LinkedIn Ads Show

Show Resources:

Find which companies use competitors' products:
Datanyze.com
BuiltWith.com

Episodes we referenced:
Ep 10 - What should you offer from your LinkedIn Ads?
Ep 15 - Benchmarking Your LinkedIn Ads
Ep 17 - LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Ads - Should You Use Them?
Ep 27 - Agile Testing For Your LinkedIn Ads Management
Ep 29 - LinkedIn Ads Saturation - Are you experiencing it?
Ep 30 - LinkedIn Ads Newest Features and Future Roadmap

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 ask, we answer. The great Q&A episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show coming right atcha. Buckle up.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. A huge thank you to all you who submitted questions for our first Q&A episode. You certainly didn't throw any softballs. So you're about to get an eclectic mix of some of the most challenging issues that you'll face on LinkedIn Ads. A quick dip into the reviews. Raul Hernandez Ochoa says "best in class. AJ delivers real value from experience, love the actionable insights." Raul, thank you so much for saying that. I trust your opinion more than almost anyone out there. For those who don't know, Raul hosts the #DoGoodWork podcast, and he is the master of systems and productivity. So he's definitely worth listening to and following. And then Felicia Gheorghe, who's a paid social pro at a company called DHI in Copenhagen says, "Good stuff. Probably the best podcast on the interwebs. Hands on and no generic advice. Love it. Thank you, AJ Wilcox, for making this happen." Felicia, I don't know that I would agree that it is the best podcast on the interwebs. But heck, yeah, I'll take it. I would absolutely love to feature you. So please leave a review wherever you tend to review things and I'd love to shout you out and feature you here.

Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. Leonardo Bellini, from Italy, says my question is this one, "Which is the best trade off between available budget and campaigns granularity? If I have, let's say, a 5000 euro budget, does it make sense to split the budget into say four campaigns?" I know you're a big fan of running more campaigns in parallel using different audience targeting options. And Leonardo, this is a great one because I am a huge fan of splitting up audiences into smaller segments so that I can learn something. I treat each small segment like a private focus group that no one else can see. But if we break up too granularly, we definitely end up hitting some roadblocks. For instance, each campaign has to have a minimum $10 or 10 euro budget for the day, if you break your audience up into two smaller groups, each one could spend $10 or 10 euro per day, which is $300, or 300 euro. And if I take a look at a campaign after it's spent $300, or 300 euro, my reaction is honestly going to be well, that is not enough data to actually tell what's going on. So I need this to run longer. And then at the same time, if you take your 5,000 euro budget, and you break that up into 20 campaigns, just at the minimum of 10 euro per day, you're going to overspend your budget by twice. So breaking up too small really does have its disadvantages. I like to shoot for about $1,000 per month or 1,000 euro per campaign. So if a budget is $5k, I'd probably do about five campaigns max. And then when budgets get into the $100k range, the six figures, I'll go a little bit further, we can do 100 to 150 campaigns pretty easily. But don't take these numbers as an absolute constraint. We run campaigns all the time with 300 people in them. So it just depends on whether or not it's worth your time to manage a small audience and realize that it's probably going to have to run longer than just a single month to gain any learnings from it. And of course, if you're working with an agency like ours, who cares, you know, make us manage tiny little campaigns. That's what we're here for.

3:33
Georgiana Dumitru says, "Great opportunity, AJ, so I'm taking advantage of it. I would like to know if you ever build up campaigns for a B2C client and that it generated results? Thanks!" And Georgiana, this is a great question because I get asked about B2C all the time. The big challenge with LinkedIn Ads is it's expensive, and it's also more middle of funnel. And those two things don't lend themselves very well if you're let's say selling handbags or or you have some kind of e commerce product. So most of the time, I'm picturing B2B when I'm talking about LinkedIn Ads. But we have found quite a few B2C use cases where it tends to work quite well. We've seen things like coaching programs, which that's technically B2C. You're training professional, but it's the money coming out of their own wallet for that training. We found hiring and recruiting, obviously, that's kind of LinkedIn is bread and butter that works quite well. We've seen things in financial services. We even had a helicopter transport company like the Uber of helicopters work extremely well. Some of the most efficient campaigns we've ever seen. We've seen travel higher ed, all of these things work. So in general, yeah, I think B2C isn't the best fit, but there are certainly pockets and good use cases where it does make sense.

4:50
Chris Dickson asks, "What's your best solution for retargeting competitors and their customers?" Oh, Chris, you're speaking my language here. If you're advertising on something like Twitter, This is really easy. You just target the followers of your competitors Twitter handle, and now you have access to their followers, their users, and people who like them, it makes a lot of sense. But on LinkedIn, we can't target company page followers. In fact, unless you are the company page owner, you can't even see who your followers are. So some of the ways that we go about this, you can take a look at services like Datanyze and BuiltWith.com And what they do is they crawl the web, they look at the different tags, the marketing tags, and JavaScript on companies' websites that tell which products they're using. And then they go on the back end and say, Okay, cool. It looks like IBM is using Marketo. Great, and they compile this list. So if your competitor is a company who installs JavaScript, tracking tags on people's websites, then you could go and buy a report from someone like Datanyze and BuiltWith and just get a list of here's all the the people who are customers of this competitor. And then you could take that list and upload it as a matched audience, and show ads just to the relevant roles of those companies. I think this works extremely well. I'm a big fan. Something else you could do is go and find out if LinkedIn has a skill around either the competitors name, or the names of their products. And if you can target people who have that skill, and then maybe subtract current and past employees because they would obviously have that skill too. That might get you practitioners who use your competitors' software or service. Something else you could do, go to the company's page, scroll down to where their posts start, and click on the ads filter. And then you'll get to see some of their ads, actually, the last six months worth of sponsored content ads that they're running, and click through on some of them and look and see what the UTM parameters are, as they're sending you to their landing page. In some of those UTM parameters, you might see some clues about how their targeting, or what kind of campaign this is. And that could give you some interesting insight into how to counteract them, or one of them.

7:10
Daniel Borba says "video ads on LinkedIn, any and all questions around that topic". Yeah, this definitely seems like it should be a whole episode. But I'll touch on this one too. Video is really tough on LinkedIn. And it's a lot better now that we have this engagement retargeting so we can start to do sequences, and you can do storytelling. The basics of why video ads are tough to make work on LinkedIn is, number one, they're expensive. And number two, anytime you have a video ad, there's inherently two calls to action. The first is going to be watch this video. And the second is going to be take some kind of action that we're going to ask you after. And of course, you as sophisticated advertisers know, the more things we ask of our prospects, the less likely they're going to be to do it or the more people we're going to have dropped out of that process. And of course, they're not inexpensive. LinkedIn has an opportunity cost when they show a sponsored content ad, they know that that is worth probably $8 to $11 per click. And so when you show video, they have to charge enough that they're still going to get the same or more from that inventory. And because the video now has two calls to action, it's inherently going to get less interaction, meaning that your cost per is going to increase. So I will do a whole episode on video ads. But here's a basic strategy. Most don't know this, but with video ads, you can bid cost per view, or cost per impression. Of course, that's the only two options you get if you set the video views objective, but you can also bid by cost per click if that's within a website visits or a lead generation objective campaign. So I'm a big fan of start by bidding cost per click with video just to take the risk away, test out your creative, and then switch to cost per view or cost per impression where it makes sense, if you can get your costs down because engagement so high. Make sure your videos have a lot of action within the first two seconds, because that's all you get to grab people. And then make sure you've got a good thumbnail especially for those slower internet connections who can't see that action. Give them something good to look at. And your subtitles have to be either burned in or uploaded as .srt files because 80% of the viewers will watch with the sound off so it's got to look good with the sound off.

9:25
Guadalupe Molina says "I need to demystify what is a click. When I put website clicks as an objective and create an ad that links to a website article and I bid by cost per click, every time the money is spent, does that mean that a click goes to the website? Or can it mean that I'm bidding for any type of click, just as clicking on my brand logo, etc.? I cannot find this answer anywhere." And Guadalupe you are in luck. I actually have an episode about objectives coming out very soon. So watch for that. But this is definitely where objectives get complex because if your objective If is set as engagement, engagement means any click so you're going to get charged if you're bidding by cost per click for likes, comments shares, a follow to your company page, a click to your company page, or a click to your landing page. So if you're bidding by engagement, yeah, you're going to pay for everything. The nice thing is though, the engagement is about 35% cheaper. So if your ads are getting pretty much only clicks to your landing page, engagements are a cool hack of being able to pay less for your clicks. But if you choose website visits or conversion, then what LinkedIn calls a click is only a click to your landing page. So if you open up your analytics, and you see that LinkedIn reports 20 clicks, but analytics only sees 16, what happens there is yeah, you paid for 20 clicks because LinkedIn technically sent them, but for people of that 20 dropped out or left or whatever before the page was finished loading. A lot of times this has to do with your page load speed. Especially because pages just take longer to load on mobile. So it's definitely worthwhile to make sure your landing pages load fast for mobile, so that people don't get bored of waiting for it to load and end up leaving. If your objective is lead generation, a click is when they open the form. So we'll go a lot deeper into that one in a future episode, a very near future episode, but Guadalupe thanks for asking that.

11:25
And then Kristine Sergejeva has asked several different questions. Thank you, Kristine, I'm so excited to have these. She asks, "Can GIFs be used as LinkedIn ads?" And that would be like an animated GIF. Unfortunately, no, you have to convert that to a video and use it as a video ad if you want to use it on LinkedIn. I've tried animated GIFs in about every way I can think of. I even turned an animated GIF into a ping. So LinkedIn would accept it and still it doesn't play the animation even though it does everywhere else on the web. She also asks, "I still do not have clarity, when and how much I have to increase the bid, if I start with the lowest bid." And this is going with AJ's strategy of bid the very minimum, don't plan on actually spending your budget and you just want to minimize your cost per lead. So she says, "Will a higher bid also increase my click through rate or only impressions, or it depends?". So Kristine, this is definitely one of those cases where it depends on a lot of different factors, but we'll break them down here. How much you increase your bid or decrease really depends on the speed that you need to know at. So for instance, if you're at the beginning of the month, and you have a whole month to spend the budget, you might want to increase by 10 or 20 cent increments until you start to see traffic come through that's meaningful. But if you're in a rush, let's say you're four days before the end of the month, and you've got a budget to spend, then you might move by whole dollars, you might increase by $1 or $2 and just see. The goal is to find that point at which you are bidding the least possible to still spend your budget. And whether you find that by incrementally slowly decreasing from the minimum, or starting at the minimum, bouncing high, and then backing it back to somewhere in the middle, the goal is just to eventually find that point of efficiency. And then to your second point here, yes, raising your bid can increase your click through rate. But I definitely wouldn't count on it all the time. What happens is, if your ad is towards the top of the feed, it's going to generally get clicked on a lot more than one that is further down the feed. So if your ad is in the first position, which is the second post on someone's feed, then it'll likely get five or 10 times the click through rate if it were in the second ad position, which is like seven posts down the page. But what happens is if your ad is performing well, if it's getting a high click through rate, even if you're not bidding very much so LinkedIn wouldn't want to put you at the top. But if your ads get clicked on a lot, there's really high engagement, then they're motivated to continue to put you at the top, even though you're not bidding a whole lot. So really the key here is having really good performing ads. And then you can get it to where you are bidding very low, but still showing near the top of the feed and getting a nice high click through rate. But of course, when you increase your bid, you will definitely increase your impressions. And this is because you are making yourself more competitive in the auction, therefore winning more auction, therefore winning more auctions for impressions, so you will definitely see more impressions. But watch what happens to your click through rate. If you're bidding CPM, you will definitely see a change in in click through rates as you bid up and down. And that's because a direct CPM bid totally affects whether you show up in the first position, or the eighth position, which would be like 50 something slots down. Christine also says "I had this bad experience, that each change that I make to a campaign, makes the campaign's performance worse. Have you noticed this or is it just me? Is it just for sure period of time while the platform is adjusting to the requested change?" And Kristine, I haven't found this to be the case. But I also wouldn't be surprised if this is actually saturation. So go back and listen to Episode 29, if you haven't already all about saturation. Because when you're experiencing saturation, something that worked before, is just going to continue performing worse and worse. And it acts like a stair step pattern, where your click through rates will fall gradually and slowly. But you will dip down in chunks as you drop in your relevancy score, and start losing auctions quicker. It also could be the message or the offer. So don't count those out. And remember that the best audience doesn't mean that performance will be great. And what I mean by that is if you are narrowing your audience to more of the right people, it doesn't mean that you'll see performance increase necessarily, but it does mean that the lead quality that you generate from those should be better. So I wouldn't count on this turning around by itself, I would suggest holding your audiences consistent. So define who the right audiences are and then test different messaging and offers against them until you see performance pop back up. And ideally stay for, you know, at least two or three weeks before you have to refresh anything. Then Kristine asks, "Is it normal that after I paused the campaign and then activated again, it takes like a day for the campaign to activate and starts with very few impressions." And Kristine back in like 2012. LinkedIn used to claim that if you pause the campaign and then reactivated it, that it would reset your relevancy score. And so there'd be this learning curve that your ads and campaign have to go through again, before they really went back to normal. Now, even since, like 2012, when I heard this, I've done a lot of pausing and unpause in campaigns. And I have never actually seeing this occur. So I kind of think that it's not true. And maybe that was just LinkedIn not wanting us to pause campaigns, so they continue making money. I don't know. But what I find is the learning curve that Facebook advertisers go through is really crazy. I mean, it's to the point where if you double your budget overnight, it's like your whole account freaks out and it takes several days for the algorithm to catch up and go back to performing well. When you launch new ads, it'll take quite a while for performance to kick in. And I'm actually really grateful because LinkedIn users, we don't really go through that. When we launch a new campaign. When we increase bids. When we increase budgets, we don't see a giant shake up like you'd see on something like Facebook. When we launch new ads, it's normal for LinkedIn to show impressions for a day, a day and a half for it to get a feel for relevancy score, and then kind of go to its normal cadence. But even that learning that LinkedIn goes through is usually pretty kind. It's giving really solid impressions, usually in pretty good inventory. So I actually really like that first testing period for ads. So I haven't found that to be the case that pausing and unpausing campaigns really negatively affects them. It could be a relevancy score issue. So I would try changing up your ads, changing up your offers, and just see if you can get something with a high relevancy score that isn't necessarily swayed too much, especially as saturation occurs. Along the same lines, she asks, "Have you noticed that normally for the first week of the campaign, it can perform really well, even with very low bids. But then starting from the second week, the platform seems to be just doing everything to push you to increase the bids." Now, it is very possible that LinkedIn is purposely trying to trick you into raising your bids and disincentivizing you from bidding low, but I really only see this happening when my ads aren't getting a great click through rate. So if you're around average, or maybe slightly above or even below, I could see this happening as your relevancy score is dropping. What you get is lackluster performance, plus saturation when people have already seen your ads, and they start clicking at a lower rate. And then as your relevancy score drops, you need to increase your bids to stay competitive in the auction and get LinkedIn to keep showing them. So that's probably what you're experiencing. But if you can play with messaging and offers to the point where you're getting like, .7, .8%, click through rates. Usually this isn't an issue.

19:22
And Sean Possemato asks, "What kind of data does the insights tag give you from your website visitors if you're not running LinkedIn ads?" So what Shawn is referring to is the free website demographics that anyone can get by opening up a LinkedIn Ads account and installing the insight tag on their website. You don't have to spend a dime. And it's kind of like Google Analytics or Facebook Analytics, where the platform is showing you what they can see from your website traffic. And this is great, I recommend everyone do this, whether or not you're spending money on LinkedIn Ads, or whether or not you're even B2B. There are reporting that you'll see from this are things like job function, title of the people who are visiting your website, their company names. It's like the last 20 companies or maybe the most interactive 20 companies, industry, seniority, company size, location, country or region and even county. And as a bonus here, if you've set up website retargeting segments, you can also break down all of your website demographics by these segments. So for instance, create a retargeting segment, even if you don't plan to advertise to them, of just people who've filled out your forms and made it to thank you pages, or maybe just people who visit the Contact Us page. And then you'll get to see the titles, the securities, companies of people who made it to those pages. And I think that's really powerful information. In Episode 30, we mentioned that this feature is going to be getting a nice boost coming up soon. So I'm expecting a lot more information, but as of right now, it's those whatever seven or eight different dimensions that you can break your traffic down by. And they will tell you traffic percentage. So what percentage of the job function of business development has been on your page, but they're not going to show you click through rates or anything in more detail because they didn't originate that traffic. They don't know what actions people took to get there, or anything like that.

21:20
And Raul Hernandez Ochoa, the same one who left the review, so thank you, Raul. He asks, "Are there click to message ads coming to LinkedIn, like on Facebook?" And for those of you who don't know, click to message ads on Facebook, what they do is they drive traffic directly into Facebook Messenger, where you can have a more powerful chat bot experience for that prospect. And truthfully, I don't know, conversation ads on LinkedIn are really LinkedIn's first foray into that chat bot experience. And I know there's a lot of directions that they could take this. Partner integrations into things like MobileMonkey and WeChat, but we don't know where that is on their roadmap or their list of priorities. I would say that if conversation ads as an ad format performs really well, they'll probably try to make it more powerful and do something like this with it in the future, but truthfully, I don't know.

22:12
And Biswarup Banerjee says, "How has the corona related crisis affected the ad spend on LinkedIn by companies?" And we did see a lot of big companies pull back spend during that first period of economic uncertainty. We also saw a lot of small advertisers quit entirely. And the effect that we saw, this looks like it caused costs per click to drop by five or 10%. And I had friends telling me that Facebook prices had dropped 10 to 30, maybe even 40%. I even had a friend who invests heavily in YouTube ads tell me that prices dropped to like a seventh of where they were, which is incredible, but it looks by now that most companies have really kind of gone back to normal, or at least close to normal. We also see a lot of new entrants into LinkedIn Ads because of budget that they had set aside for things like trade shows and conferences aren't happening anymore. And that budget needs to go somewhere. And I'm so glad that those budgets are going into digital. Lots of companies coming into the 21st century. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the rest of the Q&A

23:17
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23:26
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23:59
All right, let's jump back into more Q&A, Chase Gladden, one of the best marketers I know in San Francisco asks, "What would you use as a minimum test budget, as well as what point would you decide a test has received enough impressions spend and conversions to declare a winner?" So number of impressions I don't really care much about, but I find that 100 clicks is a good first test on conversions. At LinkedIn, $8 to $11 cost per click average 100 clicks is going to be $800 to $1,100. dollars. And I would call this sticking your toe in the water because after about 100 clicks, if you've got like one conversion, then you know that it's performing really poorly. And if you've got like 20 conversions, you don't know for sure that you have a 20% conversion rate, just because the data isn't complete yet. But you know, it's performing really well. So after 100 clicks, I know directionally whether or not it's a good offer or good ads. In North America prices. It's usually about $300 in spend before we see click through rates become statistically significant. So if your goal is just to find out what's the message that gets my prospects to engage, you can usually do that after spending about $300 between two different ad variants. If you have a good content offer, check out Episode 10 for going really deep on offers, then it's usually about $5,000 in North American spend before your conversions becomes statistically significant. So if you have a great budget, yeah, I would go at least $5,000 a month, run a significant test every month to the conversion. But if you have less than that, or just need to pivot faster, yeah, you can make these decisions a little bit quicker.

25:41
Anna Phillips asks a good one. She says, "Well, this is probably a better question for someone who works at LinkedIn. But why do you think the ad platform is so behind the times when it comes to customizing data, reporting, comparing different time periods, segmenting by platform device, etc. Like they just added the ability to custom itemized columns and to see frequency metrics maybe a month ago. Do you think there's a specific reason behind this discrepancy between potential and reality? And do you see it getting better in the near future?" This one's definitely going to get me in trouble, but I'll answer completely and honestly, I don't think that LinkedIn had much faith in its ads platform from the very beginning. It's always been really expensive, and LinkedIn still make 60% of its revenue from recruiter. So LinkedIn Marketing Solutions has always really been the redheaded stepchild. I remember early on and LinkedIn Ads when it took two and a half years for them to roll out just a new UI change, because they only have like two developers, and they were both shared with recruiter so they couldn't give the ad platform very much time or attention. And to LinkedIn's credit, in the last few years. It really seems like we've seen LinkedIn realize that it has something truly special and trying to catch up. But of course, it's very far behind. I don't see LinkedIn products team using their own products, unfortunately. And I don't know what this is like in all kinds of different industries. I don't know if product is usually not using their own product. And I'm not sure whether Facebook and Google do this. But I see that as being a core reason why things get released that aren't actually what advertisers want. So I would love to see people who are planning product and roadmap at LinkedIn, actually having advertising experience or actively advertising for a client on the side or something like that, so that they can actually experience their own products. And I think things would come a little bit better ironed out for us. I also think that there's a level of arrogance within the LinkedIn corporation that won't come across when you talk to an individual. When you talk to any of them, they come across as very much wanting the best for their advertisers and listening. But I bet that attitude and arrogance would be palpable in a leadership meeting, and I know that would trickle down to the product. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions has done very well as an organization over the last several years with just constant growth. And I think LinkedIn is actually patting themselves on the back for seeing that growth. But I think that growth is actually happening in spite of them and their policies. I think this growth is happening because marketers are getting more sophisticated. We have better tracking and reporting, and attribution technologies that are helping us realize that we have this need for higher quality traffic. We can watch what happens after the initial conversion as it goes through the sales process. And LinkedIn has always had extremely high traffic quality. So I think marketers are turning around, even if LinkedIn thinks that it's their products that are really taking the credit. I honestly think that if LinkedIn really understood what it had, it would work to sprint to become a world class platform. And I think it could be as long as they will use their own product and listen really carefully to customers. And even if LinkedIn really sprints and makes this happen, it's going to be really hard to shake the image that LinkedIn has had for years of being "too expensive and it doesn't work". So right now is where you say. woah AJ, tell us how you really feel.

29:08
Okay, next one's from Laurie Archer, who says, "This one may stump you. I've already reached out to LinkedIn support to have this answered, but they are unable to assist me. I work for a marketing agency, and I have a client who wants me to post ads promoting their products to their page and show up in the newsfeed of their followers. However, I need to use my own credit card for these ads, not theirs, and I don't want them to have access to my credit card. I have campaign manager access to their account. So how can I post ads to a client's page and use my own credit card to purchase them while keeping the number private? Any suggestions would be so helpful." Laurie, this one's not stumping for me at all. In fact, I'm really surprised that LinkedIn couldn't get you an answer on this one. Here's what you'll want to do. Have the client give you account manager access to the account because right now you just have campaign manager and then have them make you the billing admin then you place your credit card in there. Now, the reason why this works, there can be only one billing admin. And only that person can change the credit card and even see the last four digits of it that's on file. And of course, the client can still be account manager access, and account managers can actually change the billing manager. If heaven forbid you got hit by a bus or something, they could still make someone else the account manager. And what happens is, if the client changes to another billing admin, your credit card number would be immediately erased. So there's no concern there at all. The account will just shut off until someone puts a new credit card in.

30:36
Our next one. Stacy Taylor says, "Great, I have a question. I noticed that when building different audience segments, if the audience is small, the estimated costs are higher. Often I end up grouping segments together to keep costs lower, that I would actually prefer to separate out to target the messaging better. Do you have best practices or research on audience size considerations? Do you have best practices research on audience size considerations in relation to the cost and message targeting?" Yes, Stacy, this is totally the case. The smaller your audience size is, the higher you have to bid to be competitive. And I'm not sure what causes this. It's the same thing on Facebook. So it could be something like a smaller audience means that there are other bidders who are targeting larger audiences that you have to outbid for those members. Honestly, it could be artificial, where LinkedIn is just charging you a premium in the auction for being more specific. It could be a smaller audience produces fewer impressions anyway, so we have to bid competitively just to see traffic. And really, it could be all three or none of them. But I find that this can be overcome for the most part with just good efficiency of your ads. A tighter audience means that you can be more specific in your ad copy, which leads to higher click through rates, which lead to an increased relevancy score, allowing you to bid less and still get the same traffic. But sometimes you can't and you end up just having to balance paying, let's say 30 cents to $1 more per click as just the cost of getting data into your silent focus groups. Because that's what these micro campaigns are is just data for you to understand how this segment of the population reacts to what you've shown them.

32:18
And I know I'm absolutely going to butcher this name, but Kaj Robert Karjalainen asks, "What would work best LinkedIn lead gen forms are driving the prospect to a landing page?" And then second part of the question, "Which objective works best with video ads?" So the first one about LinkedIn lead gen forms, Kaj, I've got a great episode for you. Go check out Episode 17 that goes way into more depth about lead gen forms. But basically, I would say if your goal is quality of prospect, send them to your landing page. And if your goal is quantity of number of prospects at the lowest cost, go with the lead gen forms and Episode 17 will explain exactly why. But your secondary part of the question here, you'll want to check out the episode on objectives that's going to come out here in the next few weeks. But like I explained a little earlier, I choose website visits or lead gen so that I can bid cost per click on my video ads to start with. That reduces the risk until I can find out if the ads perform well enough that I can bid by cost per view, or cost per impression and save money there.

33:24
Mayur Katkar says, "Can we put maximum targeting options to increase the lead relevancy?" And I think what Mayur is asking is, can we keep stacking different targeting together to make our audiences more relevant? And yes, you can absolutely do this. And I'm a big fan of it. But like we mentioned here a couple questions ago, the more targeting options that you pile on, the higher your floor price goes. So the more you're going to end up paying. So I only recommend stacking what you would actually find helpful. For instance, if you just want a smaller audience size, I wouldn't put something like like company size or gender or something like that on top of it just to shrink it down, because anything you add is going to increase your floor bid. So only ad targeting that you would actually find helpful and be more core around who your prospect is.

34:15
Okay. Ivy Hou asks, "I'd like to know how to do a budget and conversion forecast for LinkedIn ads as a new channel." Now Ivy, this is absolutely deserving of a whole episode. And so I've added this to my list of content I want to cover. And we'll absolutely do this on forecasting. But check out Episode 27 on agile testing, if you haven't already. This is going to be extremely helpful for you in just seeing the strategy of how I approach something. But here's the general outline of that strategy. I shoot for a $5,000 a month budget if I'm in North America, if I'm targeting outside North America, I can budget less and then within the first $1,000 spent all know about what my conversion rate is. And my conversion rate and my cost per conversion is essentially going to tell me what can I expect from this platform? Is it a total fail? Is it a total win? Or something in between? And then check out Episode 15 on benchmarks. So you can take a look at your cost per click, your click through rates, and your conversion rates along the way to see if you're in line, ahead, or falling behind. And then get ready to pause or revert if you see performance slide. Every new test that you do, take it as that, it's a test and something that could be a bad test. So be willing to revert and say, Ooh, okay, my hypothesis was wrong. Let's go start something else. And you'll definitely want to set internal expectations with your boss, with the board, the CEO, whoever, that this is a pilot and your goal is performance and not just randomly spending an entire budget, whatever that is. I think it would be way better to come in under budget and know that yeah, looks like LinkedIn could be an efficient channel for us, rather than just saying, well, I had a $5,000 budget. So I spent it, but I didn't spend it well, because then you'll look at the performance of that spend after and conclude that LinkedIn is too expensive and doesn't work, which I've heard so many times. It's not even funny.

36:11
Alex Pethick says, "Hey @wilcoxaj, I'm a fan of your podcast. Thanks for all the advice you provide. I'm curious, have you noticed that LinkedIn has removed the ads tab from the company profile pages? Any idea how to see competitors ads now"? Thanks, Alex. Yeah, this one threw me for a loop too. In recent episodes, I've mentioned that I found where that was. You go to the company page, and then just scroll down until you see the ads filter above all the posts, and then you'll still get it. So it's still there, but it just moved.

36:42
Jeffrey Donnelly asks, "Why doesn't the platform allow users to identify their wants and needs and connect advertisers to those wants and needs?" And this is one that I really wish we could do. For the longest time we had search platforms like Google where people were showing their intent, what they wanted and what they were searching for. And then you had platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, where you were showing someone your personal traits. But there wasn't anything that blended the two. When I heard that LinkedIn was up for sale, I was just hoping and praying that Google would buy them so that we would get the world's biggest search intent database, overlaid with the professional trait data that only LinkedIn has. But of course, Microsoft bought them. So I didn't quite get my wish here. I know, they've tried to do this a little bit with interest targeting at least at one point, I don't know if it still does, but it'll take into account someone's Bing search history. So anyone that they know of who's searching on Bing, they can get that intent data. But I'm imagining that's a very small segment of data that probably doesn't influence things all too much. And in Episode 30, we talked about what's coming on the roadmap, and that we're going to get products on pages, which is kind of like a review mechanism. And maybe we'll see, once we have something like that maybe there's a way we can signal interest or desire for a certain class of products. And then advertisers could, let's say, if we're trying to choose a new CRM, we could signal that interest and CRM advertisers would naturally show us more ads.

38:14
Caroline Wyly asks, "I've had good performing ads and some embarrassingly poor performers. With the poor performers, no matter how much budget tweaks, change in copy, audience, etc. Nothing worked. What made it even worse is that it was a lead gen campaign and the few leads that did come through we're not have the right seniority. Not much insight from LinkedIn either." And Caroline, I think this goes down to two different things. Usually, I can trace good ads back to a good offer. So check Episode 10 to learn more about offers. And I can usually trace bad performance back to bad offers. And we face the same challenge where if a client gives us a not very interesting offer, and we're trying to craft ad copy, and creative to try to make that look good, there's only so much lipstick that you can put on a pig trying to make it look pretty. So changing or adjusting the offer trying to get it to where it's providing a lot of potential value to the prospect where it's showing a lot of perceived value to the prospect. Usually those offers will be easy to write high performing ads for and they also help them convert better. But anytime leads come through that don't match my specific targeting. I think that's a completely different issue. So the first thing I would say is check to see, do you have audience expansion enabled on these campaigns? This is the worst offender, because that box is checked by default, you've got to really be vigilant to make sure you're unchecking that. And it allows LinkedIn to stick anyone they want into your existing audience. So that's most likely the case make sure you go and uncheck that. And likely you'll start getting seniority is coming through that actually match your targeting. But this could also be viral traffic. And what happens is anytime in your target audience that someone hits like, comment, or share, it then goes out to their network. And it's not abiding by the targeting that you chose. This usually happens in smaller quantities, it might be like, you got 20 leads, and then you get one that's viral. And then if you see a seniority that doesn't match what you're targeting, but you go, okay, it was only one of 20. It sounds like this is happening to a good percentage of them. So that might not be it. I would also check your targeting and make sure that you're not excluding, rather than including people of seniorities. I've seen that happen a couple times. And also realize that the way that seniority works on LinkedIn, people can have multiple seniorities. So it could be that you're targeting, let's say, VPS. And LinkedIn thinks that they are a VP at one role, but then they're an individual contributor at another that could happen to. You might want to check your definition of what LinkedIn considers senorities to be versus yours. Like for instance, I would look at a doctor or an attorney who runs their own office or practice and I would say, oh, they're probably owner, partner, C-level, some kind of mix of those. But then I look in LinkedIn and LinkedIn calls them directors. So be aware that maybe what you call a certain seniority might not be what LinkedIn calls them.

41:12
And Efrat Dekel asks, "What's the minimum list size I can use in practice in LinkedIn website retargeting ads?" Efrat, you need at least 300 people that LinkedIn has identified within the last 180 days. So that's the absolute minimum. Although I would say if you're advertising to any audience that only has 300 people in it, you might as well not run it, because that's not going to produce very many leads. Although, of course, I'm sure that targeting is going to be great. And the caveat here is that LinkedIn needs to actually identify these people. So let's say you have 600 visitors to your website, but 100 of those aren't LinkedIn members. So LinkedIn wouldn't be able to identify them, so they're not going to make it into your audience. And then let's say half of that traffic, is using an iOS device like iPhone or iPad, or Safari browser or Mozilla. And so they make it into the audience, but then their browser just throws the cookie out. And now they're no longer part of that audience. So you might find that even though you sent 600 people, LinkedIn still saying you're too small to actually advertise to these people, because you're under the 300 person limit. In practice, usually need to send six or 700 people to your website before this becomes large enough to use.

42:27
All right question by Annie Rose. She says, "Most of the times my ads I create in LinkedIn are incomplete due to strict violations. I would love to know what the most common mistakes and intermediate advertiser would commit in building a LinkedIn Ad, and what are the do's and don'ts?" Annie, this is truly deserving of its own episode, and I'm going to make that happen. We want to do something on policies, procedures, and what happens when you get disapproved. But here are a couple of nuggets to chew on in the meantime. Every ad at LinkedIn is human reviewed. Sometimes it's up front and you might see you're waiting four to 24 hours for your ads to be approved before they start running. But sometimes they go live immediately. And that review is done after the fact. And you would only see this happening if your ads were live. And then they spent a little bit of money and then got disapproved later. We've had ads rejected for things like being related to COVID. Dealing with initial coin offerings like crypto related things, advertising alcohol, using excessive punctuation, mentioning LinkedIn in the ad copy will get you disapproved. And also, we found this is not an explicit podcast. So I'll say any swears worse than the a word will get disapproved. Sometimes if you get something disapproved, you can get it by by just resubmitting because it can be a very subjective thing whether or not someone thinks that this infringes on a policy. The other thing you can do is you could try posting organically, and then just boost that organic post since most of the time boosted posts don't go through the same review process, at least from my experience.

44:02
Okay, last question here from Glenn Schmelzle, who's a good friend, he asks, "Do you compare the incumbents click through rate to the click through rate before saturation, or after when you're doing AB testing?" So this is a little bit complex. When you start running an ad, it's probably going to have a high click through rate at some point. And then over time, as people have seen it before, you'll see click through rate slide and start to perform worse. So he's asking when you're running an AB test, let's say you leave the winner from before and you test something new. And then you compare that A and B. Do you compare B's click through rate or cost per click with the click through rate when A very first started, or now after it's saturated a little bit? And this is a brilliant question. My answer is absolutely before because when an ad very first launches, you really get a feel for what that ad is capable of, how interesting it is. And saturated. can be affected by so many things like how active an audience is, or how long you've been running it. So I think the statistics you should care about are definitely before. However, I wouldn't suggest launching something new against something that's old. Because what happens is the thing that is new, LinkedIn looks at that as a risk, because it doesn't know how that new ads going to perform, but it does know the old one. So it's safer to keep running something that's old, not performing well, then testing something that's new and could potentially be a great performer, or it could be terrible. So what I suggest doing, if you have a winner from your AB test, go ahead and pause your whole A and your B and then recreate your A along with your new B. Then both ads and LinkedIn's eyes are brand new, and they're both going to get compared side by side properly.

45:52
And guys, I had so many more Q&A questions for you, but we're already going on too long. So I'm going to save these for our next Q&A episode that might be in, let's say 20 or 30 episodes, so keep sending in your questions, I'd love to feature you. Alright, here comes the episode resources for you. So stick around.

46:15
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

46:26
I mentioned several great resources throughout this episode. So check them out down below in the show notes. There was Datanyze and BuiltWith that are really good for finding out which companies use certain products. I also mentioned a whole bunch of episodes like Episode 10, Episode 17. If you're not already caught up, definitely go back and listen to those those are absolute gems. And if you're new to LinkedIn Ads, the best course that you can take is the one that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Learning. It's called advertising on LinkedIn. You can't miss it. There's a chubby ginger dude pointing at you smiling, that's me. And all I can say is the price is right. I think it's $25 for the course, if you're not already a LinkedIn premium member and get it for free. And it's the same information that I would teach you, if you hired me for $500/hour to train your team one on one. So I highly recommend that one. Next, make sure you're subscribed to this show, look down, hit the subscribe button if it's not already hit. And do rate the podcast because I want anyone who sees this and is considering to give it a listen. And then please do review it. Every review helps and I totally want to shout you out. So whatever podcast player or service you use, leave a review for the show and I'd love to read it out. As always, email us at [email protected] with any show ideas, suggestions, feedback, or topics we should cover. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

Data from the study

Little Easter Egg hack - each embed you see for a chart, you can flip through the GDS charts. There's an extra I didn't publish.

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:

What happened to LinkedIn Ads during the COVID-19 pandemic? Is there an opportunity for you as an advertiser? Spoiler alert, yes.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So I've gotten lots of questions from advertisers during the COVID pandemic, asking about what's changed. We definitely noticed the impact. So I've been telling people kind of shooting from the hip, like, oh, 5 to 10% drop in cost per click.

0:38
Well, I decided to actually dig into the data. And what I found is there's much more to the story, and I'm super excited to tell you all about the impact, but especially the opportunity for you as advertisers. In the news, not a ton has changed recently on LinkedIn Ads, but in personal news, it's the summer and our air conditioner went out. We spent three days in the dark with all the windows shut. No one allowed to open a window or a door just to keep the house from getting to the 80 degrees or 27 Celsius like it got on the first day we realized that it wasn't working. You know, there's something wrong when your butter is a pool rather than a cube. And of course, everyone's excited about spending a bunch of money on a new air conditioner during a pandemic. That was sarcasm. A review to highlight here thatch_o said "best marketing podcast". "This is the best marketing podcast hands down. As a PPC marketer, I want to improve upon my LinkedIn ad skills. AJ is not only very knowledgeable on the topic, he's an engaging speaker and makes learning more about LinkedIn ads entertaining, easy and fast. This podcast has become one of my very favorites, and is a must listen." thatch_o, thank you so much for submitting that. That warms my little ginger heart. I've said this in the past but the way I approach this podcast is thinking of all of you as listeners like you are a member of my team. And it really is a masterclass on LinkedIn ads. I don't hold anything back and I train you just as if I would train the members of my team. It makes me so happy when I find that people like you are getting a lot out of this. And it is helpful information. So thank you, and everyone else I want to feature you. So please, whatever podcast player you are using, write a view, and I'd love to feature you here. Okay, without further ado, let's hit it.

2:18
COVID-19 has had a strong influence on most of the major ad platforms. I've heard from multiple large Facebook advertisers that cost per click and cpms have fallen by like 30 or 40%. And one big advertiser even told me that YouTube ad inventory for them decreased by 80% at one point. So we analyzed the data from $1.5 million worth of spend across almost 2,900 campaigns. So it's a large data set. But certainly, if LinkedIn released something like this, it could tell a more complete story. Or of course, if any of you listening have access to a much larger data set, let me know we can collaborate. But here's how the analysis went. We ingested the 1.5 million in advertising spend and segmented them out by ad format and bid type. And we analyzed the differences in both average cost and average click through rate for every day from February 1 to August 28. And the goal of this was just to find insights. When were engagement rates high and low, when we're costs high and low. And what we saw was especially interesting around the costs because we saw average costs decline from February to April, and then have rebounded and some even fully recovered.

3:33
Results

So now we're going to go into the results and I'm going to share with you what we found, which I found really interesting. And if you're like me, and you listen to podcasts really sped up, I listened to podcasts at two and a half times speed, then this might be a part where you want to slow it down just so you can get a feel for the metrics because we're going to throw out some percentages. Overall we found cost per click to drop about 2.9% from February to March. And then they dropped another 25.2% from March until April. So looking at the platform, overall, it drops 28.1%. And those are costs per click. If you click on the link down in the show notes, it'll take you to the post where you can see charts. And you can see what this drop looks like and then what the recovery looks like. And I'll do my best to describe it to you over words, even though I'm not what I would call wordsmith. And then in May, we noticed a recovery of about 11.5%. And then that recovery, even though there was a little bit of a drop in July, kept going all the way through August the end of our data set. And the net result of this is that we're currently as advertisers paying 13.4% less than when we started before the pandemic. So to me, this spells opportunity. I love buying ads at a 13% discount. But then the story goes deeper here because we started breaking it out by individual ad type and what we found when we were looking at just sponsored content ads, we noticed a similar very large drop, 27.7%. But they've only recovered about 6% since that drop. So what I'm telling you is the most competitive inventory on LinkedIn is currently running at a 21.7% discount. And of course, since the platform overall is at a 13% discount, and sponsored content is at a 21.7% discount, that means that the other ad formats are either dragging that down or reversing it. And this is true when we broke out the other ad formats and looked at their data. Text ads are currently costing almost 18.5% more now than they did in February. Dynamic ads currently cost 17% more than in February, and the sponsored messaging ad formats, which are message ads and conversation ads, are now costing almost a 38% premium compared to that of February and granted the majority of our data set is sponsored content, that's the majority of what we run. But we're still talking 10+% of the data being dedicated to each of these ad formats. So it sure looks solid to me. And I'm not exactly sure what would cause sponsored content to get abandoned so much. But text ads and dynamic ads and sponsored messaging to get adopted so quickly. I would have guessed that text ads and dynamic ads because they're only on desktop would actually get more inventory, because so many people working from home on their computers all day and not using their mobile devices because they don't have to worry about their boss seeing them on LinkedIn or a social network. But the data is telling us that these ad formats are actually more expensive, which is crazy.

6:42
Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into what we found by each individual bid type.

6:47
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

6:57
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. 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 directly with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns, or heck, send a carrier pigeon. Our mission is always to make you look like the hero.

7:28
All right, let's jump into the differences that we saw by bid type because this was really fascinating. And again, refer to the charts that you can see here in the post that I linked to in the show notes. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that there is a significant difference in the costs on LinkedIn, depending on your bid type. So if you look at these charts, you see pretty much exact opposite charts for those who are bidding CPC versus those who are bidding CPM. And what we've done is based off of the bid type, we looked at your effective cost per click. So no matter how you were bidding, what your cost per click ended up being. And advertisers paying my cost per click are currently still buying LinkedIn Ads at a 14.3% discount. While advertisers who are paying CPM are currently paying 49.4%, more than before the pandemic. So, the lesson here is that the majority of advertisers should be bidding CPC and not using auto bidding or CPM. They're being way overused, and it's causing them to pay significantly more per action. As you know, from listening to Episode 06 about bidding and budgeting, a low CPC bid strategy is cheaper than auto bidding about 90% of the time. And I think the simple reason why so many advertisers are using these inefficient bid types is that auto bidding is the default bid type when you build most campaigns. So advertisers who don't know better will oftentimes just go with the default. So when did we see these costs start to drop. Well, what's so interesting is that I was expecting a precipitous drop right in the middle of March, when advertisers were starting to come to grips with the reality of impending business closures and potential global recession. But check out this heat map picture that I've got in the post showing daily performance for all of March. And what we see is that costs really didn't start to drop until the 23rd of March. We see cost per click, we're definitely in the eights. And you'll see them in red because this is a scale of red are the highest CPCs and green are the lowest. And it starts to go yellow around the 23rd and 24th of March and goes green for the rest of the month. And I think this makes sense because B2B companies tend to move a little bit slower. So it looks like companies waited a little bit to cut their budgets back and actually made those cuts later in March, and certainly early April, as we definitely saw costs really drop in April. So takeaways for you, I think LinkedIn advertisers are buying at a 13.4% discount right now. So if you're on the fence about investing or increasing budget, this is just a great time to do that. And surprisingly, the less competitive ad formats have actually increased in cost. So they're not as advantageous a buy, but sponsored content being still down by 21.7%. That seems like a great discount. So any of you who want permission to run sponsored content, you've got it from me, that's for sure. Another takeaway here is that too many advertisers are bidding using either auto bidding or CPM rather than cost per click, which is less efficient the majority of the time, and it looks like most advertisers really held steady through most of March, and then the big budget withdrawals happened during April. I want to ask a favor of you. If you know anyone who manages LinkedIn ads, or has an extreme interest in them, please share this post with them or share this episode, or both. I would absolutely love to see this information get into the hands of all those who are advertising. And with that being said, I've got the episode resources for you coming up. So stick around.

11:16
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

11:27
Okay, so of course, the big resource here is going to be the link to the study that I did. So you'll see that it's B2Linked.com/blog/COVID-19effectonlinkedInads. Don't try to do that from memory. Just go to the show notes, or just navigate to the B2Linked.com blog and click on one of the latest posts. And there is a little easter egg hack for those of you who are sticking around. I embedded these charts into the post through Google Data Studio. And I just realized that in Data Studio, you're not limited to just the individual page. And there were some extra charts that I didn't publish, but created. So if you're interested, just flip through there on any of them and just check that additional info out. If you're new to LinkedIn ads or have a colleague that you're trying to train, definitely check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is, of course down below as well. And it is either free or $25, depending on your LinkedIn subscription. And it is by far the best training resource that I've seen out there for LinkedIn ads. And it's a heck of a lot cheaper than hiring me to train your team individually. Look down at your podcast player right now and make sure that you've nailed that subscribe button, and then please rate the podcast. Obviously, I'd appreciate five star,s but whatever. And do leave a review because I would love to shout you out here on the show. And of course, if you have any feedback, any questions, any topics you'd like us to cover here on the show, email us at [email protected]. And with that being said, I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives!

Show Resources:

Brand and Demand Playbook

Why Every Startup Marketer Should Be Using Conversation Ads

Get in touch with Ryan MacInnis: Twitter – @RKMAC or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryankmacinnis/

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:

There are four LinkedIn Ads, ad formats, and 11 plus variants of them. LinkedIn figured out the right combination to use, and they just shared it with us.

0:14
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

0:23
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. LinkedIn just published a really valuable playbook, which contains absolutely prescriptive recommendations about what combinations of ad formats to use, and when for maximum effectiveness. Today I sit down with Ryan MacInnis from LinkedIn Product Marketing. He's going to share his research that he and his team just published. Ryan is over sponsored messaging as an ad category and shares with us some of his excellent insights. So without further ado, let's hit it. Ryan MacInnis, thanks so much for joining us. I'm excited to have you here on the LinkedIn Ads Show.

0:57
Yeah, thanks so much AJ for having me. I appreciate it.

0:59
Oh, of course and super excited to get to chat about the new playbook that you guys just released. I know you've been working really hard on it for our listeners. So this is Ryan Mcinnis. He's in the New York City Office for LinkedIn. I'm assuming not during COVID times you're working out of the Empire State Building.

1:14
That is right. Yeah, no, I'm actually in Connecticut. So I can see the city, but I'm not currently working in it.

1:21
Perfect. Get away from the hustle and bustle.

1:23
Exactly.

1:24
And Ryan is over the sponsored messaging product in Product Marketing at LinkedIn. So super excited to get to ask him all these questions and hear an internal response. Awesome. Okay. A very first question. Ryan, tell us about you. You know, what are you into personally? What do you love about work? What are you responsible for? Give us all that good stuff.

1:45
Sure. Yeah. So I actually started my professional career as a Boston Globe sports journalist, and that was in the end of college, beginning of kind of my professional years and I was covering high school and college sports. So I fell in love with storytelling kind of early on, and was exposed to B2B marketing from there. And I spent a lot of time attending startup events, realized how hard it was to take something that was really complex and position it in a way that not only explained what it was or what it did, but made it really clear to somebody, I'm like, what value they could get from it. So that's how I got into marketing and more specifically, product marketing. And talking about sponsored messaging at LinkedIn, it's really a situation couldn't have been any better for me. I've spent the last five years or so running early stage marketing teams at startups, whether it be the first in marketing hire, or leading a team where the company is less than 100 people, messaging and chat bots and whatnot, were a huge part of our marketing strategy. So aside from doing the really early stage startup stuff, I spent a little bit of time at Twitter on their product marketing team for the developer platform called Fabric that was eventually sold to Google. And yeah, even though I had that big company, express I still do consider myself an early stage marketer, since a lot of the skills you know, the frameworks and go to market efforts have been super helpful in scaling conversation ads, which was a new format we launched back in March. So that's kind of me professionally, me personally, big into sports. I used to be a basketball referee, a high school basketball referee. So spent a lot of time doing that. And yeah, love reading as a former English major, I guess you're never former you're always an English major. But I do like to spend a lot of time reading and kind of disconnecting from a lot of the nonfiction business world.

3:36
Well, I love that you have experienced as an early stage marketer, you also have experienced in product marketing at larger companies. So I think that puts you in a really unique position to understand your advertisers, which we'll get into here in a few minutes but this is why I'm so excited to have you like showing us this playbook. This is super exciting about the playbook. So I know you told me in the pre-show chat This has been your three plus months in the making. share with us the story behind it. Tell us about the new new playbook and why you decided to tackle this kind of project.

4:07
Yeah, so I'll first just kind of talk about what it is. And I'll bury the lead on that. So it's our new brand and demand playbook. And really what it is, it's a combination of tactical advice on how you use our different ad formats in both feed and messaging, along with our newest features such as retargeting together to help you achieve your goals on LinkedIn. And then it's also a source of inspiration. Kind of the second half of the playbook are nine customer stories that not only share the successes in the tactics on how advertisers featured used something like carousel ads and single image ads along with message ads, but you can get a snapshot into what their framework is for how they deployed these things. And so you get everything from the creatives that they use the quotes from the people who really went went big on this and believe that this is gonna be a big part of the strategy. And then you also see benchmarks and results. And so what we wanted this playbook to be for the first time, is the ability to kind of tell that cohesive story of how do all of these formats that marketers have available to them today on LinkedIn, how do they play best together? And how do we recommend which formats to use based on which stage of the funnel you're trying to engage your audience and then also give people you know less about us and more about the successes of our of our customers? How do we give them enough of that true playbook so they can learn and seek inspiration from some of the best marketers doing it today?

5:31
Yeah, and what was the pain point? I'm assuming you guys were hearing customer feedback, people expressing a need or a pain, wanting certain kinds of information. How did you decide to even come out with this playbook? Yeah, I guess let's start there.

5:48
Yeah, definitely. So when I joined obviously conversation ads had just launched and we had more recently launched you know, video ads and retargeting was coming up right around the time that we're starting to think about this playbook. And we had conversations around how there really wasn't much advice on how to use these formats best together, even though we were seeing really good results from advertisers that were. And so it was solving a problem that many advertisers on LinkedIn, they kind of go into their strategies saying, this is the piece of content I want to promote. Here's the one format and I was personally guilty of this as a B2B marketer previously to and then you judge the success of the content based on how well it did there in that format without thinking about how other kind of like supporting cast members can help lift that up, ie, you know, text ads, or video or things like that. So what we're really trying to do is help advertisers be more successful and we believe that it wasn't until we had all of these things like the most engaging ways for you to capture someone's attention in video and conversation ads. And then of course, with retargeting and being able to really dig in and tap into that behavior that you were able to understand a bit better. You could actually figure out how you would connect the dots between running an ad in the feed with really trying to drive conversion and messaging, for example. So it was a really kind of a call that we wanted to answer on how we could help advertisers get more out of the tools that they had access to, even if, you know, some of the lines weren't super clear on what they can do with them.

7:20
And Ryan, this is awesome. I'm a huge believer in using other ad formats together to really multiply your efforts. And I didn't come to that understanding until I was in a quarterly business review with one of our clients. And LinkedIn gave us a report that said, here's how people click on your sponsored content ads, who haven't seen another ad format from you. And here's how they click when they when they have and it was like a 30% lift and I went, ah, there's the value. You may not see a direct ROI from any single ad format, but as you bundle them together, it starts completing the rest of the story.

7:57
Definitely. And to your point, exactly. I think it's helpful for a lot of marketers to understand not only the context of what somebody is doing or thinking about when they're on LinkedIn, maybe they're there to just passively browse. They're there to learn from their peers. Or maybe they're saying, hey, this helpful piece of content, or this webinar is going to help me get that next promotion in my career or, you know, make me a better, you know, insert job title. But the other thing that I don't think a lot of marketers realize is that everything that you're doing in the feed because it is the kind of most prime real estate you have on LinkedIn is essentially providing context and warming up people that you want to have as customers or convert on a big activity that you're promoting. So anything that they see in the feed is kind of contextual relevance for anything that they may see in their inbox. So if I were to want to promote an event, like we were talking about a few weeks back, like carousel ads in the feed to promote some of the speakers and so if I'm in the feed, I know that hey, this company is has this event coming up. I know that the speakers will be there and then maybe in my inbox because we can be a bit more targeted and tailored to an individual person, we can say, Hey Ryan, we know you're in Product Marketing at LinkedIn and this is a pain point that we think you're really going through right now. This is why you should attend this event, use our lead gen forms, and you can register right then and there. And you have the context as to why you're receiving that message. And you understand kind of what the value was in the feed. So to your point, the more that you can help these things work better together, the more successful a lot of these marketers will be.

9:25
Yes, and you are in a fantastic position. Seeing all of this data, I mean, as the platform you get to see anything that was touched with a lead form. You get to see the exact conversions happening, the confluence of all of these ad formats. So you're in amazing position to actually tell what combinations of things and I'm sure you're using really cool machine learning and AI algorithms to figure this out. But you now know what's going to be the best combination. And now you're sharing that with us. And quite frankly, in the past, I've seen quite a few of the playbooks that LinkedIn has created. And I would say they haven't exactly been brimming with actionable information. And I've gotten to review this one, and it's completely the opposite. I'm actually really happy with this one. What changed with this? And is this a pattern for the future?

10:12
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think it's going to be something we're going to look to do more of. I think it's important to say that a lot of the playbooks in the past were foundational kind of owner's manual guides that you could read and understand how products worked. And they were really important just to understand the nuts and bolts before you could kind of get into the tactical How do these work together? But there are definitely a couple things, especially during our time being you know, quarantined and spending more time at home that magnified this, that made this playbook kind of look like what it what it does, that you'll read. And the first thing is that obviously we have even shorter attention spans I think, than we did before COVID-19. Especially those that are balancing homeschooling, taking care of loved ones, kids and whatnot. And then the other thing that was really interesting is that many marketers felt like there was a window of time, or maybe they could innovate in ways that they couldn't have before. When many of their competitors were decreasing their spend or moving slower than they would in the past. And so we were really hearing a lot of feedback on, hey, we know that this is a window for us to gain a competitive edge or reach an audience in a way that might be a bit unexpected given that everybody's trying to reach them through email, for example, how can we innovate on that? And then the last thing that I think was was super interesting is that, you know, as a former advertiser on LinkedIn, I think there's a lot of preconceived notions about advertising is like, especially from what you've been exposed to. So maybe you only understand a sliver of the products that we offer, or you only understand a little bit of how we talk about targeting and how you can reach kind of the right persona within the right company that's really important for your ABM efforts. So that was kind of the behind the scenes thinking that went into this no nonsense approach, which is if I were a B2B marketer, and I needed something that was easy to digest during this time when everybody wants my attention. How can we create a piece of content that would be valuable for them?

12:05
Ryan and I think you nailed it. Thank you for that. As you were working to create this brand and demand playbook, I'm sure you were looking through a lot of different research. What do you feel like is your biggest bombshell that you experienced in researching? Was there anything that just stood out like a sore thumb?

12:23
Yeah, it's funny you use the word bombshell. Like I don't think it can be any more obvious to a lot of people once they've done it themselves. And once they've read the playbook, which is the opportunity cost of not using feed and messaging together is just enormous, right. And I think many advertisers are advertising just in the feed, which obviously is the most competitive real estate and even though you can reach millions of people there, it's extremely hard to get someone to take an action on a lead gen form. For example, most people come to LinkedIn to explore, to learn, to do these things mainly on a mobile device, you know, and so nothing is more jarring than clicking an image and a form pops up, and that be your only chance to really engage with somebody. So I think when we looked at a lot of what made our customers successful what we were seeing, particularly with how they were using, you know, video retargeting with ebook promotion and a single image ad and how they're actually putting together their own strategies for how these ad formats can work best for them. We really wanted to drive home this feed plus messaging narrative, because we knew that kind of warming up your lead that narrative would result in a subset of your audience seeing both to your point earlier. So seeing a piece of sponsored content, and then actually having that contextual relevancy on why they should convert in the LinkedIn inbox. And so when you know more people are being exposed to that context, ultimately you can lower your cost per lead and increase your lead gen form conversion rate, which is a lot of marketers are really looking for especially during this time.

13:54
Oh, I love it. And then this may be similar. I don't know you tell me if this is the same as bombshell, but what do you feel like was your biggest takeaway, or the biggest takeaway you'd suggest for advertisers after now having been through the playbook?

14:07
Yeah, I think obviously, we talked about my first big takeaway, which is that the formats work best together, not in silos. And it's no secret that the majority of advertisers are looking to advertising the feed first and kind of messaging is an afterthought. And we're really trying to do is change that narrative and saying, how can messaging be a bit more of a not just a supporting cast member, but you know, maybe a second leading role and how you think about a particular audience. So that was kind of the biggest takeaway that I think a lot of people when they when they read the playbook, we'll see how prominent messaging is within each stage of the funnel and how we recommend using it, or even within the success stories at the end, a lot of our customers are using message ads and single image ads or video single image ads and message ads. And so there's a very healthy mix on how they can be powerful together. But, I think the other takeaway that many people will have is that there are so many people you can seek inspiration from and the willingness of these marketers who so graciously approved for a lot of their creatives and their strategy to be put in this playbook. They're great models for people to look at. And the best part is, is maybe 30% of them have similar tactics, like it's pretty unique the way that these marketers are thinking about it. So that's the biggest takeaway, aside from how these formats work well together, is that there's so many marketers who are doing this well today that you can seek inspiration from and coming out of it, not only will you have a better idea on how you can use these different formats and targeting facets, but also based on what industry, what region you're in, where you are in the world, kind of which story resonates most with you and how you can kind of seek inspiration from that.

15:46
Great! We as advertisers, I think we tend to think of each of the ad formats kind of in their own little silo. I tell people all the time, sponsored messaging ads are really good if you have a special VIP kind of offer, but don't use them if you don't have an offer that grabs them at first. And what we've found is so many advertisers have come back to us and said, hey, we actually found sponsored messaging ads to work really well as a retargeting ad for, you know, a different ad format. And it makes perfect sense. And one that I'm a little embarrassed that I did come up with.

16:23
No, and you're totally right. I mean, one of the success stories we've seen recently with conversation ads are advertisers using even if it's high intent behavior on your website, and using that as a retargeting audience for a conversation ad promoting an ebook download. You know, you wouldn't believe the successes that a lot of these advertisers are seeing when an audience has that context as to why they're being reached out to. Very similarly, with with marketers on their own websites, the ones who are really good from an automation perspective are able to give, you know prospects and people who are on LinkedIn a lot of that helpfulness. Like why are you asking me to read this message, why are you asking me to take action on this CTA and the easier you can make that decision, the better the experience,

17:08
Yeah, surrounding them so they've they've seen your brand before, they feel comfortable. There's already that know, like, and trust factor. It's a brilliant way to approach it. And then here in the brand and demand playbook, this is very prescriptive, as opposed to, I would say other playbooks or other content that LinkedIn has published before. What am I trying to say? It's much more prescriptive than other content that we've seen LinkedIn recommend before. How did you decide on the different recommendations? And I guess, how did you approach the different recommendations that are very prescriptive in here?

17:43
Yeah, that's a good question. I think as a product marketer, I look at three things on a weekly basis. The first is customer behavior. The second is sales feedback. And then the third is market dynamics, which obviously are are changing because of, you know, what's going on the world, but essentially that is what technology will marketer use today? If not tomorrow? And how can we understand like where we should be building products and making recommendations to to meet them where they want to be. And so I think for this playbook, it was the results that our customers are seeing that whereas was most important. So in my case, it was conversation as we've seen conversation ads grow a tremendous amount since launching in May, in March, rather, and I wanted to understand why advertisers were having success with it. And if they weren't, why they weren't. And for many times, more times than not, they were a result of using multiple formats together were conversation as were a key piece of that to your earlier point around how they can work best together. And so, as I mentioned earlier, like carousel ads to highlight speakers or even you know, product features, if you're trying to get somebody to buy in on the narrative of one platform to help them solve all your problems, maybe each tile tells that story or, or highlights a different aspect of your platform. And then conversation ads is a great way to get them to convert. So some of the things we're seeing you know, to be honest, is, you know, well over 50% lead gen form submission rates with some advertisers who not only are using conversation ads best practices, you know, really short, engaging content, two to three calls to action, using lead gen forms as your first CTA, but also having these formats be supportive. And what they're trying to do is, is anywhere from five to seven times higher than sponsored content alone. And so we started to pick up on what sort of behavior was most valuable to marketers that we wanted to share with even more marketers. And so the other source of inspiration as we were starting to think about this was what customers the success they were seeing with, you know, Lan, LinkedIn Audience Network and retargeting, so I'm kind of more on that, like reach in context layer. And so we took some of these findings, started to form some perspectives on which formats and targeting facets were the best for marketers to use based on what we were seeing from our best customers, and then how we watched an audience respond to it, that was really important as well. And so that's why you'll see a lot of visually engaging recommendations at the top of the funnel, like single image ads, carousel, ads, video, and even conversation ads, depending on if it's you know, kind of a brand play, or really trying to promote a blog post that is around a particular movement or whatnot. And then also, you can see, kind of towards the lower end of the funnel, where message ads or sponsored messaging is maybe more of an investment because as a prospect is lower down the funnel, there's more context, you've warmed them up a bit more, and now you're shifting to kind of the best place to have that intimate conversion opportunity, which is in messaging. So we decided on this based on a combination of what are our best customers doing today and why and then what behavior are we seeing, you know, members respond really well to LinkedIn? And how can we help marketers meet them where they want to be met?

20:47
You certainly won't hear me arguing with a 50% conversion rate. That's amazing. So for performance focused demand gen marketers, let's say testing out LinkedIn Ads for the first time. Let's give him a an imaginary budget of, let's say something like 10k, how would you approach a brand new account? Do you have any recommendations for what you'd put into which ad format and which audience and how?

21:13
Yeah, I think for performance focus dimension marketers, obviously, any type of retargeting would be extremely valuable. So if you've never advertised on LinkedIn before, that's totally fine. Maybe you're using some of our conversion tracking on your website. And so you can definitely plug in some of the high intent behaviors as audience types that you would like. So people who have converted on ebooks previously, or visited pricing pages or other high intent pages that you find valuable, and then for 10k, I really think you can get a lot of value right now with conversation as I'm not just saying that because I'm the product marketer for it. It's definitely a format that is the most delightful way possible to receive an ad right now. And what I mean by that is you have 500 characters or less to explain to somebody why you want their attention. You give them the ability to provide context, additional calls to action if they're just not quite ready to convert as opposed to you know, message to your point. An exclusive offer it's binary, either you convert or you don't. Conversation as are definitely a bit more informal. And you can, see a lot of great results for not a huge investment right off the bat. And then of course, we're talking about brand and demand, we're talking about feeding messaging, link text ads, dynamic ads, any way that you can kind of get your, your brand in the top of someone's feed, even if it's not, you know, right in front of them and in the feed itself, but on the side, kind of the right rail way of advertising. They are going to see that on LinkedIn and that is only going to help lift the conversion rates with conversation ads. So from a targeting perspective, definitely recommend an audience that is already warmed up in some capacity. And then I think for performance marketers if your goal is lead gen, obviously, that conversation ads right now paired with something like text ads, or even, you know, you can do something around like spotlight ads and whatnot. You can see really good results for for that 10k number.

23:08
Oh, beautiful. Thanks for that advice. And just digging into a little bit of what you've seen from conversation as because they are new. What are some of the best calls to action that you've found being successful with conversation ads?

23:19
Yeah, it's a good question because I think as a marketer, you're trying to understand and dig into exactly why people are behaving the way that they do. And so with conversation ads unlike message ads, you don't have a subject line, you don't have all of these great things when you can say as many words as you as you want, or at least much more than with conversation ads. And so the calls to action in the language that you use is very important. And I think what we're seeing anecdotally is is kind of this like passive and friendly way of using these call to actions particularly around lead gen forms. So if you are promoting an event, instead of register now, maybe it save my spot or you know, like, sign me up sort of thing. And I think that most people tend to look at these call to action is very formal. So I connect with a member of our sales team or download now it's like get your free copy, like get your free copy is a lot more informal, a lot less intimidating. And so from a CTA perspective, we always recommend you think that you're having a conversation with a friend or a colleague. And if I was trying to get you to read the playbook, I wouldn't send you an email and say, you know, click this link or, you know, click this button and download it now, I'd say, you know, like grab a free copy or something like that. So I definitely think a lot of the things that marketers are seeing success with an email right now and the language that they're using can definitely be transferred over to conversation ads.

24:47
Excellent. So how would you recommend dividing budgets between, let's say, the feed, messaging ads, and even right rail, do you have a rule of thumb that you'd follow?

24:58
Yeah, I mean, I don't have have anything prescriptive or I'm not going to at least try to make any of those recommendations here, but I would just kind of recommend based on what the goal is, if it's more brand focused, I definitely think investing a bit more in the feed makes a lot of sense with video with single image ads, really trying to understand the behavior of somebody on LinkedIn, especially with video retargeting now, so watching more than 25%, more than 50% and using that behavior to send them something more enticing. I think the feed is extremely valuable. And then I think as you move down the funnel with your audience, making sure that messaging is as much of your strategy as sponsored content. So sometimes that's 50/50 for people that I've seen a ton of success with sponsored messaging, but it should least be kind of that 70/30 60/40 split when you get towards the bottom of the funnel, or at least in that high intent consideration phase where you're trying to get someone to download an asset, attend an event, or things like that. Because we definitely see that people will give sponsored messaging and try, but compared to the amount that they're investing in sponsored content, I think that this playbook will help them think about it as more of a pillar of their strategy.

26:11
That's perfect. That's exactly what I think everyone here wanted to hear. So kind of going into back to your personal or business life here. What are you most excited about or looking forward to coming up right now?

26:23
Yeah, so obviously, this playbook is probably the thing that I've been looking forward to most. But I think much bigger than that, going to sponsor messaging specifically with conversation ads. I'm excited about getting a lot more of my former colleagues in the startup space, kind of this mid-market marketer to give conversation ads a try. I think the perceived notion that LinkedIn is an expensive place to advertise isn't wrong for people that don't have a strategy that helps them use all these things together really well. So you're not using retargeting Not thinking about kind of a very intimate audience and we're startups. And you know, smaller marketing teams fall in as they think that this is a place that's kind of unattainable for them to advertise. And that's not true at all. And so we have a blog post, that by the time this podcast comes out will be live. It's called why every startup marketer should be using conversation ads. And it's kind of like an open letter to myself, which is, if I had conversation ads, obviously, in previous roles, why should I be using it? What are some of the success stories we're seeing from a lot of these scrappy marketing teams that are trying to use their budgets really effectively? So I'm excited for more of these smaller marketers or those with a bit smaller budgets to really find a ton of great value out of conversation and specifically, and then how LinkedIn can be even more impactful for them.

27:50
Great, and we're going to link to the why every startup marketer should be using conversation ads down in the show notes will also link directly to the Brand and Demand Playbook. So all of you can can consume this and even follow along. So that's fantastic. Congratulations on the release of such an awesome asset. By the time any of you are hearing this, this should be available. So obviously Ryan and I are talking before it's fully released, and it's a big burden on his shoulders, and that will be lifted on Tuesday. So that's great. Yeah, Ryan, this has been fantastic. Just getting feedback from you and hearing really how marketers can better use the ad formats in tandem with each other. Do you have anything else you'd like to share with us or anything that LinkedIn advertisers should be paying attention to?

28:34
No, I think there's a lot of great things that we're coming out with from a product perspective, I think, you know, LinkedIn live and events and things like that are gonna be something we're gonna continue to invest in. If you are a conversation ads customer or you want to try it. We just came out with a new reporting feature called Flow Chart that I'd love to, you know, kind of plug which gives you CTA level, engagement, understanding verse similar to how you would think about it. Google Analytics or where people are dropping off in your conversation. And so I would definitely ask you to to look at that if you're thinking about conversation ends, or you want to understand how this new format can be helpful in your goals, because you're gonna learn a ton about the behavior of somebody in the inbox that you never had before. So that's gonna be great.

29:18
And I have definitely gotten a chance to check out the flow chart view of the conversation ads. And that was a brilliant addition. So thanks so much for that. And with that being said, thank you so much for being on the show, Ryan. Sure. Appreciate your insights. And is there any way that you'd want listeners to connect with you?

29:37
Yeah, sure. I mean, if you're active on on Twitter I'm at @RKMAC, or I'm on LinkedIn, you can you can find me there.

29:45
Perfect. And I'll go ahead and link both of those down below in the show notes. Ryan, thank you so much for being on the show, and we'll look forward to hearing from you soon.

29:53
Perfect. Thanks so much for having me, AJ. Appreciate it.

29:55
All right. I hope you enjoyed that talk I had with Ryan. I've got the episode resourcescoming up for you right now. So stick around.

30:07
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

30:18
Okay, the Brand and Demand Playbook that Ryan mentioned, I've got the link down there below. So definitely check that one out. I think you'll like having that one reviewed and on your hard drive. He also mentioned the blog post, why every startup marketer should be using conversation ads, I've got the link down below for that as well. It's definitely worth checking out. Ryan shared his Twitter handle as well as you can connect with him on LinkedIn. So I've got both of those links for you. And if you are new to LinkedIn ads, or you have an employee or a colleague who needs to learn it, definitely check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's incredibly inexpensive and very valuable. And then take a look at your podcast player right now and see if that subscribe button is already lit up. If not, give it a nice loving touch. And while you're at it rate us of course, I'd love to see five stars on everything, but rate us whatever you legitimately think we deserve. And I would love to hear you review our podcast to on whatever service you're using. leave us a review and I'd love to read it aloud and help shout you out. With any show ideas, topic suggestions, any sort of feedback, hit us up at [email protected]. And then with that being said, we'll see you back here next week, cheering you on inyour LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

Episode 03 - 2020 Roadmap

Watch the webinar

Episode 16 - Ting Ba announcing Events and Live

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 Roadmap Update for the second half of 2020. Here's the exciting stuff you can expect to see in your account soon.

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

0:21
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So back in Episode 03, I walked you through the LinkedIn roadmap for 2020. And I'm sincerely decently surprised by how much has actually happened, considering the Covid disruption. I'm genuinely excited for these developments. And I can't wait to explain why. We'll also cover what's new in your account right now so that you can start to test. But first, some further ado. So in the news, the biggest thing I've been hearing about is advertisers mentioning that the ads tab moved off the company page. And many of you may know this is how we spy on our competitors. We go to their company's pages and click on the ads tab. And then you can see the last six months of sponsored content ads they've run. And I actually noticed this last week and said, oh, man, it looks like LinkedIn, taking things away. It's a strike for privacy. But then a couple people over both Twitter and LinkedIn mentioned that it's still there, you just have to scroll down further into the post section. And there you'll see a little button for just looking at the posts that are ads, so they integrated into the rest of the feed. This is actually a better place for it. But I do wish they would have like, told advertisers about this move happening so that we didn't worry that everything was being taken away. A couple of cool reviews the highlight, Todd-Ohio says "extremely informative. AJ holds nothing back and is truly an expert on LinkedIn ads." Todd, thank you so much for leaving that. That means a ton to me. And then CocoPodcastSuchti says "absolute best podcast on LinkedIn Ads. AJ's podcast is incredibly insightful and helped me so much with optimizing my own LinkedIn campaigns. I love that AJ gives honest recommendations and also talks about the points that he doesn't agree with on LinkedIn." True. "In my opinion, the absolute best podcasts on LinkedIn Ads. Thank you so much for this AJ, please keep it up best from Berlin, Cosima." Thanks so much Coco. I appreciate that. I definitely gonna try keeping this up. Like I've talked about on previous episodes, the workload required to put one of these episodes together is really high. And I'm already quite busy, but I have every intention to keep rolling out high quality stuff. Okay, anyone listening, I want to feature you. So please review this podcast on whatever podcast player you use, you have access to, especially if I know you, I'd love to give you a shout out.

2:40
Okay, with that being said, let's hit it.

2:42
So just recently, Candace Marshall, who I call a friend at LinkedIn. She's the product marketing manager over the ad formats. She got to hop on a webinar, talking about the upcoming roadmap, as well as the recently rolled out features, and just in case you'd missed that webinar. I want to hit all of the highlights here. If you'd like to go watch the full webinar yourself, go down to the show notes. I've got a link where you can sign up and watch it. But let's start with what's new on the platform, what you can look in there and expect to see right now, In Q1 of this year, they rolled out new interests. And we actually got 28 new subcategories for things like home appliances, wearable tech, mobile tech, and a bunch of others. And Candace also gave some insight into how they pull this data, how they determine what makes someone interested in a topic. She mentioned, they pulled data from reads, likes, shares, influencers and topics that they might follow. And she also mentioned that they're inferred based on profile similarities of other similar folks to them. And she didn't mention the Bing Ads integration. But in I'm assuming this is still the case. They would also take if they had your Bing search history, they would use those topics to also inform your interests. So that may have changed and it's likely not huge data set anyway, but interesting nonetheless. We've talked about this before, but they also released the company targeting. So there's two new types of company targeting. One is company category, which is curated lists from LinkedIn, Fortune, Forbes, and probably a lot more to come. This is a really valuable resource for those who are looking to target just specific sizes of companies. And those who are really the movers and shakers in their industry. There's also the company growth targeting, where you can target by percentage growth of company, which is really, really cool to me. They also released contact targeting where you can now target by device ID. So those of you who have device IDs from your programmatic advertising, now you can upload those and get to utilize them on LinkedIn inventory. We've talked about this how we get retargeting on engagement, so anyone doing video view, or lead form opens or submits you can now retarget or exclude, one of my favorite things, based off of those actions, and she recommended 50,000 video views in the last 90 days, or 1000 lead gen form opens in the last 90 days for their algorithms to work properly, which was really helpful to understand the scale needed for their algorithms to really optimize. Candice also mentioned that message ads and events and some other engagements like company page visitors are coming. Next is with the LinkedIn audience network. Now we're actually going to have a full episode about the LinkedIn audience network, probably here in the next couple months. But like I've mentioned before, LinkedIn is pretty tight lipped about the types of websites that your ads might show up on if you enable distribution on the LinkedIn audience network. Candice mentions a couple others which were really interesting. She mentioned New York Times and Business Insider. Add that to the other ones that LinkedIn released in their announcement earlier this year, where it was like Microsoft.com, MSN, and the Flipboard app. Also since June, you can actually retarget video views over the LinkedIn audience network, which is something I didn't know about, which is actually really cool. Their full integration with integral ad science is now totally complete. And this is for those of you who are at large brands who need that pre-bid brand safety guardrail on everything that you do. And they also mentioned that moat and doubleverify integrations are coming and LinkedIn audience network as you probably know, because I just talked about video on it video retargeting. It supports both single image and video sponsored content. And some great news for you video advertisers, sponsored content now supports vertical video. So rather than 16x9 widescreen now you can do 9x16 vertical video. And it's my understanding that if you use vertical video like this, it's only going to show on mobile, it wouldn't show on desktop, but I could be wrong on that one. LinkedIn have improved their previews, they call it a more accurate preview. So if they're calling it more accurate, they're not calling it perfect. But I guess it's still better than the previous of the past where we would look at them and say, okay, but I still have to see it live because I really can't trust this. And you can now delete individual creatives, which is something I didn't even know because I've always deleted creatives directly from the company's page. But this is great that we can do this within campaign manager, now. We still can't delete campaigns, still can't delete accounts. but hey, creatives as a start. In March 2020 of this year, LinkedIn released under the umbrella of sponsored messaging, conversation ads. They punctuated the value of this release by saying that the number of messages on LinkedIn, on the back end, has increased 400%. And in a survey, 89% of consumers say that they want to talk to businesses through messaging, but only 49% do. And conversation ads, if you didn't know, are kind like the chatbot experience for LinkedIn ads, where you can give people different calls to action and based off of their responses, you can lead them down a different path and basically give them more ways to convert or interact with you. LinkedIn also recently released templates, which it used to take us about 30 minutes to build one of these conversation ads because it's, it's so complex, there's so much to that logic. And now with these templates, you can really just pick something and go from there. Maybe give it some slight edits along the way and customize it. But it's a lot faster to build now. And I know I mentioned in Episode 29 in the news, but LinkedIn just released visual reporting for conversation ads, and they're calling it flowchart view. You can access this by going into your conversation ads campaign, selecting your creatives, and then clicking the flowchart button. And what you see is a really very beautiful, visual way of understanding how many people and what percentage of people are going down different paths in your logic there? I think it's called a waterfall chart or something, but this is great. It was really difficult before to understand how each of your calls to action were performing. And now it's quite visual. I love this. I'm a big fan. And if you listen to Episode 16, where we interviewed Ting Ba from LinkedIn, you'll know about how in May of 2020 this year, LinkedIn released events. And that means that for free, a person or company can set up an event and even broadcast live from it. Of course, that's as long as you've applied and been approved for LinkedIn Live. You've got to get access first. But as soon as you're approved, you're good to go. And page admins can actually invite their first degree connections as the company page. But you can't invite people as an individual, it's company only. And because of the whole Covid situation, they've actually sped up the approval process for LinkedIn Live applications. So it's now down to seven days before you hear back, whereas it used to take up to three or four months to get approved. And if you're trying to get approved, we know what they're looking for, at least at the page level. They're looking for at least 1000 page followers, and some posting of a video in the last six months. LinkedIn hasn't specified anything about what they're looking for to approve an individual, but I would guess it's probably something similar. They want to see that you've worked with video, you've posted native video, and probably that you've got a decent level of connections or following. There's also been a recent release of the reach and frequency metrics that we didn't used to get. So now you can get your average reach and frequency to help evaluate how your advertising is going. And what was so cool with this one is the reporting for reaching frequency actually goes all the way back historical. And this makes sense because it really is an easy calculation for LinkedIn. All they needed to know was unique impressions. And then they can calculate all the rest of this quite simply. But I think this is great that we can now go back in time and see what our frequency looked like at different periods. And the last recently released feature here was in the bidding and budgeting, we now have lifetime budgets, and target cost bidding for lifetime budgets, LinkedIn says that this is a lifetime pacing of whatever your budget is. And they try to show ads just when your audience is on LinkedIn. So it's kind of like day parting and scheduling, but you don't actually get control over which hours, they just try to show it probably during peak hours. And this will be interesting to test, but I'm not overly excited about it. The same thing with target cost bidding, target cost bidding, will maximize your ROI based on the cost per click that you want to pay. And call me old fashioned, but I just don't understand the problem of bidding a certain amount and realizing that I'm going to pay let's say 10 or 20 cents less than that. But the value of this target cost bid. If you bid $8.75 per click, then you will end up paying $8.75 per click. So we've done some testing on this one and we ended up paying 20 or 30 cents more per click, because we were actually paying what we were bidding. But we didn't actually see additional traffic, it seems to us like it's just bidding and then rounding our costs up. But admittedly, this has been a pretty limited test. So I'd love to hear from you if you're seeing the same thing. If anyone's gotten target cost bidding to work well for them, please let us know. And also if you're one of these advertisers, that this was a really awesome release for you. I would love to hear why I'd love to hear what makes target cost bidding so much better than just paying a little bit less than what you're bidding. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into what's coming up for the rest of the year from LinkedIn.

12:53
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

13:03
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 getting you the lowest costs and the highest quality of leads is our focus. We're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners. So you know, we're doing something right. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2linked.com, to chat about your campaigns. Or heck, send a carrier pigeon or smoke signal. No matter how you get in touch, we'll make sure we make you look like the internal hero. All right, let's jump into the upcoming roadmap.

13:37
LinkedIn Live & LinkedIn Events

So the first category here is LinkedIn Live and LinkedIn Events. Now, obviously, most of this is done on the organic side of LinkedIn, but there will certainly be tie ins to the ads platform, the ability to sponsor some of these things to target audiences in the future, so this is why we want to pay attention to them. And personally, I'm really excited to use something like LinkedIn Events and LinkedIn Live to put on a live webinar, or even like a summit. And then just like we promote webinars now through LinkedIn Ads, we can also promote an event. And maybe this converts higher than it would be just from normal sponsored content. We'll see, I'm excited. LinkedIn says that we'll be able to download our event registrations. As of right now you can see who attended and who expressed interest, but there's nothing you can do automatically from there. But in the future, we'll be able to download that list, kind of like you can with a webinar currently. And in late 2020 or early 2021, we're going to get the ability to sponsor a LinkedIn Live with Ads. And who knows how that's gonna perform from a cost per attendee standpoint, but I'm sure excited to test. And of course, we'll get to use LinkedIn lead gen form ads for gathering these registrations, which means we'll get higher signup rates, and also the ability to retarget anyone who opened, but didn't fill out or excluding those who've already filled out. And then we'll also get the ability to retarget event attendees, they'll become an audience that we can either include or exclude. So that's a fantastic use of engagement retargeting. And the way that event notifications will work, LinkedIn says they will let the prospect know seven days ahead of time, and then remind them again three days, and then the day before that your events coming up. And we don't know if this is going to be like an email that goes to them reminding, or if it's just if they happen to be on platform, they'll see it or maybe a push notification on mobile. But I do love the fact that there will be some sort of notification to try to increase our show rates.

15:42
Stories Ads

And if you listen to Episode 28, when we interviewed Michael Stelzner, we mentioned there would be LinkedIn stories, and even stories ads. LinkedIn says that the second half of 2020 is when LinkedIn is going to release stories, these real time experiences to all users And they're already live to certain users. For instance, if you are in Brazil, France, the Netherlands, or Australia, you've already got access to this. But as they ramp up and roll out to everyone, I bet there's a lot of millennials and Gen Zers, who will rejoice. They say to expect stories ad formats in Q3. So we're getting pretty close to that. And if you're wondering what it's going to be like to sponsor story ads, I would say go check out Instagram and Snapchat and see what that's like because obviously those are successful and LinkedIn is probably going to use them as the model. I would love to hear what you guys think would be a great type of story to sponsor when we get this ability. Things like a behind the scenes or look how we're working from home during COVID. Sharing news, they will have stickers as well. So those might be some ideas of what you can do. But I'd love to hear how you guys are planning on using it. Stories are not something that I've played with a whole lot on the other networks like Instagram and Snapchat, so this is really a new world for me, and I'm looking for any ideas I can get. One thing that I'm really excited about with LinkedIn Story Ads is I think this is going to be brand new ad inventory all together, it's possible that this will just be another sponsored content post. But it's not in the other networks. And so if we have brand new inventory created, a new slot on the page, then especially right at the beginning, it won't be competitive, we'll probably get to bid the very floor, whatever that is, and still fill our whole budgets worth of traffic. So that'll be fantastic.

17:38
Audience Insights

And if you listen to Episode 23, where I interviewed Sam Fonoimoana, we talked about how LinkedIn was going to be coming out with an ABM dashboard, like a company engagement report that you could see right within campaign manager. And this is going to be launching in sometime Q3 in 2020 this year. It's going to be free and you don't actually need to spend anything on LinkedIn Ads to get it. And I think it will be an update to the demographic reporting the free reporting that we get now. And I really hope they call it LinkedIn Analytics or something like that. So people think of it of using it alongside that of like Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics. Now, if you use Sam's report, you'll get all the interaction from every single known company, you can get thousands, I'm fairly certain that through this new reporting, you'll probably only get access to, you know, maybe 20 to 100 at most. So if you've already gone to Sam at Stoke analytics, you've still got a better product than you'll get from LinkedIn. But we'll see in Q3 when it launches. We'll get to see a demographic composition of the audiences. We'll get to see by content, what that audience most cares about, as well as engagement metrics to see how each segment of that audience is engaging.

18:53
Document Ads

And then in Q4 of 2020, LinkedIn says we'll be able to monitor and optimize our sales pipeline. With CRM integrations, so the way I see this working would be an integration with something like Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce and HubSpot. You'll be able to pull those offline conversions in and know how many, let's say marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads those campaigns drove. And I think this is a brilliant move. I've been telling LinkedIn for years they needed to do something with a CRM because wow, the value of LinkedIn Ads is in the lead quality, it's not in getting the lowest cost per lead. I'll step off that soapbox now. Organically, we've had the ability to create document posts for quite a while now. And these actually perform really, really well organically. And now LinkedIn says that we'll be able to create document ads sometime during Q1 of 2021. With the document posts right now, you can post a PowerPoint presentation or a PDF or a Word doc and it's kind of like a carousel ad where people can scroll through each page. And I have high hopes that when this becomes a document ad, will be able to use this for an immediate transaction of content. So I'm thinking things like ebooks and white papers and case studies. Maybe there's a lead gen form, where as soon as that's completed, the person is automatically given that piece of content. And on the back end, we don't have to get our marketing automation system to gather that email address and send it off to their inbox. It would be so cool if we could just deliver it automatically. And LinkedIn does say that there will be a beta later this year. So if this is something you're absolutely desperate for, get with your LinkedIn account rep right now and request access to that beta.

20:44
Products on Pages

The next release that LinkedIn mentions is called products on pages. And this is kind of like a G2 Crowd kind of competitor, where you're going to be able to go to companies pages and leave reviews on their products. They also mentioned something thing about individuals being able to demonstrate proficiency. So maybe if let's say you are like a HubSpot Pro, you could somehow get some kind of a connection to the HubSpot page or product with your review. The beta is going to be launching. And actually, I think the beta has already launched it was in the first half of 2020. So maybe some of you listeners are already part of this. I know I have at least one friend who's part of it for a large European brand. And I wouldn't be surprised to see this actually release out to everyone right at the beginning of 2021. But who knows they've been releasing things really rapidly lately, and maybe we see it later this year.

21:39
AB Testing/Split Testing

This next release I'm really stoked about they're calling it AB testing or split testing. And I'm sure as many of you know, you can currently go into a campaign and set your creatives to either rotate evenly or optimize to click through rate. And in the past I'm sure you've heard me say, as attractive as It sounds to want to rotate your creatives evenly, it's a really terrible thing for your ad performance. I call it the charge me more and show me less button. And the reason why is when it rotates your ads evenly, what it's doing is it's entering both ads into the auction evenly. But of course, both of them have different relevancy scores. So the one with the higher relevancy score will get a higher number of impressions at a lower cost. And the one with the worst relevancy score, it's still going into the auction, but it's losing a lot more often, meaning that you're not getting those impressions that you're hoping for. And when you do, you pay a higher cost per click for them. So with this new release that they say is coming in Q4 of 2020, you'll be able to compare the performance of two campaigns that differ by one variable. And apparently the reporting will be based off of statistical significance, which is really cool. I've asked LinkedIn several times how this is going to interact with LinkedIn's auction? And is it possible for LinkedIn to kind of gloss over the fact that these ads and variations are going to have different relevancy scores? I haven't gotten a definitive answer, but I'm sure closer to release, I'll have some more information to share about that.

23:16
Campaign Manager Lite

The next release is one that I'm not super excited about, but I definitely understand the value here. They're releasing something called Campaign Manager Lite, which is kind of like a really simplified version of campaign manager, where you can boost posts directly from the company's page, kind of like you can on Facebook. And this is really simple for those marketers who may not be as familiar with PPC advertising, but they still want to take organic posts and event posts and easily sponsor and extend their reach. That'll actually be out pretty soon. They they're saying Q3 of 2020. And of course, anytime you try to take a complex advertising product, like campaign manager and make it lite, it's probably just going to take away a lot of options and control. So chances are I won't be playing with this very much, but I definitely understand the value for advertisers who may not want to jump into campaign manager and learn all of these tips and tricks.

24:16
LinkedIn Business Manager

And then finally, LinkedIn is releasing something that they call LinkedIn Business Manager. Now, those of us who are at agencies who work with a lot of different LinkedIn Ads accounts, this is something we've been asking for for a long time. Those of you who are experienced with Facebook ads, you know, Facebook Business Manager. And it's kind of like we're an agency can have a single entity that they get access to that entity for the ads account, and then the business can add their employees to that entity. So right now, when a client gives us access to their account, we have to go in and add every single employee. And then if and when that employee leaves, we have to remember to go into those accounts and remove that person. And this would be a lot simpler if we could just remove the person once from the company's business manager, and it would remove them from all of the client accounts. We're still a ways out on this one. LinkedIn says it's releasing in the second half of 2021. But there will be a beta early next year. So if this is something, if you're an agency who does a lot of this, maybe request that from your rep. All right, that was a lot of good stuff coming out. So thanks for sticking with us. Right after the break here. I've got the episode resources for you. So stick around.

25:42
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

25:53
Resources

All right, you could actually go and watch the webinar that this was kind of a commentary on so check the show notes down below. It is lead capture so submit your information to LinkedIn and you can watch the whole webinar. The link there is down below. And then also go back to listen to Episode 03 about what's coming in 2020 and what's coming in in 2021. And you can see how much LinkedIn actually has released this year, even despite Covid. Also, don't miss Episode 16 with Ting Ba at LinkedIn, where she told us all about the new releases of LinkedIn Events and LinkedIn Live, that goes deeper into what we've talked about here. And of course, if you are new to LinkedIn advertising, or you have a member of your staff who is go check out the course on LinkedIn Learning, the link is also down below. And this is one that I did with LinkedIn that really takes you from the very beginning of LinkedIn Ads all the way through going and creating your own campaigns, and it can get someone up to speed really quickly. It's also incredibly inexpensive. It's only about $25, or if you have a LinkedIn Premium subscription, it's free. And it covers all the same stuff that I would cover in probably the first hour and a half, if you hired me to come and train your team at $500 an hour, so it's a fantastic value. On whatever podcast player you're listening to look down and hit that subscribe button. If this has been a value to you, I'd love to have you hearing more episodes. And also if it has been a value, hit the rate button. And I'd love to have this podcast really blow up and get more people hearing all the great tips and tricks they just can't hear anywhere else about LinkedIn Ads. And if you will, leave a review on whatever podcast player you listen to. And I'd love to shout you out at the beginning of the episodes. And as always reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions or suggested topics for the future. I'd love to give you what you're hungry for. Alright, with that being said, I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

Sales Navigator

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 used to perform great, but performance has been dragging lately. Yeah, we're talking about saturation today.

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

0:20
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Have you experienced the horror of your LinkedIn Ads that were performing great a few weeks ago, and all of a sudden performance is dreadful? You're not alone. We're going to dive deep into audience saturation and what you can do about it to keep your audience's engaging. In the news, as a reminder, we're going to be doing our first of hopefully many Q&A episodes, get your questions into podcasts at [email protected] and I would love to field them there. In platform news, there's something really cool that LinkedIn just released for conversation ads, and it's called flow chart view. It's essentially a waterfall chart that shows you all of the different questions and different calls to action that you provide in a conversation ad, it will show you what percentage of people chose which option. And this is so cool because now we get to see very visually what people like and what they don't. And now you can tell if you've got a call to action that is, let's say two or three steps down in your tree, and it has a really high conversion rate. That could be a great reason to promote it to the very first call to action that you provide, and maybe swap your first down into the third. I checked it out. It looks beautiful. And it should have released to everyone on August 4, 2020. So if you're running conversation ads, definitely check that little goodie out. LinkedIn doesn't share with us benchmarks all too often. Usually we have to come up with them ourselves so we can see whether or not we're doing things. Well. We got a rare benchmark confirmation this week from LinkedIn. They said that on sponsored messaging ads, the average open rate is 55%. And then the average click through rate once someone has opened is 3.2%. This was great for me to figure out, because I've been telling people that average was about a 50% open, and a click through rate was anywhere between 3% to 4%. So I'm certainly glad that I wasn't that far off and that I wasn't misleading people. So check your sponsored messaging campaigns and see how your performance is doing. And certainly, if you are below or even at those benchmarks, then that could be a good clue that you need to go in and switch something up. I shared in Episode 13 about how sponsored messaging ads are the most expensive ad format on LinkedIn if you are only performing at the average. So that's why I say if you're anywhere near the average, go change something up. These ads are only interesting to me when I can far exceed the averages. We'll probably end up doing a whole roadmap update episode, but for right now here are just a few cool things that are happening. really soon. The first is that any sort of sponsored messaging ad has a really tight frequency cap of each member can only receive one every 45 days. Well, in September of 2020 this all change. It's going to be reduced from every 45 days down to 30. And I'm actually really excited about this, because I've never heard someone complain that they were getting too much sponsored inmail. And anytime I've heard someone complaining about it, they were actually talking about Sales Navigator outreach, and weren't actually talking about a sponsored message ad. So anyone who's using sponsored messaging at large scale, you're about to get a nice performance bump, a ton of extra impressions. The next road map update is we're going to get stories ads, like I mentioned in the last episode, stories have actually already been live in the Netherlands. And it's certainly not long until we get them as an ad format. I'm not a huge user of Instagram or Snapchat or actually I'm not even a user of them at all. So I'm not super familiar with the stories type of format. But I'm really excited to see what people end up doing with that on LinkedIn, I definitely think there's a place for it. Another that I'm really excited about, we're soon going to get the ability to retarget event attendees. So if you're running a LinkedIn event for something like a webinar, or let's say, a live stream in the future, you'll be able to retarget those audiences. And I'm just crossing my fingers that we'll be able to retarget audiences smaller than 300 people, because I've seen a lot of lives and events who have less than 300 people, and I'd sure hate it if we couldn't retarget unless we had that many attendees. As part of that event update. We're going to get the ability to use lead gen forms to get people to register for a LinkedIn event. That's pretty cool too. And of course, with the recent update where we can retarget form openers and form submitters, it makes it even more powerful. If you listen to Episode 23, with Sam Fonoimoana, he shared with us how he uses his tools and the LinkedIn API to show in great detail exactly which companies are engaging with your ads and what sorts of actions they're taking. Now LinkedIn is going to be releasing their own version of this. I assume it's going to be called company engagement reporting, or maybe something like an ABM dashboard. But whatever it is, I'm excited to see it. And I'm still pretty sure that Stoke Analytics, and Sam over there are going to have a more in depth report. But of course, I'm excited for anything that LinkedIn gives us that's powerful in campaign manager.

5:39
Reviews

Let's highlight a couple of reviews from listeners who've been listening and reviewing Darryl Oberg, who's the owner of a wide internet marketing. He is a total rock star when it comes to paid media in British Columbia, Canada, he says "been listening to AJ Wilcox in his LinkedIn ads podcast. It covers the changes clearly and coming from Google at Facebook ads, I'm looking to promote more LinkedIn ads. Great podcast, and I highly recommend listening to it if you're considering LinkedIn ads." Darryl, you're a total stud. Thanks so much for leaving that. And then Amy McGlinn, who is a copywriting extrordiaire in New York shared "I love this show!" "For everyone using LinkedIn ads for leads. This is the show." Amy, thanks so much for the kind words I'm so glad you're getting value out of it. And you. Yes, I'm talking to you right now you with the headphones on possibly on the elliptical machine right now? Yes, you! I want to feature you so make sure you review us somewhere somewhere on the internet. Make sure that we can find it and I'd love to shout you out. Thanks in advance for that support. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it.

6:45
My friend Luca Brinkhues, I hope I pronounced that right, who is a total digital marketing rockstar in Germany. He reached out and said I'm running into an issue repeatedly. These audiences run well for four to five weeks. I'm getting a cost per lead of like $15 to $20, which is fantastic, by the way, and then the cost per lead starts to rise to $50, $60 $70 plus. As you probably know, it's the same with Facebook. But due to LinkedIn's high ad costs, I feel like the cost per lead rises much higher, much faster. How do you deal with this? Are you simply creating new ads pretty regularly? Or is this a sign that the offer is just not good enough for scale? Luca, this was a fantastic question, and one that prompted me to want to come out with this episode. So this is definitely an issue of saturation. But there are three different kinds of ad saturation. So let's go through each one. There's ad saturation, there's offer saturation, and then there's audience saturation.

7:42
Ad Saturation

Now the most common is definitely ad saturation. And what this is, is people have seen your ads before, and they're kind of sick of them, in essence, because they've seen that same image, their brand tells them oh, I've seen this before, it's not new, move on. And they become banner blind to it. So as you're running ads for a while, more and more people who've seen your ad previously, are now ignoring it and scrolling past. So how do you know that this ad saturation is occurring? Well, here are the signs. If you go into chart your performance of your ads, if you see your click through rate dropping steadily over time, or if you look at your cost per click, and they are climbing steadily, those are pretty solid signs that you're experiencing ad saturation. It could even be more extreme, you could see rapid drops. This can happen if your click through rate drops below a certain threshold that makes your relevancy score drop significantly. And now even with your same level of bidding, you're not winning as many impressions in the auction, and you see your traffic just drops off or even your impressions drop off. From our analysis, we found that ad saturation tends to occur on average between 27 to 33 days, but it certainly could be longer or shorter based on the activity level and size of your audience. So for your audience, I would highly recommend, go ahead and let your ad saturate and watch your click through rate fall over time, and build your own model about how long it took for that audience to get sick of that ad so you can catch it before it happens again, next time. When you see your ad start to saturate, pay attention to your frequency metric. If you go right above your campaigns, you'll see an option there called columns. It usually defaults to columns performance, but change that to columns delivery, and then you'll get to see your frequency metric. This is the average number of times that your audience has seen your ad. We've noticed saturation occurring anywhere between a frequency of 2.3 to 2.9 and so it totally depends. Okay, so you've gone and built your model and let's say that you figured out that your audience is saturating about every 27 days. What that means is you want to set something on the calendar every 27 days, and maybe ideally even earlier to give you some time to prep. And this is when you're going to change things up, you're going to refresh that ad copy, and or imagery. Now I'm a big fan of changing your ad copy quite regularly, so that you can test the motivations that are inspiring your prospects to click. But in the case of ad saturation, the most important thing you can do is actually change your image, change it to something completely different. Because our human brains are so good at looking at an image and very quickly deciding whether or not that image is interesting to us whether the person is threatening or attractive or exciting. And because our brains react so quickly, if you want to fight this banner blindness, a lot of times you could even keep the same ad copy, but just change the image and then people will end up giving your ad a second Look. And of course, you can notice things like your click through rate starting to drop, or your cost per click starting to climb. And it might not actually be saturation. It could also be something like a major competitor entering into the auction and starting to crowd you out, but there really isn't much that you can actually do about that. Or if you know any way to actually do something about that, please let me know privately. But because you can't really act on that, we'll just assume that it's always saturation. Funny story, I once got in trouble with LinkedIn for talking about ad saturation. This was several years ago and it was because they felt like it put them in a bad light. The funny part about it is I'm admittedly very critical of LinkedIn on many things. But ad saturation is actually one of the things that I absolutely praised LinkedIn for because it's so much easier to manage your ad saturation on LinkedIn than it is on Facebook. This is because people on Facebook tend to spend 30 plus minutes per day, but they're only lost into LinkedIn like once per week. So there's much less of an opportunity to saturate your audience when they're only seeing your ad, even if you're bidding aggressively, about once per week on average, whereas on Facebook, they could be seeing it multiple times per day. And you can burn an audience out really quickly. I mentioned that on LinkedIn, it's about every 27 to 33 days when saturation occurs on Facebook, it's oftentimes between seven and 10 days if your audience is quite large. So because of that, I am so grateful that LinkedIn is not the platform that people go and spend all day long on because it makes it really easy to control and predict.

7:42
Offer Saturation

The next type of saturation and this one is the next most common is offer saturation. And if you remember from Episode 10, your offer is really your lead magnet, your call to action, whatever you want to call it, it's what you're offering your customer in exchange for their attention. Now this happens because people have been seeing the same offer repeatedly and they no longer either perceive it as new, or perceive it as interesting or valuable. It's essentially old news. And of course, you as a marketer who worked really hard putting this asset together. You don't want to feel like it's old news. Don't worry, if it performed well at one point it's likely going to perform well again in the future, you just need to give people a break, because they're sick of it right now. In order to tell that we're experiencing offer saturation, what we're usually watching for is if we've tried refreshing either ad creative or copy three times, and no matter what we try, we can't get click through rates back up to around where they were when the offer was new or when the last round of successful ad copy was new. That tells us people are probably tired of the offer. There's only so much that we can do to the actual ad copy to try to get their attention when they've seen this same webinar, the same ebook several times and they're no longer feeling compelled to go towards it. This type of saturation is tough, because we know that creating a whole new offer, a whole new call to action takes significant time and a lot of cases, so plan ahead. If you know that your average offer is going to last, let's say, one to three months, make sure that you're always working on your next offer so that you can swap it in as soon as you see saturation occur. Saturation of the offer can look like a drop in click through rate because people aren't as interested. But you'll also see the people who do click, maybe some of them are the same ones who've already clicked before. And they remember they've already seen this or converted or decided not to convert, and you'll notice your conversion rates can actually drop as well.

14:40
Hey, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the least common and the most dangerous kind of saturation.

14:46
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

14:56
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We've spent over $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 become official LinkedIn partners. So you know we're doing something right. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaigns. Or heck, send a carrier pigeon. No matter how you get in touch, we'll make sure we make you look like the hero.

15:27
Audience Saturation

Alright, let's jump back into the most dangerous kind of saturation. And this is the least common and this is audience saturation. Now, I hope you are not experiencing audience saturation because this one is not nearly as easy to fix. What this is, is people now recognize your brand. And no matter what ad copy or imagery or video or offers you throw at them, they're looking at your brand and saying, oh, I've heard of them before. I've seen them everywhere. This isn't worth my attention. When we see audience saturation. occur, it's usually because a company has been advertising heavily to an audience for 2, 3, 4 years. If you are experiencing audience saturation, the best thing you can do is actually take a break from advertising. I would advise you to take advantage of something like a COVID outbreak, where people's minds really aren't on the platform or advertising or business in general. But if you can't predict the future, like I certainly can't, November and December are really good times from my experience to withdraw yourself from the auction. They're the most expensive times of the year and by far the least performance for my experience. But let's say that you are held to a strict lead goal and you can't just pull out of the auction and stop spending for a month or two. In this case, you will want to do anything you can think of to shake things up in a big way. Make a stir or make the news. Either one will will potentially work really well here. Now we're talking about saturation like it's a really bad thing because, of course, it's the harbinger of kind of some poor performance. But you can actually harness this and control saturation for your own good. The way that this works is your target audience, let's say it's 50,000 people. Of that 50,000 people, you might have 20,000 who are near daily users of LinkedIn. And let's say 10,000, who log in once every couple weeks, and then the other 20,000 is somewhere in between. If you're using sponsored content ads, you can make sure you only have two ads active in each campaign. And what that's going to do is put you on a really strict frequency cap, where your ads can only be shown to any individual member a max of once per day. So what that means is, the more active people in your audience will likely not saturate very quickly because they're not seeing your ads very often. And the least active ones obviously won't anyway, and so the effect you get is this very even saturation. The other ad formats are significantly harder to saturate with because first of all text ads and dynamic ads are on desktop only so it's only what 20% to 30% of your audience are even going to be eligible to see them. But text ads and dynamic ads also borrow inventory from each other. So they'll switch up pretty regularly. And of course, like we talked about earlier, sponsored messaging can only be sent to someone once every 45 days, or once every 30 days after September of 2020. So if you're going after an evergreen audience with sponsored content, I highly recommend two creative PR campaign so that you, at least as evenly as possible, saturate this audience slowly and regularly. But I hear some of you asking, but AJ, what if you want to saturate your audience? Let's say you've got a webinar coming up, or an online summit or something that is seven days away, and you really want to make sure that you get in front of your audience as often as possible to remind them of this event that's going to be over soon. So this is a great strategy to get in front of your most active users often to remind them of what you're doing. If you want to actively saturate this audience as much as possible, what you'll want to do is put five ads in that campaign. The reason why this works is LinkedIn has a rule that one unique creative can only be seen by one person every 12 hours. So if you have five unique creatives that can technically qualify you to have five impressions from a single audience member within a 48 hour period. So this is the most you can saturate an audience. And I think that's pretty cool. Although truthfully, it's not something I do super often that's really only in the high urgency cases, like we talked about in Episode 21. We also see quite regularly that when we launch a new offer or a new campaign, sometimes we'll see conversions go crazy for the first few days, and then all of a sudden conversion rates drop. For a long time, I wondered if this was some sort of saturation occurring, but it was happening so quickly over a matter of days and I couldn't imagine that audience being so active that they were tired of this offer after just three or four days. What we've discovered is this is usually a sign that there was latent demand in the marketplace, and you've reached all those who were actively waiting for your product or service or information. And this is usually a very good thing. You just captured the most excited people in your audience who've been just waiting on pins and needles to see what you're offering. Alright, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around.

20:49
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

21:00
Resources

Okay, here's some great resources for you. If you are new to LinkedIn advertising or have a colleague who is right in the show notes below, you'll see a link to the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning all about LinkedIn ads. And this is fantastic. It's only an hour long, and it's altra inexpensive. If you've got LinkedIn premium, it's free. Or if you don't, it's only $25. And it covers all the information that I would present to you one on one, if you hired me for $500 an hour to come and train your team. So I highly recommend it. It's a great one. Something else that's interesting, we don't talk about the organic side of LinkedIn very often here, but many of you may be familiar with the Sales Navigator tool. This is what sales teams use to do outreach. I actually secured a link that most of the time they offer a 30 day free trial if you just go right to LinkedIn, but I actually got offered a special 60 day free trial link. And so that's below too if you and your sales team happened to leverage Sales Navigator or want to start, check out that link to get an extra month for free. On whatever podcast player you're listening to. Please hit that subscribe button if you want to hear more deep LinkedIn Ads info. And also look for the stars where you can hit rate or and or review. I'd love to shout you out for leaving a review. So definitely hit us up there. And then if you have any episodes, suggestions or questions that you want answered on our Q&A episode coming up, reach out to us at [email protected] and we'd love to give you exactly what you're looking for. All right, I'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

2020 Social Media Industry Report

SME's Facebook Summit

Social Media Marketing Podcast

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:

Only 23% of B2B Marketers use LinkedIn Ads. We interview Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner to find out that and more.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. I am absolutely brimming with excitement today, because I get to introduce you to my guest, Michael Stelzner. He's someone I'm blessed to call a friend and a mentor. And he needs no introduction, but I'm going to give him one anyway. He's the founder of Social Media Examiner, which is the resource for social media marketers to stay up on industry changes. He's also the host of the social media marketing podcast, to which I'm a subscriber and have never missed a single episode. It's got over 400 episodes, and I've even been a guest twice. He also hosts Social Media Marketing World. The mega conference for social media marketers in San Diego every year. And as a side note, this is one of my favorite conferences to attend and speak at because it's the first and only conference with a dedicated LinkedIn track. Finally, some love for LinkedIn. He's a mentor to many of the biggest names and social media and constantly has his finger on the pulse of all things social, which is why I'm so excited to be talking to him today about the industry report he recently published and how LinkedIn fits into the entire social media ecosystem, plus an exclusive announcement at the end. So stick around just a short news segment today. Just a reminder, I'm going to be doing the first of many q&a episodes here coming up in the next few weeks. So get your questions into [email protected] and I'll make sure to feature your question. Okay, without further ado, let's hit it.

1:51
Hey, Michael. So great. You could come and join us here on the LinkedIn Ads Show.

1:54
Thanks so much for making the time.

1:55
AJ, it's absolutely a pleasure to join you today.

1:58
Well, I am in storied company here. I feel like you are the father of the whole social media industry. So I'm just quite honestly very flattered you've considered to come on the show. I call you a friend. And I'm really excited for the stuff that you're going to share with us today.

2:12
Well, it's been great to work with you and become your friend over the years. And I'm really really honored that you also calling me the father because I'm definitely not the father. Probably this one of the jokers, but happy to bring whatever wisdom I can to your audience for sure.

2:27
When the jokers bring the wisdom, it's a good castle.

2:30
I guess first of all, how are things been going for you during the whole COVID situation? I mean, tell us personally how things are.

2:37
Yeah, well, as you know, you got a chance to come out here and film inside of our studio during COVID. And it was pretty quiet here in the building. Most of our staff are working from home. Things are uncertain like we for sure don't know for example, if we're gonna have a physical conference because as of this recording, California is kind of not looking so good with COVID, which we won't know for a while and that's kind of unnerving to not know about your future. But you know, I'm a believer that whenever you are dealt a deck that you don't expect that there's opportunity in there somewhere. And I believe in innovating your way out of struggle. So we have just used this as an opportunity to be super innovative. You know, that phrase, the mother of invention is necessity, right? So like when you need to do something is when you do stuff that you never thought you could do. And that's what's exciting for me is, I believe, incredible opportunities coming as a result of this, and we're just kind of figuring our way out, but we're not pessimistic. We're very optimistic about the future. And we're just excited to see what tomorrow holds for sure.

3:38
Well, and like I mentioned in the intro, you are the creator of the mega conference for social media. This is Social Media Marketing World and I counted a huge blessing personally, that you were able to put on the 2020 show, basically right before all of the COVID shut down happen. So I'm amazed that that was the one show I got to go to.

3:56
Yeah, that was crazy because I think everybody became aware it was March 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, right? So literally the very first American who died of COVID was up in Seattle on like, the second day of the event. And all of a sudden, everybody's like, Whoa, what's happening here? And then, slowly but surely, people began to realize this might be the last big conference that I'm gonna be at for a long time. And indeed, that happened. So yeah, we were really blessed to kind of be there during that experience. And, and it was just a surreal, really neat opportunity that was granted to us and hopefully, we'll be able to do it again in the future. We'll see.

4:32
And anyone who has not yet been able to attend Social Media Marketing World, I will tell you, I speak at probably 15 to 20 events every year. And that is by far my favorite. Like if I knew a pandemic was coming and I could choose one show to speak at before everything shut down for five months, that would have been the one. So thanks for making that happen.

4:50
Thank you, AJ.

4:50
So I know you just I'll say recently, but this was in May, you came out with this massive report that you do across all social media every single year. So it's the 2020, social media marketing industry report from Social Media Examiner. First of all, how long have you been doing the report? And why do you do it?

5:08
Well, thank you for mentioning that. Yeah, first one came out in 2009. So this is I think, the 12th annual report, if I'm not mistaken. So we've been doing it non stop every year for 12 years. And it's been really fun for me to survey thousands and thousands of marketers, I think we surveyed this year over 5000, marketers all over the world, in B2B and B2C. And it's just been really exciting to kind of see how they're changing where their trends are. And we look at everything from use of video, to use of social platforms, to future use of social platforms, to objectives and benefits of social media and a million other things and we give it all away for free in about a 50 page report. We use it internally to help direct our editorial direction and of course, decide what topics to talk about on the podcast and what kind of things to have at our conference. But you know, a lot of people in the world use it to also do some of the same things like we've already had 25,000 downloads on that thing. You know, we're recording this just a couple of months after it came out.

6:08
And for listeners who want to go and look at this report while we're discussing it, yes. Can you tell us where can we find it?

6:13
Yeah, socialmediaexaminer.com/report2020.

6:18
Perfect. All right, make sure you go get your copy. We're going to be talking about specific points in here that you'll probably be interested in.

6:23
Yeah. And it's free.

6:24
Yeah, exactly. And oh, boy, I'm so glad that it helps dictate your editorial direction that you guys can use it. Because I know it's valuable for us, we get to take a temperature of, you know, how do people feel about LinkedIn specifically?

6:35
Exactly.

6:36
Did you have any really big bombshell realizations from the data this year? I mean, was there anything that just punched you in the face?

6:43
Everything just kind of at a macro level, changed a little bit like across all social platforms, a lot of the benefits went down across the board, which is one of the things that I kind of thought was interesting, but still, you know, and the benefits of social media that we asked about every year are things like generating leads, generating sales, all that kind of stuff. And still, for the most part, more than 50% of marketers said, actually, more than 59% of marketers said, it improve sales, developed loyal fans, generated leads increased traffic, and increased exposure. So it's still like the top benefits are there. But the benefits that started shrinking are, for example, providing marketplace intelligence, growing business partnerships. I think this has to be a bigger part of what social media was back in the day. Because back in the day, there weren't as many social platforms like Twitter was it and Facebook and you could tweet somebody and all of a sudden they'd be open to talking to you, you know, those are, those are kind of different days, right?

7:44
Oh, yeah. Love Twitter.

7:45
Yeah. So everything went down a little bit as far as the percentages but I wouldn't say anything, like struck me as absolutely shocking. Not at all.

7:53
That's really interesting. And do you feel like the COVID situation influenced any of this? Do you know how much of the data collection happened during quarantine? No, this was all collected pre-COVID. But I will tell you, we did another content study in July, just for internal purposes. And we we asked some of the same questions and not all the questions, but a lot of the things have held the interest in the platform's hasn't changed the order of the rankings, all that kind of stuff. So if anything, I think COVID has increased. For example, we just recently had Mark Zuckerberg report on his earnings call literally just yesterday. And I think if I'm not mistaken, the use of Facebook has gone up by 11%. Meaning the amount of time people are spending on the platforms. So I think what COVID has done for the social media platforms is increased usage and activity, because people are stuck at home and they want to socialize and where else to do it but on the social platforms, right? So COVID has turned out to help the platforms. I don't think it's hurt them at all.

8:53
Yeah, I've seen the same thing with LinkedIn. We've seen our impressions, our engagement go up across nearly all of our clients. So I feel like Facebook jumped 11%. LinkedIn probably did too.

9:03
And speaking editorially, we've seen jumps across our editorial channels as well. So I think the interest in learning how to use social platforms has increased as well. Because the old traditional ways of doing speaking and local events and all that stuff are obviously not able to happen. So those naysayers who have been eh, social media is just for them young kids right? Now they're all of a sudden, oh, maybe I better learn this stuff.

9:30
Which is a good thing, because it's a very powerful side of our digital marketing tool set.

9:34
Yeah, exactly.

9:35
You mentioned that you surveyed both B2C and B2B right. The first chart I want to ask you about is if you're following along page 14, where it's talking about platform use for B2C marketers. And of course, I'm not surprised at all to see that Facebook's at 96%. 96% of B2C marketers are using it, but I actually was pretty surprised to see LinkedIn at 50%. So I guess my question to you if you have the insight, yhy do you think B2C marketers are showing interest in LinkedIn? What kind of draw does it have for them?

10:05
Well, first of all, it's a really fascinating question. So just to give you some quick data for everyone who's listening, Facebook is used by 91% of B2B marketers, followed by LinkedIn at 81%. And 50% of B2C use LinkedIn, but only 4% of them say it's their most important platform. Facebook is used by 91% of B2C marketers, okay, that shouldn't surprise you, right? But a big chunk of them use LinkedIn also, okay. Now, when it comes to B2B 46% of B2B marketers say that Facebook is their most important platform. Okay, followed by LinkedIn. So almost half of b2b marketers, say if they could only choose one platform, they choose Facebook. And then 33% choose LinkedIn. So this was a choose one right? Here's all the platforms 46% said Facebook. And then 33% said LinkedIn of B2B marketers. Right? So that's the question, right? Why so much interest in Facebook? Right? And I think that it's part of a bigger dialogue, which is, Facebook is used by everybody. Okay. So if we think about this for a second, Facebook is the platform that the world is on. And there's billions on Facebook and there's hundreds of millions on LinkedIn. We know this to be true, right? People use Facebook, for personal and for business, right. And people use LinkedIn, probably mostly just for business. So because they already are B2B, and their friends are on Facebook. They go to groups on Facebook, it's part of their natural living. It's almost like email for them, right? So the Facebook ecosystem is so huge and so ubiquitous that the whole world uses it regardless of whether that business they work for targets B2B targets B2C. I know your next question is like, well, why? From the business side of things, first of all the ad costs are really affordable, as you know, on Facebook. Secondly, they can do super creative targeting on Facebook that you cannot do on LinkedIn, which I know you know is true. Third, live video is available for everyone on Facebook. You don't have to wait. You don't have to get selected. There's nothing signed no signups or anything right. And fourth, facebook groups are way better than LinkedIn groups. Okay, there was a time where LinkedIn has dominated. But now it's Facebook groups, right? So from a utilitarian perspective, these B2B marketers, they have groups of customers that are on Facebook. They're using live video on Facebook, because it's the only place that they can use live video because they're not been selected yet on LinkedIn. They're using it to acquire customers because they know that their customers are also on Facebook, right? So it's not that they don't find value in it. It's just that they use it. Now. This Is the distinction. You know, from the B2C side of it. If we flip the coin, the B2C side, they don't really put a lot of value in LinkedIn, only 40% of them say it's their most important platform. 50% say Facebook. And that makes a lot of sense that they would choose Facebook as their overwhelming platform. So I think what's going on here is it's just Facebook is the innovator. LinkedIn has never really been the innovator. LinkedIn has been like the ketchup boy, for lack of better words, right? Yep. About four years behind. Yeah. So I think it'd be not smart for B2B marketers to ignore Facebook. And I would I would think you would agree as well, you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. It doesn't mean LinkedIn isn't powerful. It just means that LinkedIn is different, right? So I think LinkedIn for a lot of B2B marketers is an important part of their arsenal of marketing tools. But it's not their only thing that they do. That's my thinking. I don't know. What's your thoughts on that?

13:53
Yeah, I totally agree. I get asked all the time. When I'm pitching LinkedIn to a potential customer. They'll say something like, Oh, we don't think are customers on Facebook. And I usually stop them and say, well, they are. Everyone is on Facebook, the challenge is we just can't reach them well enough with targeting by who they are professionally for it to make economic sense, you know, because LinkedIn cost per click is so high, it basically means that if you don't have a large deal size on the back end, LinkedIn is priced themselves out of the market for you. So anyone with a lifetime value of under about 10k, I tell them go Facebook and Google all day long. But if you have over that, and precision in your targeting, make sense, then yeah, you go to LinkedIn.

14:35
Well, and here's some more interesting data of the B2B marketers that we surveyed, which I think was about 40% of our survey audience, which is, you know, makes sense, because B2C is very much all over social more than B2B is 73% of those B2B marketers said they wanted to do more with LinkedIn The next year. So it's not like LinkedIn isn't important to them. They just haven't yet done as much as they want to do they want to figure it out more. I know that a lot of them are hopeful they're going to get live, right? Live video. I know a lot of them are like, trying to figure out how in the world, they could possibly make ads work for them. Right? And I'm sure a lot of them are interested in publishing content on LinkedIn, right? Because it's one of the few platforms that actually does give you really incredible reach. Where Facebook represses your reach, LinkedIn allows that reach to just explode because as you know, every time someone likes or comments on your editorial content, or your post or whatever, their friends see it right. That is so cool. Let's hope LinkedIn doesn't take that away. Right? And let's also be intellectually honest, LinkedIn feels so much more like what Facebook used to feel like that it's actually become a destination. Where I think for a lot of marketers, it became a place they just checked in and they left. I think it's now becoming a place that they go and they hang out. And I'm sensing that. Do you feel that as well?

16:04
Yeah. In fact, when Microsoft released their last quarterly earnings, they shared something that LinkedIn never shares, they actually shared how much time on platform grew over the last year. This was obviously during COVID. But they showed a 60% increase in time spent in the newsfeed over the previous year. And I don't think that's just COVID I think a lot of that is just it is it's a destination. It's a place where people come now to hang out and interact, where it used to be come back every six months to update your resume. Well, you know, and it's funny because we forget sometimes who owns these platforms, right? We forget that Facebook owns Instagram. And we forget that Microsoft owns LinkedIn. But really fascinating news that I just read earlier today, Microsoft is thinking about purchasing the US based TikToK. And that just came out with the news today. So can you imagine if Microsoft was able to somehow make that work where they owned TikTok and LinkedIn. I mean, holy cow. And it doesn't seem to make sense at first blush, right? Why would they do that, but this is a way that they can capture a younger marketplace. Think about the incredible opportunity to bring people up into the Microsoft family of products, right? They've got plenty of cash, you know what I mean? And all of a sudden, it's like, wow, this could be bringing in some really interesting, innovative technology, if they were able to acquire this from TikTok into the LinkedIn ecosystem.

16:04
Yeah, when I heard LinkedIn was being bid on by potential buyers, before Microsoft made the announcement. I just went, oh, please, please, please have it be either Google, Facebook, or Salesforce. Any of those companies could make amazing use of LinkedIn data. And then it was Microsoft. And I kind of went, ah, darn. I mean, there's some value there, but not nearly as much. Google marketers forever have been just saying they are giving us amazing tools for B2C. We've got nothing for B2B. Facebook, the big challenge is yeah, people use it for B2B, but they can't get people to reliably give them their business info. So those combined, that'd be great. But we got Microsoft, we'll make the best.

18:11
And you know, fascinatingly enough, they do have a pretty, pretty big consumer division with Xbox, right? So imagine if they had Xbox and TikTok, right? And then all of a sudden, you begin to see the connections there, right? And all of a sudden, maybe they take their gaming system, and who knows, maybe they acquire a live video company. I mean, you could just kind of see a whole consumer division of this thing, kind of fascinating diversion. But I'll let you take back control.

18:34
Yeah. And now a younger audience who are being introduced to LinkedIn with a consumer research company. I did a survey of high schoolers and college students on basically how do they use LinkedIn. And I'll be doing a podcast on this in the future. But what we found is high school students don't even know what LinkedIn is, college students go, I'll look at it when I get a job. I mean, if you can imagine something like tying in livestreaming gaming with Xbox, TikTok, I think LinkedIn would actually really benefit as those people get into high school and college and start to build a profile.

19:09
It'll be interesting. We'll have to watch how that goes.

19:11
Love it. Anyone following along to the report here on page 23. It's about future LinkedIn plans. And it says more than half of marketers, 55%, plan on increasing their LinkedIn organic activities over the next 12 months. And while 55% is pretty high, I'm seeing that it's only a 3% increase from 2019. I mean, do you have any comment on that?

19:34
Well, if you think about how we do the survey, we say, you know, do you plan on doing more or less or the same or you know, something along those lines, right with all the platforms. And when they say that they want to do more, it's a bit subjective about what those organic activities might be. So in their mind, they might be thinking live video, they might be thinking more posts. So it's a bit subjective, but it's good because the good news is more than half right, 55% want to do more with LinkedIn in an organic way. So what that tells me is that there's interest in continuing to innovate, improve, increase activities, it doesn't mean they're just going to post more, it just means that they're going to try to do more, whatever that means to them. Right. And I think that's good news. Because if it was less than half, then that would be probably a negative indicator that would show that they're not so excited about it anymore. So the fact that it went up a little bit is actually not bad at all.

20:33
Okay, that's great insights. On page 29. We see that b2b marketers are far more interested in learning about LinkedIn. That is 72% of b2b versus 52% of b2c. I think this reasons I think it makes sense.

20:47
I'm with you, 100%. But I think it's interesting that 52% of B2C want to learn more about LinkedIn. That's the fascinating thing here, right. And maybe we should just talk for a little bit about that because I don't think we really did go into that right. Why would B2C people even be interested in LinkedIn. You willing to talk about that for a little bit?

21:03
Oh, hundred percent. Yeah, that was actually one of my questions. I'm curious, like, what is the draw for them?

21:08
Well, I think that we're starting to see it become almost an influencer site like Instagram. And I think we're specifically seeing this a lot with the female influencers on LinkedIn, like, especially in the in the business world. I think we're starting to see a lot of people use it as a blog platform where they can just post short form videos. I think we're also starting to see people just post what they're doing in their life, right. And it's almost become like a little blog, for lack of better words, right? Like, this is what I'm doing. This is what I'm struggling with. This is my story, right? Yeah. And it's not surprising, because anywhere you have the opportunity to write a story. And people follow you. You have an opportunity to build a following because I've been around long enough and you've been around long enough that this is how blogging started. Right? Yeah. In the beginning, it was people telling stories, right? It was stories of their life, right? Now this has moved on to social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. So if people are going on there, and they're in the B2C world, like fashion or home goods or whatever, and they want to establish themselves in a predominantly male dominated platform, let's be honest, right? If they can go on there as a female, and they can do something that stands out from everybody else who's doing pure business related content, all of a sudden they have an opportunity because there's not as much competition. Right. And we're seeing this with a lot of people. Like we see this with some people go on there and talk about politics, which is definitely B2C, some people go on there, and they talk about whatever they're an expert in. So they're using it to draw an audience to them for a consumer facing kind of thing, but they're using it in a way that is, I don't know how else to say this. Technically, it makes sense. But culturally, it seems a little off right? Because so much of the platform has been linked to my blog posts about business related topics, right? Discussions around business related topics. But the moment people talk, start talking about personal stuff on there all of a sudden, hey, these are just humans talking to humans and that stuff works. Have you noticed that this is starting to become a trend? And some people are getting traction with this?

23:16
Yeah, absolutely. I've actually gone through the same thought process myself. If I have to go to one platform and share something, when I share on LinkedIn, it gets 20, 30, 50,000 views. If I go and share on Twitter, I haven't checked my analytics recently. But I would imagine I get less than, I don't know, 200 views on a tweet. And so I don't even think about the culture of what are these networks I'm posting on, I think of I have limited time, where is my audience, and I'm probably going to take it to LinkedIn where I have a bit bigger of a megaphone.

23:45
Yeah. And I think that the truth is that if we think about the historical pre-conception of what LinkedIn has been, which is it's a job place, right, to get a job. So when you're going on there, to get a job. You're going on there for B2C jobs just as much as you're going on there for B2B jobs. Right. So therefore, there are people that are interested in B2C industries that are in there participating. And it kind of logically makes sense. If they don't really care about the business to business topics that maybe you and I care about. And they happen to go on there thinking it's for one thing and realize it's for something else. They might come back, right?

24:23
Yeah. In fact, we find several niches inside of b2c that make a ton of sense on LinkedIn. The first is what you've already mentioned, recruiting like hiring, recruiting, anything like that, technically a B2C offer, but you reach someone by who they are professionally, so it makes sense in the B2B context. Also, higher education, like recruiting for MBA programs, for instance, is big. We've also found financial services and even some kinds of travel tend to do really well on LinkedIn Ads. So I'm looking at that going okay, 95% of our clients are B2B, but we Have some B2C that makes sense. So I guess if they make up a small part of the interest we're seeing.

25:05
Yeah, absolutely. So I think that anybody listening to this who is B2C? And is all in on all the other platforms and maybe not all in on LinkedIn or maybe they feel like they can't talk about certain things on LinkedIn, I would just say experiment, right? What do you get the list? Let's see if I can get some traction.

25:20
Yeah, I would tell people try to avoid politics and religion, if you can. Try to avoid pictures of you on the beach, you know, holding your drink of choice. But outside of that, LinkedIn sharing is very Facebook. And, you know, people just sharing here's what I ate for breakfast. I've seen that do well. So I think that's good advice.

25:38
Yeah. But if you show a picture of you on a beach drinking and you're in the business of trying to get consumers to go to the beach, and drink, then go for it, right?

25:47
Yeah, then that makes plenty of sense.

25:51
I've also found that if you share something that's personal, but you just bend it towards business. I've seen our mutual friend Dennis Yu does this quite a bit. He'll show Something's just personal about his life. And then he'll relate it to how it taught him something about how to run his business BlitzMetrics. Yeah. So I think even if you're just sharing what you had for breakfast, steer it in the direction of what you're doing professionally and chances are people aren't gonna beat you up over it.

26:15
Good advice.

26:16
All right,let's talk about video platforms, page 36 talks about the video platforms that marketers want to learn more about. And I think my first question for you here is, what is the draw in social media video? And then who's using it? And how is it most used effectively?

26:33
Well, first of all, video is absolutely huge. Let me address this from a couple different angles. Let's start with LinkedIn in particular, and then I'll go to the the bigger draw. I think that there's a big opportunity for video on LinkedIn. First of all, you've got live video, if you can get it. It's amazing for creating engagement. But even uploaded video is also something that you know, as long as you keep it short, right, it's something could be very powerful. But I think the opportunity for LinkedIn is if they ever come out with a stories based thing on LinkedIn, it would be huge. Just like Facebook, and Instagram, and Snapchat, and TikTok all have stories. If there's a way that LinkedIn could roll something like that out, I think it would be absolutely huge because what it would allow is part of this bigger trend, which is authentic raw Day in the Life, here's the experience that I'm having. Or here's the event that I'm at, or here's how the sausage is made inside the factory, you get where I'm going with this right? Or here's what it's like to work at this business. The fact that it can be just done from a phone instantly in seconds and doesn't need to be perfect is blowing up on all the other platforms. It's huge. So if LinkedIn ever does and I I'm almost willing to bet money, they're they're considering it behind closed doors, you know, I'm sure they're probably like, when are we going to come out with stories? When are we going to come out with stories, but if they do that it would be absolutely huge. Now to the bigger question is what is it about video in general on all the platforms for the most part, but especially Instagram and Facebook, it's a huge opportunity to develop empathy and connection with an audience. Because when they can get to know you, and begin to like you and trust you, that kind of reduces that barrier of wanting to do business with you, right? And I think that the key thing is that most video consumption on the other platforms is like 15 seconds or less, right? So that's where the story stuff like this is where the story is, is blowing up on every platform because it's short, highly consumable, and it tends to be linear and it's kind of a story environment where each one builds on top of the other and it's super easy to consume. I think that that is really, really big. And I think that LinkedIn for sure saw the value of video with the uploaded video right? And I'm sure you use it and a lot of other people use it. Live video is starting to become really popular. But I do think that video is the future. If we step back and ask why is video the future. Let's think of this in light of this pandemic, have you been watching more or less netflix....? Since the pandemic happened?

29:08
Yeah, me personally, it's been about the same, but I know a lot of people...

29:11
How about the rest of your family?

29:13
Yeah, they're spending definitely more time in front of the TV. Yeah.

29:16
Yeah. So you think about this, right? You've got all these streaming platforms that are coming out with amazing quality content, right? And it's next to nothing, right? Or it's free in the case of Amazon or, or if you happen to like, you know, have an AT&T internet connection you can get HBO max for free. I mean, or Disney+ is next to nothing, right, it's so cheap. So what you have is you have this incredible high quality content that the world is watching on their television, their smart TVs, on their phones, everywhere, right? So the world has become consumers. The whole world has become like expecting that I don't have to go to the movies anymore. I can get better quality shows with the click of a button and I can binge watch them and be highly entertained, right? So when we think about that, and we transition over to YouTube, which is the business opportunity, I think for so many of us, is YouTube. And I talked about this at my keynote at Social Media Marketing World, there's this mass consumption of video on YouTube as well. And I think all the social platforms know that the consumers are expecting to be able to find high quality content that's educational, or entertainment that they can just watch, right? Short form stuff tends to be entertaining, longer form stuff tends to be, you know, in the case of our world, educational, especially with LinkedIn, generally providing value. And I think that the whole world has just gotten to the point where that's how they prefer to consume content, by watching. And that means they're reading less. And, you know, there's a lot of statistics showing people just aren't reading as much as they used to. Audio is also down a little bit now because of COVID because people aren't commuting as much as they used to so they're not listening to podcasts as much as they used to, but video has completely exploded. My guess is if we looked at the data consumption of video, it's probably quadrupled. Why do you think everybody's talking about zoom? So it's gone through the roof. So it's a mega trend now. So the opportunity, I think, for us is figuring out how to tap into it. And there are some of our friends doing it really well on LinkedIn.

31:20
Oh, yeah, plenty of them. I love what you said about just how easy it is to build that know, like, and trust factor over video. I tell people all the time. I mean, if you're trying to think of an offer that you can give through LinkedIn, it try to make it a webinar if you can, because two minutes of you talking to camera will build more know, like, and trust factor than reading five of your white papers. So I definitely agree with that.

31:45
Michaela Alexis is someone who I think has been doing a really good job. She's one of your contemporaries. What I love about what she's doing is she's she's using it for storytelling. And this is something all marketers need to think about. Like storytelling is not just a consumer thing. It's a B2B thing, right? So what makela does really well, she'll take something that happened in her life. And then she'll so a story around it right? And she'll get people to watch it, or consume it. And then she'll get a chance to talk about what she wants to talk about. And I think this is a lesson so many of us as marketers could take and use in video on LinkedIn, which is how can we sell a story? How can we take something that happened in our life and make a connection to something we are offering to our client base? If we can do that, we can we can move mountains.

32:27
Shout out to Michaela. What's up, Mick? Something else I wanted to mention, you brought up stories for LinkedIn? Message to my LinkedIn partner team, Iam not sharing this outside of NDA. This was outside of your channels. I actually had someone chat me this morning from the Netherlands, showing that story ads are rolling out in the Netherlands. I thought you might be interested.

32:48
So how can they have story ads if they don't have stories?

32:51
They have stories they actually launched stories to higher ed first. So education has had it then they built the ad unit off of it.

33:00
Oh, perfect. Okay, so stories is coming, then that's so awesome. Okay, LinkedIn, if you're listening, this is the part that frustrates us, okay? You can't just let certain people have these features forever. You need to roll them out to the world. I mean, come on. Learn from your brother, okay?

33:18
Well, that's been so interesting watching video roll out because video was already huge on on Facebook, on Instagram, before it was even released on LinkedIn. So I think a lot of people got into the habit of sharing video and creating on other platforms, but they didn't even think to bring it to LinkedIn. So you know, they're a little bit late to the party, but I think that means that there's a big opportunity for those who aren't looking past it and overlooking. On page 37. about social media ads. This is one I was obviously paying close attention to. It says that B2C marketers are likely to use Facebook ads, 74% of B2C marketers, 45% of B2C marketers using Instagram ads. B2B marketers are using more LinkedIn Ads. This is up 23%. And so I guess I'm curious, why do you think and we may have already touched on this. But why do you think only 23% of B2B marketers are using LinkedIn Ads? And what does that opportunity look like for reaching the other 77%?

34:13
Yeah, well, I think that the challenge with LinkedIn Ads, as you know intimately well, is that they are a little bit too costly, and that they are not as targetable you know, as a lot of the other kind of thing. But if we think about this, it's true that even on Facebook, the free users of all platforms is monster huge compared to the paid users, okay, so if we think about this, from a perspective, like take Facebook as the behemoth, there's only like 6 million that actually use it for advertising. That's it. Okay, out of the hundreds of millions of businesses are on there, it's tiny little fragment. So while a lot more people say that they use Facebook ads than LinkedIn, it doesn't mean they use Facebook ads every single day. It so my guess is what's really going on here is you have most people using organic on both LinkedIn and Facebook. And those that do use ads are using it on Facebook only because they probably haven't been able to figure out how to make it work on LinkedIn. That's my thinking. Like, for example, we're a B2B company, right? We help marketers working for other companies figure out how to take their, you know, goals to the next level. We have not successfully use B2B LinkedIn Ads, we just haven't. For us for what we sell, we just haven't been able to make it work. So we're probably not unlike all the other B2B companies out there, right? They're just a lot every B2B company is selling the really expensive products that have the huge profit margins and are willing to pay that high cost per acquisition. That's my thinking.

35:46
Yeah, I think that's really accurate. I mean, when you're interviewing all these social media marketers, not all of them are advertisers. So seeing a figure that low, even if someone is B2B, they may be an organic marketer and so there's no reason for them to use LinkedIn Ads, so it makes perfect sense.

36:03
Yeah, most people don't use ads is probably the simplest answer.

36:07
And those who do are probably going to start on Facebook. This is kind of off the beaten track. This isn't a question I told you. I was gonna ask. I was so shocked last year, when for those who don't know, you had this show called The Journey that was on Facebook and on YouTube. And it was basically a documentary style of what it took to put on the mega conference, Social Media Marketing World. And I was watching every episode, I I loved it. But it was so interesting last year to hear you share on your podcast, anyone who's not listening to the Social Media Marketing podcast, definitely do. You probably are, if you're listening to this one, you've probably listened to Mike's show, but you talked about how you just decided to drop the journey entirely from Facebook because the watch time wasn't there. Can you give us a little bit of insight into it?

36:54
Our old adage was distributed everywhere. So the idea was that we would take the journey and we would call publish it on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, and YouTube natively. All okay? Now the only platforms that provide true metrics on video really well is Facebook and YouTube. LinkedIn doesn't do a real good job with their retention metrics. So you don't just know how many people viewed it, but you don't know how long they've used it unless they've changed that, which I don't think they have. They haven't have they?

37:22
Nope. Through ads, you can see the stats, but organically, you can't see 75% or completions.

37:27
Yeah. So the challenge is, what is the view? And this is an important thing for marketers to wrap their mind around, right? A view is not a view, by the metrics we think of as a view. Facebook calls a view three seconds or longer. YouTube is 30 seconds or longer. Twitter. Nobody knows. LinkedIn, nobody knows.

37:48
LinkedIn is two seconds.

37:49
It's two seconds?

37:50
Yeah.

37:51
Okay, so think about that. And you think about the feed experience on all these platforms. They're all pretty much the same. It's all a feed, right? You scroll through it. Generally it's muted. It's playing. So first of all, it's very easy to scroll through a feed and see a video play for two or three seconds and have it counted as a view. But you and I both know that they're not really intending to view it. So you could falsely see these big numbers and say, wow, look at all the people watching my videos on LinkedIn, and Facebook and Twitter and wherever. But thank goodness, YouTube, and Facebook show you this thing called the retention graph, which means they show you how long they stick around for and they show you the drop offs. So when you actually get to that level of data, you begin to realize that Facebook looks like going off the edge of a cliff after the first few seconds. Okay. YouTube looks like a gradual downhill slide. Not even more of a hill, more of like a, sometimes it's barely declining and staying flat on YouTube. So then you begin to ask yourself, why is that? Oh, it's the behavior of the platform's. So people go to LinkedIn and to Facebook and to Twitter to discover whatever is going on. There's no intent to go there and watch a video generally speaking, but they go to YouTube to do only one thing, which is to watch video, okay? So as a result, it made a lot of sense for us to just say, we're not going to publish the journey on all these platforms anymore. We're going to publish on one platform. And we're going to link to it from these other platforms. So today, we don't have the journey anymore. And instead, we produce three original, two original videos, which AJ has got a bunch of stuff on our YouTube channel, you definitely want to check it out. Look up Social Media Examiner on YouTube, and we take those videos and cross link those. We cross link to videos from LinkedIn and from Facebook directly to YouTube. The goal is to promote to the channel known as YouTube for us, because that's where people go to watch. And it's been fascinating for me to look at the data to see that some people are watching on smart TVs. Some people are watching on smart devices, some people are watching on desktops. And the goal for us has become we want to grow that channel because that's the place where everybody goes to watch video. And we want to tap into that mega trend I talked about earlier of people consuming video, right? What's great about YouTube is it's kind of like TicTok. They go to watch one video and then the algorithm intelligently introduces a bunch of other videos to you. Those videos could be your videos, right? And people stay and they watch a lot of videos and they have a high session duration. So it's been a really fun ride for me to go all in on YouTube and just see how everything has been growing. It's a really, really well tuned platform for video. So that's why we do not publish uploaded native video anywhere at all, except YouTube. We just cross promote to it, which is crazy, but I'm telling you, that's where everybody goes for that. And there's platforms for different kinds of things. And definitely video consumption is all on YouTube. I think that's the reason why LinkedIn hasn't revealed the data because they don't want to be embarrassed by how few people actually stick around inside their videos. They just don't want the world to know.

41:08
Exactly.Yep. It's just not good on any social site, because that's not why people are going, they're not going to be specifically entertained.

41:16
Well, the only video that's good is the short stuff, right? So that's why ads inside of stories are becoming popular. Because somebody can stick around for 10 or 15 seconds. But because that's kind of the normal attention span, if you will, where they want quick, high volume, short duration kind of videos. So that's why I'm sure stories will come to LinkedIn for every lessons.

41:36
And anyone who sees a really good LinkedIn story ad for b2b please forward it to me I'm, I'm dying to see how we can use story as effectively. In my mind, I think it's a very B2C kind of ad format, but we'll see. I want to I want to be surprised. Alright, so Mike, if you were a brand new B2B company, and you don't have the same brand power because I don't know how many followers you have on every every channel, but you are world famous. If you lost that brand power and had to start a brand new company with a with a new name, how would you approach it from all social media channels?

42:09
Where would I start?

42:10
Yeah, maybe specifically, what would you do on Facebook? What would you do on LinkedIn?

42:14
Okay, so first of all, I would definitely start a Facebook group. If I was starting all over from scratch, because it's all about community. Remember, social is about people and community, right? And Facebook groups is probably the best of what Facebook offers. And the good news about that is I would go in there and start a group and it would be focused on whatever my niche is and I would try to cultivate relationships inside of those groups. Knowing of course, it's not my platform, it's rented land, but it's okay. Facebook has made it very clear they're all about those meaningful engagements. And you can develop those relationships, which everybody in the B2B world knows is so critical. So I'd start with a Facebook group. And I would also consider using ads too, because if I had the money ads can be a huge accelerant on Facebook because it can be very economical. And whether you're a local B2B business trying to get Local stuff or whether you're big national brand, I would be all in there. So that's where I would start. And then as far as LinkedIn, I would probably say, do whatever AJ says, I'm gonna turn it right over to you. What would you say? Becauses honestly, I don't even know.

43:13
Well, honestly I mean the organic reach is so good on LinkedIn for personal profiles, not as good as companies. So I think the first thing I would do is go build your profile, spend some time on it, start connecting with the right people, and then start sharing because it's really easy to stand out. Once you become an influencer, once you have a lot of followers who care about you. It's not a hard jump to get you interested in understanding in what their company is doing. But I would start focusing heavily on the profile. Okay. And I know we're running low on time, I got to get you to your next meeting. I put a question out to all of my LinkedIn followers and just said, Hey, I'm going to have Michael Stelzner on the podcast, what questions would you have for him, and I had about 15 people responding and give me questions. We only have time for one so I'm gonna highlight Charles Lightfoot III, who asked a really good question. He said, "After seeing where marketers are planning on increasing spend and which platforms they are digging into deeper, I'd be interested in hearing, what are his predictions on lasting shifts in consumer behavior on social post pandemic?" So, in essence, how does the pandemic change what social marketers are going to be doing in the future?

44:24
Okay, first and foremost, you got to get video figured out. Okay, that's the theme that shouldn't be a surprise to anybody based on this conversation. You've got to figure it out. And I would say, if you're going to do the longer form video, I would go all in on YouTube. And I would figure out a way to make that a big opportunity for your business because YouTube is unlike all the other social platforms, it has a very long tail, meaning your video could all of a sudden months after it was published began to be suggested, as other people are watching video and it might come up just as the next video and all of a sudden it could really take off. And it's ike a blog post in Google search. It's that powerful, it's crazy. So don't forget about the fact that people go and they seek out content, B2B content on YouTube, I would go there for sure. I would also check out TikTok. Believe it or not, it's blowing up. It's not just for the young kids. And I do think that it is probably going to be the next big platform that everybody's talking about. It's heavily B2C right now. But there are people that are starting to experiment, you know, with it and trying to figure it out. TikTok is the opposite end, it's the short form video, right? So if you can figure out how to create short, engaging video on the platform that people are going crazy over then TicTok. And then of course stories on Instagram as well. So I would just say like, get the stories thing figured out. Figure out how you can make that shortm form video because it's going to be the normal, it's going to be the new normal. And then just remember, people are spending a lot more time, this is the other big trend, on social media, because they've got nowhere to go. They've got absolutely nothing to do, I wouldn't be surprised if we could get this data, how many times people open up the social platforms on their phone in one day, all of them? My guess is it's at least a dozen. So I think people are just so bored. And they're so sick of being where they are that they're going on to these platforms one at a time like this over and over again. That's a big opportunity for businesses because that means that they're gonna be there more than ever before. And as a result, that means your ads have greater opportunity to be seen, there might be more ad inventory. And there's just a lot more opportunity as a result of all this going on right now.

46:34
Brilliant, Mike, that is amazing. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us. One thing I want to kind of point out here, I would assume the majority of our listeners are managing LinkedIn Ads, but are also responsible for Facebook. And so this is probably going to be really interesting to our listeners. This podcast is going to be released on August 11. And you have a Facebook Summit happening from August 10 to the 14th. So if you're listening to this podcast around the time of releases, you've got to go check this one out. Mike, can you tell us about the Summit? What are they learning? What are they getting out of it?

47:08
Yeah, we brought together 12 of the world's top Facebook marketing experts to teach you Facebook Ads. So I'm sure a lot of you are using that to teach you Facebook Live, you know, and Facebook Live is, like I said, available to everyone to teach you Facebook groups, Facebook organic marketing. So if you want to really learn a lot more about that, which I know you do because you guys have told me you do based on the stats. This is a great opportunity to get it live to live online event, socialmediaexaminer.com/FBsummit. And for those of you that are also interested, we've got a YouTube summit that's going to be releasing. You heard it here first. I haven't told the rest of the world, but in a couple of weeks after this, we're going to have the very similar kind of thing all on YouTube. And it's going to be focused on YouTube Ads, YouTube video creation, and YouTube's algorithm and all that stuff. That'll also be 12 of the world's top experts on YouTube. So we've found that these online summits have been really very well received, and they're a very economical way. So to find that one, you'll just want to go to socialmediaexaminer.com depending on when you hear this, and you'll be able to find that as well. And I have not told anybody about that. So you're getting like a big exclusive here. Think of these events as like a series of live trainings that are also recorded. But they're all highly instructional. They're all pretty much some of the best speakers that you would see at Social Media Marketing World. And I think one of the unique things that I've got going for me as I develop a deep relationship with a big bench of experts, as AJ can attest, and these are not just anybody, these are truly the best in the world.

48:48
And is there a cost associated with the summit?

48:50
Yeah, the price is depends on when you buy. There anywhere from $247 to $497. So it depends when you get in. So if you're checking out the Facebook marketing summit, as of this dropping, it'll probably be about $500. The YouTube marketing summit, if you get in early, it would be about $250. So a couple hundred bucks, investment might end up saving you a lot of pain and suffering as you learn from these experts who have been doing this for a long, long time,

49:19
Worth every penny. Absolutely! Michael Stelzner, thank you so much for joining us on the LinkedIn Ads show. It's been a pleasure and looking forward to the next time we get to chat.

49:27
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, AJ,

49:29
I've got the episode resources for you coming up. So stick around.

49:38
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

49:49
I hope you enjoyed my chat with Michael Stelzner. As promised, here are the resources from this episode that we talked about. The first is the 2020 Social Media Marketing industry report. You can get on socialmediaexaminer.com/report2020. There's also the Social Media Examiner Facebook summit that is going on right now at the time of release. So check that out socialmediaexaminer.com/FBsummit for Facebook summit. And I mentioned Michael's podcast, the Social Media Marketing Podcast. There's a link in the show notes there. So go check that out. If you're not already subscribed, it is the top Social Media Marketing podcast, and you should definitely be paying attention to it. If you are new to LinkedIn Ads or are training an employee on it, I would highly recommend checking out the course that I did with LinkedIn on LinkedIn Learning. It's all about LinkedIn Ads and covers the basics of everything you'd want to know about LinkedIn Ads. And the price is right, it's only $25 or it's even free if you have a premium subscription to LinkedIn. Look down at your podcast player right now and make sure you hit that subscribe button if you aren't already. And please do rate and review. If you leave a review I would love to shout you out here on air. So definitely let me know what you think. As always reach out to us at [email protected] with any suggestions for future content or questions you've got, and with that being said, I'll see you back here next week cheering you on in your LinkedIn ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

Episode 25 - How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Ads For Better Performance

Episode 06 - LinkedIn Ads Bidding & Budgeting Strategies

Episode 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:

You've heard of agile development. But have you heard of Agile LinkedIn Ads management? Strap in, I'm gonna show you how it's done.

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

0:21
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So Episode 25 was all about the types of optimizations that you can make in your account to show improvement. But you've all been asking me how often you should be doing this optimization and how much data you need and how fast you can go. So I'm going to break down exactly how you can go and launch, test, and pivot with your LinkedIn Ads in a very agile way so you can move faster and conquer your competition. In the news, LinkedIn did a survey where they had just over 800 marketers across the globe kind of self report on how they'd been disrupted during the whole COVID situation and the results were quite interesting. About 10% of respondents said that their business had been totally disrupted. So this is a group who are trying to save their marketing budgets, and basically try to stay in business and not lay anyone off. Then about 70% responded that it was business, but unusual. So they're spending time on strategic planning. They've been mildly disrupted, and they're trying to figure out ways to get around and get through. But business is still going. And then you had 20%, who really said their business had been evolving. These were companies in a category that are really thriving right now. They're in a growing market. They're finding new customers, they're taking advantage of these new opportunities that the post COVID world is providing from those that I've spoken to I would say that these percentages are probably about accurate. In the survey results, they linked to a document that they call Driving ROI. And it's a set of best practice resources that LinkedIn compiled to help marketers. So I clicked on it, I read it, it was from 2019. And it is something that I'd read before but had kind of forgotten about. And I want to point out just some interesting findings here. And I've linked to this in the show notes down below. But it's called the long and short of ROI. As you consume this, you can just hear LinkedIn ranting, during the whole piece about the complaints that they hear so often from advertisers. They really come to three points here. Number one, marketers are measuring ROI too quickly. Number two, when they say they're measuring ROI, they're not really measuring ROI. And number three, internal pressures are causing marketers to move too fast and make actually poor decisions. And although it does sound like a bit of a rant, I totally understand where they're coming from. I'm sure they've had many advertisers quit where they say, you know what, we had to quit, we're just not seeing the return on our investment here. So this is LinkedIn reminding us if your sales cycle is six months long, quit complaining when you haven't seen ROI after four months of advertising. We talked about this in Episode 24, all about funnels. But LinkedIn is going to look really expensive if you're just tracking to the cost per lead. And if you're not measuring past that, if you're not measuring to cost per sales qualified lead, or cost per proposal, or cost per closed deal. Those are the points in your sales process where LinkedIn is gonna start looking really good. So if you're not tracking all the way to that, you probably won't have enough faith in the platform to give it a real shot, or even keep going. We're also planning a Q and A episode here in the next few episodes. This is our first of hopefully many. And I want to get our q&a questions from you. So any question you have about LinkedIn, I mean, we'll make it a total potpourri. Email them over to us at [email protected] and we'll do our best to include it. I want to highlight a couple new reviews on our iTunes page Naira Perez, who is the founder of SpringHill Digital up in Portland. She is a LinkedIn Ads and a social ads expert. I've gotten to talk to you on many occasions. She's amazing. Okay, so her review says two words "amazing and useful". "AJ gives you actionable lessons. He doesn't keep secrets when it comes to optimizing ads on LinkedIn. He shares what has worked for him and what hasn't. If you run LinkedIn ads, listen to AJ, you will learn something in every episode, he is the gift that keeps on giving". Naira, thank you so much for the kind words, I'm so glad that you're getting a lot of use out of this. The next one comes from Mark Gustafson, who's the founder of 900Kings, and actually a close friend. He's actually the inspiration and my fact checker for episodes eight and nine, all about Facebook ads and Google ads. He's a fantastic paid search and social marketer. So Mark says "best B2B Advertising resource". "AJ is the best in the business. There isn't anyone else I turned to with B2B questions. He's easily the most knowledgeable about the LinkedIn ads platform. The podcast is pure value and perfect for the newest B2B marketer all the way to the most senior. Also, can we talk about that dreamy voice? I could listen to those dulcet tones for days." Mark, thanks for the kind words and thanks for turning a bright red behind the mic. I'm so glad this isn't a video podcast. And seriously, listen to my voice. There is nothing sweet about this. I'll rant for a second. I've got this crazy accent from growing up in both Utah and Arizona and learning Spanish in high school learning Russian after high school and before college. Basically, I don't even know how to describe my own accent. I sound real weird and I fully admit it. Okay, cool. Now I want to feature you so please do make sure you review on whatever podcast player you listen to this on. Leave a review. I'd love to shout you out on air. Thanks in advance for that. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it.

5:59
Agile Testing

We're gonna talk about agile testing. So what is agile? Well, agile methodology is really started out in project management as a way for cross functional teams to get to move quickly and build collaboratively through continuous improvement. Now, you may have heard of development teams working in two weeks sprints, or doing daily stand up meetings. This all comes from the whole agile movement. We've adapted this to LinkedIn Ads management because it's a process that really requires continuous improvement, just like project management. So what is agile management of LinkedIn Ads? Well, to me, it's it's really making quick decisions on results from your LinkedIn Ads, so that you can learn more and test faster, find out what performs and then you can do more of that and have success for longer. So I'm going to share the agile process that we follow. And it all starts the moment we launch new ads. So when we launch new ads, we try to launch on either a Monday or a Tuesday whenever possible. And that's because those two days are the days where LinkedIn traffic is the strongest. We try to stay in the morning because morning tends to be the strongest traffic times for LinkedIn. We're always going to launch two ads, an AB test, where we are varying something so that we have something to compare against. Because if you just launch one ad, whether it performs well or whether it performs poorly, you don't know what caused that. But if you launch two at a time, you're giving yourself a better chance of having something that's going to be successful and getting to compare against what wasn't successful. Now if our Monday or a Tuesday happens to land on a holiday or the next few days our holiday we try to postpone either launched the week earlier or a week later. Again, when possible. Sometimes you've got a gun to your head and you just have to get ads launched. I'm sure you've listened to episode six because it was one of our most popular episodes. It's all about bidding and budgeting and it's the strategy we use to get the lowest cost from LinkedIn, no matter what your budget and what your performance. So if you've listened to that, you know that you're going to start with cost per click bidding. And you're going to bid really low to keep your risk low as you're testing. Right after your ads go live for the first day or day and a half, LinkedIn is testing your ads to try to figure out what the relevancy score is going to be. In order for them to test, they seem to give you pretty prime placement for your ads. And they're going to show quite a few impressions to your audience. And really, they're going to give you the benefit of the doubt in most situations. Regardless of how your bidding, chances are, they'll probably show you towards the top of the rankings. So you're probably getting impressions that are worth more than what you're paying, especially if you're bidding low. But once a day to a day and a half has passed. LinkedIn has shown your ad enough times they've given it enough impressions or given them enough impressions, that they can give you this relevancy score. And let's say it's a number between 0 and 10. Based off of that relevancy score, your next few days are going to become very evident how you're performing. So days two and three, we're watching to see what happens. LinkedIn has given you the relevancy score that they think you deserve. I think they make the decision a little bit quick, but so do all the other platforms. But you're really on your own now. And it could result in three possible outcomes here. So the first outcome is, you have a really high click through rate right out of the gate. And so LinkedIn gives you a great relevancy score, you immediately start spending everything you want to. And if you click performance chart inside of campaign manager, and look at these campaigns, by impressions, it will look like a couple of flat days where LinkedIn was giving you the benefit of the doubt. And then a spike upward when you actually outperformed their expectations. That's fantastic. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you could also come out of the gate with a low click through rate and a poor relevancy score. You'll know this happened when your impressions really fall off a cliff. So if you go to again, performance chart inside of campaign manager, and you look by the impressions by day, your first day, LinkedIn gave you a bunch of impressions. The second day, it was kind of halfway through where they decided you were a poor performer. And then by the third day, they just didn't deliver much. It looks like the downslope of a mountain. And the third potential outcome is really you did okay, you got an okay click through rate and a decent relevancy score. And things might continue the way that LinkedIn kind of predicted they were. So now we'll dive into what you can do, based off of which outcome you really landed in.

10:40
Outcome Number 1

So outcome number one, you did great, your ads are attractive enough to get traffic, but don't rest on your laurels yet it's not over. Once you get people to click, now you need to convert them. So assuming things are looking good to the click through rate, people actually care about your ads. Now you're going to go into data gaps. mode, let your ads run for the next $300 to $1,000 and get a feel for the conversion rate. If you're happy with your conversion rate and your cost per lead, just let it ride. Go back into data gathering mode, you're gonna hands off, leave it alone. So you can accumulate enough data to analyze, and use to optimize later. Go listen to Episode 15, if you haven't already, because it's all about benchmarks. And we go super deep into how you can tell what's working and what's not. So you can focus in the right area. And you want to make sure that you're watching this performance over time, because we have this thing happen in social advertising, especially called ad saturation, or audience fatigue. And what that is, is you are showing your same ads and offers to the same people over and over and on a pretty good performing ad, still only about 1% of people who see it will end up clicking on it. So that means 99% of people potentially see your ad and go, nah, I don't want to click on it. Even the people who might want to click on it, if it's the fourth, fifth, eighth time they've seen this exact ad, they're going to take a mental note of it, and then just skip it next time they become banner blind. And the way this will manifest itself in your account, if you go back into performance chart in campaign manager, and switch to looking by average click through rate, you can see over time that your click through rate is starting to drop. We found this period to be about 27 to 33 days on average, which is about a month. So what that tells us is if things are going pretty well, we might check on it two weeks from now three weeks from now and just see our our click through rates decreasing significantly. Does it feel like these ads have lost steam? Have they dropped in relevancy score leading to higher cost per click or lower delivery? And we know because the average is about a month. That means once a month, we're going to plan on refreshing our ad creative or testing a new offer, even even if it was a fantastically powerful high performing offer to begin with, because over time, anything will become a low performer, if you've saturated your audience hard enough, and that's mostly ad saturation, people getting sick of seeing the same ads. And you can relieve them of this by simply just changing the image. You may also want to change your ad copy in case they've already clicked or maybe even converted. But what's most important here is the ad needs to look different and stand out.

13:35
Audience Fatigue

Now audience fatigue is something that's a little bit different. Let's say you've been advertising heavily for the last four or five years. Or maybe we'll simplify it, let's say for the last one year, you've been going heavy on an audience. You've been religiously changing your ad copy, keeping things fresh, trying new offers entirely, you may find that your performance decreases over time because the that audience has already heard of your company and is now starting to ignore anything from your company. This isn't a great place to be in because if you've been advertising heavily for years and years, chances are you are really relying on the leads that this platform pushes. But it could be a sign that you either need to really vary things up, or even try going on pause for a little bit, giving your audience a rest, and then see if they come back after a little while. So that's how I handle it. If you launch and the launch was very successful, your ads did great.

14:30
Outcome Number 2

But what if you had a failed launch? This is outcome number two, it means your ads really didn't land with your audience. There could be a lot of reasons for that. You might have done a poor job of actually defining who that audience was. Your ad might not have looked attractive enough for them to stop scrolling. And maybe most often, your ad copy didn't do a good job of pressing on a pain point, or calling out to them in a way that they cared about. But for whatever reason, your ads came out of the gate with a poor, click through rate and you've got a bad relevancy score. LinkedIn gave you a small sample of impressions for a day to a day and a half. And it means your ads didn't get enough clicks to qualify for a high relevancy score. So performance is likely going to be terrible. You can force it, you can specifically go in and bid higher or do automated bidding. But if you do this, you will pay way too much per click, and you will just be getting robbed by the platform. When ads come out of the gate performing poorly, sometimes it's really unfair. Sometimes LinkedIn unfairly awarded you a poor relevancy score because in the sample, they showed they didn't see enough clicks. And so they assumed you had a poor relevancy score. But you can resurrect this by just launching the same ads again. So if we launch on a Friday or a Saturday, and our ads just die, most of the time, what we'll try doing is just go and relaunch exactly the same ads on a Monday or a Tuesday, and just see. We're giving LinkedIn just one more chance with these ads to see if they unfairly awarded a poor relevancy score. If they fail for a second time, though, especially on a Monday or a Tuesday morning launch, then we know something's wrong with that ad creative. And we need to go back to the drawing board, or continue to suffer the most expensive cost per click you've ever seen from any channel. If you're having a hard time getting people to click on your ads or getting LinkedIn to even serve them. This point, you probably have not gotten enough traffic to find out how it's going to convert on your offer. Or maybe you did get a decent conversion rate. But since the clicks are costing so much, your cost per lead wouldn't be worthwhile in the end anyway. So at this point, things are going poorly and you should plan on just pausing these ads and relaunching an entirely new test. Episode 24 was all about funnels, so make sure you're paying attention to the right thing. If your click through rates are doing great, don't go and test new ads copy. And if your conversion rates are great, don't go and make major landing page changes. First start with the lowest hanging fruit, the parts of the account that are having the most trouble. If what you're trying isn't working, you can really try something radically different. And like I mentioned earlier, an AB test is going to give you a better chance of finding success with at least one of your variations. So try launching two ads where you vary the pain point you're pressing on. Or maybe you're touching on a different motivation. Or maybe you're even testing different calls to action or offers. You never know how something is going to perform until you test it. So don't be afraid to launch new ads and quickly retire them or pause them. If they're not living up to your standards. Then we have the third outcome, which is kind of like it's okay performance. There are certainly things you can do to try to increase performance. But if things are just going okay, I would say just like option number one where we had a success campaign go into data gathering mode. And then once you have enough data, evaluate to see if it's worth continuing or if there's something in the account that needs to be improved. Here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into maintaining an account once it's doing well.

18:15
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads Experts.

18:25
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's's largest accounts and we are the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners. And performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch, and we'd love to help you absolutely demolish your goals.

18:47
Continued Maintenance

Alright, let's jump into continued maintenance. We talked about Ad saturation, how about once a month, your ads aren't going to be fresh anymore and you've got to change them up. So plan on doing that at least once per month. And follow the same agile testing steps that I mentioned before. Every new ad launch, you're going to take a look at it and say, okay, for the first three days, I'm going to watch and see, do these perform well? Are they getting a good click through rate? Are we getting a good cost per click? And then over the next week or two, you're saying, okay, is this leading to the conversions at the right costs that I want. You'll also want to keep your offers or your calls to action fresh, because you can change the image you can change the ad copy of your ads, a ton of times, but eventually people are going to catch on if you've been advertising exactly the same offer for the last six months. Every offer really has its own life. We've seen some that after a month that audience has just done and then we had one account where we had a winning offer that we couldn't dethrone for like seven months. No matter what other offers we threw at this audience, they kept preferring the one from seven months ago, and it was still converting even though it wasn't converting at the same rate that it was at the beginning, so we were trying to get it off its throne. So if you've been running an offer for about a month, chances are you can refresh your ad creative, use a new visual, and you can get that offer to live for another month, maybe even two. So watch that performance. Specifically watch your cost per lead, and your conversion rate as you go. As soon as you see that conversion rates start to slip, that's probably a great sign that you need to change up your call to action, give them a different kind of offer something that's new, that they will actually consider if they've already seen the other one several times and have decided, oh, I've already converted, or no, I'm not interested in that. And then keep that up, rotate through new ad creative and new offers as needed as your performance starts to decrease. And if you do this, congratulations, your lead generation machine is complete. To maintain it, what you need to do is Just keep feeding it new ads, new headlines, new intros, and new offers only when they're needed. And then this entire time you're gaining knowledge, you're learning about your audience along the way, you're finding out what they like and what they don't.

21:14
Pain Points

Here at B2Linked, we do a lot of ads troubleshooting. And so I thought it would be helpful to at least share with you how we think about finding pain points and what potential solutions are. So let's say your ads aren't performing well. That means either you're getting a high cost per click, or a low click through rate, or even both, they oftentimes go together. What you can do is try new ad copy, new imagery. If it's a video ad, try new video creative. And after two or three different tests of messaging, or visuals, if it's still not getting clicked, chances are the problem is your offer. You're probably asking people to do something that they are either unwilling to do and it scares them away, or they just don't see value in what about your conversion rates. Let's say you're not happy with how much you're paying per conversion, or your conversion rate is low. There are two things that we like to test here. And the first is evaluate your landing page. It's possible that your offer itself is really attractive, but maybe the way that your landing page is laid out, or the elements on it are getting in the way or distracting, and it's decreasing your conversion rate. One easy way to test if it's your landing page that's getting in the way, or the offer is you can test the same exact ad, but run it as a LinkedIn lead gen form. So you're asking people with the same form, but you're skipping the landing page, your website visit all together. Now lead gen forms, as I'm sure you know, tend to convert significantly higher. So we expect that when we do this test, the lead gen form is probably going to convert let's say 10 to 50% higher. But if it is significantly more than that, let's say conversion rate doubles or triples, that's my first clue that something on the landing page was getting in the way and you need to do some testing there. If it's not the landing page, though, it's likely the offer itself. Listen to Episode 10, where we go really deep into offers. And that'll give you some great ideas on how to try out new offers ideate, formulate, and create new offers. What if your ads and conversions are all going really well, but sales reports back that they're not closing these deals? Well, there's a lot of different things that are possibly out of your control here as a marketer, but maybe your sales team isn't nurturing right? Or, and this is a hard realization. You might not have the right product market fit, maybe your product or service that you're selling, maybe it doesn't solve a significant pain point enough that people want to buy. And no amount of snazzy marketing can fix that. Those are obviously much deeper problems, but see if you can isolate where they are and take off your marketer hat and put on your sales enablement hat and go and try to solve that problem, and that will earn you some significant quarterly bonuses.

24:06
Goal of agile management

The goal of agile management of LinkedIn is really threefold. Number one, you want confidence that what you're doing is working and will lead to business. And this is hard, because in B2B, we oftentimes have these long sales cycles. And it doesn't make sense to keep advertising for a year and a half if you don't know for sure that there's going to be some revenue that comes from that. You'll want to have stopped advertising much earlier. So as a marketer, you're looking for shorter term clues that the traffic will convert into profitable sales. Goal number two is you want to keep fresh with your audience so that they don't get sick of your ads, your offers, or even your company. If you can stay fresh, your performance won't decline significantly. And this is fantastic because social ads of any kind really are a moving target because the same thing that worked two months ago may totally fail today. And that's just because of ad saturation. So do your part to keep things looking fresh so that you never get stale to that audience. And then Goal number three here, you want to identify the problems and inefficiencies of your account so that you can fix them early and they don't turn into something terrible later on. Okay, I've got the episode resources for you coming up, so stick around.

25:28
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

25:39
References

I referenced quite a few other episodes in here. So check those out in the show notes if you haven't listened to them already. Episode 25 is all about optimization of your account, making it better when it's already doing well. Episode Six is on bidding and budgeting. Episode 10 is all about offers. And Episode 15 is all about benchmarking. To see where you stand if you're performing well, or if you're performing poorly. If you're new to LinkedIn ads, or if you have a colleague you're trying to train, check out the course, I actually did the LinkedIn Ads course on LinkedIn Learning. There's a link for that down below. But because it's LinkedIn Learning, it is insanely inexpensive, and it's a great training. It's the same thing that I charge $500 an hour for and would take me an hour and a half to train you and your team. And through LinkedIn, you can get it for 25 bucks. Or if you have a LinkedIn premium subscription, it's free. Take a look at your podcast player right now, especially if you're new, if this is your first episode. If so, congratulations. Welcome! And hit that subscribe button. We want to make sure you stick around and hear more awesome LinkedIn Ads strategies. Please do rate and review us on whatever podcast player you lean on. We're especially looking for stitcher right now. So if you happen to be a stitcher user, I would love it if you go and review us there because we only have one lonely one there. And of course, I'll shout you out for your review. As long as I know that it's you. So give me something good to say about you there. And like I mentioned at the beginning of the show, get your QA questions in, email us at [email protected]. And actually, feel free to email us with ideas or topics you'd like to see us cover or questions, anything that you'd like. But especially I'm looking for good Q&A questions to cover or a whole Q&A episode. Hopefully, it's the first of many. So I'll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

LinkedIn Explaining Auction

How Does the LinkedIn Auction Work?

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 are unapologetically expensive, but what makes them that way? Let's break it down.

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

0:19
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. I'm so tired of hearing people say the same thing about LinkedIn Ads that they've said forever. I've heard it's really expensive. Why is that? I'm gonna dive into exactly why that is and what you can do about it. Let's hit it.

0:34
So how does LinkedIn decide how much you pay for a click? Well, there are two big pieces that weigh in here. The first is what your bid is. Now you can bid by either cost per click, cost per thousand impressions, or automated bid, which really is just a cost per thousand impression bid that you don't have to babysit as much. So we're going to concentrate mostly on cost per click here because I'm assuming most of you listening are bidding are really smart advertisers and are bidding on a max cost per click model. The next piece that factors in here is your relevancy score. Now, LinkedIn calls this relevancy score, Google calls it quality score, Facebook calls it relevance score. And it's all the same concept. It's essentially, how often do I make the network money when they show my ads. So each individual ad creative gets a relevancy score. And it has to come up with this. So let's say you launch a brand new ad. Well, LinkedIn doesn't know what relevancy score to give it. And so it's probably going to borrow from other ads in the campaign. If all the other ads have been performing really well, then it's probably going to get an assumption of a really high relevancy score. If the others are performing really poorly, it will probably assume this one will perform poorly too. So other ads in the same campaign. But let's say this is a brand new campaign. LinkedIn doesn't know how it's going to work, then I think they might either borrow from other campaigns that are running concurrently, or borrow from the account in the whole. So your relevancy score is mostly made up of what your click through rate is. And this makes a lot of sense, because if I have a 1% click through rate on my ads, and my competitor has a half of a percent for every single time that LinkedIn shows my ad, or my competitors ad, there is an opportunity cost in it for them in saying, hey, even if AJ is, you know, he has a 1% click through rate, he's only willing to bid $5 per click, his competitor has half that, and the competitors willing to bid $8, well, LinkedIn looks at it and goes well, for every hundred times. I show AJ's ad, I'm gonna make $5 and every time I show as competitors ad for 100 times, I'm going to make $4 so even though I'm bidding less, LinkedIn still says that I'm making them more money than my competitor. So this is how this relevancy score works. It was really pioneered by Google back in the early Google AdWords. Now Google Ads days. And it makes a lot of sense. So it's based off of how often you make LinkedIn money. Well, that is pretty much your click through rate, it's for every time I show the ad, how likely is someone to click it, and therefore LinkedIn get paid, but they're also paying attention to things like comments, likes, shares, and even negative member feedback that they can provide on ads. So you can actually find what your relevancy score is by running a Campaign Performance Report. And then look at it's at the time of recording column BI is called campaign quality score. And so this is a snapshot at any given time, you can see what your campaign quality score is. But I would argue this isn't all that helpful, because this is something that changes quite regularly. And you can't always wait around to watch if this number has changed up or down. I think you just need to go by maybe what you're ad performance is looking like today. And if performance looks bad today, and over the last four days, you can assume it probably has a poor relevancy score, and you can try something else.

4:10
Auction

So the auction, LinkedIn calls it a second price auction. And the way it works mathematically is we're going to put you versus a competitor. So you have a bid. And we're going to multiply the bid by the relevant score to get a combined score. And we'll talk about what that means here in a minute. Okay, so you're bidding $8 and you have a relevancy score of 6, because you've got a click through rate that's slightly above benchmark because you created a good ad. So you take your $8 bid times your 6 relevancy score, and that gives you 48. So that's your combined score. And at this point, that doesn't mean anything. Now your competitor comes along and bids $12. So they're bidding $4 more per click than you and I know you're sweating right now you're thinking for sure I'm going to lose this bid. But they have a relevancy score of 3, because their click through rates are well below the average. And they're just pulling teeth to try to get LinkedIn to give them traffic. So a competitor bid of 12 times the relevancy score of 3, they're getting a combined score of 36. Now, this is where the math gets a little bit tricky, but you have a combined score of 48. your competitor has a combined score of 36. So what the auction does is it divides the losers combined score that's 36, in this case, divided by your the winners relevancy score, which is a 6, and that equals $6. So that means that that really is how high that the winner would have to have bid, you know, you bid $8, but you actually only needed to bid $6 to beat the loser. And because it's a second price auction, what you need to do is pay one more cent than that. So in this case, you bid $8, but you're only going to pay $6 plus the one cent to beat them by a cent. So that is how a second price auction works. Again, this was really pioneered by Google. This is how digital advertising has been forever. So does this actually happen in practice? Well, not from my experience. And I'm not saying that LinkedIn is disingenuous here in what type of auction they have. But go and do this experiment for me, go for half a day, bid $50 on a cost per click basis. And tell me if you only paid the $12 and one cent that it would take to beat second place. Chances are, you probably didn't. You bid $50 aand you probably paid something like $48.30 for it. So I'm not sure if it's because it's not really a second price auction. Or maybe it's because there's enough competition around all the audiences they are always going to pay really close that there's always someone nipping at your heels with better performance or bidding higher. So the edge cases here, you may not want to download this report, you know, three times a day to see how your campaigns are doing and realizing that the campaign report will only give you the campaign relevancy score, not at the individual ad level. So it's helpful to understand what it looks like when you're really high or really low. So edge cases here, if you have a relevancy score of 10, you are getting tons of traffic, even if you bid all the way down to the floor. And because you're performing so well, with such a high click through rate, if the floor didn't exist, you should be able to pay less than the floor. But because there is a floor on everything, you can't do that. So a little hint here, when we get into the bidding budgeting episode, we'll talk about how you can use CPM bidding to pay even below the artificial floor. So that's a relevancy score of 10. Things are looking great. You can keep lowering your bid and still spend all of your money very efficiently. What if you get a relevancy score of 1? What that means is you were so uncompetitive in the auction that LinkedIn won't even show your ads. So you could bid you know $30, $40, $50 a click and it's not even until you're paying super huge when you start to overcome the relevancy scores of your competition. So you're most likely going to land between there.

8:12
The floor

So I mentioned that LinkedIn has a floor. And the concept of the bidding floor was really started to keep the riffraff out. I think at this time, LinkedIn probably saw other ad networks that were that they had a lot of crap on them, think like the belly fat ads on Facebook. And so what they did is they said, Hey, we know that competition is going to rise prices normally, but what we're going to do is set a arbitrary floor here that you're not going to be willing to pay if you're just being opportunistic, trying to get cheap traffic. And so they make sure only advertisers are coming to the platform that are serious. And then once you hit the floor, then competition kind of rises normally. And Google did this really well by you know, initially in the early days of AdWords, they set a five cent floor on every single keyword out there. And so at the early days, you could bid five cents and still get traffic. And Facebook followed suit. I don't know what Facebook's minimum was because they've always gone CPM, but it was really low. And then they let everyone come and have success on their platform, and then go and tell their friends who then jumped on and used it. And competition kind of raised naturally for everyone. And I call these really generous platforms. Because, you know, early on early days before there was competition, you really couldn't do any wrong. You'd come to the network and inevitably have success unless you were a crappy marketer. Okay, so the way this goes history was back in 2008, LinkedIn released a $2 floor for all text ads. And that was, you know, basically from 2008 till they launched in 2013, the sponsored content ads, and I was the first person to launch sponsored content ads, which was awesome. I got to use them before there was a significant floor. So back then when sponsored content came out, there was somewhere around a $4.50 cent floor. I saw it down to $4.25 for some really uncompetitive audiences. I saw it, you know, $6.75ish for more competitive audiences. And it stayed that way for quite a while. And then just recently, last year in 2019, when LinkedIn released their objective based advertising platform, prices increased about 35%. So what used to be a $4.50 floor is now $6.08. The way this works is back before objective based advertising, we had a website visits objective, and that was how you would just get traffic to your website. And that is currently called legacy. But back then it was just called website visits. After objective based advertising, they moved to where now website visits has a 35% increase in the floor, so you're going to have to bid higher and it Raise the auction for everyone. So a little trick here, if you're still sending website visits traffic, and let's say, back in 2018, you had launched some of these campaigns, try just editing the campaign to repurpose it so that you can keep it as a legacy campaign. That will be something really cool to help you get, you know, 35% less cost per click at least anywhere near the floor, as your competition is getting. So you might ask, well, if you're not bidding right at the floor, what's the harm in LinkedIn raising the floor price? The challenge here is that when suggested bids and the floor price go up, people begin by bidding higher, either because they're forced to now or because it's suggested and they just don't know better, so they're going to take the platform's recommendation. And now when everyone is bidding slightly higher, competition gets higher, and those who aren't bidding as high start to lose traffic or maybe if their relevancy score isn't doing as well. So now prices have been raised for everyone and It feels quite artificial. And I'm sure it's very obvious to you, I'm not a fan of artificial price hikes, I'm not a fan of even a floor price, I honestly believe that you should have a platform that is really inexpensive to get in, and then you let competition naturally raise the prices up. But since we do have a floor, it's helpful to understand what else may contribute to LinkedIn's higher prices.

12:24
Low inventory from low use

So aside from the artificial floors, which I obviously don't support, one of the things is low inventory from just general low use of the platform. So absolutely nothing against LinkedIn here. I love it as a platform, both paid and organic. But it is also the network that you don't think to spend as much time on because it's professional. So meanwhile, people are going and visiting Facebook 18 times a day, on average they're probably going to LinkedIn three or four times a month. Now there are certainly more active users. But with the vast majority of users checking in, not very often, and especially early on with LinkedIn, it was a platform that people only came back to every like six months to update their resume, or when they were looking for a job. This ended up creating really low inventory.

13:09
Low variety of types of professionals

So the few advertisers who were bidding on that inventory, it cost more for them. Now, it's really exciting that LinkedIn is getting used more and more. So we're seeing a lot more inventory open up, probably keeping prices relatively steady, even though a lot of new advertisers are coming in. Something else that tends to lead to these high prices, is the fact that there's a low variety of the types of professionals and businesses that there are out there. So follow me on this. If you are bidding on keywords like with Google, your competition is built naturally over billions or even trillions of combinations of words in the written language. And that's pretty cool. That means you can keep prices pretty low for a long period of time. Facebook is more audience focused, but they built over consumer based information. And other facets. So you can split any individual person up into lots of different segments, you know, are they a cat person? Do they love coffee? Are they into music? And so you have all of these different ways of categorizing a human. And it means that you can spread that competition out really naturally. On the other hand, LinkedIn has a very few set of facets that you should be able to target someone by. There are only so many job titles out there. There's only so many levels of seniority, there are only so many finite numbers of companies of certain sizes. And so because of that competition is going to naturally group around the more competitive aspects of who someone is. Certainly if you are targeting the highest rank, so like a CEO of large enterprise companies, that's going to be a really expensive click.

14:52
High competition from big brands

You also have high competition from really big brands because they have these deals that are worth millions of dollars to them. The same reason why if you want to try to outbid Salesforce in Google ads, you're going to be spending $80, $90 per click on something like sales CRMs. Really expensive because you have a company like Salesforce, who are such finely tuned marketers, and they have a large lifetime value. They know what they can afford to spend. And so they're willing to spend big and bid high. And so you've got this high competition from brands who the click is probably worth much more to them than it is to you. And so it drives competition up higher for everyone.

15:33
Competition will naturally increase over time

The fourth cause here to higher prices, his competition is naturally going to rise over time. More and more people hear about and consider the platform and then they start having conversations with their bosses about what channel should we get involved in. And inevitably, they're going to think, hey, we should check out LinkedIn, I've heard some good things. And also advertisers are getting more sophisticated at tracking. And as they do this, they're going to find more and more valuable In this really highly targeted, really high quality traffic, and they're going to make the decision to scale and keep spending and maybe even keep bidding higher as they start to get into Salesforce land.

16:11
Timing of day

The fifth cause of high prices here is actually the time of day. And you wouldn't think about this usually. But there are certain times of the day when people tend to be on LinkedIn. And there are certain times when they tend not to be. And what happens is, you know, advertisers will go in with a budget with certain bids. Sometimes during the day, they will outspend their budget, and they will drop out of the auction. So you can imagine some advertiser demand may taper off towards the end of the day. So that may affect things. When people are online more, it creates more added inventory, bringing overall prices down. And when people aren't there, let's say in the middle of the night, and everyone's bidding for that just few insomniac visitors who might come, those cost per click are going to be really high and it's probably not a great time to be bidding where people their not really in their right mind. There's also this issue of time of year where, you know, in December, people are really blowing their budgets up because they're trying to finish the year, the quarter, the month really strong. And so you have these big advertisers who are just you know, draining huge budgets. And in January all that kind of disappears. January's traditionally a very good month for LinkedIn advertisers. No one's in a hurry. It's the beginning of the year where people are back in the office and don't have things on their calendars. They're willing to entertain. They now have higher budgets, or they have new fresh budgets that they can start to think about allocating. So timing of day timing and general seasonality plays in here nicely.

17:40
Bidding each other up

Okay, number six cause for high prices is of course bidding each other up. So one competitor says, hey, I'm getting less traffic than I'd like. I'm gonna go ahead and raise my bids by you know 5% or 10%. And you'll at some point, go Ah, you know what, I'm not getting traffic anymore. I better go on raise my bids. And so you tend to bid each other up over time.

18:03
Bidding yourself up

Seventh cause of high prices is bidding yourself up. So when you have a single account and two campaigns who are targeting the same user, you are not going to bid yourself up, you're not providing yourself competition, which is really helpful to know. But there are companies out there who have multiple accounts, let's say using an example like Microsoft, it doesn't make sense for the Xbox team and the Microsoft Office team to be using the same account. So they might theoretically be targeting the same user, even though it's both coming from Microsoft. And in that case, they would bid each other up, you know, Xbox says I'm willing to bid $6. And Microsoft Office says I'm willing to bid $6.50 and you can see competition is, you know, the same company is now driving their own costs up.

18:52
Platform generosity

I mentioned this concept of platform generosity a little earlier. And I want to throw this out there as a concept I've been thinking about over time, and the way I qualify it is, it's the feeling that the network really supports you. And it inspires confidence to test new things, knowing that it's not going to embarrass you or cause you to make expensive mistakes. So Google and Facebook definitely have a platform generosity. I've tested this with Facebook, where I go in and just say, okay, I'm going to take Facebook's recommendations in creating a new ad set. And I'm going to bid what they say to bid. And I'm going to target how they say to target. And generally I'm going to have pretty good performance unless my ads suck. Google's kind of the same way. It's certainly getting much tougher now that everyone on the planet is advertising on Google. So quite a bit more competition there. I don't feel like LinkedIn has a high amount of platform generosity, because if you go down and create a brand new campaign, you're going to tick the audience expansion box which generally muddies your targeting and decreases your lead quality. You're going to bid automated bid and that's going to oftentimes You know, depending on your click through rate, but if you have an average click through rate, you're going to pay much more for that click, then you would have if you bid CPC. So that's one. The other one is if you do decide to pay by cost per click, which tends to be the lowest cost most of the time, LinkedIn will recommend a really insanely high bid to you, regardless of what your budget is. And they'll have a floor that's quite high in a suggested bid range that's quite high. So I would absolutely love to see LinkedIn start focusing on platform generosity. And in talking to LinkedIn's product people, this is certainly not what they intend. They don't intend it to come across like we're, you know, less focused on the user having success and more on padding the bottom line, but I think an extra focus here and attitude shift could go a long way in helping people understand that if I test something on LinkedIn, I'm not going to be embarrassed to my boss because I overspent the budget or just paid way too much. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into what you can do to pay less on LinkedIn.

21:11
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

21:22
Alright, let's jump into this. So now you know the history. And if you're paying too much for LinkedIn Ads traffic, here's what you can actually go and do about it. So a few different scenarios here. Let's say you're not being competitive enough. If you're running text ads falling from the first position to the second ad position, it's just a few pixels below. So there's really not a huge problem to bidding low with text ads, you'll fall down to the next position down and still be above the fold. Sponsored content is a little bit different of an animal here though, because the first ad position starts as the second item in their newsfeed. And if you drop down to the second position, that's five more slots down. So now you'll be at slot six for your ad position. And if you're up at the very top, you're probably going to have a much higher click through rate than you would if you fell down one or two positions. We've actually done a test here where we found that if we had a 1.2% click through rate in the first position, it actually dropped down to a 0.2%. So it dropped an entire full percent, just going from slot one down to slot two. It's important to understand here that your lead quality does not decrease when you drop down positions or when you bid less. The common thought is that it does, but in a lot of testing we've done we have not found lead quality, as long as we set our targeting really tight, we have not found lead quality to fail us when we're bidding low. If you are bidding by cost per click, LinkedIn is much more incentivized to show you in higher positions because that's where the ads get clicked. If you are bidding by cost per impression, then you will tend to fall down positions much more quickly. So if you want to pay less, there were three real mechanisms you can do. The first is you can bid less. The second is you can launch ads that get a better click through rate. And the third is you can actually change your bidding strategy to bid smarter. So I'll put it out there this way. If you took LinkedIn's recommendations, and you bid really high, let's say you bid, you know $15 a click and you have a $50 per day budget. That means you're only going to get just over three clicks a day out of your budget. And you could probably hit that in the first half of the day. So imagine you spent all $50 in the first half of the day and then for the last half of the day, you just got nothing, your account was pretty much off. If you would have been half that you could have paid half the price and gotten double the amount of clicks and it might have actually gone all day, you know, maybe it still cuts off earlier in the day. So be smarter about the way you bid, pay attention to did I actually hit my budget during the mid day? I like to use this little rhyme, if you hit your budget during the day, you paid too much for clicks along the way.

24:19
Armchair Economist

So now I get to sit in my in my armchair here and play the role of an armchair economist. Now I know LinkedIn has Stanford and Harvard MBAs who know way more about economics than I do. But I'm going to attempt to postulate here some ideas that I think LinkedIn could do to improve their pricing model. So first off, since the pricing has been set by artificial floors, I would love to see LinkedIn artificially cut its floor prices in half. And what would happen is, if we're already past the level of competition, where people are paying more than the floor, which we are in most cases I'm sure, LinkedIn has no need to worry about the riffraff. The floor will have already kept them out. And anyone who did attempt to come in and bid too low for what they're actually offering, they wouldn't be shown anyway. And of course, the better advertisers, they would be paying close attention to okay, how low do I bid before my traffic cuts off? What this would do is it would cause everyone on the network to come and have success and go tell their friends, just like early Google and Facebook. And I postulate that if the only thing that people knew about LinkedIn Ads, who hadn't tried it was no longer "I've heard it too expensive". We'd probably see LinkedIn ads gain mass adoption, and then pricing would come back up naturally. And I think it would be a lot better received. And I think what mass adoption on LinkedIn Ads would look like is everyone in B2B, LinkedIn would be the de facto platform that they would jump on and learn when they were very first coming out of college or be the first platform they try, rather than trying Google first, then Facebook and then kind of failing over to LinkedIn when Facebook got too expensive for them. And certainly, if this were the case, the Microsoft stock price would take a hit for a quarter or two. But then pricing would come back up naturally rather than artificially. And then everyone in business to business would recognize LinkedIn as a tier one platform and not a tier two or tier three. And this is not without precedent, because we've already seen that LinkedIn knows the effect of artificially lowering prices. When I very first tried sponsored Inmail back before it was in the platform, you had to go directly through a sales rep. It was a $3 per person you sent to and since it came out on the platform as self service, it turned out to be a I think they started the floor somewhere around 25 cents to send it and the floor now has been dropped twice. So they've artificially lowered the price of sponsored in mail twice, maybe even three times now,which is fantastic. We've seen much better performance from our sponsored in mail. And I'm so grateful that LinkedIn did that. And then even just recently, dynamic ads saw the same shift. And this one wasn't quite artificial. What happened is LinkedIn gave up that inventory that they had given to the programmatic exchanges for just general 300x250 banner ads across the site. And what that did is by dropping that inventory, it opened up the inventory to all of us advertisers to use both text ads, and dynamic ads that occupy that same space. So now dynamic ads dropped their prices more than half. It was actually down to about a third to a half of what they were before, which is fantastic. And now I can actually recommend using dynamic ads again, back then I couldn't because they cost more than than sponsored content, and they had really low engagement rates like text ads. So I would absolutely love to get rid of the high floors. I would love to see sponsored content. Sure text ads has always had a $2 floor. I'd love to see sponsored content adopt the $2 floor as well. And of course, if that doesn't get me any traffic, so be it, then I have to raise my floor. And of course the platform could inform you of that. Okay, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around.

28:20
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

28:30
Resources

Okay, I've got a couple of good resources for you. There's a really cool video back from 2013 where LinkedIn explains how their auction works. So if you weren't quite following with like the what do I divide by what and what got multiplied together to decide how much I pay? Go watch this video. It's there in your show notes. I've also linked to a YouTube video that I created where it discusses both bidding and budgeting strategies, and definitely check that one out. Next, I've got a course on LinkedIn learning com. It's called Advertising on LinkedIn. Definitely check that one out. The link is in the show notes here for you. And it's a really inexpensive way to learn from the ground up how to advertise in the most efficient way. As always, I would love it if whatever player you're on you do subscribe and then you make sure to rate and review as soon as you know how much value you're getting out of this. Make sure you leave a great review telling other people that they can find a lot of good stuff out of this podcast that I hope that you're getting. Finally, definitely email us [email protected] with any ideas you have for future shows, we'd love to take your your recommendations here your advice, would love to cater to you. So anything you're looking to learn, I'd love to hear. I will see you back here next week. And I am cheering you on in your LinkedIn ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

Ep 23 - LinkedIn Ads Reporting Insights You Didn't Know Were Available

Ep 6 - LinkedIn Ads Bidding & Budgeting Strategies

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 account is going great, but you want to raise. Here are the things you can do to bump performance, even if the account is already going great.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So if things are going well in your account, but you're looking for some further wins. Well, I've got you covered. Today, we're going to be talking about the optimizations that you can do whether your account has a couple weeks of spend, or whether you've been a heavy spender for years. No matter where you're at, I'm sure you'll definitely get something out of this. In the news, as of the time of recording, LinkedIn is on there twice yearly shut down. This happens twice a year, and it's a whole week for the Fourth of July, and then a whole week at the last part of December. So not a whole lot happening over there. Not lots of new things coming out because they're all on vacation, but support tickets are still being responded to, so all's right in the world. On last week's episode, I told you about how several of us advertisers noticed that our click through rates dropped significantly on June 16, across a whole bunch of accounts. After a little deep diving and data, it looks like the drop was mostly noticed by those bidding cost per click, and not nearly as much by those bidding either cost per impression or automated. So we're gonna keep going, we're gonna keep digging and I'll definitely let you know what we find. But if anyone has insight as to what might have happened, I'd love to hear about it. Hit us up at [email protected]. Just one review today from riverton12 it says "AJ is the best. Full disclosure I work for AJ at B2Linked. AJ is the best at what he does. I have learned more since I started working for him than I could have ever imagined. He explained stuff so plainly and just gets to the point. What a boss." I hesitated to read this one since it was from an employee, but I didn't ask my employees to leave reviews. So I thought I'd go ahead and shout it out. Steve, you know who you are. Thanks so much for the kind words and making me sound like a douche by reading that out loud. All right. I want to feature you. So definitely leave your review. Let me know anything about you that you especially want me to shout out on air. And let's keep these reviews cominng. All right, with that being said, let's hit it.

Optimization
2:22
So the topic of optimization when things are going well, but you want them to get better. And same kind of principle applies even if your accounts not going well, and you're just trying to improve it. But this is a lot simpler when you can see pockets of success that you can capitalize on, and pockets of failure that you can take care of bid down, turn off all those things. In advertising, I like to think that we have two hurdles that we always have to get over with our ads. I've used this analogy before, where the first hurdle that we have to get over is we have to get people to click on the ads. They have to be interesting enough that someone will want to engage Then once they've clicked, now we need them to convert and take the action that we're asking them to. And of course, many of you are in some heavy business to business applications here. So we can add some additional hurdles for things like getting them to mql status, like marketing qualified lead, or SQL, sales qualified lead. Maybe even all the way to close, where you've actually won the business. So think of these like funnel stages, because if you make it over one, but then totally trip and fall on the other, you're not going to win the race, or you may not even finish. So we'll talk about optimization techniques and things you should watch for on both of those hurdles, both getting people to click on your ads enough, and then getting those to convert. And I think it makes sense to focus on two different areas of performance, where we can eke some additional performance out of them. And so let's start here with taking the worst things in the account and making them better. Improve the worst. things so the average collectively for the whole comes way up and makes the whole thing look better. And of course, this really depends on what your definition of poor performance is. Because poor performance to me could be you're not getting enough volume, you're not spending your budget, or your cost per lead or cost per conversion, or cost per click is just too high, and it's dragging your performance down. So let's start with probably the most obvious, if something's not working, you can just shut it off. That means if you have a bad ad, or bad ads, or even whole bad campaigns, you can just go and hit pause on them and shut them off. Keep them from running. For audiences, you know, are not going to be profitable or ads that you know aren't, this is a great way to just get the performance gone. If you are after cost efficiency, though. Let's say this a campaign is going okay. But cost per conversion is just a little bit too high and it needs to get cheaper. One of my favorite strategies here is to just bid down. If you know that your ads are 15%, more expensive than they should be, then you can go and bid down by 15%. And you will lose some volume there, it won't get nearly as many clicks. But the clicks and traffic you do get will be efficient. Let's say that you listen to my advice in Episode 6 about bidding and budgeting, and you have something that's performing not very well and so you've bid it all the way to the floor, the very lowest price you can bid. But let's say you're still spending too much or it's still inefficient. Of course, you could shut it off. But you could also limit the budget, lower the budget down, because if all of your best performers are spending, you know, $50 a day, let's say, and you take some of the worst and lower them down to where they're spending maybe $10 per day. Sure, they may still be a little bit inefficient, but on average, the whole account is going to look better because you've minimized the bad performance.If you listen to Episode 23, where Sam Fonoimoana offered you guys his free targeting audit, which is amazing. If you haven't gotten it, go get it. And you can use this for a lever that we call tightening our targeting. If you know something's not performing very well, you could take a look at the audience and see if there's any pieces of that, that you could trim out or cut off entirely, leaving you with a little bit less volume, but all the good stuff. This could be things like narrowing your company sizes to only those who can really afford you who are going to be top quality leads. Or maybe you're including too many seniorities. Maybe the person who actually feels your pain is a senior seniority, meaning that they're an individual contributor. And if you're targeting, let's say managers and directors, you're probably paying too much for that traffic. And then what about your ads? Let's say your ads performance is not great. There are some pretty simple things you can do to those. Again, on episode six, we talked about About the bidding and budgeting, and how your click through rate affects how much you're paying. But if you're paying too much or not getting enough traffic, one of the best things you can do is test new ad copy. If you have click through rates on sponsored content that are like, let's say, 0.4%, you're about average, you're probably going to be paying $8 to $11 per click if you're targeting somewhere in North America. So if you can launch some ads that increase, let's say, you get up to 0.7 or 0.8%, click through rates, you'll likely see your costs per click drop to around the $6 to $8 range, and immediately you're 20%, 30% more profitable just because you've got more people interested in clicking on your ads. We found the best performance in testing to come from adjusting our intro text in ads so that's usually the first AB test we're going to run. But if you've noticed that your click through rates are coming down over time, you're probably saturating that audience and it's probably a good idea to give them something fresh. After all, if they've already looked at your ad five times and just said, yeah, I'm not going to click on that, then no matter what you do to the words, they're still going to remember the creative the imagery. So try changing out your imagery, give it a fresh look and see if you can help improve your click through rates that wa. That will bring cost down and it will bring volume up, and that will cover a multitude of ills. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into how you can improve your best performers.

8:31
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

8:40
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's largest accounts. We're the only media buying agency to become official LinkedIn partners, and performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch. And we'd love to help you absolutely demolish your goals.

Improving Your Best Performers
9:05
All right, let's jump into the levers that you have to improve on the stuff that's already working in your account. The same rule for good performers applies here, where good performance could mean all kinds of things to you so you'll have to pick and choose from here what makes the most sense. But good performance could mean that you're getting a really low cost per conversion. Or maybe you're hitting the right volume of leads or fully spending your budget. There are all kinds of things that you as advertisers will want to focus on, and you may be gold on, you may get bonused by so that's what we're gonna try to do. Find those particular levers and help them out. The first thing I like to do with great performers is bid them up. Because if you have a campaign that's performing, let's say 30% better than average to the cost per lead, if you go and increase your bids by 20%, you'll now likely get a lot more volume, alot more clicks, and a lot more conversions, and you'll still be 10% more efficient than average. I call that a win. Now, of course, if you ever increase your bids, you'll also want to increase your budgets, because like we've talked about, if you hit your daily budget during the day, you paid too much for your clicks along the way. So make sure you raise your budgets high enough that your campaigns aren't just hitting them in the middle of the day. You want that to stretch all the way to the end, ideally. Same thing here on improving your ad copy to improve on the already winning ads. So you've got ads that are doing great. Well, there's probably a test that you can run that will get you 5%, incremental 10% or even 15% incremental gains. Test new ad copy, test new imagery, test anything you can to improve just a little bit because really, any increase in click through rate goes a long way to get costs down and volume pretty much as high as you need it. I got to consult on an account week that had 4% click through rates on their sponsored content, it was absolutely incredible. They were paying less than 30 cents per click from sponsored content. Oh, my heart just sings when it sees metrics like that. So of course, I was looking at that like a huge win. But then we go back 30 days and see that 30 days ago, the performance they were running at 7% click through rates. And so that means even after click through rates fell to half of what they were, and performance was still amazing. That means back then 30 days ago, they were getting less than 15 cent clicks. It's incredible. So it doesn't matter what kind of performance you're seeing. If your ads have been running for a while, we see that the average is like 27 to 33 days when ads will start to fall off. Meaning if you're looking at their click through rate over time, if you click on the performance chart, and sort by average click through rate. You can watch this happen after about 27 to 33 days of saturating an audience, you'll see your click through rates start to drop off a cliff. So even if you've got great performance, you can make it even better or catch up to where it was at the beginning before the saturation by just changing things up a little bit. You don't necessarily have to change the offer, you can just change the motivation and the imagery that people are actually seeing in the ads. And I would be remiss if I didn't bring up your offer here because we've seen even when you have a good offer that's performing well, launching a new offer can easily double or triple your results. So take a look at all of the different offers that you've run and how they've converted. And try to understand the ones that converted the best. What made them amazing. Can we go and create more offers like that? Do we see people like to attend our webinars? Do we see that they like guides about a certain topic? Or will they convert like crazy on checklists? Those are the things that you'll find out for your own account. And test or try some new offers. We've also seen this quite often where, let's say a guide was converting at 10%, which was a little bit below average, but not terrible. And then we just changed the title, change the name of the guide to maybe just hit on a different motivation or pain point that your customer might be feeling. The content of the white paper, the content of the guide doesn't have to change, it's still gonna cover all of the same great stuff, you're just presenting it in a little bit different of a way. We've seen this literally double conversion rates. And because the design of your guide has already been done, there's not a whole lot of work necessary here to just change the title on a PDF and swap it out on a web page. So there's something that takes very little effort and can really, really pay off. Something else we've found to be insanely successful is to take off your marketing hat and put on your sales enablement hat. Go spend some time with your sales team, show them what your targeting is like show them the ads people are clicking on, show them the guides, people are downloading, get them in the mindset of where they know what their prospects are going through, so they can better tailor the conversations. This will also give you an excuse to learn more and get more feedback from sales that will help you optimize and close that loop quicker. I want to tell you about what I call data journey. Back in 2011, I was spending a good amount on LinkedIn Ads, and LinkedIn didn't even have conversion tracking yet. And of course, it wasn't going to come out for six more years, unfortunately. I was waiting for a long time. But for simplicity, I did all of my optimizations in the account based entirely off of click through rate. I figured that any ad that people clicked on significantly more was probably going to be the most interesting and was probably going to convert the best. Then I started getting access to my conversion numbers. Through analytics, I would run an analytics report, I would run a LinkedIn report, drop them into Excel, marry that data up, and then start doing these calculations of what is my cost per lead?, what is my conversion rate? And this is consequently, when I fell in love with Excel and data. Mmm, sexy, sexy. But as I was doing that, I noticed something that I thought was really strange. There was zero correlation between the ad that had the winning click through rate, and the ones that had the winning conversion rate, it was literally a coin flip, if the ad that I had just promoted to keep running was even the right one to keep promoting. So this opened my eyes quite a bit and I realized, you always want to take action on the results that are closest to the money. That means the furthest down the sales funnel, you can possibly get data, at least at a large enough sample size that it makes any sense. Since the closer you get to the money, the more the data means the more accurate it's going to be. The more predictable it becomes. Then another few months later, I started getting a lot of mq l SQL proposals, closed numbers. And I did the same thing to them. I brought them into Excel and started doing all of this analysis. And I found that for every stage, the ad or the campaign that converted higher, it was a little bit more likely to mql higher, and then even more so an ad or a campaign that mql'd. at a high rate, it was even more likely to sql or proposal and then close at a high rate. So the principle here of this story is that you want to optimize for the deepest sales stage that you have enough data for because you can totally ignore poor click through rates if your conversion rates are amazing or lead quality is so high that you keep closing everyone who clicks. So who cares if an offer converts amazingly well, but you've spent $1 million on it and nothing has turned into close business. Or conversely, if your conversion rate is absolutely miniscule, but every conversion ends up closing, we actually have a client like this right now where their webinar is converting at 6% with cold traffic. And I would have looked at that and said, man, 6%, that's really low for a webinar, we really haven't hit the mark here. Let's go back to the drawing board and try something else. But he is closing business like crazy. And based off of their deal sizes, they are running probably a 10 x ROI Right Now, this can be a little uncomfortable for those of you who are testing, because if you see something performing poorly, you may want to hurry and get rid of the poor performance. But if you can take a look at what's happening after the realm of poor performance, let's say it's a bad click through rate. But wait until you've gotten some conversion and see if it's going to make up for it. And I've mentioned that you want to make sure that you have enough data to actually analyze here. What I found is my results to the click through rate generally becomes statistically significant after about $1,000 in ad spend. Now keep in mind that is in North America and in the English language where it tends to be the most competitive. If as soon as you leave the English language, or really go outside of North America, your costs are going to drop significantly, meaning that you'll probably be able to get enough data for even less money. And if you care about your conversion rates, and your cost per conversion. And again, if you're in North America with a content offer that's converting between, let's say 12 and 15%. It usually takes about $5,000 in ad spend to get statistical significance around those values. And of course, you don't have to spend that over one day or a month even. All you need is that amount of data to attribute. Now all mentioned, if you're not converting at 12 to 15%, let's say you have a harder offer like Get a demo, talk to sales, buy something now, or maybe it is a content offer, it just doesn't convert very high, then be aware, you're probably going to have to spend significantly more in order to get that same level of statistical significance. So I would recommend starting out with a really good content offer. From my experience 95% of the time, the math works out in favor of content, and getting a cheaper cost per lead, but then nurturing that person to a sales conversation, rather than just going immediately for the kill and going right to the sales conversation. But certainly, because it's 95% of the time, you might be that 5%. And so I recommend that everyone test a little bit, and then you'll know for your own brand performance. But if you have to spend $1,000 to get statistical significance for your click through rates, and $5,000 to get statistical significance for conversion rates. To get statistical significance for mql's you may have to spend twice Or three times to get significance around sql's, it might be three or four times more than that. So this is where we depart from where advertising as a creative endeavor and gets way more into an analytical and a predictive one. Any of you who are lovers of data? Oh, the world is yours. I'm calling it 2020 is the year of the technical marketer. Okay, I've got the episode resources for you coming up right after the break. So stick around.

20:32
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

20:43
Okay, I mentioned Episode 23. with Sam Fonoimoana giving his free audit around your targeting, go back and listen to that episode. definitely take advantage of it because this is an audit that you cannot do yourself. Also, we talked a lot about bidding and budgeting and this one So if you need a refresher or want to go a lot deeper, go check out Episode 6, all about bidding and budgeting. And if you are new to LinkedIn Ads, go check out my course on LinkedIn Learning. It's just over an hour long. And it covers pretty much what I would cover if you hired me to come in and train your team one on one. To bring me and it would be $500 an hour, but this course is either free, or I think only $25 if you don't have access to LinkedIn Learning already, so definitely, I know which one I would choose. Take a look down right now at your podcast player and subscribe on whatever player you're listening on. And please do rate the podcast. And of course I would love five stars, but if you just don't think that my poor ginger soul deserves it, well, that's fine, give me four. And please do go leave a review for the podcast. I'd love to shout you out. And especially I'd love to see a review on Stitcher. So those of you who are stitcher users, please go leave your review there. We're up to I think like 25 now on Apple podcasts, which is fantastic. Thank you everyone who's leaving it there. But Stitcher only has one right now and it could use a little bit of love. Any ideas for what you'd like us to cover in the show? Or topics? Or questions? Email us at [email protected]. I would absolutely love to hear from you. All right with that being said, I will see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiative.

Show Resources:

Episode 10: What should you offer from 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:

Marketing and sales funnels with LinkedIn Ads, a match made in heaven or the devil's playground. You're about to find out.

0:13
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

0:21
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So the topic of funnels is really hot in digital marketing right now. What are they? How do you build one for LinkedIn Ads? And how do you think about LinkedIn ads in the different stages of the funnel? We'll cover all that in more on this episode. This topic was suggested by Antii, one of our listeners. So please do take us up on the suggestion for emailing us at [email protected] and suggesting topics you'd love to have us cover. In the news Brooke Osmundson, who's the Director of Paid Media at NordicClick Interactive. She's really active on the PPC chat community on Twitter. She brought to a bunch of us advertisers attention that starting around June 16 of 2020. If you're listening to this later, that click through rates were dropping across the board across all of their clients. And we looked into it and notice that ctrs dropped about 10 to 20% across most of our accounts running especially sponsored content, and text ads. So we're not immediately clear on what caused it and we're still investigating, but if any of you are listening who have the same thing, please reach out to us at at [email protected]. We'd love to help get to the bottom of what in the world could be causing this. Highlighting a few of the reviews that you as listeners have left on the podcast. TheOverwhelmedBrain, says "as a small business owner this show is one of my most important resources. I've been following AJ for a while on YouTube. So glad he's got a podcast so I can listen anytime I want. love this show. So much free advice I'd have to pay for otherwise. Can't Get. Enough already learned so much." Thank you so much, TheOverwhelmedBrain, that warms my heart hearing that. Jacketkicker says "your go to source for LinkedIn ads. AJ's podcast has helped me set up flawless ads for my clients. The advice he gives in this show is priceless. He's also very responsive to questions and comments on LinkedIn. He's been a huge help for my business. Jacketkicker, I am so glad that you've got that much value out of this. It's exactly as intended. And Asmaa, who is a connection of mine on LinkedIn. She's the Community Manager at Clickfunnels. And she says "great show!" "This show is a great choice for every marketer or media buyer who wants to start with or leverage the power of LinkedIn ads. AJ is the go to man for anything LinkedIn related and the show has been very informative, yet not intimidating so far. Great job." Thank you so much Asmaa, I sure appreciate you leaving that and just a shout out as small as the only one who has reviewed us yet on Stitcher. So the majority of you have reviewed us on Apple podcasts. If you happen to look down and see that you're using Stitcher, I would absolutely love it if you could reach out and give us a review. I want to feature you so definitely if you want a shout out, leave a review. Okay with that being said, let's hit it jumping into funnels.

3:14
What Are Funnels?
Okay, so what are funnels? There are quite a few different definitions out there. In marketing, we talk about the funnel being something where we take someone from before they know we exist all the way to purchase. You may have heard of things like cold traffic and warm traffic, the know, like, and trust factor around your brand. And one of my favorites is the Aida model, A-I-D-A and it stands for awareness, interest, demand and action. And the concept here is that the majority of people have to learn about you and then trust you before they're ready to buy. I'm sure many of you who came up in in marketing have heard the old adage that someone has to see something seven times before they consider purchasing from you. So that's really the classic definition of a funnel. But in recent years, the concept of the sales funnel has really come into its own in digital marketing. And if I can make my own definition for it, this is a curated experience to get cold traffic as effectively as possible through your sales process. Usually, this happens through a series of content that helps kind of take someone's hand and walk them through the buying and education process without needing to talk to a person. Some of these sales funnels can be completely executed without the person actually having to talk to a human, but a lot of them do mean you will have to talk to a human at the end, but at least by the time they get there, they have been so well educated and qualified that sales' job really is pretty simple. Okay, so how do LinkedIn Ads then fit into funnels? Well, LinkedIn's native targeting, that is the targeting that we've had access to for, you know, basically since 2008. It works amazingly well. Well, targeting cold traffic, these are people who haven't heard of us before, is their first taste of the brand. It gets us in front of very important types of VIP prospects that we wouldn't be able to get in front of otherwise. So every time I run a LinkedIn campaign, I picture this as being cold traffic. This is the first time all of these people have heard of me. And I need to make that kind of impression. If you haven't listened to Episode 10, about offers and calls to action, definitely check that episode out, because it goes a lot deeper here. But on LinkedIn, because this is the first time they've heard of our brand, we need to lead with value first. But it doesn't always make sense to lead with light content. Like here, go read some blog posts, and we'll retarget you later, just because of LinkedIn's high costs. So what we've found to be the most effective is getting someone right to kind of the middle of the funnel here and giving them some kind have content that they find really valuable and gated, turn it into a lead magnet. So these will be things like checklists, cheat sheets, guides, ebooks, webinars, and in person events. And it's this concept of the value exchange. If you're offering something to your prospects, that really does solve a perceived pain point, or satisfies a major curiosity of there's something that they stay up all night thinking about or worrying about, then, of course, they're going to be willing to put in their information and submit a form in order to get it. So your content really does have to be amazing. And then the rest of the funnel, what that looks like LinkedIn kind of brings them in, I like to use the metaphor, we can lead a horse to water, and we can get them to take the first drink, but after that, it's really up to sales. That means we can get someone to fill out the form. But after that, it's really a marketing and nurture approach by sales, to really get rapport and a relationship with that person. So that you can eventually have a sales conversation that turns into a closed deal. Now, this isn't all to say that LinkedIn is only for the top of the funnel, it can be a really good channel for the middle and bottom of the funnel, too. If you are a massive fortune 500 brand who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars advertising to the general public? Yeah, all traffic is going to be pretty much warm traffic at that point. But for the majority of smaller advertisers, those who don't have massive, massive budgets, assume that all of your native targeting is going to be cold traffic. And so if you want to get in front of warm traffic, you're going to want to target things like account lists of companies, you know, you've already had some kind of touch point with, contact lists where you know, these are someone who's a warm prospect to you, or even a retargeting less, where you can then get in front of people who at least they've already been to your website or certain pages of your website. And of course as a performance marketer, your goal is to get a cold prospect as quickly and as cheaply turned into revenue for your company. And so if you are the type of company or brand where you can push someone, you can push cold traffic right into a demo or purchase. That's fantastic, good for you. We found about 5% of the time this works because a brand is either so disruptive, or there's such latent demand in the marketplace for them. And you can get away with that, or they have such a strong brand. But the other 95% of the time, you'll notice getting low click through rates because you're not starting to lead with value. You might see really low conversion rates because you're asking too much too soon. It can be really hard to scale. It's hard to get LinkedIn to send you traffic even if you're bidding high. And of course, as you're bidding higher, you'll notice really high costs per click, which lead to a really expensive cost per qualified prospect. So if this is the case if this is what you're seeing, you know you've got to add at least one more step to the funnel here before you start asking right for a demo or a purchase. So then you start considering, let's try a two step funnel. Remember, we want as few of steps here as possible, because every step we add, takes more time and additional cost in advertising. So now this two step funnel, maybe you're leading with something like a content offer, and then you're retargeting those people with a demo or a purchase. And the guide you're going to use here is your conversion rate. on that first step of the funnel, we're always looking for content that gets 15% or higher conversion rates. And so if you have this content, you know, you're getting a low cost per opt in from your LinkedIn Ads. Now you're going to start watching the second step. So as this traffic graduates from having downloaded a piece of content, so now they should at least know like and trust us to some degree. Now we want to start showing them ads that then push to that demo or purchase. And on those demo and purchase ads, take a look at your click through rates. Are your click through rates low? Or is conversion rate even low or cost per conversion high on this step, that probably means you need to add a third step in your funnel. So you'll want to rinse and repeat through this cycle, adding stages until you find that yes, you have effectively moved cold traffic very efficiently, all the way to where they're willing to talk to a sales rep. This is, make no mistake about it, the holy grail of B2B advertising.

10:36
Here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into nurturing your funnel stages and actually building sequences.

10:42
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts

10:50
If the performance of your LinkedIn ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's largest accounts and are the only ones media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners and performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch and we'd love to absolutely help you demolish your goals.

11:14
Nurturing Your Funnel Stages
Alright, let's jump into nurturing your funnel stages and building these smart sequences. So here are the different tools that you have to actually build sequences. If someone has interacted with a lead gen form in any capacity, they've either clicked on an ad so a lead gen form opened, or they've submitted one, LinkedIn now lets you build retargeting audiences right on the platform for either including or excluding those people. It's fantastic. Same thing goes with video. If they've watched at least two seconds of your video, you can put them into a retargeting audience, and you can segment them by if they've watched 25%, 50%, 75% or even completed your videos. Again, this is for both information And exclusion, which is super important. And we'll get to why. Of course, if you get this traffic to your website or a landing page, you can then do web retargeting on LinkedIn, and start building that audience of at least 300 people who have visited your website. Then there's the list retargeting where you can either get a list of prospects that haven't closed yet, and upload that to LinkedIn and show specific ads just to that cohort. Or maybe you even have a cold list that you've purchased, you can upload that as well. Same thing with company names, if you know that there's a list of companies who have converted, but they have not yet closed into deals for you, then yeah, you can upload a list of those companies and either include or exclude them from your targeting. And if you are in that segment, where you're sending people to your website or a landing page, one of my favorite things is to then retarget that traffic through Facebook and Google's website retargeting. And of course, all of the ads that we launched from LinkedIn have really detailed UTM parameters or tracking parameters in the URL. So you can then go to your Facebook and your Google retargeting campaigns and say, Hey, if UTM_campaign contains the word cmo, create an audience for them that we're going to call chief marketing officers. That's just one example. But you can go pretty ninja here. And of course, you'll probably have email, maybe text, phone calls, all as potential second or third touches here to help you build a sequence.

13:35
Building a Sequence
So how do you build a sequence? It's as simple as having some kind of audience that's cold, and we're going to call this our original audience. Then the people from that original audience who took the action that we wanted them to, let's say they submitted the lead gen form. What we would do is create an audience of just those who actually submitted the form and we're going to exclude that same Audience from the original audience. Then we set up a second campaign, one that is only targeting that list of people who took the desired action, our converters, then we can specify a specific message just for them. The same thing goes if you're building more than two steps in your sequences, you can do the same thing by creating a new retargeting audience, and then excluding that from the previous step. So you are graduating people, anyone from the original audience who took the step that you wanted them to, they are now released from that audience, and you're not going to pay for a second click from them from that cold audience. And they are going to be passed into your warm audience. And I think we've got to talk about attribution models here and attribution in general, because it's really easy to think, oh, someone saw my LinkedIn ad, converted, and then came back through a retargeting ad, or a paid search branded ad and then became customer and it's just two quick touch points, one top of the funnel, one bottom of the funnel, and now they're a customer. Hooray, we have revenue. But in actuality, if you go and look at your channel contribution report in analytics, you will see that no one's path to becoming a customer looks quite that easy. It's all over the board. You'll see touchpoints from every possible channel in about every order you can imagine.

15:25
Attribution
So I get this question a lot. Okay, so how should you do attribution for LinkedIn ads, should you count first touch attribution or last touch attribution, or w shaped or anything else? For quick definitions here, first touch attribution means the very first time that prospect was introduced to a channel. So let's say LinkedIn is the very first channel they saw, if they convert there, and then end up coming back two or three months through, let's say, Google ads. LinkedIn would still get all of the credit because it was the one who originally found that prospect. They wouldn't have learned about the company if not for them. And then you have last touch attribution, which is exactly the opposite. Whichever marketing channel touched them right before they became a customer, that's the channel that gets the credit. And then you have w shaped because a W has like a peak in the middle, where you give equal credit, maybe to the very first touch, equal credits, the last touch, and then maybe there was a touch in the middle. If they were an inactive prospect that kind of reactivated them. So maybe LinkedIn introduced them to the brand, then they went inactive for a little while. clicked on a retargeting ad in the middle, that kind of brought them back in, and then maybe they ended up clicking on an email and going right to demo. So now LinkedIn, a retargeting, ad, and email all get credit for that customer. So which of these attribution models do I recommend? Well, my preferred method here is something I call any touch attribution. And what that means is because we are only working with the LinkedIn Ads channel, we know that our clients are also doing heavy work on Google, also doing heavy work on Facebook, and a whole host of other channels. Our clients for sure have to figure out what type of attribution model they want to use, they'll decide if it's first touch, last touch, multi touch, W shaped, H shape, I mean, just name a letter here. But what matters to us because we are optimizing this one channel, every single conversion matters to us. We don't need to take into account that one of our conversions only accounted for 33% of a lead. We just need to know that this ad copy and this audience produced a conversion so that we can optimize account performance to get more of that. So we leave it to our client to roll things up to the multi channel level and decide how much credit to give each channel. But we want every possible conversion point from LinkedIn because it is concrete action that someone took so that we can help us optimize the account. And for any one channel, I recommend that everyone adopt this strategy. The way this works in a CRM is that when someone fills out a form, let's say on your landing page, the content of those form fields, as well as the tracking parameters in the URL, get passed into that CRM to either create or update a prospect record. Now, depending on the way your CRM is set up, it might be one of three different ways. The least sophisticated way is, let's say AJ Wilcox is already a lead in your system and AJ just clicked from a LinkedIn ad and filled it out. That existing record might have had a source of, let's say, a Google ad. But now it's going to be overwritten. And that means whoever was responsible for the conversions from Google just lost credit. And now LinkedIn got the credit. So you can tell why this is problematic. We don't want channels overriding each other. But the way we sure like best is when the CRM can collect every different source and just make a list, . You can pattern the whole journey out of which channel each prospect touched. So that means you look at this prospect record for AJ Wilcox, you can see he clicked on a Google ad and then converted from a LinkedIn ad and then opened eight emails and converted on one and became a customer. So if your CRM isn't already set up this way to take every sort of source, and not overwrite, but instead make a list and help you map the customer journey, then maybe you can work with your CRM admin and implement that because it really is amazing data. Great, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

19:57
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

20:07
Episode Resources
And for your episode resources here, make sure if you haven't already, go back and listen to Episode 10 of this podcast, all about calls to action and offers. You'll be glad you did. Anyone who's new to LinkedIn advertising, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning the links right there in show notes. It's just over an hour long. And it takes you from the very beginning of LinkedIn Ads all the way through intermediate on how the platform works and how to do things. The cost is the best part. It's either zero dollars or $25, depending on your LinkedIn subscription. So definitely check that out. It's the same thing that I would train your team on one on one if you hired me to come and train them, but at $500 an hour that comes in a little bit higher than the $0 or $25. Take a look at your podcast player right now of choice and hit that subscribe button. not already subscribed. And then please, if you like what you hear, definitely do rate the podcast. And I would especially love it if you would leave a review on whatever podcast player you're using. And I do want to shout you out. So please leave that review. I'll shout you out beginning of the show. With any ideas for episodes, anything you'd love to have us cover, reach out to us at [email protected]. And with that, I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.