaigns being just the difference in the audience. So it's an AB test of audience vs. audience. So you might find something like hey, the click through rates are higher with director level than they are with VP level folks. Or maybe cost per click is lower when we target the audience by job function than with job title. And then you could use those learnings to find out how you get more traffic or cheaper traffic or better quality of leads. You can roll that data up to the account level at any time at any granularity and find insights fast. You can roll all of your similar types of targeting up, you can roll all of your similar sonorities up to learn about them, the world is your oyster. And then of course, each of those individual campaigns as they spend and amass data, you'll eventually be able to draw conclusions about them individually. So how this targeting type and this segment of the population converts to this exact offer. So really, I told you that this episode was all about AB testing. But the way I'm describing it to you is actually setting up a series of AB tests, that's AB tests around your ads, and AB tests around your audiences. And simultaneously running a giant multivariate test of ads against individual audience micro segments. Boom, talk about under promise over deliver, whoo, give myself a high five. If you are a total stats geek, and you're geeking out with me on this, then I'm sure you're going to be lured in by this concept of you can tell LinkedIn you want to rotate creative evenly, instead of optimizing to the best click through rate. So fight that urge. The reason why this is is it's really a misnomer in the way that LinkedIn presents it. It's not going to show both ads evenly to that audience. What it's going to do is enter them both into the auction evenly. But of course, LinkedIn is going to give different relevancy scores to each of those ads, meaning that the one that performs higher is going to get shown more, it's going to win more auctions, and it's going to win them at a lower price. And the poor performer won't show as often. So if you select this option, you'll find that even though you're rotating evenly, you still end up with a mismatch in your impressions and your clicks. So I call the rotate evenly option, the charge me more and show me less button. I don't like pushing that button. But there is a solution for this issue coming. LinkedIn announced that they're going to have a split test option coming where you'll effectively be able to split test your different ads against each other, and it actually will split them 50/50. I keep asking LinkedIn how this works with the auction and how it avoids falling into the same trap as the rotate ads evenly, but no one's gotten back to me on that one yet. I figure it's probably implemented the same way that Facebook's is because Facebook has an A B testing option as well. But I haven't found anyone who can tell me how Facebook pulls it off, either. So if any of you know reach out, I would love to hear how this interacts with the auction. All right, I've got the episode resources coming up for you right now. So stick around.

24:51 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

25:02 Resources Alright, got some great resources for you. The first is that split test calculator. It's called splittestcalculator.com. It's a great one to go and pop your your stats from your campaigns into and see if they're significant or not. The next is, if you haven't listened to it Episode 15, all about benchmarking, you'll see that option that link right in the show notes below. And you'll also see a link to Episode Seven, all about account structure. This will give you a little bit more insight into how we structure and account for manageability and for testing. And if you're new to LinkedIn Ads, or you have a colleague, who is point them towards the LinkedIn ads course on LinkedIn Learning. There's a link to that below as well and it's a great intro course into LinkedIn. And because it's on LinkedIn Learning, it is ultra cheap. It is literally 1/24th for the cost. If you had me come and train your team on exactly the same material. Make sure you look down at your podcast player and hit that subscribe button, make sure that you've got every one of these episodes coming at you. And please do rate the podcast. And then if you leave us a review, I would love to shout you out as well. And then finally, if you have any ideas or questions or topics that you'd want to cover here on the podcast, 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.

Show Resources:New! View your company page followers. New update to the playbook on targeting from LinkedIn

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

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

Show Transcript:

Here are five more common LinkedIn Ads mistakes. Are you making any of them? Just fix them quickly, and your boss will never know.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! One of our most popular episodes was the top five mistakes that LinkedIn advertisers make. That was Episode 18 in case you missed it. Make sure you go and listen to it is super valuable. Well, we tend to see a lot of mistakes happening so we put together five more. Again, in no particular order, you may be making some of these and others you might not. So let's jump into it. First, though, in the news, LinkedIn rolled out a new bidding interface. And it's not out to everyone, at least at the time of recording here, but it's on its way rolling out to everyone. And you'll notice it still defaults to auto bidding, but now that's called maximum delivery. And then within parentheses, it says auto bidding. The other option is manual bidding. And for each of these options, you can select the optimization action that you would like LinkedIn to optimize towards. So that is your clicks, leads, just impressions. And it's been interesting to test these out, but we still see that we get the best results from either auto bidding, if we have high click through rates, or bidding manual, enhanced CPC and bidding low if it's below. There was a great announcement that I'm super excited about. You can see the link in the show notes below. But now LinkedIn allows you to view your company page followers. And when you go and check that out, it will tell you the month that that person became a company page follower. So I'm really excited to use this data to visualize the growth of our company page. And I hope you are as well. Episode 31, if you remember, was an interview with Ryan Mcinnis from LinkedIn about the Brand and Demand playbook that they released. Well, they also released an updated version of the Targeting playbook. You'll also find that link there in the show notes that you can go and download that and check it out. I have kind of a mixed reaction to this one. I really like that when they updated it, they called the seniority that they call senior, they actually labeled it what it is, senior individual contributor. The vast majority of LinkedIn advertisers get tripped up by senior because they think oh, senior managers, senior directors, senior VPS. That's not what it's talking about. It's actually referencing someone who's not entry level, but not yet a people manager. It's exactly what they're saying. It's an individual contributor, that they call senior for some reason. So that was really cool to see them point out. But I was put off a little bit because going through there, you'll see that they include a recommendation for enabling audience expansion. And if you've listened to more than like three episodes, you know my stance on audience expansion and how I think it's utter and complete garbage. So maybe research it and take that advice with a grain of salt, realizing that some is probably good, some might not be so good. But you'll want to make that call. It's probably worth checking out at least what LinkedIn recommends. What LinkedIn recommends for targeting is a lot of what we recommend too if you've been listening. A shout out to Ron Halpern, who left a review for us, and he says, "One stop shop for all LinkedIn ad info. This podcast is my secret weapon at work. It keeps me up to date and current on things that make me invaluable. Thanks to AJ, his passion and his ability to break down the very info around marketing on LinkedIn. If you're looking to run ads on this platform, you must listen to AJ. The performance benchmarks he shares make it worth it 100% on their own, but he is so ridiculously abundant with his knowledge, even a hardened pro would find his podcast valuable." Ron, I'm so glad that me and the team can be here to be your secret weapon at work. We're super happy to superpower you and sincerely thanks for leaving such a stellar review and sharing it out to the world. That's so incredibly meaningful to us. The next is from BarrettDastrup, who says, "Can't believe this info is free. I've been listening consistently for less than a week and have already applied multiple bits of advice I've picked up from AJ. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for just getting to the point and packing this time with only the useful information. no fluff here. Love it." Barrett, I'm so glad you appreciate that no fluff style. Personally, I just can't stand content where it feels like they're trying to hold stuff back or they themselves don't have a deep enough understanding to go deep. So I'm so glad that you appreciate that as well. That's definitely our style. Okay, I totally want to feature you. So make sure you leave a review on any podcast player that you use, and I'll totally give you a shout. And if you don't want to be shouted out publicly, well instead just tell your friends at work about the show privately or leave a review with an anonymous name. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it.

4:54 Wrong Objective Again in no particular order, one of the biggest mistakes that we see is people selecting the wrong objective. Last week's episode was Episode 34, all about objectives. So make sure you go and listen to that to go a little bit deeper here. But at a high level, when you're presented with LinkedIn objectives, and you see something like oh conversions, and you think, yeah, I'm going for conversions, and you select that option, I would totally understand where you're coming from. Unfortunately, LinkedIn is usually optimizing for max, and not for cheapest or most efficient. What this means is, if you're optimizing for conversions, LinkedIn is going to go out and bid as high as it needs to, to try to get the most amount of conversions. And they're not optimizing for what we see most advertisers care about, which is getting the right volume, but not at crazy costs. So go and listen to last week's episode about objectives to dive deeper into them. And it's really helpful to understand what you think you're optimizing towards, versus what LinkedIn actually is optimizing towards, or at least attempting to. The one that really seems to trip people up is the lead generation objective. Because everyone goes in and goes, yeah, I'm generating leads, that's what I'm looking to do so they click that, just to find out that when they create the campaign and start creating ads, that can't send traffic to their website, because lead generation as an objective, ropes you into only doing the native lead generation form ads. So they're definitely worth understanding at a deeper level. And do make sure that you put in the work to understand what each of the objectives do, so that you can ensure that you're selecting the proper one. And if your goal really is to spend all of your budget and you don't care about efficiency, then the objectives that LinkedIn gives, you actually should line up very nicely. But if your goal is efficiency, you'll probably end up using an objective differently than LinkedIn would recommend.

6:49 Wrong Size of BudgetThe next big mistake here in our list is advertising with the wrong size of budget. And we covered budget in Episode 19 really deeply, so go have a listen to that. But this really goes both ways. Advertisers with too large of a budget, and advertisers with way too small of one. The most common here is we regularly see advertisers who read our recommendations of you know, budgets of $5,000 a month, and say, "Well, I don't really have that kind of budget, but I'm gonna give it a shot anyway." And of course, you're dealing with small sample sizes here, so some tend to get lucky and they'll close a deal in a very small amount of spend, or they'll happen to get a really high conversion rate with just a few clicks. But most don't really get lucky like that. And just remember that the real value of LinkedIn is in the lead quality, which really isn't measurable from the platform itself. To adequately test the lead quality, you've got to get these leads into your CRM and compare them against other lead sources. So that you can tell that, yes, LinkedIn ads are generating traffic that are so high quality, that even though we have to pay three to five times more for each lead, they're definitely worth at least three to five times more to me. We talked to a lot of people who are saying, let's advertise for a month, and then we'll see if the return on investment is there. And I always have to stop them and say, well, you're not going to see a return on your investment after one month when your sales cycle is six to 10 months or even 15 months or longer. So same warning, if you go in with too small of a budget, or too tight of a timeframe that you hope to see results in, you'll probably be a little bit disappointed. But what about the other side? What about having too large of a budget? Usually, what happens if your budget is too large, you'll end up just paying too much for traffic. And then later, when you do your analysis, LinkedIn will look really inefficient. And you'll end up cutting the budget anyway. The way that this works is if you're using auto bidding, LinkedIn is going to look at your massive budget and say, "Oh, I'm going to bid really insanely high to make sure that I can spend all that budget to this audience." But if you're bidding really intelligently, let's say you're using manual bidding, you'll still likely end up bidding really high manually, just to make sure that you can spend your budget. And as you know, as your click costs go up, so do your costs per lead. And the channel will end up looking really inefficient. At some point in the ecosystem in the in the bidding auction environment, you end up passing this point of diminishing returns, where LinkedIn will keep charging you more for each click. But, it won't when you additional traffic volume in the auction, it won't get you additional impressions, you're just paying more for each individual impression. So I'm a big fan of starting out small start on smaller budgets. And then once you've nailed it, then worry about scaling it. And if you're scaling up from starting low, it's really easy to see that line of diminishing returns, as you said, "Oh I raised my bids from $14 to $14.50 and my cost per click went up by 50 cents, but I didn't get any additional impressions for that money." It's a lot simpler to do. So as you're pitching your boss or the board or the CEO, or whomever, make sure you ask for a budget, usually to start with between $5,000 and $10,000 per month, and then it's really easy to scale up or even back from there. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into more common mistakes.

10:28 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

10:37 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you be to linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $130 million on LinkedIn Ads, and getting you the lowest costs and the highest quality leads is our focus. And we're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners, and we don't have a sales team. So you'll deal with a LinkedIn Ads expert from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of b2b linkedin.com, to chat about your campaigns. Or Heck, send a carrier pigeon or smoke signal, our mission is always to make you look like the hero. Alright, let's jump into the next three common mistakes that you might be making on your LinkedIn Ads.

11:16 Not AB Testing One big mistake that we see people make is that they're not AB testing, they're not running any testing in their account. And for the record, this topic deserves its whole own episode. But just touching on it lightly. Because LinkedIn targeting is so tight, and so good, it enables you to get to run, like what I call silent focus groups. You can use your targeting to define very specific small, tight knit groups that all have something in common. And if you run the same ad, or the same two ads to these two separate audiences that are similar, but varied by one thing, it's really like getting to run a focus group. And you get to find out what your prospects like what they don't like, and what will get them to convert. So for instance, if I'm targeting marketing decision makers, I could make it really easy for myself and just target job function of marketing, and seniority of everything manager and above. And that's one campaign. It would be really easy to manage. Ceate two ads within it, and I'm done. But the problem with that is that you'll end up with all of the results that you get with nothing to compare it to. And if results are bad, or if they're good, you don't have any sort of levers that you can pull, or even learn from. So instead do something like a separate campaign for marketing managers, another for directors, another for marketing VPs, and a final one for CMOS. And you run the same two ads across them, and you find out, Oh, wow, it's less expensive to reach CMOS than we thought, or marketing managers aren't really resonating with our content. Those are the types of insights that you can get. A lot of times we see campaigns with only one ad running in them. And that sure seems like a waste, because it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to create one additional ad. And then you'll get to learn about what motivation is driving your potential customer, you can look at the cost per click, and the click through rate to understand how engaging each version of the ads are. And of course, down the line your conversion rates as well. So if you're only running one ad, you're missing that ability to have a second version to compare against. So you just kind of have to take whatever performance you get. And then we also see the opposite of this mistake, which is also a mistake of trying to test too much. Because LinkedIn is targeting ability is so good. Many are tempted to create way too many audiences or way too tight of targeting that creates tiny audiences. Now remember that every campaign has to have a minimum budget of $10 per day. So do the math at you know, at least $300 per month for each campaign and see if that would make you overspend your budget. So don't create so many campaigns that even at the minimums you're gonna overspend your budget. And even if you don't overspend your budget, you may end up getting so few results on each small campaign, that you don't really learn anything about those audience segments anyway. You're going to look at them at the end of the month and say, I can't take action on a campaign with only 20 clicks. So maybe I'll let this go for another month. And then that goes on adn on. My personal rule of thumb is to make sure that each campaign has a budget of at least $1,000 per month, at minimum. And that way, if I have a an introductory budget of $5,000 per month, I'm not going to go and create 20 campaigns. Along the same lines as over targeting. There's also running too many ads at a time. And of course there are exceptions to this rule. But in general, I would say don't be tempted to run more than two ads inside of any given campaign because if you do Some of your variations will get fully ignored. And then I wonder why would you even worry about creating variations that will just get labeled with a poor relevancy score, and they'll never see the light of day. They'll never get enough data to actually compare anything. So if you run two at a time, you'll always get enough data across both of those variations to at least get a flavor of what's going on. We covered this in Episode 29, about Ad saturation. But if you have more than two ads in a campaign, it will cause your campaigns to be able to be shown to the more active members, more often. Which sounds good, except what you'll end up doing is fully saturating the most active users of LinkedIn, and then not giving proper coverage to everyone else. But if you're always running two at a time, you're going to saturate pretty evenly.

15:48 Targeting Too Broadly The next mistake we see is targeting too broadly. And there's a couple different variations of this, there's where your audience size is too large, or your targeting is too broad, and you're going to be getting less qualified people in there. We'll tackle that one first. So if you're targeting too broadly, it's probably because when you were setting up your audiences, you were feeling this FOMO or fear of missing out, because you were looking at the targeting options and thinking, Oh, well, we'll be missing out on that one lone diamond in the rough, if we don't include the adjacent department, to the people that we're actually trying to target. In my mind, I see the these like, like concentric circles, or even a Venn diagram, where your most core audience is the very center, and they're the ones that you should fully concentrate on. And then once you've fully covered your most core, the highest impact users, then you can start looking at ways to branch out and reach a few more people that way, I'm sure we all have a story where we got some golden lead from someone who, when we looked at them on LinkedIn, they didn't fit the targeting criteria that we would usually call the perfect customer. But try to overcome that FOMO and instead, just worry about fully attacking your absolute core of prospects first, then once you've nailed it, you can scale out more broadly. On average, your core group of users will be the most efficient. So don't get FOMO and think, well yeah, I guess an accountant could be interested in my service. We see this one quite regularly, where we see audiences get built with too large of a size. And what happens here is you won't learn much about your audience, because you'll see all of those results coming into one large segment. And like we talked about before, if you're just looking at one large segment, there's nothing to compare against. So if we talk about that original example, targeting marketers, breaking them up by seniority, so that you can learn what levels of seniority interact with your content, or offers in certain ways. But it doesn't have to be seniority. You could break up by geography, or skill, company size, basically anything that you want to compare performance for, and then learn from the difference. You can break up your campaigns, I really like to see audiences between about 20,000 to 80,000. So if I have an audience that's much larger than that, I'll just find some arbitrary excuse to break it up into into two or three or five. So then I'm learning exactly what my ideal prospects like what they don't. And I get to learn from that silent focus group. Alright, I've got the episode resources coming up for you. So stick around.

18:37 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more?  AJ Wilcox, take it away.

18:47 So check out these articles that we talked about in the news section. The first is and these will be right for you in the show notes. There's a link where you can see how to view your company page followers. That's really cool going all the way back historically on the month and year that that person started following you. Super cool, I was excited for that. The next is the article on the new update to the playbook on targeting from LinkedIn. So definitely worth having a look to see if they're suggesting anything that you haven't considered before. And then if you're trying to learn LinkedIn Ads, or if you have a colleague, or a friend who is, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning, I think it's only $25. Or it's free if you have a professional subscription to LinkedIn. And it's a really good intro to LinkedIn Ads. Take a look down at your podcast player and make sure that that subscribe button is all lit up. That way you'll make sure to not miss an episode. And please do rate the podcast and leave us a review. If you're willing to I'd love to shout you out. And as always, reach out to us at [email protected] with suggestions for episodes and topics, questions, or anything your little heart desires. With that being said we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

Episodes we referenced:
Ep 17 - LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Ads - Should You Use Them?
Ep 26 - LinkedIn Ads are so expensive. Why is that?

Article on MarketingLand

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

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

Show Transcript:

The objective that LinkedIn Ads is optimizing towards is not the objective you are optimizing for as an advertiser. And that means you can take advantage of it, if you know how the objectives work.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So objectives on LinkedIn came out in early 2019. And we even had Episode Four with Amita Paul from LinkedIn about how LinkedIn is thinking about these objectives. And if you've managed Facebook Ads before, this was probably a very comfortable change. But I certainly did not appreciate the transition to objectives, as it added a lot more complexity to us as advertisers for not much additional value. But now that we've got experience with all of the objectives, we found the tips, tricks, and hacks on how to use them to our advantage, and I'm super excited to share them with you. Highlighting a couple of recent reviews, Neil Benson over on pod chaser says, "I took a Jays LinkedIn ads course on LinkedIn learning, and now I'm diving into his podcast to get deeper into the topics I need to learn to drive wildly successful LinkedIn ads campaigns. It's only been two days since AJ showed me how to create a campaign and I've spent $60 for eight leads so far. By the time I've listened to all the episodes, we'll know how many of those leads became paying students." Neil, thank you so much for leaving such an awesome review. That makes my little ginger heart so proud that you're seeing results already. So keep it up cheering you on. And then Christie McCabe, who is an Aussie from the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. She works at an agency called Clevvi. And she says, "The go to podcasts for LinkedIn ad strategy. AJ has always been my go to resource for any questions related to LinkedIn advertising, I was so excited to see he launched a podcast so I can upscale while commuting, walking, etc. His podcast episodes are succinct, informative, and so giving valuable information and examples. AJ is genuine and helpful, sharing years of study and trials with us, which is so appreciated." Christy, you totally made my day. Thank you so much for saying such kind words. And if you found value by listening to the podcast, please do leave a review. And I want to help feature you. Okay, let's hit it.

2:21
So we're diving headlong into objectives here. And before we had objectives, what was it like? Well, we just had two bidding options, there was CPC bidding, cost per click, and there was CPM bidding, cost per thousand impressions. And if you look at anything that LinkedIn published, they would always say the same thing, "if your goal is getting impressions bid CPM, and if your goal is getting clicks, bid CPC", and it probably took me a little bit too long to figure this out. But that's really not good advice. And I ended up writing an article for MarketingLand back in 2015. And I've linked to it in the show notes. But it details the reason why this is actually really bad advice. And it it's because as a performance marketer, my goal is to get the lowest cost per result possible. And so I've done a lot of testing on different bid models, bidding high and low in both CPC and CPM. And I found that whatever bid model is that you're using whatever produces the lowest cost per click, also results in the lowest cost per impression, and vice versa. And the one factor here that all of this depends on which bid model you want to use, it's totally based off of your click through rate or your engagement rate. And so this is the concept that I developed where you've probably heard me say before, if your click through rates for sponsored content are over 1%, that's when you want to bid CPM. And when they're under that you want to bid CPC, but low. And regardless of what your actual goal or objective is, if you want the lowest cost per impression, or lowest cost per click, lowest cost per lead, you could follow this guideline, and that would give it to you. You've probably heard of eCPC or eCPM, and that means your effective cost per click or your effective cost per impression. And the way this works is if you're bidding for impressions, you can still see, in the dashboard, what your effective cost per click would be. So check this out and see no matter what objective and no matter what bid type you're using, go and take a look at the CPC column inside of campaign manager. You can even customize the columns and put CPC next to CPM and see if this holds true. And of course, you're all sophisticated marketers, so you might not be saying the same thing. But I hear a lot of people saying, well, cost per click isn't the end all be all. And it's true cost is important, but it's not the most important thing. But when we're comparing bid models, you have to assume that your conversion rate is going to stay the same and be held constant. And so if you do this, if you're looking to reduce your cost per lead, the way you do that is by reducing your cost per click. So we're always looking for any way to reduce the costs. And of course, still fill your budget. And inevitably, when you tell your LinkedIn rep, that this is what you're doing, you're trying to lower your cost per click, they will certainly tell you that you need to bid more competitively because that will give you a better conversion rate, and lead quality. And so I've done a lot of testing around this. I wanted to find out, if I bid really high did my lead quality increase? And if I bid really low, and I was scraping the bottom of the barrel for these leftover audience members, did my lead quality decrease? And in every case, we actually haven't found a difference in lead quality. And we've run a lot of data through this test. So I don't think that holds water. But of course, I'd love to hear from you if you've found differently. So then LinkedIn rolled out objectives in early 2019. It was actually in late 2018, where it was an open beta, that anyone could switch back to the old interface if they wanted. But when we saw this, the very same issues came up again. And that is, when you look at the objectives, LinkedIn says to pick the objective that you want to optimize for. And that's what they'll go after, they'll try to optimize for the same thing. But we found very quickly that that's not always correct, or even most of the time. So to understand this concept, you'll need to separate the idea in your head, that the objective that you choose in LinkedIn is actually the best objective for you if your goal matches that objective name. I know that's a little complex. So I'll give you an example here. If your objective is lead generation, because your boss said, we need to generate leads, then you'd probably go and try to select lead generation as your objective. And then you find out after selecting the lead generation objective, that all that means is now your ads are going to have a native lead generation form attached to them. And you may have wanted to generate a lead from your landing page form. So it certainly is worth understanding LinkedIn's definition of objectives. And of course, we'll find ways to use this to your advantage as well. The principle here is that the objective that you select in a campaign means that LinkedIn attempts to optimize towards that objective, but the definition of optimize is going to be different, I think, for you as the advertiser, then it means to LinkedIn. For LinkedIn, optimizing means volume, and they're usually not too concerned with cost efficiency. And for my experience, the advertisers goal is usually quite the opposite. Efficiency first, and volume second. The reason why LinkedIn optimizes towards this, I think they figured out very early on that it's worse to have an advertiser say, I put in my credit card, I developed campaigns, and it didn't spend anything, than it was to have someone come and say, I tried out LinkedIn Ads, and they were too expensive. And you might feel like this is more of a cash grab, like if LinkedIn is gonna charge people anyway, you might as well take their entire budget. But in talking to LinkedIn's product management team, I don't feel like that's the case, I don't feel like this is purposely grabby or being greedy or trying to rip anyone off. But I certainly see how this can feel. And I feel like that when a new advertiser goes in to create their first campaign, it's really daunting to look at this list of seven objectives, and immediately have to pick, ahhh, this is what I feel like is more my objective today. And I'd love to simplify this. So in my mind, it's so much easier to take out the things that aren't really all that valuable, leaving you with only the best ones to try. So let's walk through some of the objectives that I recommend avoiding.

Objectives To Avoid

8:36
Brand Awareness
The first is brand awareness as an objective, and I recommend this zero percent of the time, it's quite literally worthless. The reason why is the only thing that brand awareness as an objective has to optimize towards is people seeing the ad. And seeing the ad is exactly the same thing as an impression. And it doesn't make any sense to me that an ad platform can optimize towards showing impressions to people who happen to see impressions. And it would be okay, even if there's really no algorithm attached here. Except if you look at your bidding and budgeting, you can't actually change your bid. If you choose brand awareness as your objective, the only option you have, which really isn't an option is CPM bidding. So having a platform optimized towards showing impressions, it's not really a thing, I would just ignore this one altogether. If my goal is awareness, I would much rather go for something like the engagement objective, and then have the freedom to change my bid style based off of what I need, as well as whatever is going to give me the best costs.

9:41
Website Conversions
The next one, and I know this is going to be controversial, but it's website conversions. I see people using this objective every single day. And it makes a lot of sense. If my goal is to get conversions, of course I would want to optimize towards that. But the challenge here is LinkedIn is attempting to optimize towards those that it feels are most likely to convert. But LinkedIn really has imperfect data here. The only data it really has is back in 2016, when they launched conversion tracking, and of course, there were so many people who installed it incorrectly, we've seen plenty of that, where it's firing a conversion for every landing page view or something like that. It meant that the data really isn't all that great. And the fact that this didn't come out till 2016, when everyone else has had conversion tracking for years and years and years, it means that there's a pretty small data set here. But of course, we have lead generation form ads. And for that, conversion tracking is absolutely perfect. It's flawless. This is a conversion that is occurring on Linkedin.com. LinkedIn sees everything about that conversion about who did it. And so that data is really good. But of course, we've only had that for a little while, too, we've had that for I think two or three years. So even if we assume all of the data is perfect, you look at Facebook, and Facebook probably has the best data scientists in the world working there. Facebook also has tons and tons of interaction and interest data. And I don't really know, but I'm guessing it's probably 1,000 to 10,000 times more data that Facebook has about us than what LinkedIn has about us. And even with all of that crazy amount of data, Facebook still recommends 50 to 100 conversions per week, per ad set for their conversion objective to work properly. So think about that 50 conversions per week per campaign, how many advertisers do you know who are spending large enough and having a high enough conversion rate to even do that on LinkedIn? Do you know? I can count on one hand the number of accounts, I know who can actually hit that. So I don't have a whole lot of faith in the website conversions objective, I just don't think that we have enough data most of the time for it to work. We've done quite a bit of testing. And what we've found is turning on website conversions objective versus just website visits, it was totally a coin flip as to whether things would improve or deprove, if that's a word. So sure, the data is maybe imperfect and the algorithm doesn't really have enough data to work with. But the real nail in the coffin for me on website conversions objective is that all of those advertisers who are using the conversions objective, they are providing extra competition in the auction, and they are willing to bid more for conversions. And so everyone's bidding each other up. So your cost per click and cost per conversion will likely be much higher on website conversions than it would be for just traditional website visits. And I don't think it's a bad thing to test, I would just start with website visits first, and then launch a website conversions version of it side by side and just test to see if you got any value out of it. Like I said, for me, the experience has really been a coin flip as to whether it's it does anything at all.

12:59
Video Views
The next objective here is video views. So there is definitely a good reason to use video views objective, but I only recommend it to about 5% of video advertisers. And I know your jaw just dropped. So I'm going to explain this. Running video ads, especially on LinkedIn, it's just higher risk than running static ads. And that's because with a video ad, you really have two calls to action in everything. The first call to action is please watch this video. And then your second call to action is whatever you want them to do afterwards, click to our landing page or fill out this form. And in order to count as a view on LinkedIn, someone just has to watch for two seconds or more as it's playing there in their feed. And for my experience, it's usually about a quarter of everyone who will count as a view. So if you have 1,000 impressions, you'll probably end up with 250 views. And that's not much of a commitment to stick around for two or more seconds. So it doesn't tell me that someone's actually interested. Which means if I'm paying by a cost per view of a video, or even cost per impression, I won't really know how that's performing because my cost per view or cost per impression, it will just look higher than what it was when I was running a static ad against it. And I'm not telling you don't run video because video is a very powerful medium and LinkedIn video ads can be really good, especially because they just released the ability for us to to retarget video viewers. But what many of you may not know is that if you choose your objective of website visits, you can actually run video creative inside of that, which means you can still show your ad to people and it's video, it's going to play automatically. But now you're only going to pay when someone actually clicks on whatever your landing page is. And the same thing works with lead generation objective. You're only going to pay when someone opens up the form. And because opening the form or clicking to my landing page is a much stronger action, it's a much better signal to me to know whether or not I have a good engagement rate or poor. So I'm a big fan of start your video campaigns out on a cost per click basis. And then if you find that your engagement rate is really high, then it makes sense to launch a video views campaign, and then bid by either cost per view, or cost per impression, whichever is less expensive. And that'll have you saving some money. And like we talked about before, with whatever objective that minimizes your cost per impression will also minimize your cost per click, the same rule applies with a cost per view as well. So you just want to see your effective cost per view, effective cost per impression, and effective cost per click as low as possible. And you use whatever objective or whatever bidding model gets you there.

15:56
Job Applicants
And the last objective I would tell you to avoid is job applicants. Now, if you're just using LinkedIn for recruiting, it's totally possible that this could be a really good objective for you. But quite honestly, I haven't used it very much. And I can't see how this would actually be more beneficial than just using any of the other objectives, and targeting just those with the trait of job seekers. And of course, that way, you'd actually have more freedom, you could choose whichever ad format you wanted, you could choose whichever bid model you wanted. So I just don't see much of an advantage to having this as an objective. But please let me know if you've experienced otherwise. Okay, we're gonna take a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive back into which objectives you do want to use.

16:40
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17:23
Objectives You'll Want To Use and How To Use Them
Alright, let's jump back into the objectives that you'll want to use and how to use them.

Website Visits
So when I'm considering which objective I want to run for a campaign, the first thing I'm going to do is decide whether my traffic is going to my website, or I'm keeping them on LinkedIn. And if you're trying to decide between the pros and cons there, check out Episode 17 on lead generation form ads, and that'll go way deep into it and you'll know your answer there. And if you want your traffic to go to your website or a landing page, you can't go wrong with website visits. I love it because it's the lowest risk type of ad format and objective. The reason for that is you're going to pay only when someone clicks to your website. So you're not going to pay when someone clicks like or when they go to follow your company, or when they just click to go see your company, or how about when they comment below. All of those actions would otherwise be payable, but because you selected website visits as your objective, you're only going to pay for those clicks to your landing page. It makes it ultra low risk. And it's a great place to start. And if you are sending traffic to your landing page or your website, you can totally own it. You can track all of your tracking with really complex or beautiful UTM parameters. You can retarget that traffic with your other channels like Facebook and Google. And inevitably, you'll end up with higher lead quality, because that person has been to your website, and they've received a stronger branding impression than they would have by not visiting your website. And you also have a lot of freedom here and how you bid, you can bid cost per click cost per thousand impressions and auto bidding. You'll even now see target cost per click, which we've talked about before, not my favorite bidding model. But there's a lot of freedom here and how you bid. But if you do want to just keep your traffic on LinkedIn and take advantage of the higher conversion rates that you get by not transitioning someone from one website to another. You can do that with LinkedIn's lead generation form ads, which can be attached to any sponsored content. That's your newsfeed ads, or any sort of sponsored messaging ads, so sponsored messages or conversation ads.

19:34
Lead Generation
You'll remember from Episode 17, how we talked about lead gen forms produced the cheapest leads possible, generally conversion rates that are 10 to 50% higher than if you sent to a landing page. But because LinkedIn made it so easy, you're probably going to see a diminished quality of lead. As of recently we can start to retarget anyone who interacts with that form, so whether someone opened it or whether they filled it out, both of those actions we can target or exclude from our campaigns now, which is amazing. They've got the same flexibility in bidding, we can bid by cost per click cost per thousand impressions, or an auto bid.

20:13
Engagement
And then you have engagement as an objective. Now, I love engagement, simply because it allows me to hack the algorithm a little bit. The deal with engagement is you actually pay for any interaction on the ad, you're going to pay whether someone clicks to your landing page, or whether they click like, comment, share, a click to your company page, or any other interaction. And so if you're bidding cost per click, that sure could add up to a bunch of people who aren't taking the actions you want them to take. But here's why I like it so much. The bid floors on engagement are 35% lower than they are when you choose website visits or lead generation objective. So basically, that means that if you use engagement as an objective, it's possible to get a 35% reduction in your costs. And if you check out Episode 26, all about what makes LinkedIn Ads so expensive, you'll learn more about this. So here's how I decide whether or not I want to use the engagement objective. I'm going to launch a website visits campaign or a lead generation campaign. And if I look at those sponsored content, and I see that less than 35% of my clicks are coming from social actions, then I know it's going to be cheaper to use the engagement objective and be able to bid 35% lower and go ahead and pay for those extra interactions. We've done this where the ads that we launch, they just don't tend to get interactions, they don't tend to get likes, comments, shares or company follows. And this is great, we run those as engagement ads and of course, 100% of the clicks or near it are going to the landing page, and we're able to pay 35% less. It's pretty cool. And of course, if you know this, if you know how the objectives are charged, and what they optimized towards, you can have some cool hacks, you can do some fun things. Some examples of this could be things like a quiz that where you're specifically asking for engagement, but you set the objective as website visits. So all those actions will be free and you'll only pay for a few people clicking. And of course, you can send that traffic to somewhere where it might be valuable anyway, like a demo page or something. And this can play double duty here as well. Because I'm sure as many of you know, anytime that someone takes a social action on LinkedIn, liking, comment, or resharing, it then helps that post go viral. It becomes eligible to be seen by that person's followers and connections. So if you can do this in an ad and get people to want to engage socially, then you'll get a ton more viral views and clicks. A similar kind of hack you could do is you could run a video ad on cost per click with website visits as your objective. And then make the call to action a social engagement. Like if you agree or comment with why you disagree, something like that. And again, that would also help it really go viral. And please reach out. Let me know any cool and interesting ways that you've found to hack LinkedIn's objectives to get better pricing. Okay, I've got the episode resources coming up for you. So stick around.

23:30
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

As promised, check down below in the show notes for the article that I wrote on MarketingLand back in 2016 about bid type objectives. It's certainly older, but it'll help you understand the principle of whatever bidding gets you the lowest impression cost will also get you the lowest cost per click. You'll see a link to Episode 17 on lead gen forms, which will help you understand your objectives, as well as Episode 26 about why LinkedIn ads are so expensive. That'll help you understand the engagement objective and when and how it's less expensive. Check out the course on LinkedIn learning or LinkedIn Ads. I'm the author of it. And it's an incredibly inexpensive and great way to train yourself or your staff, whoever is looking to get started at LinkedIn Ads. On whatever player you're listening, look down and hit the subscribe button and as soon as you found value in anything that I've shared, make sure to rate. And please leave a review. I would love to shout you out. I give shoutouts to anyone who leaves a review. With any questions or topic 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.