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.

Show Resources:

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

Free audit - click the scheduling link at the bottom of this article to get it

Sam Fonoimoana's email: [email protected]

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

Show Transcript:

Today we're talking about the advanced reporting capabilities for your LinkedIn Ads that you didn't even know were possible. Strap in, and let's do this.

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

0:22
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. Today I get to introduce you to my secret weapon. Sam Fonoimoana from Stoke Analytics. He's a reporting and data ninja, which you'll absolutely soon find out. And he's got access to LinkedIn Ads API, which allows him to gather data and insights that you won't find in campaign manager for your account. I'm excited to introduce you to him as we are longtime friends, and he's even got a really cool free targeting audit to offer you. So definitely take him up on that. With that being said, let's hit it.

0:58
Alright Sam, thanks so much. Welcome to the podcast.

1:01
Thanks so much AJ for having me.

1:03
So excited to be talking to you here. We've obviously worked together on LinkedIn Ads for a long time. And this is so cool that I get to introduce you to the LinkedIn Ads Show audience, I would love just to have you start telling us about yourself. Tell us about your background and why you do such cool stuff with LinkedIn Ads reporting?

1:21
Well, it's true. Like we we've known each other now for a while, remember our days back at the back of demo working for that company? And you know, data was everything. And we had a lot of fun. I remember you taking that sequel course when we were over there, you did a good job for a marketer.

1:36
Not bad for a marketer.

1:38
Yeah, my world really has revolved around data I started off as a finance guy. And, you know, quickly discovered that if I really want answers to the questions I'm asking as a finance guy, I need more data. And so it just led me down this path of being able to pull the data myself from many different data sources. And really, you know, try to try to answer the questions myself, you know, using this data

2:00
Well, and Sam is crazy impressive. For those of you who don't know, like he said, started out in finance and he is incredible at sequal, incredible at servers, incredible at Python, and, and even more. So just incredible with all kinds of data. And it's been so fun to see him innovating and building stuff specifically around LinkedIn, because that's what I get to use all day.

2:22
Well AJ, I really appreciated working with you over the years. And, you know, working with LinkedIn getting access to that that exclusive LinkedIn API, you know, we have access to more data than then than anyone else trying to go into campaign manager. And it's been a blast, just learning, like what you can do. And I know that's what we're going to talk about today. But there's so much reporting you can do, you know, if we're pulling data straight from the API, and that's what you know that's what we'll talk about today. So

2:49
Cool! All right. We'll get to dive super deep into the kinds of reporting and things that you can pull that like you mentioned, we don't get through campaign manager. I don't want to reveal too much of our secret sauce as an agency, but just a heads up, Sam has built all of our reporting stack, we are able to report on things that not even LinkedIn can report on. And that's really all thanks to him. So super stoked on that. Anyone who's looking to really up your reporting game, check out Stoke Analytics.

3:17
Thanks so much AJ. Thank you.

3:19
Okay, so you've got kind of four different reports that you can give a client who is advertising on LinkedIn. Could you give us a kind of quick rundown on the types of reporting that's available? What we as advertisers can can get with your help?

3:33
Sure. So the first one is, is an ABM report. And it basically just drills a little bit deeper than then LinkedIn. But that'll tell you how your content is resonating with specific targeted accounts you're going after?

3:47
Yeah. And so anyone who is in your ads account, you can go into the analytics into the demographic report, and you can see the last 10 companies that have interacted with your ads, those that have interacted the most or whatever. How deep does your report go?

4:01
You know, we can get, you know, top 100 companies that have interacted, you know, with with your leads, and that's over time. So you know, we can go back by month and and show that for, you know, up to six months back.

4:15
I love that my report I was just looking at has 3,500 companies represented there. So you get a lot more data than we can get through a campaign manager. Then also tell us about your your persona level reports.

4:29
So next one is his persona and as similar to the ABM. You know, for those companies that are specifically targeting, you know, job titles, you know, we can we can do a similar type of report where we can see which content is resonating with specific job titles.

4:42
Cool. I love that the exact ad that the exact job title clicked on and interacted with, you can see which titles tend to win, which titles tend to lose. So we'll go deeper into that one as well. Now, tell us about your most recent one, which is really exciting, the targeting audit that you're offering.

5:00
Right. So this his next one is is our audience targeting audit. And it's it's built to be able to show like for all your campaigns that are using audience targeting, you could see, you know, what percentage of your budget is going towards those audiences you specified. And you know, just as importantly, if not more, you know, how much of your budget is not going towards those.

5:21
Super super valuable to those who are advertising to know how much of your audience is people you actually chose versus those who don't? So these three reports are really cool for LinkedIn advertisers. What else do you offer? I mean, what is your agency offer to everyone?

5:37
I mean, really, our agency is focused around customer journey analytics and so you know, we're really good at integrating multiple different systems, all CRM to web analytics, web analytics to AD platforms. And you know, that really is our bread and butter. We're Adobe's official partner to do any, any Salesforce or dynamics integrations into into Adobe products. I mean, they just Trust us to do that integration. And yeah, that's that's where we focus on customer journey. It's where it's at.

6:05
I love it. And I can I can say an amen to that because we've been using your, your whole suite of reporting and analytics for years and years. So thanks for hooking us up there.

6:14
You got it, AJ.

6:15
Okay, so let's dig specifically into the targeting audit, because this is something that you're offering to any of our listeners for free, dive way deep tell us like, what are the capabilities? What are they going to be able to find, etc.

6:28
I mean, I think what's attractive about the LinkedIn platform is that you can target you can set up your campaigns to target audiences better than any other platform. You know, the the platform, however, it doesn't really give good optics into how that targeting is performing. And so this audit will go in and will pull any pull all of your campaigns that use some sort of audience targeting and basically just show you. It'll show you the total number of dollars that is being spent outside of audiences that you've specified.

7:01
And this works by what sort of targeting facets? Can we look by job title? Can we look at job function? Can we look at company sizes? You know those types of things?

7:10
Yep. So we can look at job title, seniority, company, industry, company size, location. I believe there's one more, but those are the main ones that people seem to be interested in.

7:26
Awesome. So you can take a lookat specifically your targeting that you've selected for a campaign. And it will tell you how much of your budget, how many of your clicks, how many of your impressions came from that audience versus audiences you didn't explicitly choose?

7:41
That's right. And I was able to, to build this with your help AJ, so you know a little bit about this. And in the early stages, it was interesting to see because you would think that, you know, if you explicitly targeted let's say, a job title such as CEO, you would think that LinkedIn would dedicate the majority of of that campaign spend towards that job title. But you know, in our early test so far, we've seen like, you'll, be surprised there's big chunks of, of campaign budget that's outside of those job titles.

8:11
Yes. And there are opportunities to use this information to tighten up our targeting and make us even more efficient, which is nice. I don't want this to feel like we're crapping on LinkedIn as a platform, because, you know, their targeting doesn't actually hit who it does. We find both winners and losers in this report. And we can actually take action on that to improve things. So I think this is still really valuable for anyone. And because this is a free audit, any of you guys listening, can go get this audit for your account and see what percentage of your budget is allocated to people that you haven't explicitly chosen, which on an expensive platform like LinkedIn, I mean, every dollar every click, you can save is such a good thing.

8:56
Yeah, that's right. I mean, I would just add, it's like you said, there's both winners. You know, and losers, like we, you know, there's one use case where we find a job title that wasn't included, but the click through rate was way higher, the cost per click was way lower. And so instead of getting angry that they're happy about that, oh, we're just gonna, we're gonna add this to the campaign and get more of that traffic.

9:16
Oh, yeah, in fact, I remember seeing an example on one of our accounts, where one of our job titles that was being included that we didn't explicitly say, had something like a 2.3% click through rate, I think was like VP of sales or something. And so we went and explicitly added that as like, yes, this campaign wants to target this job title. And we saw a couple others, where spend was going and we went out, those are not the right title. We could go in and explicitly add them as an exclusion, which is really cool. All right. So for anyone who wants to get this audit on their account, how do they get in touch with you? How do they get ahold of this free audit so they can get ahold of me I'll leave my my contact information, but it's a quick process. You basically just set up a meeting with me. You invite one of our our LinkedIn user accounts to your campaign manager to your ad account, the one that you'd like to have the audit on. And then we'll have this spun up for you. And within 24 hours, email you the link, and then we can go through the audit results to help you interpret the results.

10:17
Very cool. So this is something I encourage every one of you listening to take Sam up on. Super, super valuable even as just insights to verify the targeting strategy that you're using. This is really, really cool. I like I said, we've used it for all of our accounts. And it's helped us to take some actions that have improved performance significantly. I'll make sure that that Sam's email address and web address are all in the show notes so you know exactly how to go and get there. So what are some of the actions that advertisers can take if they are looking at this audit and they see, oh, man, this percentage looks really high towards audiences. I'm not explicitly targeting, what sort of actions can we take?

10:56
There's three main actions you can take off of the audit. The first one is, you can already check on the audience expansion, if there's like a, let's say there's 65% plus of your budget that's going to outside audiences, then you can go in and double check that audience expansion is not enabled. And automatically, that's going to cut down that percentage, you know, if you do have it enabled, and you don't want those broad matches, you can go ahead and uncheck that. So that's one quick one. Second thing is you can go through and exclude any any losers. You know, instead of just saying, hey, just include this audience, but you don't do an exclusion, you can go in and explicitly exclude clear cut losers. And then the third thing is, is the opposite of that you can come in and include any winners kind of like that, that use case that you're talking about AJ.

11:49
I love that. And for any of you who've listened to more than one episode, you know, my stance on audience expansion. I absolutely hate it. I think it should be not included on any campaign, but certainly if you use the audit and you do see, you know, we had a situation where we did the audit pre and post removing audience expansion. And we saw a 20% difference. I mean, it was like, night and day between using audience expansion and the types of roles you're reaching that you wouldn't want to necessarily versus not. And from using this, what are some of the results you've been able to see? I mean, I can share what we've seen by by using the audit, but I wonder some of the other results that your other clients have seen?

12:30
Sure. So we, you know, we had a large client of ours who spends quite a bit on LinkedIn every month. And, you know, they they definitely went through and double, you know, double checked all the audience expansion, they went ahead and excluded some clear cut losers. And, you know, in in one case, they just had spent so much money on a on a job title that's so far outside of the, of the target audience that, you know, they went back to LinkedIn, they're still kind of in the process of trying to negotiate a credit and that's no good. guarantee, but just because they had spent so much money on it, you know, they felt like they had to go back to LinkedIn. And so these are some of the things that our customers are doing with it. I mean, for sure you can you can streamline that campaign and you can get more optimized with this data. And then who knows, maybe you can win some credits back. I don't know.

13:19
So when you're looking at the results of your audit, what are you going to see? Can you tell us the specifics here?

13:25
Sure that there's four main sections of the audit. The first one up at the top, you'll see the overall dollar amount spent on other audiences. And then the next thing you'll see is a pie chart and it'll show you the spend percentage breakdown, you know, targeted audiences versus other audiences. So that's quick, easy reference. Third thing is it'll show each campaign and it'll break down that campaign you'll be able to see if it has audience expansion enabled on the campaign. And you'll also be able to show you know, the dollar spent on targeted versus other audiences by campaign That way you can click on any campaigns that are just way off. And then that that'll that'll filter the last part of the audit, which shows you every single audience that has received impressions and clicks on that campaign. And then you'll be able to see, hey, this was this was part of my targeting. And it'll also identify, hey, these ones are not part of the targeting, but are still spending dollars against the campaign.

14:24
Very cool. All right so anyone listening, make sure you hit pause on the podcast right now, go in order your audit so that it's running and you'll get to see this 24 hours from now. And then specifically around the other reporting that you offer. Tell us about what you offer. I'd love to know how much it costs, you know what we all get access to as advertisers by getting to work with you.

14:47
Sure. So you know, for the full ABM reporting, you know, job title reporting and for the targeting audit ongoing, you know, we try to we try to keep it fairly cheap for advertisers. It'll run between $100 and $400 a month if you're just depending on on your spend levels. And, you know, it's quick, it's automated and you'll have it whenever you need it.

15:13
Awesome. Let's dive into the the ABM report. Can you give us specifics? Like when we're looking at the ABM report, what exactly are we going to see? What sort of insights is it going to give us?

15:23
You know, for the ABM report, it's useful to see you know, which ads are resonating with with targeted accounts. I know for for a lot of our customers they're trying to go after certain accounts. The content team is coming up with so many different ads hoping that it's, it's going to be sticky, you know, with these targeted accounts, and they don't really have a good way of measuring it. So this report will help you to see like what really is, you know, sticky with with your targeted accounts, and what's not, I mean, because that's the last thing you want to be is, is noisy, you know, to your targeted account, and this will clearly help you to be able to see that

15:59
Yeah. So you'll get to see your impressions, your clicks, by company, your click through rates, your, if they're filling out forms, either lead gen form or landing page, you'll get to see which companies are converting. You'll be able to sort them, you'll be able to see the exact ads that people from those companies have interacted with, clicked on. I'll just add my, my voice to this. It's incredible. We use this for all of our clients and gives us pretty significant ammo that we can bring to our client reporting every week.

16:32
Awesome, AJ. Yep.

16:34
All right. So let's also talk about the persona reporting, because the persona reporting is really similar to the ABM. It's just, it's targeting the persona rather than the company. Walk us through what we're gonna be able to see by looking at the persona reports.

16:48
Yeah, it's similar to the ABM one, you'll be able to see by by job title, you know, which ads are resonating and which ones are not. All those same metrics that you had mentioned. You know, same same type of things. So we can see clicks, impressions spanned. If it's a video, you can see video start, percentage of completed videos, all those different metrics. And I think for us the use case. You know, one of the big use cases that we've had is, there's companies that, you know, for example, one of our customers, they started this new campaign, they're really trying to penetrate the mind share of, you know, three, three different personas. One of them CMO, the other one is CIO, and the last one is this new, CRO, Chief Revenue Officer. And so with this reporting, it was awesome, were able to bring to light that they were killing it with CMO and CRO, like a lot of the content that they were serving up to these job titles. They're very engaging high click through rates, low cost per low cost per leads. And then for the CIO, it was also able to reveal that there wasn't one CIO, there wasn't one CIO click, I think we looked over a three week period. They were kind of kicking themselves, but that It is important to know. You have to know what's resonating and what's not so you can swap it out. The last thing you want to be as noisy tier two target audiences.

18:09
Oh, yeah. And it's important for advertisers to not take it so hard if you launch an ad to a persona, and it's a total miss. It's, it really is valuable to see that miss to know how you can change. It certainly doesn't reflect on you as a marketer, like, oh, you were really bad at predicting. Predicting is what it is. We can do really poorly and still learn from it and do great afterwards. One thing I really love about this report, I don't know if this is something that that is going to be publicly offered. But we were able to break down not only the job title, but also the job function of, of these personas. And it was really cool to see the exact job titles and what LinkedIn which job functions LinkedIn considers them, to be with him. So that was really insightful information for us being able to not only include/exclude job titles, but also do the same thing for job functions.

19:04
Yep, job function is definitely available as well.

19:07
And then of course, you offer reporting that is not just for LinkedIn. I mean, obviously, we're friends specifically because you've got really cool stuff. I mean, we're friends, because you're awesome. But then we're, especially friends because of the insights you give us into LinkedIn Ads, but you do not just LinkedIn. What are the other channels that you bring into your reporting? What sort of insights are you providing for your other clients?

19:29
I mean, really, our our company, I think I mentioned it before, but we're all about true customer journey analytics. And so that's every you know, from from the first ad click from the first visit to a person's website all the way to the first dollar of sale. I mean, we're we're gathering data from all the platforms. So from all the platforms Facebook, LinkedIn, Bing, Google Ads, and from all the different web analytics platforms, we have connectors into all those. Very importantly for B2Bs, the CRM system, Salesforce and Dynamics. We are well versed in all these different platforms and, and really how to stitch them together in the right way so you can see the full customer journey.

20:10
Oh, yeah, Google Analytics, Adobe analytics, every platform you can think of Stoke does it. So I can testify. Sam, tell us where we can find you. We'll have links in the show notes. But how do people follow up with you? How do people follow you how to people learn more? Sure, if you want to check out our website at stokedata.com. And you'll see a little bit more about some of the things we've talked about today and in our other services. And then of course, you can find me on LinkedIn, Sam Fonoimoana and then my email address is [email protected]

20:44
Love it. Sam, thanks so much for sharing your awesome findings and what you're offering with us today. I'm really excited for other people to see the audit and get to take a peek at what they're doing on LinkedIn and how to further improve because that's what we're all about here at the LinkedIn ads show.

20:59
Awesome AJ. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you.

21:03
So there you have it ladies and gentlemen. Reporting you didn't even know was possible on your LinkedIn Ads initiatives. I'll share Sam's contact info right after this.

21:18
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

21:28
All right, as promised, here's the episode resources. So we've included the link in the show notes down below, or on the B2linked.com/podcast website, if your show notes don't have it. So check that one out. Absolutely, go get that free audit. And then if you want to contact Sam Fonoimoana his email address is [email protected]. So you'll find his email address down below there as well. If you are new to LinkedIn advertising, you'll want to check out the LinkedIn learning course that I did all about LinkedIn Ads. The link for that down below as well. Or you can just navigate right to LinkedIn learning or lynda.com and search for the LinkedIn ads course you'll see my face there. This course is either free or I think $25. So it is a smoking good deal, considering if you hired me to come in and train your team, the same thing would cost somewhere around $750 in training time, so definitely well worth boning up on that. Look down at your podcast player right now and hit the subscribe button. And please do go into wherever you're listening and leave us a rating. And I would love it if you would leave us a review as well. I will shout you out if you review us. So if you want that shout out definitely take me up on that. And then with any ideas, any any suggestions, anything you'd like us to cover, reach out to [email protected] and I would love to take those and incorporate those into future episodes. Okay. With that being said, I'll see you back here next week, Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

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

Engagement Retargeting Announcement

What should you offer from your LinkedIn Ads? - The LinkedIn Ads Show Episode 10

A Guide to LinkedIn Ads Targeting Options - The LinkedIn Ads Show Episode 11

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

Show Transcript:

You've been testing LinkedIn Ads and results look great. And now you want to scale up. Here's your playbook for scaling efficiently.

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

0:21
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. I once had a boss who said that you can scale up, or you can optimize costs down, but you can't do both. Thank goodness, he was dead wrong. We're going to show you how you can scale and keep slash improve your efficiency. Okay, into the news section. I just realized that I haven't covered the release of engagement retargeting in the news. I blabbed about it on LinkedIn, but I never even mentioned it on the podcast. If you listen to Episode Three, where I was talking about roadmap, I let you know this was coming out. And I also let you know that this is the feature that I was most excited about. But then I didn't even mention it in the news. Okay, so here's the story. When it was announced on June 3 of 2020, about a quarter of users had it rolled out and then it rolled out about a quarter every week. So by the time you're listening to this podcast, everyone here should have it. And what this is, it's the ability to retarget lead generation form openers, and lead generation form submitters. We'll talk here in a minute why this is monumental. It can also retarget video viewers, anyone who watched at least two seconds, anyone who watched 25% of it 50%, 75% and completion. And it's important to understand this is both from an include and an exclude, meaning you could create a funnel that's like, if you watched 75% of my video, exclude those people from my original audience. And now I want a retargeting audience that all it does is show ads to the people who watched at least 75% and maybe I'm showing them the next one in the sequence.

2:00
So of course, including is cool, but excluding to me is always cooler. The other cool part about this is it there's a 100% match rate. If you're on LinkedIn, LinkedIn knows who you are, and they're tracking what content, what forms you're interacting with. And so it's not like website retargeting where traffic hits your landing page and you lose half of your audience because they don't accept cookies. This is 100% of the people who open your form, submit it, or watch any portion of your video end up becoming as part of your retargeting audience. Super, super cool. I am ecstatic about this. We really haven't done much with LinkedIn video ads, because when we've compared effective cost per click, and effective cost per conversion, video always tends to be, not always, in most cases, LinkedIn ads video tends to be more expensive than static. And so we've just said, well, without retargeting, why would we care? Why don't we just launch static ads instead? Now that we have retargeting. I'm gonna start recommending LinkedIn video ads quite a bit more often. It's this level of control. It was one of the table stakes that I needed before I could start actually recommending it. And you'll see in the show notes, a link to the announcement that I actually helped with on searchenginejournal.com.

3:15
At the same time, they also announced the LinkedIn audience network partners. Now in the future, we're going to have a whole episode about LinkedIn audience network. And I get a lot of questions about this. But what was so cool to me about the announcement here is for the first time, LinkedIn actually shared some of the sites that are off of LinkedIn that your ads can show up on. Now they have, as far as I know, over 1000 of these sites that are super handpicked, they are nuts about quality over there. They never want your ads showing up on a Breitbart and ending up hurting your brand. But they've never actually mentioned any partners. And quite frankly, I don't really frequent the sites that the ads are showing up on so I didn't really have much of an idea. Like I mentioned in the last episode, I've been privy to some of these sites, just from private conversations with LinkedIn product managers. But under NDA, I wasn't allowed to share them. Okay, so now they gave us three examples that I can share. They mentioned the Flipboard app, which a lot of people consume news on tablets. They also mentioned msn.com, and Microsoft news. And these make a lot of sense there, Microsoft properties, tight control owned by Microsoft, yada, yada. And then of course, they have a bunch of other hand picked ones that they haven't announced yet. But the second, they're public, I'm going to add them into the news section. So keep staying subscribed. And if I can get real with you guys for a minute, just some real talk here. I'm spending about four hours of prep and researching on each episode. And that's what the whole team supporting me with editing and publishing. Thank you, Matt and Lindsey, I know you guys are listening. I'm also running B2linked.com the whole agency and writing a book and I have four kids and a lovely wife who all like it when I'm around. So I'm having a tough time keeping up with the pace and I would love to hear your feedback on these two things. And I don't want you thinking, "oh, AJ doesn't want to hear for me". Absolutely. I'm talking to you, I want your feedback on these things, because I really can't, I can't make these decisions without your input. Okay, So question number one, do we dwell too much on details? For instance, would you be happy with it if I were just to say, and if your click through rate is over 1% on sponsored content, that means that it's a good time to switch to auto bidding, you'll end up saving money. Instead of what I might normally say, which is, here's the background on the differences between CPC bidding and auto bidding. And here's why each bid level affects your campaigns the way it does, etc, etc. Number two that I'd like your feedback on is length. Right now I basically plan out a pretty in depth topic and I talk for as long as it takes to cover the subject. Sometimes it's as low as 30 minutes. Sometimes it's over an hour. And I've heard feedback from some of you that people like 20 ish minute podcasts, and this is a little bit foreign to me. Because I personally really love long podcasts, but would you like them to be shorter? Would you like them to be more specific in topic? So Email us at [email protected]. You'll see that down in in the show notes and let me know seriously i'd absolutely love to hear from you on this because if you want less depth less details, if you want shorter than honestly these would take me a lot less time to create but you know, in depth is kind of my style if you haven't gathered already, so please let me know.

6:31
Okay, highlighting reviews. Michelle Araiza writes "the ultimate LinkedIn Ads podcast for the modern marketer". "AJ is the LinkedIn Ads pioneer and breaks down the topics very well for beginners. He's tested every LinkedIn Ads feature and honestly shares his experience and best practices. This podcast is a marketers must for staying relevant in digital marketing." Now, Michelle, I happen to know she runs demandgen at an awesome San Francisco cloud tech company. She's a stellar marketer in her own right, so Michelle, thank you so much for the kind review. It's that much more meaningful coming from you. And I do try really hard to honestly share. Sometimes what I share is hot takes sometimes I know LinkedIn doesn't actually appreciate my advice that I'm giving people. But I feel really strongly that you guys deserve to honestly know the things that the platform can't tell you. Yeah, we've spent $135 million so far on LinkedIn ads, and we figured out a lot of potholes because we've stepped in them. We found a lot of cool hacks, things that worked unexpectedly, and that's what I'm seeking to share with you. And so I hope that's really appreciated.

7:35
Then alo marketing writes "love AJ!" "AJ podcasts are full of great information that you can put into action. I have enjoyed all his podcasts and look forward to listening to more." Alo marketing, I checked them out their local agency in New Jersey and Alice I stalked you on LinkedIn and just wanted to personally say thank you for that awesome review. Then Michael A Manzur writes, "wow powerful show with actionable practical tips". Now I know Michael, he's a he's an incredible LinkedIn ads marketer in South Florida. And he knows the South Florida market. He knows the Spanish speaking and English speaking markets really well there. You're going to be hearing a lot more from Michael, I'm sure soon. And I want to feature you, so please leave your reviews on whatever podcast player or service that you're using. I would love to hear your feedback. And a little bit more real talk here. I feel like a total douche reading reviews that praise me as like being amazing. So do share whatever you want. I want honest reviews, and I will read them word for word. But if you can make me sound a little bit more humble, I'd turn less red while I'm reading them.

8:41
Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. We're gonna use an example here of scale, saying that if you have a target audience of 10,000 people, which I'm using this for a nice round number. If you've listened to other episodes, you may know that I really like audiences between about 20,000 and 80,000 people in them, but nice round number here of 10k. So you have an audience of 10,000, let's say 1,000 of them are active on LinkedIn each day. So that's a big assumption, but let's say about 10% of them are going to be on LinkedIn at least once a day. And if you're having success, and you want to scale, there are three levers that you can pull. Assuming you can't impact how active your audience is on LinkedIn, that would be the fourth lever, if you could turn that up. But the other three levers that you can control, we're going to go through each one in order of priority. Your first lever here for scaling up is to increase your audience size. Now, there are two different ways you could do that. You could either number one, target the same persona in just new ways. So you've got the same target audience, you're just finding different ways of targeting that same person, and this is the preferable way. The other way is to actually expand your audience to target more personas. So the lowest hanging fruit here is to target the same persona, but just target them in different ways. If you listen to Episode 11, on the in depth types of targeting, you'll get more detail here. But basically, the way that LinkedIn can put people into buckets for you, as an advertiser to advertise to, is totally based off of how complete their profile is, and how much they share. And so as you use different types of targeting, you get access to potentially different people who still really fit your ideal criteria. For instance, if you're targeting just by job title, LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles. And that means that you're only reaching about 30% of your audience, which seems like a big opportunity if you're going man I wish we had about I don't know the other 70% of our traffic,

10:44
then you might want to expand into something like job function with seniority. And job function is your department, which is really broad, but it is significantly cheaper on a cost per click basis and can get you a ton more impressions more volume of clicks. So if you can fit your audience nicely into a whole department with their seniority, then that's a great one to use. We also really love using groups a lot of times with seniority. Skills with seniority. We like taking existing audiences and creating look alike audiences from them. And that can help us reach new audiences and test them in their own right. There's also account based marketing, if you bring your specific list of companies. Now I realize you're probably already targeting the same companies through your native targeting. So this may not actually act as an expansion to your campaigns. But who knows, maybe this is a new set of companies that you're not reaching elsewhere, and this could be a good way to expand. Also, when you're doing account based marketing, you don't necessarily just need to go after the people who feel your pain. So if you're selling a software, and an individual contributor is the one who uses it. They're the ones who understand the value of saving the time or the hassle or whatever you provide. If you're targeting just by specific companies, you can be a little bit more liberal, you can target the individual contributor, you can target their manager, maybe even all the way up to the C suite. You can target finance, who's probably going to be signing the contract. You could if it's a small company, you could target the company owner, who's probably going to be involved in that decision, too. So if you're doing account based marketing, you can be a little bit more broad about your roles in an effort to just give that buying committee a big digital hug. If you have email lists from somewhere else, especially if those emails are possibly not found within your existing target audiences. You can scale by uploading lists. This is a great way. And last episode, I think you can hear the like the cringe in my voice. But this is a possibility, there is that checkbox called audience expansion and in my mind, I'm going nooooo, don't mention it. I usually say uncheck that. But really if managing your LinkedIn ads campaigns is a huge pain for you, because you're managing so many other channels and you just don't have time to get strategic, then hitting that one checkbox can give you access to new audience, even though it won't be efficient, it won't be transparent, but it is a possibility.

13:16
Okay, so for an example here, our audience size of 10,000, maybe we were targeting them by job title. And if we add on a skills plus seniority version, now this new audience has 30,000 people in it. And of course, there will be some overlap between your 10,000 campaign and your 30,000 campaign. And that's totally okay. You don't get punished in any way for overlap. But even if there's 100% overlap, you still tripled your audience reach and this will help you expand. You may be thinking these are the same people, but we're just targeting them differently. But my argument here is yes, you are targeting theoretically the quote unquote same people it but now we're doing it in different ways. And by doing This we are making up for where LinkedIn doesn't have the profile data, maybe they haven't filled out their profile all the way. And we can still reach the right people. And by using this strategy, we've been able to double or even triple our audience sizes, which is fantastic. And this tells us that despite just using different targeting methods, we're actually reaching new audience members as well. Because if we've maxed out one type of targeting, and we add new on and we can double or triple our level of spend, we know we're reaching new people that we weren't reaching before. The other way I mentioned of expanding your audiences is to target more personas, you're expanding the roles that you're going after. So for instance, if you're only going after individual contributors, if the seniority called senior that LinkedIn lists, maybe it makes sense to move upstream a little bit, so maybe you want to start targeting manager seniority or director seniority, maybe those who are decision makers, maybe they can engage in your product as well. Same type of thing with company sizes. If you're focused specifically on let's say company sizes 500 to 1,000. What if you move down market a little bit? What if you did the 200 to 500, or maybe even larger, you're going for 1000 to 5000. You can expand that way, and really increase your audience size. If you're already targeting specific industries, you can target more industries, or even just remove the industry filter altogether and hit the relevant roles in all industries. Maybe you can even target other roles entirely within the companies. So if you're targeting just engineers, for instance, just developers, maybe you can target like IT managers or someone else, obviously, as long as they're relevant. Okay, so the example here is maybe your 10,000 person audience is mostly individual contributors. And then when you added in manager seniority, it jumps up to 20,000. And so now you're reaching 30,000 people which tripled your audience size. So as long as this makes sense As I never recommend spending LinkedIn money on audiences who aren't going to be a great fit for you, but if it does make sense to go after other roles, a wider variety of companies, then this can work great. It's important to understand that expanding your audience should scale linearly. And that means that as you increase your audience size, your costs per should not increase, or at least not significantly. We had a client that we followed exactly the same process, and we were able to nine x their budget. And as we multiplied their traffic and leads by nine, our cost per lead actually dropped a little bit. So this is what you should expect. You're reaching new audiences who should hopefully be just as excited about your product as your original audiences were.

16:50
Okay, your second lever, let's say you've totally maxed out your audience. It doesn't make sense to target any more of them or target them in any other ways. Now, your net lever is going to be getting a higher percentage of your existing audience to take action. And really, this means increasing your click through rates. So if you have an audience of 10,000 people, and let's say 1,000 of them are active on each day, you can have a sponsored content ad that's performing above average. So let's call it .5%, half of a percent. And that means that you're only getting five clicks per day from that campaign. So what if we could launch an ad that gets double the click through rate, we're getting a 1% click through rate. Now, all of a sudden, it's the same audience, we're doubling the traffic that it's sending. And this will also scale linearly. In fact, it scales better than linearly, because as your click through rates go up, your cost per click will likely come down, at least somewhat. I mean, usually we see if a click through rate with doubles, we can usually get you know 30 cents to a $1.50 off of each click. And so if you have control over the ad copy, maybe you're changing motivations in the ad copy, maybe you're changing imagery to get people to, we call them a thumb stoppers, get people to stop scrolling, and pay more attention to your awesome ad copy. Maybe your offer isn't very attractive and no matter how many ads you write, you can't get people to click on that at a higher rate. Maybe it's time for a new offer. We've found in a multitude of ad copy tests that with any given offer, we can sway performance by 5% to 15% by changing imagery, changing ad copy, just trying to capture them a little bit better. And this is usually something that ad managers have at their disposal. Usually you can write ad copy. I mean, sometimes I know it has to go through legal and approval and all that. But a lot of times this is something that marketers can do very rapidly to test and find out ways that you can get your click through rate higher. Generally, I don't care about click through rates all too much. Because as long as I'm spending my budget, and I'm only paying when someone clicks, then why would I care about how many people actually saw it before they clicked? Well, this is one of those circumstances, if you're looking to scale, you're going to try to max out these audiences. And now you'll have to pay a little bit more attention to, to click through rates and impression counts, which is something that PPC, advertisers don't really get into all too much. We're usually a lot more focused on click through rate cost per click and cost per conversion. To sum this one up, this is a great way to expand, but sometimes you can't control, Maybe you've done all of the ad copy testing, you can around your existing offer, and maybe you've improved performance by 5% to 15%. But you can't go more than that, then it's probably a good chance that you'll need to create a new offer, which I realize is a big deal. It's a big undertaking to create a whole new offer, if you don't already have a content team working on something like that. Okay, after a quick sponsor break, we'll dive into the third way you can scale your campaigns.

19:57
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com the LinkedIn Ads experts.

20:06
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We managed LinkedIn's largest accounts. We're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners. And of course, your 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.

20:29
Great, let's jump into the third lever that you have to pull to scale your LinkedIn Ads account spending strategically and efficiently. This third lever is to show more impressions, which basically means you're going to bid more. Okay, so for an example, you have this audience of 10,000. 1,000 of them are active on LinkedIn every day. If your bids are too low, they're too restrictive. They may be making your ads only eligible to be shown to let's say, 200 of the thousand people who are acting So if you go and raise your bids by 50 cents, or $1 per click, that makes it a little bit more worth LinkedIn's while to to show your ads. So now they may show you to 500 of the 1000. Keep in mind that there is a point of diminishing returns, and you will find it as you continue to increase your bids. So I'm going to walk you through a very real example here. Let's say we want more volume, and our bids are at a $7 CPC. Now we know that we're going to pay really close to our bid. So let's say we're paying about $6.90, we go and raise our bids to an $8 CPC. So we've raised it $1. And now our ads are being shown to 500 out of 1,000 people, and now we're paying probably $7.90. So again really close to our bid. But now we're still not getting as much traffic as we want. So we increase our bids to $10 per click. And now our ads are being shown to 950 out of 1,000 people Now our cost per click are really close to $10. Let's say it's $9.80. So the result here is now we're paying $3 more per click than when we started, and it gave us nearly double the traffic. But if we have a conversion rate of 10%, that means that your cost per lead just went up by $30. And maybe this is worthwhile for you so we can keep going. Now, you don't know that you've pretty much maxed out your audience, because in this example, I'm telling you that you know, we reach 950 of the thousand people. But LinkedIn doesn't tell you how active your audience is, they don't tell you the number of total impressions possible from your audience. So let's say you're saying, wow, I just really need more traffic. So you go and increase your bids to $14 per click, so you increased by $4. And now you're probably paying somewhere close to about $13.70. Well, now you're bidding so aggressively that LinkedIn gave you all thousand people, so you get access to all thousand to show them an impression. But now you're literally paying twice as much per click, you're now paying almost $14 per click where you started out paying only $7 per click before. So now your cost per lead doubled, and you only got 50 more impressions than when you were bidding $10 or $4 less per click. So certainly that's not worth it. And it's helpful to find that line of diminishing returns. And I don't have a great formula for you here. You know, we usually gut check it will we'll be watching our effective cost per click. Over time as we were making these changes, and we're also watching our impression volume. And if we see our cost per click spiking up, but impression volume not changing, then we know we've really maxed out that audience. And this works no matter how you're bidding if you're bidding by cost per click, cost per impression, or even auto bidding. You can chart your effective cost per click over time, and you can chart your impressions there with the performance chart button. We never want to cross this diminishing returns line. That is unless you have a massive budget, and it's worth it for you to pay a lot more to get a proportionally smaller audience. If you pull this third lever of increasing your bids, it's really super easy to scale. As long as you're not near that line of diminishing returns. It's super easy to just go and increase bids and watch your traffic jump up, but certainly realize that this negatively affects your efficiency. So if you're trying specifically to stay below a certain cost per lead, or cost per conversion, or some kind of other action, realize that the more you scale this up linearly, it's going to change your cost per click. Because of this, I think this lever is one that I will only pull when I have exhausted the first two levers. I've expanded my audience every way I can. And I've also done a lot of testing on my ad copy to try to improve that way before I ever bid up. Or hey, maybe this is the first lever you pull when you're VC funded. Hey, oh! Just kidding. What I want you to get out of all of this is that scaling up doesn't have to cost more, you don't have to lose efficiency. You'll want to start out by maxing out your audience targeting and personas first. Then as soon as you've scaled them up as far as they'll go without increasing bids, then you can work on getting your click through rates up. And as you know from Episode 10, coming out with a new offer can work wonders here for improving your click through rates. Remember, if you have a bad offer, there's only so much lipstick you can put on that pig. There's only so many ad copy variations you can try without realizing that it's really hard to get people to click on something that's not interesting. And then only then do you want to increase your bids and make sure to increase your budgets at the same time because you never want to hit your budgets during the day. Remember my rhyme if you hit your budgets during the day, you paid too much for clicks along the way. It rhymes so it must be true. So follow these steps and you'll reliably and profitable Be able to scale your LinkedIn ad successes as high as the network will support. Okay, so here are the episode resources for you.

26:13
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

26:22
We talked in the news section about the engagement retargeting announcement, you'll see a link to the Search Engine Journal article that details why that's so cool. You'll also see links to Episode 10 on offers that we've mentioned and Episode 11 about targeting. If you are new to LinkedIn ads or just need to get up leveled, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn learning.com. You'll see a link for that right in the show notes. It's either cheap or free, and it covers about the first hour and a half of what I cover when I train teams one on one and I charge $500 an hour. This course is either $25 or free. I can tell you which one I'd suggest Pull out your phone right now look at the podcast and make sure you've hit that subscribe button. If you like this content, of course, I don't want you forcing yourself to listen if this is boring, but I'd love to be in your ear holes for future episodes. And then please do rate and review this podcast. It's going to help other LinkedIn Ads marketers find it. And of course, I'll get a chance to shout you out, too. If you have any feedback for the podcast, any questions, any topics that you'd want us to cover? Email us at [email protected]. And of course, please do answer my two questions that I threw out there in the news section. I would love to hear from you on this to decide how we work with the show up here in the future. Okay, with that being said, I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives!

Show Resources:

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 is the only way to reach your ideal target audience, and your event is less a week away. What do you do? This is high urgency strategies on LinkedIn Ads.

0:17
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

0:24
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So LinkedIn Ads is a great ad network. When you're targeting just evergreen audiences on a consistent pace. You put interesting offers in front of the ideal audience, and then you wait for them to come to you. Every once in a while though, we run into situations where we need to spend budget quickly. Maybe you have a webinar in three days and signups are low. Maybe you have an in person event coming up soon, or an offer that's expiring. Whatever the reason, it can be really difficult to spend both quickly and efficiently on LinkedIn. So today, we're specifically going through the strategies for accelerated delivery. So you can hit your goals without wasting your hard earned budget. So in the news this week, LinkedIn did a poll of its members, and found some pretty interesting statistics. And I'm just gonna read these off, it was in a private deck or something that I can't link to. So you'll just have to listen really closely to get these these benefits out of it. So 43% of respondents are now working remotely. That seems small compared to maybe the knowledge workers that I know. But maybe the vast majority of these are not knowledge workers. 36% of respondents say they're actually more productive when working from home than when they were working in their office. Now, to me that feels low because I am very productive working at home. And I get so much less done when I could hear conversation around me in an office environment. 54% of senior leaders reported that their companies are implementing virtual events as a result of the outbreak. That even feel low to me. But hey, this is interesting. It's a poll 52% are doing more calls on phone or video that feels extremely low, especially when you look at Zoom's stock price. 26% of respondents report feeling no impact to their productivity at all. When you add those who report feeling no impacts their productivity, the 26% to the 36% of people who feel more productive, that makes 62%. So what that means is the 38% that are left are the people who feel like they're less productive working from home, which totally based off of your style, your preference, but that's pretty wild to understand as well. 45% say that this is somewhat or very likely going to become a more permanent shift. I've been thinking recently about those in commercial real estate and I'm thinking, wow, all these companies are figuring out how to get more and more of their people working from home, so they don't need larger spaces. And what are they going do with all of that space. So it will be interesting to see what that industry does. I won't be surprised if every company has some kind of a work from home policy. Okay, let's jump in and highlight a few reviews that you guys as listeners have left on the podcast pages. RyanRhoten says "Pure value. AJ is such a wealth of information on LinkedIn ads. This podcast is like using the Hogwarts pensive to glimpse into his brain and extract the exact information you need to grow your business through LinkedIn Ads. Thanks for sharing AJ, you are as generous as you are wise." Thanks so much, Ryan. So Ryan runs The BRAND New You Podcast and anyone who is into branding should definitely check that one out, The BRAND New You Podcast by Ryan Rhoten. Thanks so much for leaving such an awesome review. Okay, Cinthia M. P. calls it "Not your average marketing podcast. I just started listening to this podcast based on the recommendation from a friend and I'm incredibly impressed. Sometimes marketing podcasts can be pretty general with information that is somewhat actionable, or information you've heard 1,000 times already, but I found this podcast to be full of useful, very detailed and specific information. I had to stop the podcast a few times to take notes. I highly recommend listening. I'm excited to keep learning from the best in the world of LinkedIn advertising." Cinthia, I don't know if we've met before, but thank you so much. That means the world to me that you would say that. That's exactly how I create this podcast. I actually created in mind for my employees to help train them. And so it's really nice to hear someone saying that they're listening along, ready to take notes. So thanks, you're doing it right. The username Steve467774, totally machine generated, it says, "Informative and actionable. One of my favorite podcasts. AJ gets into the details of how to be successful with LinkedIn Ads, while keeping things easy to understand. And the best part, you can take immediate action on what you learn in nearly every episode. Keep it coming." Steve, I absolutely think that that's the case and I at least hope it is that every episode, you can take something away and go and make changes to your account right then to become more successful or more efficient. Everyone else listening, I want to feature you so go and leave a review on whatever podcast player you listen, and I'd love to feature you there. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it.

5:29
If you listened to Episode 14, that was all about low budget strategies, how to be as incredibly efficient as you can possibly be on the network. And I want you to understand, this is nearly exactly the opposite. This is all about how to get accelerated delivery. And we know that we're going to pay more for this accelerated delivery. But here all of the triggers, all of the levers, all of the knobs that you can pull in turn in order to get accelerated delivery. These are in no particular order, I really mixed them around because I didn't want this podcast to be totally lopsided where you only needed to listen to the first half. Because the last half, it got increasingly less relevant or less valuable. So we'll jump into one that I think is maybe a little bit obvious, but it's more valuable in this situation to target large audiences. Because remember, only a small percentage of visitors on LinkedIn will end up clicking on an ad. It's about 1% if you have really good ad copy, or if you're extremely lucky. So that means the larger the audience you have, the more opportunities you will have for impressions. And the more impressions you have, the more clicks that you'll get totally dependent on your click through rate. So you'll want to target these large audiences. Now consider either expanding your existing audience into new audiences, or maybe even try to reach your existing audience with new targeting. For instance, here If you are only targeting your audience with job title targeting, be aware that LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles out there. And so if you can go and reach that same audience through either job function and seniority, or skills and seniority, or groups and seniority, you now have access to significantly more people in your audience who should already still be a great fit for your product or service. And of course, it makes sense to target new audiences. If you know that, wow, only directors and above are a good fit for what we do, maybe consider adding managers in there as well. Considering that LinkedIn considers those who are managers as being people managers. So not just you have the job title of manager, they want to see that you have people underneath you that report to you. My next recommendation is called LAN, L-A-N, and it applies to sponsored content campaigns. And you'll see as you're going Down in the build process, the very first checkbox that you come across will say LinkedIn audience expansion. Don't worry, we'll get to that one in a minute. But the second checkbox will be LinkedIn Audience Network, which is like LinkedIn Display Network. If you've used the Google Display Network or Facebook's audience network. The difference here is that LinkedIn's LAN, their audience network is extremely high quality. Every one of these sites were handpicked by someone who was way way overpaid for doing this kind of job. But it's super important because so many advertisers on LinkedIn, super, super care about the sites that they're being associated with and how that reflects on their brand. LinkedIn hasn't announced before, which sites that LAAN actually has access to, and it's been really difficult. I've had conversations with those who are overland and so I know a few of these sites, but I've been under a nondisclosure agreement. So I couldn't share. So I was super excited when last week when LinkedIn made their announcement about engagement retargeting. They also mentioned an update to LAN. And they mentioned three places where these ads can show up. So Microsoft New, MSN.com, and the app Flipboard. Obviously, this is just a very small amount, I'm sure there are at least 1,000 of these sites who have all been hand picked to be high quality. What's so cool about being able to just enable LAN is one checkbox later, and you now have the opportunity to get maybe 25% more traffic from your same audience. You're not diluting the targeting, you're going after the same people you've been going after anyway. So lead quality is going to stay extremely high. The reason why you can capture 25% or maybe even more than that traffic is because LinkedIn is not really the site that people go and spend a whole lot of time on. So if LinkedIn understood who these people are when they're on other sites around the web, that is so good for us to be able to reach the exact audience in more places than just LinkedIn. And as a bonus here, when you turn on LAN, you will notice your overall cost per click goes down. And that's because your clicks on the audience network actually cost significantly less than they do on LinkedIn.com. So you'll get more traffic, it will cost less per, and your targeting stays the same. It's the same high quality, which is more than I can say for audience expansion. Still, we'll get to it.

10:37
So next we have your bidding strategy. Now first off, you need to understand the difference between your bid and your budget. Your bid is how aggressively you're telling LinkedIn I want traffic when people show up. Your budget, on the other hand, is a safety net that says once you've hit this, we remove you entirely from the auction from bidding. So first, what you want to do is get your budgets out of the way, because what you don't want to do is bid super aggressively on LinkedIn to get traffic, and then hit your budget halfway through the day, and then realize that man, I blew all of my budget on super expensive clicks. If I would have just bid less, I could have gotten clicks for cheaper and had it go all day long, maybe even gotten twice the traffic. If you've listened to me for long enough, you know that I'm not a fan of paying too much for clicks. So I always recommend bidding low. Under a high urgency circumstance, though you can't cheap out on your bids, you want to bid aggressively, giving you the maximum amount of impression share, which then turns into clicks at the rate of whatever your click through rate is. Now if you have time, I recommend first starting by bidding by cost per click, just because the risk is lower to you as an advertiser doing this because you're only going to pay whenever someone actually clicks to go to your landing page or clicks on your offer. And you can still bid aggressively on cost per click, but it's just that you're going to pay only for what you get. And I say if you have time, because a lot of times in high urgency circumstances, you don't really have time to go through and test different ad formats or test different bidding strategies. Because LinkedIn doesn't have hourly reporting, you have to go and really take a stab at something and hope that it's going to work as well as possible for you. So if you start bidding by cost per click, and you don't do well in the auction, you're not getting enough traffic. That's really unfortunate and you've lost some time. So that's a natural segue into the next one, which is all about CPM bidding. So as opposed to CPC or cost per click bidding when you're only paying because someone took action on your ads. The opposite end of the spectrum is CPM or cost per thousand impression bidding. And the way this works is it takes the risk and puts it all on you as an advertiser. Because if you have a bad ad that no one wants to click on, LinkedIn is gonna get paid no matter what, just for showing it. And you could get zero traffic to your website and still be paying and paying handsomely. The reason why it's attractive here, though, is CPM bidding, basically bypasses the whole auction. You don't need to worry too much about your relevancy score, how good your ads are, and LinkedIn size. Because since LinkedIn makes money every time they show your ad, it's low risk for them. So they don't really care to take that into account. They're just going to look and see what you're bidding and say, yeah, okay, we think that that would be more worthwhile to bank that cash rather than take a chance on serving against other advertisers who may only pay when their ads get clicked on. So this is riskier for you. But when you are bidding by CPM, LinkedIn will want to show your ad at every possible juncture. Every time that they get a chance they're going to show it, which is great for you if you're trying to get as many of these impressions in as possible in time for your event or the end of your budget.

14:10
Now, I've talked about CPM bidding. But it's really helpful to understand there's another option called auto bidding, that really is very much the same thing. All auto bidding is, is CPM bidding that you don't have to babysit as much. You don't choose a bid. It's kind of like handing LinkedIn, your wallet and saying here, take as much out as you think you need. But whatever objective you've told LinkedIn that you're trying to optimize towards, when you're doing auto bidding, it's going to optimize towards that paying CPM at the same time, CPM auto bidding, they are great if your ads are performing extremely high to the click through rate.

14:49
So this gives us a nice natural segue then into another lever you have which is just simply increasing your click through rate. I'll use sponsored content ads as an example here because they're really the standard. The average sponsored content ad gets clicked on about .4% of the time. So a little bit less than half a percent. What that means is there are a lot of people seeing your ads without actually clicking. So if you can increase your click through rates, even a small amount, it means you can get significantly more traffic. You don't need to make your audience bigger, you don't need to change your bidding at all. You can really just change your ad to something that people want to click on more often, and you can start enjoying getting significantly more traffic. On the other hand, when you're in a rush, launching new ad creatives is a significant risk. You'll have to launch and potentially see a four to eight to even 12 hour review period for your ads to go through review. And if you don't have something else running at that same time, that's scary because you're trying to accelerate delivery and at the same time your ads are offline for several hours. To mitigate this risk, I would consider going back through old successful, creative and trying to find something that used to work. And maybe it's even from different channels, maybe you're running the same kind of thing on Facebook, or Google and you can go and try to borrow whatever has been successful over there. And here's a neat little hack. If you're running sponsored content ads, there is going to be a frequency cap that is actually pretty stringent to you as an advertiser. The natural frequency cap, at least used to be members can see your ad once per day, per account. And the only way that we could actually get more delivery, we could show more often than that once per day once per 24 hours, was to put additional creatives in the same campaign. And thanks to a wonderful rep named Natalie Gubman, I recently got informed about how the frequency cap is working currently. And she says a member can see one unique creative from an advertiser determined at the company page level, so not account every 12 hours, they cannot see this one unique creative again, within that 12 hour period. However, a member can see five unique creatives from that advertiser, again determined at the company page level within the same 48 hour period. So what that means is, if you can put five unique creatives, five different ads into your campaign, you can essentially accelerate delivery to your most active LinkedIn users who are part of your audience. Now, you may not actually want to test five separate creative, maybe you're running an AB test, and you only want two different creative running. Well, what I would do LinkedIn doesn't know the difference between ads even if they look exactly the same. So if you're trying to run two ads against each other, just duplicate those two ads. LinkedIn thinks that these are two separate ads even though they say exactly the same thing. And then if you're trying to do this AB test where you're trying to split the traffic evenly, it'll be really easy to roll all of those results up and combine the metrics for the ads that were exactly the same. So you still get great split test data. And you got to take advantage of LinkedIn's increased frequency cap and getting the word out quicker. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the ad formats that we're going to use for accelerated delivery.

18:27
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

18:35
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 we're 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.

18:59
All right, let's see jump into the other ad types that will help you accelerate your spend. So the first ad type you'll want to concentrate on here is sponsored messaging. Now this is because most of the ad formats on LinkedIn are what I consider inbound. They're essentially putting a message out there and waiting for someone to come around from your audience to log in, see something and then click on it when they're interested. But with sponsored messaging that includes both message ads that used to be called sponsored in mail, and conversation ads, these are what I consider push marketing. They push directly into a member's messaging box while they're online. And they're a little bit exclusive, because each member can only receive one of these every 45 days. So while sponsored content, it's sitting in their newsfeed and if you're lucky, maybe 1% of people will end up clicking on it. These end up getting about a 50% open rate, which is definitely a minimal kind of reaction, but it is a reaction nonetheless. If you're trying to get the word out as fast as possible, having someone see an offer and then click to open it is definitely more than just watching it scroll by in their newsfeed. So again, if you're trying to get the word out fast, this is really the only ad format where you can kind of force someone to see something. I really love sponsored content as well, I don't think you should ignore that. But the next thing I want you to consider doing is stacking your ad formats. And that means using all of the different ad formats, all concurrently, because if your goal is to get in front of these people, no matter where they are, each ad format depending on where someone is on LinkedIn, and what device they're using, it means using a different ad format is much more likely to still engage one of these users, even if they were on their way to do something or we're going to be like a ship in the night passing by. The more ad formats someone sees you in, the more likely they are to click one of them. We've seen this when we do quarterly business reviews with our larger clients and LinkedIn comes to present. One of the things that they'll give us is a report, like a contribution report, of those members who saw more than one ad format, what the difference in their click through rate was versus someone who hadn't seen another ad. And we routinely see this number between about 13% and 30%. So someone is 13% to 30% more likely to click on your ads, if they've seen you in a different ad format before. So certainly, my recommendation is to use sponsored messaging first, then sponsored content, then text ads, and then dynamic ads. And I would do this all concurrently, all mimicking the same targeting. And this will envelop your ideal target audience in just a nice warm embrace a nice warm display ad hug.

22:00
The next tip I have for you is essentially a change in motivation. So there's this concept called FOMO, that many of you know, and it stands for the fear of missing out. This is such a strong motivation, a strong emotion that we as humans feel. We hate missing out. We hate knowing that there was a big party that happened last night that we could have gone to that all your friends were there, and you totally missed it. And you can use this motivation in your ad copy. Try ad copy, like don't miss it, put it on your calendar, only a few days left, limited seats remaining. Now, a note here on morals. So I'm not a fan of putting limited seats remaining. If there really are unlimited seats, you're just manufacturing fake urgency here. But if you do actually have a limited number of seats, then yes, say it. Let people know. You might miss this if you don't take action now.

22:56
Okay, this next recommendation I've been debating internally whether or not to share it with you. If you've been listening to me for long enough, you know how I feel about the audience expansion option. I hate it. I loathe it. I shudder every time I think about using audience expansion. I will say, though, as a very last resort, after you've done everything else, all my other advice here, and if you're still spending short of trajectory, it is one checkbox that you can check that will instantly give you access to a larger audience. So let's say LinkedIn, when you click that box inserts about 20% more people into your audience. LinkedIn is going to try to make sure that those are close to your ideal audience. And I think this is the only situation where I can see audience expansion making sense. Although I will say conclusively, I have never once seen a situation where I couldn't significantly speed up my spend using all of the other strategies here before I checked the audience expansion box. So I'd say maybe this is one in 100 chance that you'd even have to do this, but I have to say it. Okay, so now I'm gonna go take a shower after making that recommendation, because I feel real dirty.

24:11
The next one I've got for you is really just in case, you should ask yourself, Is this a brand new account? Is this an account that's been opened in the last few weeks that really hasn't had a significant amount of spend go through it? You should know that there is a glass ceiling on every new account to keep people from making giant mistakes. And what it does is it artificially limits your spend in that account to $100 per day. LinkedIn doesn't tell anyone about this. It's not written really anywhere, at least not that I've seen. And so what happens is, you'll be in this high urgency situation where you're trying to spend and the account will just stop at $100 for the day, and you'll be scratching your head going, I don't get it. My ads are active, my campaigns active I have plenty of budget. Why? Well, it's because of this invisible cap and your LinkedIn rep might not even know about it. So what you want to do is either file a ticket beforehand with LinkedIn help, or if you happen to have a LinkedIn rep, make sure you let them know to remove it significantly beforehand. So don't do this they have because sometimes it can take some time for them to respond. Ask several days in advance, hey, we want to spend a lot of money please remove this cap. Because nothing is more of a buzzkill than when you have $1,000 a day to spend and the account gets stuck at $100 and two cents. While everything's active. please learn from my mistakes. I've done this many a time and forgotten about this glass ceiling. There's also a setting that is actually kind of hidden and it's for good reason, we've talked about it before. And this is where you can rotate your creative evenly or optimize for click through rate. Now I want you to go and look and make sure if you have the option check to rotate evenly, change it. Get over to optimize for click through rate. The reason here is if you are rotating evenly, I call this the charge me more and show me less button. When you're in a high urgency situation, you do not want to be shown less. And my guess is you probably don't want to get charged more. So avoid that option, even if someone looked at it and thought, oh, this will help me do AB testing. It won't, it'll just charge you more and show you less. So in conclusion here, you're going to pay more for this accelerated delivery. So set that in your expectations, expect your efficiency metrics to take a hit, you are sacrificing your efficiency for speed of delivery here. Ayou won't have as much time to test things, so you'll really have to accept whatever performance your ads and offers get. So give yourself the best stab. Do as much testing as you think you can do without disrupting, but certainly put your best stuff on and keep it going. I'll also mention that it's much better to front load your ads. That means take all of these strategies into account and potentially spend more rapidly up front than you want. The reason is, if you have something like a webinar coming up, it's actually better the sooner people can get it on their calendar, just so they don't end up having something else like a conflict happen before they see your ads. So you'll want to front load there. But it's also just as important to understand that it's easier to slam on the brakes than it is to slam on the accelerator with ads. It takes much longer to find new ways, new audiences to spend more than it is to just simply bid something down, set a daily budget or pause the campaigns or ads entirely. When you are in high urgency, there is value in just being everywhere. Make sure you use all of the ad formats, make sure you expand your targeting where it makes sense. Okay, with that being said, I've got the episode resources coming up right after this so stick around.

28:06
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

28:16
Okay, hope you enjoyed that episode. I had a lot of fun recording it. I get a little bit passionate about this stuff as I'm sure you can tell. I'd love to share with you the resources we talked about earlier. But because one was a link to a protected deck, I can't share the stats with you here. So maybe just write them down or keep them in in memory. But check in the show notes. If you are new to LinkedIn ads if this is something that you are doing for your job, and you need to get up to speed quickly. The course that I built with LinkedIn Learning. The link is right there and you will love this course. It takes you from absolutely nothing all the way to yes, you can build and run your own campaigns and get started. It contains the same information that I teach in about my first hour and a half In person training, and I charge $500 an hour for that consultation and training. And the course itself is only $25. And it's even free if you have like a premium subscription to LinkedIn. So definitely take me up on that course it is well worth the investment. Both time and money.

29:18
Whatever podcast player you're on, please look down right now and hit the subscribe button. Because if this is good content for you, if this is gonna help you in your job, then I want you hearing more of it. And then please do rate and review in whatever podcast player you're listening on. I would love to feature your review here publicly for everyone. If you have ideas for the show, topics that you want covered questions, shoot them over to [email protected]. And we love to take those into account and help prepare future episodes. We're always looking for great content. Okay, with that being said, I'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

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

LI Recommended Audience Sizes

MS Quarterly Release

Ep 287 of LinkedInformed Podcast

Bidding Budgeting Episode

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

Show Transcript:

How big should your LinkedIn Ads audiences be? Hearing conflicting advice? Let's clear that up right now.

0:15
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. here's your host, AJ Wilcox.

0:23
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. There's a lot of conflicting advice out there about audience sizes for your LinkedIn ads. And I get questions about it all the time. So I figured we'd go ahead and clear that up. We've tested about every which way you can think and we've come up with our own strategy for what types of audience sizes work best. So let's definitely get into it. First off the news. This week, Microsoft had their quarterly earnings release. And this was super interesting to me. I actually heard about this from the LinkedInformed podcast by the great Mark Williams if you're not already subscribed to that podcast, it goes over the organic side of LinkedIn. And it's absolutely brilliant. In Episode 287, he goes over this in his new section. And even though LinkedIn isn't actually publishing these stats, Microsoft is. So Microsoft says that LinkedIn's revenue growth is up by 21%, which is fantastic. And they also mentioned something really cool and really key. Sessions are up 26%. Oh, I love this. These aren't stats that LinkedIn is sharing too often. But if Microsoft will share them, I'll take them. He also mentioned in this episode that an unnamed source, let this news outlet know that conversations on LinkedIn are up 55% in March, and comments in the newsfeed are up 272%. So similar to what we've talked about in previous weeks with cool COVID news happening. I know nothing's really cool about COVID, but there have been some cool things coming from it. I wanted to highlight a few of the reviews that you guys have left. Betsy Hindman in Nashville, who's a good friend Betsy, thanks so much for listening. She says "AJ is the real deal. Great podcast. Super guy. Very knowledgeable." Thanks so much for leaving that. Then Robinhfr from France says "really helpful. I love this content, so much value in this podcast". Robin thanks so much for leaving that it means the world to me. Maria Cole mentions "the most knowledgeable LinkedIn Ads experts out there. AJ knows more about LinkedIn than anybody I know. His podcast is full of amazing insights and knowledge. Often I find myself agreeing with him out loud while listening". Oh, I love this. I hope all of you are kind of nodding along if if we're striking a chord and touching on things that you found through experimentation, Oh, I love to be geeking out with you. Go to whatever podcast player you're on. And leave us a review. I would love to help feature you. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. When I was very first getting started running my very first LinkedIn Ads back in 2011. I read the recommendation that LinkedIn recommended 300,000 in an audience. And this was back when the only ad format we had was text ads. And text ads, as you know, average somewhere around a .025%. click through rate, which is incredibly low. Then in 2014, LinkedIn came out with the sponsored content ad format. And I was absolutely certain that these recommendations were going to change because text ads had a .025%, click through rate and sponsored content had 12 times the engagement. But sure enough, for years and years afterward, I still see LinkedIn recommending 300,000 for an audience size. I definitely think that there was a good reason to have 300,000 as the audience size recommendation, but now that the ads can literally spend 12 times or more, I think there's a lot more opportunity to tighten up our audiences. So we'll go into how I use smaller audiences and why. But it's important to understand the history here. And then adding to that the minimum audience size on LinkedIn used to be 1000. But then back in 2017, in April 2017, LinkedIn came out with matched audiences the retargeting product. And at that point, the minimum audience shrunk from 1000 down to 300. And I'm so grateful, thank goodness this happened, because the tighter we can make our audiences the better. Now I checked out LinkedIn's Help section on this and link to that is in the show notes. They say for sponsored content and sponsored messaging, we suggest a minimum of 300,000 audience size. For text ads, we suggest that you target between 60,000 and 400,000. Okay, so that's LinkedIn's recommendations. For some reason text ads are recommended to be a smaller audience than sponsored content, something there I'm not understanding. My recommendations are if you're using sponsored content, try to stick between about 20,000 to 80,000. If you're using text ads, try 20,000 to 80,000. Hey, how about dynamic ads? 20,000 to 80,000. Oh, AJ, I understand where you're coming from. How about sponsored messaging? Oh, AJ, I understand where you're coming from, you're gonna tell us 20,000 to 80,000? No, I'm gonna change the script on you a little bit. For sponsored messaging. I love to start with ultra tight audiences because they are able to spend so much more. But when in doubt, stick between 20,000 to 80,000. And you'll be pretty safe. Okay, so why are our recommendations so different? Why would you listen to LinkedIn versus our advice? Are you getting such differing opinions? It's important to understand where LinkedIn's motivation is, because to LinkedIn, it is a significantly larger risk for a new advertiser or a less sophisticated one to come and test out the platform come and try things out. And then not spend any money and then leave and go tell their friends that the LinkedIn Ads Form didn't work, they didn't get any traffic. So they would much rather that you had a large audience size. So you were pretty much guaranteed to spend your whole budget. To me though I have a very different motivation here. To me, it's all about getting the best performance, the highest efficiency, and the best data out of an account. And so I use these tightly themed audiences. They act like little silent focus groups, which I'll tell you all about here in just a little bit. So certainly, if you don't have the expertise on the platform, and if you're listening to this, I'm guessing that's not you. But then you'll want to follow LinkedIn's advice for audience sizes. It's pretty much foolproof at getting you to spend your budget without expertise. You may not spend very efficiently, but certainly all of those dollars got allocated. If you do have the expertise and attention to manage smaller campaigns, then you will get so much more control and insights out of your account, and you'll get a tighter ability to optimize and find efficiencies. that you shouldn't, quote unquote be able to do realize that as we're talking about audience sizes here, audience sizes are totally subjective. I can't just tell you that an audience size of 30,000 is a good thing or a bad thing, because that's totally dependent on number one, how active that audience is on LinkedIn. And number two, how often people are clicking on your ads. Because if you had a minimum sized audience of 1000 people, but you have 100% click through rate, you could probably still spend a healthy budget. Of course, that's probably not going to happen, but you get my drift. Even a small audience that's very active, can spend more than a large audience that's largely inactive. There are certainly risks with both styles of campaigns here, you can have campaigns that are too small and there are definite risks there. And then you can have campaigns that are too large, and that has its own set of risks. So first of all, if your campaigns are too small, there's a really good chance that you won't spend enough, you don't have enough people in those audiences, and all else held equal, small audiences won't spend as much as large audiences. Maybe if you are dedicating the time to build these audiences, but they don't spend very much, maybe that wasn't worth your time, maybe you see that as a waste. And then maybe you've got these small audience sizes, which means you're not going to spend very much, which means you're not going to generate a large quantity of leads. So maybe you have internal pressure in the company that not only do you have to spend this budget, but you also have to hit a lead goal. And then finally, if data is accumulating slowly, it means that we can't make optimization decisions because we're dealing with these small data sample sizes. Well, hang on, because I've got a cool solution for you that I'll cover here in just a few minutes about rolling data. And all of these risks are totally mitigated by yes, we build small audiences, but we build lots of them. So together they act like large audiences. Separately, we still get data. So hang on, I'll break that one down. I know that gets a little bit ethereal. But what about having campaigns that are too large? If you're taking LinkedIn's recommendations, which we don't recommend, I think the risks are even higher. So number one, you can have too many different people in there. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you had a campaign where you had both finance and operations professionals in the same campaign. Well, let's say finance professionals do amazingly well. But operations folks are terrible. If you're looking at the results from that campaign, it might just look average, it might be okay. And you missed out on the fact that if you would have split those out into two separate audiences, you would have found that wow, finance professionals are killing it for us. So you're missing learnings about your audience, you're losing that ability to understand more about what they care about, and really who your ideal target audience really should be. Also, audience that are too large, they spend budget too fast. So if you have a small budget, let's say you're running something at the minimum of $10 per day per campaign, if you have a large audience, chances are you're going to blow all of your money in the middle of the night before your audience even gets into work. So really, it shouldn't be about what your budget is, on a per campaign basis, it should be finding the right budget per audience. And of course, listen back on episode six, where we go in deep on bidding and budgeting to find out more about that. Okay, I'm going to give you an example. And this is a real world example of the type of targeting that we would build. A client comes to us and they say, our target audience, our marketing decision makers, at companies with more than 500 employees. So I go and build this campaign in LinkedIn. And I see a target audience size of 360,000. And this is in the US. According to LinkedIn recommendations, yeah, an audience size of 360,000 is fantastic. But I looked at that and went, man, having everyone from manager all the way up to cmo represented in a single campaign. That doesn't tell me anything. So what I did is I broke that out into four separate campaigns. One that is marketing job function with manager seniority, at companies with more than 500 people, of course, I did the same thing, but instead of managers, it's directors. And then the same thing instead of directors, it's VPS. And then finally, I have one just for the the chief marketing officers. There are 160,000 managers, 160,000, directors, 58,000 VPS, and then only 26,000 CMOS. So breaking these into their own campaign, your LinkedIn rep will definitely tell you, ah, these audiences are too small. You should really make them larger. But what I've done is taken the same two ads and put them in all four of these different campaigns. And notice, I'm still targeting the same size of audience. It's still 360,000 total senior marketers, no one made it in that audience that wasn't supposed to be there that wouldn't have been there from the beginning, I'm still able to spend all of my budget. But now I actually have information, I have data about which levels of seniority, engage with my ads, and how and even how they convert. And I can keep following them all the way through the sales process, and learn more about what it takes to get a CMO to a sales qualified lead status, versus someone who's a, let's say, a marketing manager. Okay, we're gonna take a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the Goldilocks zone for audience sizes, and actually how to create them.

12:44
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

12:53
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn largest accounts, and are the only media buying agency to become official LinkedIn partners. And of course, 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 absolutely love to help you demolish your goals.

13:17
Alright, let's jump into where the rubber actually hits the road with these tighter audiences. So we've talked about audiences that are too large, and some that are too small. Let's talk about the Goldilocks zone of those that are just right. And if you remember, last episode, we talked about the Goldilocks zone with spending enough on ad creative to get statistically significant data. The same principle applies here with the audiences as well. We're constantly looking for the right mix between learnings and spend. We want audiences that are small enough that you can actually still learn something valuable about what makes up that audience. And we also want them large enough that you can actually spend enough budget to tell and get any of these learnings. So let's say you have these large audiences and you want to break them up so you can learn more. So how should you break them up? Well, I want you to break them up by whatever you want to learn about my go to is to break them up by seniority, like that example I use with marketers, I broke them up manager, director, VP, and C level. And this is really good because it helps with content creation. If we're performing really poorly with the C suite, like with CMOS in this case, we can then go to the client and say, Hey, your content is not resonating with CMOS, you should change the content. Here's what they seem to like. That's data we can pass. You can also break up by geography, because we know that different cultures are going to respond differently. So for instance, I wouldn't want the US and Europe in the same campaign if I could help it. Of course, if campaigns are, if these two audiences are so small, and I have to combine them in order for them to run then sure, I'll do it. But I know that the cultures are different. And so I would much rather keep them separate and learn about those cultures. I really like to break them up by company sizes as well. Even if you know that any one company size 500 and above is a good fit for your product, even breaking them up by let's say 500 to 1000, and then 1000 to 5000. And then 5000 and above can be a great way of learning "do we work very well in mid market in enterprise in giant companies, even fortune 500" can be a cool way to do this. I also like to break up audiences by job function. Like that example I shared before with finance and operations in the same campaign, I would always want to keep them separate because they're going to care about vastly different things. In short, cut your audiences by whatever meaningful segments that you want to learn about. And these tend to be very broad things. I wouldn't cut my audience by let's say something like job titles or skills or other things that might be too narrow. I want these to be very broad categories. And then if you have a large audience size, don't just cut it for the sake of cutting it. Like, for instance, saying, hey, this audience is twice as large as it should be, I'm going to create two different segments, one targeting just male and one targeting just female. If that insight about how men and how women interact with your content and offers wouldn't actually be a meaningful insight to you, then don't do it. I've seen people break things up by interest, or by a college degree, or something else that they didn't really care about. They were just going for an arbitrary audience size. Yeah, don't do that. It's just not worth the effort. Okay, so here's the gold here, how do you make use of audiences that are micro segmented? Well, this is the B2Linked strategy. This is where I'm about to drop some real value bombs on you. If I take an audience of senior marketers. And I break them up into their levels of seniority and timezone. So we're talking some altra tiny audiences here. If I do that each single campaign may be getting results really slowly, it might be spending $5, $10, $15, $20 a day or something like that. If I'm looking at these individual campaigns, I'm probably going to get impatient. Or I might not be able to make optimizations because these data sample sizes are too small. Ah, but here's what I can do. I can start rolling these campaigns, their performance together with other like campaigns and start to learn things about it. With a single pivot table in Excel. I now have enough data for understanding performance by timezone and I also have an understanding of performance by level of seniority. So each individual audience Yeah, it's too small to care about, but when I roll them up to all other campaigns with a similar trait, and I compare These things in aggregate, now I actually get some really valuable information and insights. We recently did this with a client where we've got about 200 campaigns in this account. And they are defined by targeting type, seniority, geography, and company size. Now, granted, they're a large spender, but I was able to build a model that shows what our cost per sales qualified lead is by each type of targeting by each level of seniority, by their geography, by company size. Do you know how valuable that is? As the account scales up, we know exactly which campaigns to bid up and get aggressive with, to maintain extreme account efficiency as we go up. I'm sure many of you know that you really get a choice between scale and efficiency. If you're going to scale up, you're going to lose efficiency along the way. Well, we've got a great way and how we don't actually lose efficiency as we scale and that is because As of this, this microsegmentation, giving us tight controls over every little aspect of an account. And conversely, if the client came to us and said, we have to cut budget, we know exactly which campaigns to cut out first. Maybe they're okay. They're not total losers. But if I have to cut budget, I'm going to cut the worst performers first, for sure. And that means as we scale back, we actually get also more efficient. So many of you may be listening and going, Oh, man, it feels like a lot of work to manage an account with 200 campaigns. Is it worth it? Absolutely it is. If I managing an account with 200 campaigns, versus what it might be at maybe 20, otherwise. The level of control that I have over efficiency, as well as the learnings and insights I can get about every variation of their target audience. I absolutely guarantee that that is worth the extra time you have to spend creating ads, and I also guarantee your competitors aren't going through this much trouble. for managing the account, you will get a leg up on them. Okay, so should you force audience sizes? No. If the audience is larger than my 20,000 to 80,000 recommendation, but there just isn't an intelligent way to slice it. Leave it alone. Don't just aim for arbitrary audience sizes. There are some benefits to larger audience sizes, like you can actually get lower cost per click sometimes, because you have a higher probability of being able to bid the absolute minimum or lower and still spend your budget. And conversely, if your audience is smaller than our recommendation, should you add irrelevant people to the audience to make it larger just to fit this mold? No, absolutely not. LinkedIn is way too expensive of a channel to ever spend a dime on someone who isn't your ideal, perfect audience. What about if it's too small? Should you just not run the campaign? Is it not worth your time? Well, ultimately, I'm going to leave that up to you. I still think it's valuable. If you have an audience size of 300 people who are Perfect for what you do. Yeah, sure that campaign may never really spend a lot of money. But boy, any money that that does spend, or any lead that it generates will be well well worth your time. So ultimately your audience sizes will have to be what makes sense for you. Don't let someone else tell you what size your campaigns need to be, especially if what you're doing is working. But hopefully that at least provides a guide for you. Okay, I've got episode resources coming up for you right after the break. So stick around.

21:35
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

21:43
Okay, here in the show notes, check out the LinkedIn recommended audience sizes in their help section I've linked right to it. You can at least see what they recommend and why. And in the new section I told you about Microsoft's quarterly update report. The links there, go ahead and check that out. See what Microsoft says. about LinkedIn performance. Also, I mentioned Mark Williams, the LinkedInformed podcast, there's a link there to his Episode 287, where you can hear his commentary on it as well. If you're just getting started in LinkedIn Ads, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's only $25 if you're not a premium subscriber to LinkedIn, and free if you are, and it covers the same stuff that in a one on one training, I would be charging $500 an hour for. This could be also really good. If you're trying to train coworkers or new recruits in on LinkedIn Ads to help support you then check out this course it's fantastic. Whatever podcast player you're on, look down right now and make sure that you are subscribed. And then please review the podcast I would absolutely love to share your review with everyone and give you a shout out. Any ideas for the show any thing you'd like us to cover, reach out at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

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

COVID-19 insights and resources for advertisers

The digital advertiser’s guide to COVID-19

Bidding Budgeting Episode

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

Show Transcript:

How much money should you budget for your LinkedIn ads? We'll break it down cleanly so you know exactly how much to dedicate.

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

0:20
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, I get asked a lot about how much advertisers need to budget for their LinkedIn Ads. It's usually prefaced by, "Hey, I know you're gonna say it depends, but I'm gonna ask anyway". Well, the truth is, I love this question, because I actually have a straightforward answer to it. And I'm eager to teach you all about it. We'll be covering in this episode, specifically, how much on average you'll need to spend to get the results you're looking for, as well as how long you'll need to actually spend this budget over. Okay, jumping into the news. Last week, I gave you some really cool stats about what's changing from LinkedIn's perspective during this whole COVID situation. And I was going through that material trying to find some new insight. And what I found was LinkedIn gave me access to something that Microsoft put out, which was their resource for COVID-19 insights and resources for advertisers. So I decided to take a peek through there and see if there was anything of value. What I found was a document entitled The Digital Advertisers Guide to COVID-19. And I got really excited. This is right up my alley. And so I started reading and what occurred to me is that it definitely came from Microsoft. It said exactly what you expect it to say, from a company who makes a lot of money from paid search. They talk about how paid search is the most profitable channel, blahdy, blahdy, blah. And while I do agree that capturing the bottom of the funnel through search intent is extremely valuable. As you'll know if you listen to episode nine of this podcast about Google versus LinkedIn. I would say though, that during the whole COVID panic, there's been panic that has caused budgets to get pulled back. And so while people are still exploring purchase decisions, there is some reticence or some hesitancy to sign contracts right now. So search channels that are bringing people in right now who you're assuming are ready to buy is probably going to result in a high cost per opportunity or a high cost per closed deal. And as you know from Episode 19 search tends to bring in lower quality leads for a product or service that tends to be high cost. You'll get a lot of people acting like tire kickers and mom and pops who can't afford you. So even though Microsoft published this, and probably a lot of it is accurate during a non-COVID time. I personally think that LinkedIn is the channel that you want to invest in now to fill your sales pipeline amidst the current uncertainty. Now is the right time to be starting those relationships that weren't going to close for 3, 6, 9 months anyway. And you're filling them with exactly the right people who are going to be able to buy Okay, as a quick review, highlight, I wanted to highlight the next three reviews here that were left on the podcast. just.zee from Spain said "This one is a must. I'm truly enjoying listening to this show. Each episode is packed with tips. No BS pure gold." Thank you so much just.zee, that's exactly what we're aiming for here. Then a Mr. Bradshaw from the US says "soothing voice, better than calm. AJ's voice is buttery smooth. I used to pay for a subscription to calm but now I listened to AJ as his voice is sooth me into deep, deep sleep." John Bradshaw is actually a good friend of mine who left that as a joke. So John, I'm still shouting you out. But you know, I've listened to my voice. I know it's not buttery smooth. So I hope I'm not breaking your senses of pitch or good vocal practices. Then Sam McRoberts of the US says "AJ is a LinkedIn Ads wizard. This podcast is chock full of LinkedIn advertising wisdom from a guy who knows more about the platform than any other advertiser. Hands down, highly recommended." Sam is a another friend of mine. And he actually runs his own podcast and he's one of the worldwide SEO experts that I learned from. So Sam, thanks so much for leaving the review. Your review means so much to me, because I know your status in the industry as an SEO Pro. And I would love to feature you in this section, feel free and please go and leave a review so I can shout you out. And with that being said, let's hit it.

4:29
Now when we talk about budgeting, there are two different kinds of budgeting that that might bring to mind. There's the kind that's like, over a specific amount of time, this is how much budget you have to allocate to a channel. And then you have the daily budgets, like the platform you might enter in and how much you are only going to allow the platform to spend per day. If you're hoping to learn what you should be spending per day, we covered that pretty well in Episode Six, the bidding and budgeting section. So we're not going to be covering that here. Instead We're going to be talking about how much money you need to dedicate on usually a monthly basis. But some people plan their their budgets by quarter or maybe even by two weeks sprint, by year, etc. And for most performance advertisers we are interested in how much do we have to spend on a platform to really invest and learn something and evaluate whether the platform should receive more of our future budget or not. But at the same time, not spending so much that we're spending inefficiently. So there's a little bit of a range here, and I like to call it the Goldilocks zone, spending enough to learn and test and optimize properly, but don't spend too much that you wasted money. You want to spend just enough right in the middle of that Goldilocks zone. And of course many of you know the fairy tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears where Goldilocks comes in and finds that the Papas porridge is too hot. The baby's porridge is too cold and the mother's is just right in the middle. So that's where we want to be with advertising. And we are going to talk specifically about amounts that you should spend based on averages. And of course, this means you'll want to spend thoughtfully and with an efficient strategy, which is why even advanced PPC pros end up hiring us. I mean, anyone can do this themselves. But there's a lot of value in bringing on someone who can cut past that learning curve and ensure that every dollar is spent properly. So any spend spent on inefficiencies is wasted and it won't teach you anything. I'm going to mention statistical significance quite a bit through here. And I really just want to spend a moment and define why it is and what it means. So statistical significance in advertising to me is looking at results and being able to trust the outcomes as being something that I can predict to continue happening in the future. And there are lots of different percentages of statistical significance. In digital marketing. I've been taught to hold everything to a 95% confidence interval. But it's important to know that if you're only being held to a 90%, or maybe an 82%, or something like that, that's okay. That just means that your numbers will all shift lower. And you may be able to make decisions a little bit faster than what I suggest. I also want to mention something about outliers, because there are some outliers with extreme performance that you can spot very quickly. And so when you've spent $200 at the very beginning of your platform spend, and you have a ton of opt ins and conversions. That's an outlier. That's a really good thing. But it also means that you don't necessarily have to spend what I'm telling you to spend to finish evaluating the platform. You struck gold already. And then conversely, if you've spent $1,000, and you don't have a single opt in yet, you don't have to continue spending more and more and more to try to get statistical significance, because your performance is so poor that chances are even if your performance did increase significantly, you would probably still be paying too much per opt in. But most of your tests are going to land in between somewhere not an outlier. Even if performance looks a little bit good or a little bit poor, you'll need a lot more data gathering. So if something is very wrong or very right, you can get your answer a lot more quickly than here. And you probably don't need to wait for significance. Or maybe you could test it, you already have significance, especially if performance is great. Everything here I'm going to be sharing with you is based on benchmarks. So if you haven't listened to Episode 15, all about benchmarking, you'll want to make sure you go and do that. And the reason why is everything here is based off of averages. And so if you're paying more than the baseline, $8 to $11 per click, it means you'll have to spend significantly more to get the same level of data that I'm talking about. And of course, if you're paying less per click because of advantages that you learned from episode six of this podcast or maybe your advertising in a location like outside of North America, or in different languages where LinkedIn charges significantly less, then that means that you can spend significantly less budget to still reach the same levels. Also, if you are pushing people towards a high friction offer, like talk to my sales team, get a demo, buy something, you'll need to spend much more than what I recommend to get statistical significance because you need a large volume of conversions coming in. And when you have an offer that has a low conversion rate, then of course, you'll need a lot more of them. Conversely, if you have a conversion rate that's significantly higher than 15%, then you'll reach significance much faster and you can also spend less to hit the same level of significance. And then finally, if your sales team isn't as buttoned up, or your nurture sales process isn't as efficient, you will need to spend more because you won't have as many Sales qualified leads or proposals or closes the steps deeper in your sales process to figure out how you're going to get to a return on your investment.

10:10
Okay, so let's jump into what spending on LinkedIn actually gets you. Because here's where I get to get really concrete with numbers, and why I love the question about how much should you budget for LinkedIn. And of course, there are a lot of nuances like you've already heard before. And of course, we'll say a lot of ways that it depends, but we'll get to all of those shortly. And let's get into the concrete numbers here. Okay, so if your goal is to get statistical significance around your click through rates, you can usually get that in North America across all of my benchmarks with about $1,000 in ad spend. What you'll learn here is you'll figure out which messaging or motivation gets people to take action, it gets them to click. And so let's say your ad copy. You have one version that is aspirational. It makes people feel like the Hiro, and another one that's fear based telling them that if they don't use your product or service that something bad's going to happen, they'll lose their job, or they'll look dumb in a board meeting. Within about $1,000 in ad spend, you'll find out how your precise audience relates to those motivations. And this can be really helpful if you're just testing. What does my ideal audience like? What are they willing to click on? What are they curious about. Then yeah, you really don't have to spend that much. 1,000 total dollars gets you that. And then, of course, depending on what kind of offer and how you're bidding, it will likely get you some leads along the way as well. But I wouldn't worry too much about leads at this low spend stage. Now we get to what I really recommend for a new advertiser coming into the platform, I recommend spending $5,000. What this is going to get you is statistical significance around your conversion rates, as long as you're starting with assets that convert between about 10 to 15%, which is actually average for gated content offers. What $5,000 in ad spend is going to get you on average is somewhere between about 45 to 93 opt ins. Now, if you are splitting this between either two separate offers, or maybe it's the same offer, but you have two different motivations on ad copy, what you will likely get is 95% statistical significance on which of these offers or which of these ads converts better. You'll also get enough leads to actually see the impact on the business. This isn't two or three, onesy, twosies coming through. This is enough leads that you can actually look at and evaluate at some scale. And of course, a certain percentage of those are going to turn into marketing qualified leads or sales qualified leads, which will start to give you an idea of how these leads are quality wise and how they're going to start moving through the funnel. And when you go and talk to your sales team or you talk to the owner, you'll see that you're getting enough leads to actually get anecdotal Feedback from those teams or from the owner on lead quality. It's not all just about the actual numbers. It's about the perception of them by the sales team as well. You need their buy in to realize, yes, LinkedIn ads are amazing. And we should continue to fund this. Because most of the business to business that we run on LinkedIn Ads has longer sales cycles. Statistically, you won't have a closed deal in your first month. But you will statistically end up closing at least one of the leads you generated during month one. But just realize, you know, these long sales cycles, if it usually takes you 6, 8, 12, 15 months to close a deal, you can't expect LinkedIn to be magical and close deals faster than they usually close. In fact, it's a social platform, meaning that they weren't already at the bottom of the funnel. So the sales cycle traditionally takes a little bit longer. So give yourself a little bit of space and set those expectations properly internally, so that no one's expecting LinkedIn ads to be turn it on. Get instant ROI. And be a silver bullet. Okay, so what if you're saying, Oh, AJ, you're talking about 1000 $5,000 budgets, those are tiny, we have a much larger budget to work with. Well, this is fantastic because what you'll get is a statistically significant test every $5,000 in spend that you do. And it means that you can test much faster, you can run multiple tests at a time, you can actually run tests over a 2, 3, 4 day period. And keep seasonality, keep your timeline really tight, so that seasonality can't creep in and ruin or spoil some of your results. So use that as an opportunity to test more, test faster. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll get to dive into the timeframe over which you actually spend this budget.

14:47
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 manage LinkedIn's largest accounts. We're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners, and performance to your goals is our only priority. So 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.

15:19
Okay, let's jump into timeframes here. So what I have been talking about here in the past is spending $1,000 to get significance around conversion rates and cost per conversion. But you might be asking yourself, Well, maybe I don't have that level of spend on a monthly basis. How long do I have to actually spend? Now, I do recommend this on a monthly basis for a lot of different reasons. But it's important to understand that when we're looking at statistical significance, we're looking only for a collection, a pool of data. We're not taking into account necessarily timeline. So if you are patient, if you have executive buy in to run that $5,000 budget Over the course of five months, feel free. But my warning to you is that when we've worked with clients doing this, even when they say they get executive buy in, inevitably, someone will get impatient. Your boss will come to you, the business owner will come asking during month one and say, "hey, how is LinkedIn ads looking?" And of course, the proper answer is quit asking you moron. This is we need a lot more data here before we actually call it. But some people tend to let their their pride their ego and shoot from the hip a little bit. And a lot of times, they'll come and say, well, it doesn't look like it's working. Let's cut budget and push it to somewhere else. So if you can speed it up, if you can even save your monthly budget up until you have a, let's say $5,000 for a month. What it's going to do is allow you to avoid those seasonality sways and not allow anyone to get impatient. All right. So let me give you an example here on seasonality sways. If you are spending over For a five month period for a test, and you happen to go over the month of December, which for B2B is terrible, or maybe you're going over the summer. The summer usually has a pretty significant lull. Or what if you were advertising from February on. And it just so happened that your tests landed in the middle of the COVID panic, these are all things that would really significantly sway your data and make it so your data is going to be a little bit messier, or you may not be able to rely on it. So if you can force all of this into a single month, do it. And what I also like about this is that you'll be getting statistical significance monthly. So that means a new test every single month, so that you're learning. And of course, if you do this for one month, and you get enough data to say that, wow, LinkedIn ads is not working well, for us. It's a poor performer. If I'm paying an agency to manage it, I would sure love to know by the end of month one, but the channel isn't for me. So I can quit and not pay another month of management fee just to draw that out. Now, we've worked with a lot of different advertisers. And of course, they are all over the board, all different offers all different industries, all different sales cycles, and all different lifetime values. But what we find is, on average, our clients are spending between about $1,000 to $4,000 in ad spend to close a deal. And of course, it does take testing and optimization to get to that point. So maybe starting out, they were trending for 2, 3 times higher than that. So that's why I told you in Episode One, that I recommend LinkedIn Ads only for those with a high lifetime value for prospecting a new customer. But once you've optimized a little bit. Once you've found the formula that works and we'll talk about ammo alignment here in just a minute. Once you've found that formula, you'll really start to feel like your LinkedIn Ads are working for you not working against you. Because we work with so many different accounts and we work when we find what the averages are. I'm very sensitive to when, quote unquote growth hackers come in and talk about, hey, on LinkedIn ads, I put 30 cents into it, and I generated millions of dollars in revenue. So while yes, maybe they are telling you the truth, maybe they're not just blowing smoke, I want to suggest that you don't expect the same outcome for you. Be realistic. And that's why I've given you the benchmarking episode. So you can approach this thoughtfully and not just expect that tomorrow, you're going to close a multi million dollar deal. There certainly is a level of serendipity and luck associated with advertising on any channel, really. You may accidentally get lucky on your very first ad launch and get 7% click through rates on your first ad, and it got you cost per click under 50 cents. We've had several clients do this. And then conversely, you are statistically just as likely to totally bomb and do really poorly. So you do want to set proper action. Don't set the expectation that it's going to be like the growth hackers talk about how someone found a hack somewhere and you can replicate exactly the same thing. The rules to LinkedIn ads are exactly the same as every other social platform, you need to get alignment in your AMO. That is my acronym for the three things that you need for a successful social campaign. This is AMO, it stands for your audience, your message and your offer. Episode 14 goes more into depth on ammo alignment. But here's the basics. Your audience is who it is you're targeting. So you start by going for the very most core of people who are feeling the pain that your product or service solves. The error message is how people actually see your ad. What's the ad format? Which imagery are you using? What ad copy are you using to try to motivate them to get interested? And then O is your offer. This is what you're actually asking people to do, your call to action A lot of times this will be a piece of gated content on LinkedIn. And so what we're really testing for in the early stages of testing LinkedIn as a platform, we're trying to find where your audience, your message and your offer are aligned. Because when they are in alignment, you'll see crazy results. And LinkedIn becomes something that is predictable. It's a lead generation machine. And when you're not in alignment, it feels like you're pulling teeth to try to make the platform work. It feels difficult to get LinkedIn to give you traffic, or you just have to spend money endlessly to try to coerce people into converting. So I've shared a few warnings here before, but I want to just re emphasize this, because I want everyone listening to this podcast to look extremely successful and look like the heroes in your either agencies or in house role. So first off, don't spend a few hundred dollars and then make a determination on the channel. Because the real value of LinkedIn is not in the cost per click. If you're trying to get the lowest cost per lead, go to Facebook, if you're measuring your channels just on cost per lead, or just on cost per opt in, LinkedIn will always look extremely expensive. But the real value in LinkedIn is the targeting to make sure you're hitting exactly the right people who are likely and able to purchase from you. So the real value is tracking all the way down to the cost per sales qualified lead or some kind of qualified stage. Because when you're tracking all the way to cost per sales, qualified lead, that's when LinkedIn starts looking really good compared to other platforms, Facebook and Google included. So be realistic until you've spent thousands of dollars you likely won't have enough data to make the call about conversions unless you have a runaway success with 65% conversion rates, which we've seen before, but certainly not often. Another word of warning here is don't cheap out on the platform. If you stand to make $50,000 off of a closed deal, don't approach it. LinkedIn with a few hundred dollars, and then assume it's not a good channel when it didn't make you money. Realize that a deal that is worth $50,000 over the lifetime is a much higher consideration type of offer. And it's going to take more time. And it's going to take more deliberation on your clients perspective to decide to close that deal. So the higher your lifetime value, the more you will have to invest in LinkedIn ads to make it work. So if you're doing what I recommend, and you're budgeting $5,000 a month for LinkedIn ads, and you're seeing a lot of opt ins come in and then quite a few of those turn into marketing qualified leads, and then maybe 20%, 30% of those turning into sales qualified leads. If you see this progression, you won't need a close deal to tell you that this is a good channel, you'll see the data accumulating and starting to graduate through the stages and that will tell you that yes, even though I'm not closing deals right now even though we are not revenue net positive here. We feel comfortable continuing to invest in LinkedIn Ads. It's producing, it's likely to be a good channel for us. If you are extremely limited on budget, let's say you have a very small budget that you have to spend over a long period of time, and you want to maximize that. Make sure to listen to Episode 14 of this podcast because we go specifically into small budget strategies on how to make sure every dollar is spent efficiently so that you get the best chance of success on the platform. Okay, I've got the episode resources coming right up. So stick around.

24:38
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

24:46
Okay, those resources I talked about in the news. Microsoft has their COVID-19 insights and resources for advertisers. It's broken down actually by industry. So depending on what industry you are, you can go and look and see what But some of the effects that they've measured are. And do keep in mind that the majority of their insights come from a search perspective, so they may not be as valuable to you as a social marketer. But I know many of us here in social marketing came from a search background. And so it might still be interesting to peruse, over. And of course, the digital advertisers guide to COVID-19, the ebook, I've linked to that here in the show notes below. So check that out. And of course, if you are new to LinkedIn advertising, the best course I have for you is the LinkedIn Learning course on LinkedIn Advertising, I happen to be the author, so I've put the link to the course down here below. But what I want you to understand is right around an hour, this course teaches you what I would teach you if I were doing a one to one training over the course of about an hour and a half. And in person, I'm charging $500 an hour, the course only charges $25 for the whole course. Or if you're a LinkedIn premium member, it's free to watch those. So Highly recommend, check out that course. And please, whatever podcast player you're on, do subscribe to this podcast. If LinkedIn Ads is important to you as a channel in your digital marketing, then I want you to have every leg up possible. So do subscribe, make sure you catch all of our future episodes. And please do rate and review the podcast I would especially love to see your reviews and I don't mind if they're critical, feel free to write it down on me. I want to improve this podcast. So if you have any ways to to improve, maybe still leave a top notch review, but reach out to us at [email protected] with any critical feedback, anything you'd recommend, anything you'd like to see or hear. Okay, I'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show resources:

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

UTM parameters

Bidding Budgeting Episode

Account Organization Episode

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

Transcript:

The top five worst mistakes you can make on your LinkedIn Ads. Are you making any of them?

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

0:18
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, I frequently get to audit LinkedIn Ads accounts. And I've got a checklist of things I'm looking for specifically, I wanted to share these account mistakes with you in case there were any of them that you were making, so that you can get them fixed. Or if you're evaluating an agency, you'll know which questions to ask to ensure they know what they're doing. In LinkedIn Ads News, we noticed last week that you no longer have to hover over a campaign and click manage to get to the settings. You now just hit the three dots next to the campaign name and click manage from there. So I'm still not a huge fan of the the user interface here and how it's complex about whether you click on the campaign name or you click on manage. But hey, I'll take this over having to hover any day. In other news COVID-19 is still a thing. So LinkedIn is experiencing some really interesting platform growth specifically because of all that time that people are spending at home while they're working. And I've got some cool stats to share with you. So first of them is that there has been a 55% increase in interaction in the newsfeed so that means responding, reacting, commenting, I don't think this includes reading, but either way, this is really cool to see 55% more activity in the newsfeed because of course, that opens up inventory for us to use for sponsored content. There's been a 60% increase in people posting in the newsfeed so that 60% more content there. And 40% more time has been spent reading in the news section. So these all point to the fact that people are spending more time on LinkedIn. And I think that that's a great thing for all of us who are using the ads platform. The LinkedIn learning platform has reported that consumption is up 3x from February and 2x for March. And so what that tells me is, as people are getting more and more used to staying at home working from home, they're investing their time, probably less in Netflix, binge eating, and more in LinkedIn learning, consumption, and probably all kinds of different learning to this is just the one place that we have data from. So good job to all of you out there who are using this time to better yourselves and make yourself a better professional. I wanted to highlight a few reviews that had come in over iTunes here. MaggusK from Germany says "Great stuff. Thanks, AJ. It's really good to hear some tips, hacks, and hints from a LinkedIn campaign professional. Looking forward to the next episodes." Thank you, MaggusK. John from Sweden says great podcast for marketing professionals. This podcast gives you great insights on how to master LinkedIn Ads like a pro. Thanks, John, appreciate that. And finally, just.zee from Spain says "this one is a must. I'm truly enjoying listening to this show. Each episode is packed with tips, no BS, pure gold." Oh man, that just warms my heart. Thank you so much, just.zee. And of course, I want to feature your review too. So any of you out there listening, please leave me a review. We'd love to highlight it on the show and give you a little bit of a shout out. Okay, with all that being said, let's hit it. Here are the top five mistakes that we find people making in their LinkedIn Ads accounts. And again, I want to make sure that you're not making them in your account. Or if you have an agency managing your account, check that they're not making them either.

3:49
Mistake #1 is naming campaigns after the asset or after some arbitrary date range. Anytime I'm going through an account and I see campaigns called 2020 webinar or water guide, I die a little bit inside. And the reason why is because this signals to me that the account isn't producing the learnings that it should be. When you name your campaigns after the audience, what you get is this ability to break down all of the performance in your account by who. Who you're targeting, who is responding to your ads, and how. I've mentioned before that it's kind of like a silent focus group happening in your account all the time. By breaking up your audience into these micro segments of how people are grouped. All of the performance, the click through rate differences, the cost per click differences, the conversion rate differences, all of these things tell you who your ideal audience is and who they are not. And so when you name your campaign after the asset, the only thing you can actually learn about is which asset is performing and you'd be able to find that out quickly anyway, if campaigns are named after the asset that's being advertised, it also signals to me that targeting is likely all over the board. And it's unsystematic, meaning that you're probably missing out on all kinds of opportunities. You might not realize that if you targeted by, let's say, job function and seniority, that you could actually get your cost per lead significantly lower. Or if you were targeting by groups, plus seniority, maybe you could get a much lower cost per conversion. These are all insights that you won't get if you just spray and pray with your targeting.

5:41
It's also really hard to report on an account when everything is named after the asset because there are so many things under the surface that aren't visible at a quick glance, and it would require a really deep level audit to surface all of these findings. You'll know if you're running one of these accounts, When your boss asks you for a quick report, a chill goes down your spine, and you get really worried that this is going to take you hours. When an account is structured properly, reporting takes minutes, it's so easy to break down performance by your ad type, by your individual audience, by your objective, by the content by each ad, all of these things are just a click away. Also, if your account organization is off, you're probably paying too much for clicks, especially at the start of a campaign. And the reason why is every new campaign that you create, LinkedIn has to wonder how it's going to perform. And so it's going to award it a relevancy score of some sort, which probably isn't going to be very favorable. That means if your ads are amazing, because you're listening to this podcast so of course they're going to be, it's going to take a little while of LinkedIn charging you more per click than it should before you get the relevancy score you deserve and LinkedIn starts charging you what it should. If you create a new campaign every single time, you have a new asset that comes out, that means you're throwing out the old one. It's now garbage. LinkedIn can't rely on the strength of its past history to award you a strong relevancy score. That means all of the money that you've invested into these campaigns, it's just going to waste and you're also likely cannibalizing some of that same audience for multiple campaigns. Because if you're not being explicit about who your audience is in the campaign name, then it's very likely that you have other campaigns that are targeting the same audience. And when you have other campaigns, also targeting your same audience, you're not bidding yourself up in terms of competition. It's not costing you more, but you are competing against yourself. Each of those campaigns are for inventory, and it makes it really difficult to pace your spend and control your spend to these different assets. So what does it look like if someone is making this mistake? Well, first, the account is going to be really hard to look at, to understand and to manage, every little thing you have to do in the account is going to take too long. You're also not able to learn as much about your audiences. You're paying LinkedIn, the same dollars, but you're not getting the audience insights. You might as well get those along with the leads. And finally, you're probably paying too much for your clicks. So if costs look high, or efficiency looks low, this might be a clue that this is something that's happening. So go ahead and make your life easier and name your campaigns properly. So how should you name your campaigns? Well check out Episode 7 about account organization where we walk really deep into that. Your campaign names should include a systematic description of the audience, that you're targeting. And it's also great to include here your the ad format that you're using and the objective. It makes it so easy to segment and organize your account, especially if you're running different ad formats and objectives.

9:15
Okay, on to mistake #2. Mistake #2 is using audience expansion. Anytime I see the option of audience expansion turned on in a campaign, I know immediately someone didn't know what they were doing. It's a default value, but it provides no value. In fact, it's the opposite. it detracts from the value of advertising. Most of the options in the platform that I don't think are very useful, have occasional times where they can be valuable or used as a workaround or hack, but not this one, it's literally carte blanche for LinkedIn to muddy up your audience. And I can't think of a single situation where it would be smart to use audience expansion I've had a couple conversations with the product manager at LinkedIn who's over this feature. And they say that it's so valuable that it should be used on 95% of accounts. And that's why it set as the default value. I say it should be used on zero percent of accounts. And so because of that, we're pretty far apart on where we stand. So I don't know if we're going to find any common ground anytime soon. So what is audience expansion? Well, it's an option that when ticked, LinkedIn looks at your target audience and applies a look alike model to them, and then targets other people let other people into your target audience who they think are close to who it is that you're targeting. Here's the thing though, if you can spend all of your budget on your explicit ideal target audience, then why wouldn't you? Why would you ever want to leave anything to chance and let LinkedIn take a guess at Who else would be good to include in this audience? It's just not good practice. Now this isn't to say that the algorithm that it uses isn't good, it's actually pretty great. It's the same algorithm that you've used if you've ever created a look alike audience on LinkedIn, which I love to do. The problem with using audience expansion on your campaigns is that it's all intermixed with your existing audience, and you can't separate out the performance. So if I had a separate row in reporting of how performance was in my expanded audience, versus my original explicit audience, I would probably make a case for it. I'd go even further, if we could customize the URL tracking parameters that were clicked when someone was served an expanded audience add versus the original, then I could track all of that performance all the way down the sales process. And if I could do that, if I had visibility, I'd probably use it 95% of the time. Unfortunately, we don't have that level of visibility. Though, and so this option just muddies your results on who you're targeting. And from past testing with that I did when it was new, it ended up being a drag on performance. Even without the extra visibility, I would probably just cut it. Now, if you have audience expansion turned on, what you're likely seeing are poor lead quality. So maybe sales is letting you know, hey, we're having to throw out a lot of these leads. That might be a clue to look at this. Also, if you're running any account based marketing or ABM campaigns where you're targeting specific companies by name, if you're producing leads from companies that are not on your ABM list, that could be a clue that your audience expansion is turned on. And if you were paying close attention to the performance of your account, and audience expansion was turned on, it's likely you've cut budget from LinkedIn because the leads you were getting were not the quality that you would expect them to be worth for paying $8 to $11 per click. Here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into the last three LinkedIn Ads mistakes that you should be looking out for.

13:08
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn Ads experts.

13:17
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage many of LinkedIn's largest accounts and we're the only media buying agency to be official LinkeBdIn 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 absolutely love to help you demolish your goals. Okay, with that being said, let's jump into the next three mistakes.

13:46
Mistake #3 is using automated bidding. Okay, this is a big deal. So let me explain what I mean here. There is definitely a time and a place for running automated bidding and it should be part of your bidding strategy. But realize that because it's the default type of bidding, and 90% of the time, it's the most expensive way to pay for your traffic on LinkedIn, there's a reason why I'm on the lookout for this while I'm auditing accounts. To break it down. Automated bidding is just a fancy name for CPM bidding, where LinkedIn controls your bid. It's a little bit like handing LinkedIn, your wallet and saying please be gentle spend what you think you need. Now I am admittedly a very performance based marketer, which means I'm always looking for the lowest cost per lead the lowest cost per opt in possible for whatever budget I'm working with. And I know that all things held equal, let's say no matter what traffic you send to a landing page, it's always going to convert at the same rate. What that means is to get the lowest cost per lead, I have to pay the least amount per click possible. So if you're looking at just your effective cost per click. If you are bidding by CPM, this leads to a higher effective cost per click anytime your click through rate is less than two and a half times the average. Now I know this is complex, so I'll break it down for you. What this means is if you are bidding any kind of CPM model, whether it's automated or explicitly CPM bidding, it means you are paying more per click than if you were bidding cost per click. If your click through rates are not two and a half times the LinkedIn benchmark average, which is a lot. That means that your ads literally have to perform two and a half times better than the average before CPM bidding becomes a good deal before it even breaks even with CPC bidding. This is easiest to measure with sponsored content with sponsored content, the average is about .4%. And so anytime that I see a click through rate Over 1% I know that it's cheaper to bid CPM for my traffic than it is CPC. So you could imagine the 10% of the time that someone launches an ad that is significantly above the average, then yeah, automated bidding is going to look great to them. And I talked to plenty of advertisers who've gotten great success, just taking the default options in their campaign launching, and they just happen to land in the top 10% of advertisers. The rest of the time, though, CPM bidding is going to cost significantly more than the equivalent click if you are bidding by cost per click. So just because your account is using automated bidding, does not mean that you're bad, doesn't mean that you're a terrible marketer. But if you've tested into automated bidding, and you know that you're getting the cost efficiency that you're looking for, then you've got no judgement for me. If you just selected automated bidding, because that's what LinkedIn told you to do, that's where I've got a problem with it and you should probably rethink those priorities. If your account is running automated bidding across all campaigns, that's likely a sign that either #1 your account manager doesn't know what they're doing or #2 the account managers focus is to simply spend the budget and it's not to efficiency of your performance. Or heck, you might have this option 3, maybe every campaign is performing over two and a half times the benchmark average and automated bidding is the cheapest way to get traffic. And if this is the case, good on you, I'm cheering you on. For more understanding about how bidding and budgeting work, check out episode 6 where we dive in and dissect all of the different options there.

17:43
Okay, Mistake #4, and it's related and this is your bidding too high. If you're using CPC bidding, like you know you're supposed to be doing, but you are swayed by the siren song of LinkedIn's recommended bid ranges, you are likely paying way too much for your time traffic. You see LinkedIn's suggested bid ranges are quite frankly ridiculous. I don't have a better way to describe this. They'll say something like your competition is bidding between $14 and $38 per click. No, they are not. I can count on one hand, the number of advertisers I know who can be profitable on clicks in that price range. And that's generally because when they sell something, they make a million dollars. So if you have an enterprise sized budget, and you're spending six figures per month, yes, you will have to bid aggressively to get the traffic you need in a lot of cases. But if you're not spending enterprise size budgets, let's say you're spending less than $15,000 a month on ads, you likely don't need nearly that aggressive of bidding. What ends up happening is when you are bidding too high, you end up blowing all of your budget in the middle of the night because remember in North America, our budgets start fresh for the day between 5pm and 9pm, the day before. So if you ever hit your budget, your budgets become active between 5p and 9pm at night, the next day, and then you're bidding super aggressively to the insomniacs, the people who are not able to sleep, they're scrolling through their phone. And of course, they're probably not going to convert. And if they do, they may not remember that they converted in the morning. Now, let's imagine that you actually do make it through the night and your budget is still spending during the day. Oftentimes here you will end up blowing the whole rest of your budget at the very first part of the day, and then your ads will shut off, and you'll stop getting traffic the whole last half of the day. If you talk to your LinkedIn rep if you have one, they will tell you know you want to bid aggressively so that you get the best quality of your audience. Well, here's the thing, if you're worried about getting the best quality of your audience, then tighten your targeting. Make sure that everyone within your targeting is a good fit for you. And then you don't have to worry about this. Although in all of the testing I've done, I've never found lead quality to decrease when my bidding decreased as well. Now, not only did you not get to run your ads for the whole rest of the day, or maybe you spent way too quickly, you also paid two to six times more per click than you should have, which we've know that CPC really isn't everything, but it probably means that your costs per lead are two to six times higher than they could be or should be. Remember this rhyme. If you hit your budget during the day, it means you pay too much for your clicks along the way. Again, go listen to Episode 6 of this podcast on bidding and budgeting to go more in depth there on how the bidding and auction system works.

20:53
Okay, last one, Mistake #5. If you are not tracking properly now I came to advertising from the Google Ads world far, long, long, long ago. And Google advertisers have been spoiled for so many years, because Google owns both Google Ads and Google Analytics. So they have this option called auto tagging, where inside of your Google Ads, you can just tick the box that says, yes, do auto tagging. And then every ad automatically sticks on all of these tracking parameters for Google Analytics to pick up and recognize. This means that you have perfect attribution of the ad was clicked at x time, it came from y keyword, and it was in z ad group. This is fantastic for people who are just advertising on Google. But for every other platform, you need to put tracking codes in each of your links so that your analytics and CRM package can recognize where that traffic is coming from. This allows you to associate the leads that come from your advertising efforts. With how much you spent to acquire them. So this gives you the ability to figure out what is my cost per qualified lead? What is my cost per sale? What is my ROI look like? These are all things you can do if you're tracking. If you're not tracking, you're totally blind past the initial form fill. A lot of times you'll hear this tracking, referred to as UTM parameters, because that was the system that Google Analytics came up with that most started to adopt. If you use a different analytics package than Google, you'll have different names for these tracking parameters. Now, if all you care about is your cost per form fill, yeah, you don't need to track because LinkedIn can track the conversion the same way it knows which ad was clicked, by whom and whether or not someone converted. And certainly conversion tracking is super, super important. So you can get a get at least your finger on on the pulse of performance. Are you doing amazing? Or are you totally up the creek without a paddle, or somewhere in between? But if all you are tracking is just the presence of a conversion how much you paid for that, you're really gonna miss the point of LinkedIn Ads, which is the lead quality. We know that LinkedIn costs per click are oftentimes two to five times higher than Facebook's. So if you were running both LinkedIn and Facebook side by side, if you were only comparing your cost per conversion, you'd have no other conclusion to come to except LinkedIn ads is way too expensive and you should push all of your budget away from there and into Facebook. You'll miss the fact that the lead quality on LinkedIn is often much higher than two to five times better than that of Facebook. Now, if all you're using is just LinkedIn's lead gen form ads, you really don't have to worry about this too much because this traffic is not hitting your website. So you're not going to be tracking it with UTM parameters or some other kind of tracking parameter. LinkedIn is going to be passing this information into your CRM, which campaign, which ad it was. So you're probably pretty well taken care of here. So if you're not using tracking parameters like UTM parameters in all of your advertising, this is a great time to stop and start adding them in now, in the show notes, I included a great article from HubSpot, about how to use UTM parameters, how they work, how they look how to fix them to your tracking links. Okay, so that's really it the top five mistakes that I see advertisers making on LinkedIn ads, and if you're making them, it's a great time to get them fixed. And if your agency is making them well, there's not much of an excuse for that. So reach out! B2Linked.com rocks at running your LinkedIn Ads. Okay, I've got the episode resources coming up for you so stick around.

25:05
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

25:14
Okay, here are the great resources that we talked about in this podcast episode. First is the HubSpot link that I just mentioned about UTM parameters. Check that one out, it's a great read. Also, our episode on bidding and budgeting was episode 6. Make sure you listen to that. And then also Episode 7 about account organization. Super, super valuable. And again, they touch on many of these same topics and even go deeper. If you are brand new to LinkedIn Ads or trying to get to learn them. The best way you can do this is by taking the LinkedIn Learning course taught by me, and it's called Advertising on LinkedIn. Search for LinkedIn Advertising or LinkedIn Ads. You won't be able to miss it. The picture of On the cover is really silly. It's me pointing at the camera and I'm, I'm a chubby ginger dude. In just over an hour, this course covers what I usually take about an hour and a half in person in my one on one trainings to cover. And if you have LinkedIn premium, this is free. If not, I think it's only 25 bucks, whereas I charge $500 an hour. So this is by far the most economical way to learn about LinkedIn Ads. Definitely whatever podcast player you're listening on, please hit that subscribe button if you want to hear more episodes like this where we dive deep into LinkedIn Ads. I would also encourage you to rate the podcast. Of course we love five stars. But of course, I'm big on honesty and transparency here. And please do review it the more people who review the higher this ranks in the podcast listings, and I would love it if more LinkedIn advertisers got to hear about this. And of course, I'd love to shout out your review as well if you leave that. With any ideas for the show or questions, feel free to reach out to [email protected] and I'd love to entertain your ideas. I'll see you back here next week! Cheering you on and your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Show Resources:

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

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

Show Transcript:

The absolute lowest cost way to generate leads using LinkedIn Ads. This is it. Stay tuned.

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

0:19
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, because of LinkedIn's higher costs, most of our clients are interested in any performance increases we can find. And one of the most common ways of getting cost per lead down is by using LinkedIn lead generation form ads. About 60% of our clients use these exclusively so there's definitely something to them. So we're going to go into a lot of detail about them. Let's hit it.

0:44
I wanted to highlight some of the reviews that you as listeners have been leaving on the podcast pages, so please keep those coming. Lucamelie, or Lucamelie in the UK says "super valuable information. I've been following AJ on YouTube and LinkedIn for over for a year now. He consistently provides excellent value and I'm so pleased he's doing this podcast. AJ, if you're reading this thanks a million for being so generous with your knowledge." Luca, thank you. I am reading it. Thanks for leaving it. And that totally makes my day. All right, Richie Norton in the US just simply says "genius". You want to know who's a genius, Richie Norton. He is the modern day Stephen Covey, call him a friend and his show is absolutely epic. So check out his show. It's all about leadership and life and goals. And he's got a really interesting model where he'll do three episodes per week. One is an interview. One is kind of like an after review and then one is a solo cast from him talking about that particular topic and and expanding. So really, really cool if you're into leadership. Okay, NN1292 in the US, says the podcast "I've been waiting for. First off your podcast is great, and I've already benefited from the information you provide along with your insight. I look forward to listening to additional episodes in the future. You seem to have a lot of experience and it would be amazing if you could share some real world solutions and strategies that have aided you in the past. As a marketer growing in the field of this sort of content, it'd be super helpful, especially since it's not easy to find content specific for B2B. Again, thanks for doing the great work. And I'll definitely be tuning again in again soon". Thanks for the glowing review, as well as the suggestion on what we can do. I'm gleaning from this that in the future, we should do more of applicability, more case study type stuff. This is why we did this and this was the effect. So definitely gonna be baking that into the future content. I'll try to bake it in as we go as well. So I do want to feature you please do go and leave reviews. And I'll give you a shout out as well.

2:48
Okay, so let's jump into what is the lead gen form ad to start out with? Well, the way I describe it, this is like when someone interacts with your ad, rather than sending them to a landing page on your website or just off of LinkedIn, a drawer will slide down from the ad itself containing a form, a native form from LinkedIn. And it gives someone the opportunity to convert without even leaving the LinkedIn experience, which is fantastic for a lot of ways. The chief have, which is that it's the highest converting way of getting someone because it takes away so much of the friction. When we implement these, we see an average increase of conversion rates of 10 to 50%. So this is literally like you could take whatever you're doing now and get 10 to 50% more leads for exactly the same money. That's really how it works. And quite often, actually, we'll see double or sometimes even tripling of conversion rates. In pretty much every type of offer every situation, using lead gen form ads is going to be the cheapest way to capture someone's information/ Prospects who are interacting with these forms have a much higher level of trust because they don't have to leave the LinkedIn experience. It's familiar to them. And plus any information that LinkedIn knows about this individual is going to be prefilled. So if you ask for information, like their job title, or their industry or company size, LinkedIn will just automatically fill that out. So all the prospect has to do especially on mobile device where entering extra information is extra cumbersome, LinkedIn is going to make that super easy so all someone has to do is just hit the send button. You can use these for most of the ad formats. So any sort of sponsored content, whether that single image, carousel, video, maybe even if there's going to be future versions of sponsored content, surely, the lead gen form ad is going to be supported by it. Also, any sort of sponsored messaging, so that includes message ads, plus the new conversation ads. Now are these a silver bullet for advertisers? Well, they can be, but not always. There are some limitations and there are some potential warnings to keep in mind about them. So first complaint that you may hear about them is that they lead to poor lead quality. Your sales team may reach out to someone and they might say something like, ah, I don't remember filling out a form. I don't think I contacted you guys. Now, don't be worried this isn't fake form fills that are happening. This is just that LinkedIn made it so easy for someone to convert that if they waited long enough, they're going to forget that they actually filled out the form, it didn't make a strong enough impression on them because it was so easy and so quick. It required less effort. And traditionally, the more effort you require from someone, the more of their attention you're going to get. It's also less of a special experience for the user visually, because they're used to seeing things on LinkedIn and they're used to seeing things move quickly like scrolling through a feed, whereas if they land on a landing page, they will see your brand front and center. They'll have the opportunity to click around and read more about your team and see what you are offer. So that's a lot of freedom that you're not going to get if you're just going to stay within the LinkedIn experience. And you'll hear exactly the same complaints about this from advertisers who've used Facebook's version, what they call lead ads. And it's exactly the same reason. It's just making it so easy that people may not remember doing it. So make sure you are following up on these quickly so that you get fewer people who forgot that you exist. The next is you actually do need some additional systems in place to make use of them. So once the lead is submitted, it goes into the LinkedIn ads platform. And it's really cumbersome to go in. You go into account assets. And lead generation forms. And then you click on the lead generation form that you're using. And then you can download a CSV. I guarantee everyone listening to this right now is paid way too much to make this your job to go in and download a CSV every single day. So you'll definitely want to get these leads out with I'm sort of partner integration. So we'll go into that here soon. But you also need to reach out to them with email software, whether that's marketing automation, or CRM, to actually fulfill on what you gave them. Because if someone fills out one of these forms, and then you follow up 24 hours later and say, "Hey, here's that piece of content you requested", chances are, so many more of them are going to forget that they ever did that or change their mind. So you want this to be fast, you'll want to use an email software system to immediately follow up with them. Another complaint that you'll hear from other advertisers is "Ah, my sales team only likes emails that are professional, but all the G mails and the Yahoo's those personal emails are worth less to us". And quite honestly, I like the personal emails, because if I get a list of personal emails, that's going to match at a really high rate on both LinkedIn and Facebook and Google and Twitter if I'm doing these custom audience retargeting, so from a nurture perspective, I really like, but I realize a lot of sales teams will kind of frown on personal emails, and you absolutely will get more of these. You can't track lead gen form ads nearly as well as you can track a landing page visit. So I'll illustrate this by showing both pathways. If you send to a landing page, you can have a form on that landing page that captures all of their UTM and tracking parameters from the URL and passes it right into your CRM. And then you can run reports later on, grab those parameters, and you can marry them up with your LinkedIn reporting to get a cost per every stage of the funnel. It's beautiful. You can tie every piece of performance all the way back to the exact ad, the exact audience that sent it. Now consider if you're using lead gen form ads, someone's going to fill out the form on LinkedIn. There's no sort of dynamic tracking available here. LinkedIn will tell you very accurately all the way down to the time where someone fills out the form, but they won't pass anything further. So if you wanted to go really, really specific and track every ad all the way down to the ad level, you would need a separate lead gen form on LinkedIn for every single ad that you publish. And smaller accounts, you can make this work, but larger accounts, oh, this is cumbersome to do, and we've done it. The other big challenge here is you can't retarget the traffic. So if you send traffic to your landing page, you can then pick that traffic up with your Google retargeting, your Facebook retargeting, and stay in front of these people to stay top of mind. And it creates an awesome audience for nurture. But because this traffic never hit your landing page and never hit your website, LinkedIn has all of the data about them and they're not sharing it with you. And then LinkedIn won't let you retarget this that's as of the time of recording yet, but they are working on engagement retargeting that I'm told should be out somewhere between July and October of 2020. At that point we'll be able to retarget users. So something like if someone opened the lead form but didn't actually fill it out or didn't submit it, then we can retarget them and show them a different offer or show them the same offer until they do convert. So I'll be excited for engagement retargeting to come out, so we can start retargeting these lead gen form ads traffic.

10:23
Okay, so how do you actually create these? Well, first you go to account assets right from your ads account and click on lead generation forms. Then you'll create a new form right there. And what I would recommend you do lose the super in depth tracking here. But for every offer, I would recommend one single lead generation form, and then send all of your ads that are going to that offer to the same form. So you'll have maybe 15, 20, 50 different ads all leading towards or all attached to the same form. Next, you either go to a campaign that already has the lead generation objective or you create one. And you'll go through the normal process of defining who your audience is and writing your ad. But then as soon as you're done writing the ad, it will ask you which form you want to attach it to. Now, if you haven't already created your form through account assets, lead generation forms, it will let you create one from right within the campaign build itself, but certainly that's a little bit more cumbersome. Keep in mind that these ads do require a privacy policy on your website, or just written into the the form itself. So be prepared, make sure you do have your privacy policy all ready. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into how to make the best use of your lead gen formats.

11:44
The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

11:53
If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked, the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's largest accounts and are the only media buying agency to become official LinkedIn partners. And performance to your goals is our only priority. So 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.

12:17
Alright, let's jump into what you do with your leads once they come in, and what options you'll get to include. I mentioned earlier that you'll want to make sure that you're using an integration partner to get your leads out. There are three different ways of doing that. The first is the manual download. Booooo, don't do it. It's not worth anyone's time. I mean, seriously, don't even hire a VA for this. The next though is you use one of their partner services. So some of these partner services are things like HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce, there are quite a few, but they also tend to be pretty enterprise level software. So if you happen to be running a small account where maybe you don't own any of these enterprise level softwares, then you'll want third option here which is Zapier.com. And on their $20 a month plan, you can get all of these leads exported to pretty much whatever you want. So if you want these leads sent to your email and sent to a sales rep's Google sheet that they keep actively updated and then sent right into like a MailChimp or something, you can do that kind of logic with the Zapier $20 per month plan. There are some very cool strategic ways that you can use these lead gen formats. So I want to talk about two of those first. One of my favorite ways to use these is to actually test your landing pages. So in this case, you're not using lead gen form ads at all. You're sending a right to a form on your website somewhere and you know what your conversion rate is. So let's say you're seeing a low conversion rate, maybe you're only converting at 8%. What you can do is go and take that exact same ad the exact same offer and Create that as a lead gen form ad. And then you start measuring the cost per conversion and your conversion rate, especially conversion rate. And what you'll find is, on average, you'll see a 10 to a 50% increase in conversion rate, so expect that. But if it's larger than that, then this might be a good way for you to go, "oh, this makes sense, my landing page is hindering conversion somehow". And that can be the start of you saying, "hey, I'm going to start testing things on my landing page". Or "I'm going to go and make a case to my boss that we need to bring someone in to create a better landing page experience". So this can be good data for you. If you can find out that the same offer the same ad converts better as a lead gen form, then that signals there's probably something wrong with the website or at least something that can be improved. The next cool strategic use of these lead gen formats is to test the difference in your lead quality between your lead generation ads and your landing pages. If you are running these in parallel long enough, what you'll find is, yeah, sure these lead gen form ads will increase conversion rates, but your lead quality will also on average decrease. So if you can balance these out, if you've gotten, let's say 50% more leads, and your lead quality only decreased by about 30%, you still have a net increase of 20%. And it totally makes sense to use these lead gen formats. However, if that's reversed, if your conversion rate increases by 30%, but your lead quality decreases by 50%, you are still much better to send to a landing page. Now my bias is if it's even close, I mean, if I'm getting a similar cost per qualified lead, let's say from lead gen formats as I am from my own landing page, I want to use my own landing page 100% of the time, because then I can track it with Google analytics or whatever tracking I'm doing down to a very granular level. And I can also retarget that traffic with every network out there, LinkedIn included. So there's so much more freedom you get by having traffic that you own on your own website. But certainly, if it's better in your favor, you're getting a cheaper cost per lead, or cheaper cost per sales qualified lead from your lead gen form ads, then absolutely pursue that 100%. Okay, option wise, the prefilled fields that LinkedIn has, they have most that are prefilled, but some that someone will actually have to fill in themselves. And the way it works is if LinkedIn has it, they will pre-fill it. And if they don't have it, then they'll leave it blank and the prospect will have to go in and write it themselves. The standard fields that I generally recommend are first name, last name, and email. And if you take all three of those fields, it should convert at the highest rate. You're asking for very little and the email address that it fills out is going to be most likely. I mean, it's their profile email, which is most likely a Gmail or a personal email of some kind. If you want to ask more for that, or if you need to ask more from them, then you can ask for their city, their country, their phone number, their zip code, or postal code, their state province. And you can ask them for their work email, but there's no validation to make sure that it actually is a work email so they can just, it's a blank field so they could just write their profile email in, you'll probably still get quite a few of these personal emails as well. You can ask for work phone number. Obviously, anytime you ask for a phone number, people are expecting a phone call and it's going to scare them away. You will see a lower conversion rate if you're using those. You can ask for their job title, their job function, which is their department, their level of seniority, their company name, their industry company size, and on the education side, you can also ask for their degree, their field of study, their graduation date, their start date And the school that they went to or graduated from. You can also ask for their gender, which will not be prefilled. Because if you remember from our targeting episode, gender is an inferred characteristic based off of their first name. And so it's not always accurate. LinkedIn doesn't want to assume here where the user will actually see what LinkedIn considers them to be. There's a new addition here, though, which is one of my favorite, you can insert their LinkedIn profile URL. The reason I love this is it's so low friction, of course, someone filling it out is going to say, "oh, well, my LinkedIn profile is public anyway so I don't care". That's not a high friction kind of field. But if you have a link to someone's LinkedIn profile, you also know immediately what company they work at. And you can follow that to see what size of company and what industry and you can look at. You can find out so much that you don't have to actually ask for this information in the field. Because if you're asking for five, seven, eight pieces of information, you're going to scare a lot of people away because you're asking so very much. So if I have my way with it, I'm going to ask for first name, last name, email, and LinkedIn profile URL. You can also include some custom questions. These can be a single line or a multiple choice. And you can also attach a checkbox, a custom checkbox. You can decide whether or not that is required. Everything else is required. But this custom checkbox can be not required. And then you do have hidden fields you can insert if you need UTM parameters in the traffic as it comes from the lead generation form to the thank you page or whatever experience you're sending them to after. You can have those come through. But like we talked about earlier, this is at the form level. And so if LinkedIn is listening, I would absolutely love in the future if we could put dynamic parameters in here. So if we could maybe dynamically insert the campaign Id or the ad ID or both, or maybe some other parameter from the campaign, the campaign name, something. This would be super helpful. And then we wouldn't have to create an individual form for every single ad if we wanted to track much deeper into our CRM. Okay, stepping off my soapbox there.

20:19
Tracking these can be an issue. So let's talk through that one. Tracking down to the cost per lead is totally flawless. You don't have to worry about tracking pixels. You don't have to worry about them clearing or making sure that they are associated to the campaign. There's none of that. You just launch a lead gen form ad and immediately you're getting conversion information. But if you need to go deeper than cost per lead, or lead conversion rate, now that's going to be a problem. The most sophisticated advertisers are using this solution right now where they create one whole form for every single ad. And that may be worth it for tracking, but boy is that cumbersome to actually administer. And again, I think everyone listening to this is probably, it's way below your paygrade to do that kind of work. But it is possible if you want to get your tracking on point. Depending on the partner you're using, it can actually pass your campaign ID and your ad ID. So you might be able to capture those and pass those somehow into your CRM so that you can match the individual ad back with like a V lookup from a LinkedIn report. So you may be able to do something like this. I haven't fully explored it yet. I think it's possible. But you may be stuck with the one form per ad if you don't want to do all of that technical juggling. And then for retargeting, since the traffic doesn't actually hit your website, you can't retarget them. So LinkedIn, like we mentioned, is going to have engagement retargeting sometime in Q3, but it also means if you're using these, you can't do your retargeting with Google and Facebook, which is such a valuable thing right now. As a quick recap, LinkedIn lead gen formats are they cheapest way to get your ideal prospects into your database for nurturing. They are fantastic if you just need to show results fast, or show the value of the channel to prove it out, you should start seeing leads come in very quickly. And pretty much no matter what your offer is, these will convert higher than if you sent them to your landing page. However, if you want meaningful interactions with a very, very important VIP kind of audience, I would still suggest sending to a landing page. Or if you require that you have the retargeting or tracking abilities that you would only get from sending to a landing page, then absolutely, same deal. When you're thinking lead gen form ads think that this is quantity over quality. So if your goal is quality, time, and attention from a very important prospect, definitely send to landing page. But if your goal is to get the cheapest cost per on your ideal audience, get them into your database for nurturing and so you can start doing some outreach Yeah, lead gen formats are going to be by far and away the best way to do that. Okay, I've got some episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

23:15
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

23:24
If this is the first one you're listening to make sure you hit that subscribe button in your podcast player. And definitely do a rate and review I would love to shout you out and feature you in the review section. So whatever podcast player you're on, go and review there. I would love to hear, especially any feedback. But of course, I'd love to know that this is making a difference in your own professional careers and lives. If you're new to LinkedIn advertising, definitely check out the LinkedIn advertising course on LinkedIn learning, that I partnered with LinkedIn to do. It's incredibly inexpensive and it's a great from beginning to maybe slightly intermediate type of course, so check that out. And if you're a LinkedIn pro subscriber, then you should have LinkedIn Learning for free. So it should be a just totally free course. If not, I think it's only $25, so definitely worth checking them out. If you have any feedback for the show, or any topics you'd like to have us cover, reach out at [email protected]. I'll see you back here next week cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.