LinkedIn Ads Show

Show resources:

Cities that tanked and others that didn't with jobs from covid.

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

Video ad specs
Carousel ad specs
Single image ad specs
Text ad specs
Message ads specs
Conversation ad specs
Dynamic ad specs

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

Transcript:

Four different ad formats with 10 plus variations. No wonder y'all are confused about how to create LinkedIn ads. Let's get it.

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

0:20
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So you guys ask me all the time about the different ad formats on LinkedIn? Which one should I use? Which one performs best? We're going to go into all the pros and cons of each one, and which situations to use them in. So we're going to hit it. But first, let's talk about the news. Obviously, this is going to roll out a little bit later because I record a little bit earlier. But COVID-19 is all throughout the news. So I wanted to share a little bit about how people are talking about COVID and how people are using LinkedIn because of it. LinkedIn, let me know that 33% of the posts right now are related to Coronavirus or COVID-19. And then of course topics like remote working, social distancing, those things have definitely seen at least made a showing in the types of content being shared. There's been a 19% increase in the number of posts about remote work, 8% increase in social distancing, 6% of additional posts on online collaboration. So definitely, we see a whole bunch more. What else was interesting though, to me is that we're seeing the hashtag #webinar as one of the fastest growing hashtags. And I think this definitely signals the need for brands to move to virtual events. So more people are doing webinars and virtual events and talking about them. It definitely seems like smaller companies are the ones getting involved, because those companies with 1 to 200 employees are the ones driving the increase in posting, whereas enterprises are actually posting a little bit less, they're only down about 1% pre-COVID. But you know, even with that, you figure the bigger enterprises are probably being disrupted more and pulling back and maybe the more nimble, smaller organizations are deciding to, you know, this is the time to speak up. One cool article I'll share in the show notes is called as US hiring skids, Atlanta and five other cities fight back. And it's a really cool article where LinkedIn's economic graph team actually did some research based off of who's hiring and who's not in the largest metropolitan areas. And there's a really cool graph in here where they show pre-COVID, especially what hiring rates looked like. And then afterwards, you can see, surprise, surprise from the title of the article, Atlanta is doing really well. But you'll want to jump on and check out and see how did Atlanta do compared to Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, and San Francisco. Some other really cool stats here on posting, LinkedIn says that there has been an 8% increase in weekly posting on pages. So companies, like we said, are getting more involved. There's been a 10% increase in content shared by pages, so definitely more more active in the feed just doing more 16% increase in lead gen campaigns. And then of course, you wouldn't be too surprised to hear that there's been a 78% increase in Coronavirus related videos. 26% increase in original posts with video. So just people are sharing more video right now. And then a 13% increase in thought leadership. And there's been a 13% increase in sharing industry news from third party articles. Something else really cool. This is you're going to hear this two weeks after we found out about it. But LinkedIn just barely this week released two new types of targeting. One of the new targeting is called company category. So you get to it by going to company and then company category. And there's a whole bunch in here of different types of company categories. You can target many having to deal with Fortune or Forbes. So there's Forbes fastest growing companies. There's Fortune 500 companies, which is something we've been asking for for a long time, this is great. LinkedIn's news editors actually have their own list of top companies by country. And so you can use these classifications to make sure you're hitting just the very fastest growing the very largest companies on the planet. It's awesome for those who are especially in the enterprise. But then the one that I'm actually arguably more interested in is called company growth rate. Now, you access this one the same way you go to company and then company growth rate. And there are options here like 0% to 3%, company growth, 3% to 10%, company growth 10% to 20%. And then 20% and above. You can actually even target negative growth companies, so those who are pulling back on the reins. Now, immediately when I saw this, I was asking, okay, how did LinkedIn get this data? Because it can't be by company size. Because if you look at just the company size buckets that LinkedIn has 1 to 10 or 11 to 50, 51 to 200, etc, just bumping from the next bucket up, you'd be looking at growth rates in the 60 to 90% range. So we know that LinkedIn is not pulling this from the data recorded by company page admins, as they are increasing their company sizes. And this is actually really good because if you relied on people to give just that data, I think it would be largely inaccurate. Company page admins just don't go in to update their company sizes all that often. But then I started thinking about it. LinkedIn, can actually know how big your company is based off of how many employees are adding them as an employer. So this is data that LinkedIn doesn't give us. But every new employee who comes to work for you can go and set you as their employer and LinkedIn sees this data. And this goes all the way down to a granularity of one. So even if you're in an industry where, let's say only 30% of your employees are even on LinkedIn, it doesn't matter. LinkedIn is calculating here a percent growth or percent change. And so as long as you know, one or two or three people come in and associate themselves to your company page and say they work for you, LinkedIn can see that growth, which I think is awesome. All right, now let's get down to the individual ad formats on LinkedIn. And we'll go through the pros and cons and all of that good stuff. We're going to start out with my favorite, which is sponsored content. Now, there are several different variations of sponsored content. So we'll cover each one. But here are the basics of just all types of sponsored content. You can expect about 80 plus percent of your traffic to come from mobile devices, because your sponsored content comes in the newsfeed and the majority of feed users are mobile. The homepage experience both on desktop and mobile is to dump you right into the feed. So you will see a lot of interaction there. We expect somewhere around 0.4% click through rate, so a little bit under half a percent. And we generally expect to see a cost per click anywhere between about $8 to $11. The floor though is variable. So that what that means is for one audience, you might bid all the way down and find out that your floor is $5 and 50 cents. And then for a different audience, you might find that it's $6 and 27 cents or something like that. So you just have to find that floor by just reducing your bids until LinkedIn screams at you and tells you what the floor is.

7:35
So then we start looking at single image ads, which is, again, my very favorite version of sponsored content, because it's the simplest, it's the least risky. I ended up recommending this type of ad format to about 95% of advertisers. It's such a great starter ad format, because it's so simple to troubleshoot. It's made up of really three elements. There's text up Above at the top of the ad, which is called intro text, and that's by far the most important piece. Then you have a big beautiful image that's 1200 pixels wide by 627 tall. And then down below, you have a headline. Now for your intro, you want to make sure that you keep it under about 150 characters for that intro, so that it doesn't truncate and show the See More link. For the headline down below, keep it under about 70 characters and a little bit less if you want to make sure it doesn't get truncated on mobile. Our ideal we found if we keep it under about 130 characters for the intro and about 60 for the headline, we tend to see better performance, but certainly your mileage may vary here.

8:45
Then the next variation here is carousel ads. Now I recommend carousel ads about zero percent of the time and the reason why is because there there are a lot of work to create. You have to use a different image size and you can have up to 10 cards in an ad, but creating each card, you have to have your own unique, visual creative, and it gets its own headline. So if I had to create a carousel ad with four cards in it, it would be about the same amount of work as creating four separate single image ads. So it's a lot harder to create it, it's more effort. And for that effort, I don't see us getting rewarded very much. There doesn't seem to be a huge increase in performance, and there's certainly no reduction of cost. So I don't end up recommending this very often, unless you have visual creative that tells a really interesting story in these tiles that you can scroll through. One potential good use here might be if you were, if you're advertising, some kind of maybe an online summit, and each card you could show a different headshot of one of your keynote speakers, so people get a feel for you know, here are the types of speakers you might hear from if you register the same rules apply a single image here, where you get the same hundred and 50 characters for an intro. But then each card only gets 45 characters for a headline. And each image on the card needs to be formatted to 1080 by 1080.

10:15
The next variant is video ads. Now I end up recommending video ads only to about 5% of advertisers. And that generally means these are going to be the 5% of advertisers who are expert at video, they've already aced their creative on about every other network. And so when they come to LinkedIn, they already know that their creative is very high performance. And so it's a really easy translation. There are three different ways you can pay for video ads. Most people know the two second video view or the impression. Many don't know that you can actually also bid by the click which is the the least risky version and my favorite. So if I have video creative, I'm going to test it in a website visits objective first If it performs well to the click, then I can start testing. If I could save even more money to bidding by two second view or by the impression. There are three different formats for your video. You can do 16 by 9, which is just the normal it's 1920 by 1080. We've been able to do square for a while, which is 1920 by 1920, or even smaller sizes throughout. And that makes it nice for both mobile and desktop. But what's new that LinkedIn just released is vertical video. So now you can do video that's 1080 wide by 1920 tall. And this is great for specifically targeting the mobile users. If you have video creative that is formatted for vertical, it's actually only going to show up on mobile devices. So if you wanted to segment only to mobile devices, that could be a good way to do it. My recommendation is to keep all of your video under 30 seconds if possible, because if it's much longer, you will have Either most people not willing to stay and watch or a huge drop off before the end. So be brief. Also keep in mind, the same rule for all of social video applies here, it's going to start playing automatically, and it's going to play a muted, which means you want your thumbnail, the very first frame in the video should be something exciting. So if the video hasn't loaded yet, as they're scrolling by, it at least catches their eye. And then because the sounds off and 80% of people are going to watch it, totally with the sound off, you want to make sure that your subtitles are great. You can do this two different ways. You could either burn subtitles into the video file itself, which is really safe. Or you can generate an SRT file, a .SRT subtitles file. There are lots of different ways you can do this. You could go and pay rev.com $1 per minute to transcribe for you and created a dot SRT file. But then you upload that .SRT file as you upload the video, and LinkedIn will attach the subtitles to it and you'll be off to the races. My biggest qualm with LinkedIn video ads is that there just hasn't been an ability to retarget the traffic. So we pay LinkedIn premium prices, but then we can't do anything with it if they don't end up clicking. But this of course, changes in October in October, at least so far, it's looking like October, LinkedIn is going to be releasing engagement retargeting to the public, and then we'll be able to say something like if you've watched 50% of my first video, now I want to show you the second one in the sequence. Now my strategy here is if I can launch my video ads with CPC bidding, where I'm only going to pay by click, if I'm running this against other ads to the same audience, similar message, static image. If I can get my costs per click anywhere close on the video ads to the static ad, then I'm going to be happy running video ads. I know I can communicate way more emotion through video than I can from a static image. So if my cost per click is anywhere close, I'm assuming my lead quality is going to be better. And so I'm willing to pay, you know, maybe 10%, 20% more per click for a video. But if I'm paying double or triple for a video view, click, then I'm going to be happier running a static ads. Format here is it needs to be mp4 and it needs to be under 200 megabytes in file size. And you'll want to shoot at less than 30 frames per second because LinkedIn can't handle more than that. You can check out the link to the video add specs if you want to go deeper. Those are in the show notes below.

14:49
Next, we have a variation that can be applied to any type of sponsored content and actually any type of sponsored messaging ad too, and that is of course lead gen forms. Now, lead gen forms are really interesting. And they have been an absolute game changer for so many of our clients. And what they are, is if you interact with one of these ads, you click on it, a drawer will slide down with a form within the ad itself. That means there's no waiting for a new landing page to load. There's no assessing, do I trust this site or not? Because they're staying on LinkedIn. LinkedIn even sweetens the pot a little bit by auto filling all the fields that they know for the prospect. So if you're only asking for first name, last name, login email address. I really like asking for LinkedIn profile URL, that's a great one. So you don't have to ask for much else. You can get everything through that. Then this form is going to be totally auto filled. And if the prospect is interested, all they have to do is hit the submit button. Because LinkedIn has made this so frictionless. You will see incredibly high converting rates, we find that our conversion rates are most of the time 10% to 50%, higher. And we've definitely seen some times where conversion rates will double or even triple. Now, certainly lead gen forms are amazing, but they're not always a silver bullet. Because of that, I only recommend them to about 60% of advertisers. And the reason why is when you are using a lead gen form, that user it was so easy for them to fill out the form. Sometimes they don't even remember having filled out the form. And so if you contact them three days later, they may say, I'm pretty sure I didn't request any information from you, or I've never heard of you before. And it just generally leads to a lower quality of lead. Facebook advertisers will tell you this all day long with Facebook's lead ads, which is essentially the same product. Lots of times people assume Well, if all the form fields just filled out automatically, then people won't mind how much info I'm asking for. Well, that's not true. We've actually found that the more fields we ask for, we can scare people away, even if it's a lead gen form. So we suggest asking for fewer fields. But just be aware, whatever you're asking for, it will probably convert 10% to 50% higher as a lead gen form than it would if you send them to a landing page. Once someone actually fills out a form, LinkedIn is not going to deliver it to you super easily. So you're going to have to get the lead out of LinkedIn and into whatever system you're using. If you happen to be using salesforce.com, Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, live ramp, Microsoft Dynamics and a few others, then you're very much taken care of. There is a native integration there ready for you. But if you're not using one of their native integrated partners, you'll want to use Zapier.com. On their $20 a month plan, they can pipe your leads from LinkedIn into pretty much any CRM or marketing automation system out there. Like I mentioned, these lead gen forms can be attached to any type of sponsored content, or any type of message ads, which we'll get to here in a moment. They're a great way to reduce friction in your whole advertising process. So if you're having a hard time getting someone to, let's say, hop on the phone for a free consultation, maybe you have a super low conversion rate on your landing page, it's definitely worth trying as a lead gen form. Because it's taking so much of the friction away. I found that lead gen forms are by far the cheapest way to get your very qualified types of prospects into your email list for nurturing. They're just as no cheaper way to do that on LinkedIn. So this is great for just reducing your cost per lead. We talked about the lead quality generally being perceived as lower, and that is very, very true. We also see some other weaknesses, which is why I don't recommend these to 100% of advertisers. Because the traffic never lands on your website. You don't Don't get to track it with UTM parameters or any sort of analytics that you do. And you also can't retarget that traffic, at least yet, in October we'll be able to. So if your goal is to make as strong of an impression as possible on a super high value prospect, then I would still send them to a landing page. But certainly if your goal is just to get the cheapest cost for getting your ideal prospects into your funnel, so that you can then nurture them, then lead gen forms win hands down every time.

19:31
Then we move on to the text ads. I love text ads, they are very under appreciated, because they were the original ad format back in the day, these launched back in 2008. And they were the only ad format until 2013. When sponsored content launched. I love them so much because they are they utilize the same targeting as all the other ad formats. So you know your lead quality is going to be high and they're also the least expensive ad out there. The floor is static, they are always $2 per click at the floor. And you'll likely end up paying somewhere between about $3 to $5 per click. So if you're just trying to dip your toe in the water in LinkedIn Ads, and not spend a whole lot and just get a feel for what the lead qualities like, I would recommend text ads. The big downside to text ads is really, they're very low click through rate. The average click through rate we see from these is .025%. Put into perspective, that is two and a half clicks out of every 10,000 times these ads are displayed. So very, very low click through rate. You'd have to have either a very large audience or a click through rate that is much higher than average to really spend much budget at all. If you were into Google ads or AdWords back in the day, this will feel very familiar. We get a 25 character headline on these and then a 75 characters Description, which is the old AdWords was 35 and 35, for description lines. So LinkedIn gave us an extra five combined for a description, we also get a 100 by 100 pixel image, which is most often reduced to 50 x 50. The low click through rate can be a little bit of a liability, it means it's hard to spend too much money on them. And you might wonder if it's worth your time to actually set up because of how little traffic it runs. But I want to tell you about something that I really appreciate, which is you get tons of free branding. The frequency cap on these is something like 20 impressions per day per member. So imagine everything your ideal prospects are doing. They're seeing your logo in front of their face constantly. That can be very powerful. We've seen a lift as much as 15% when we're running sponsored content, and then we launch text ads to the same audience. We'll see 15% higher click through rates in our sponsored content. So there is power in combining these for sure. These are over in the right rail only on desktop, so you might not even remember having seen them. They usually show up in a three pack, sometimes there's a two pack. And very often, the top bidder will appear at the very top of the page in an ad format that LinkedIn used to sell individually called the one by one, but it's just a single line of text at the very top of your browser. I mentioned these are super low risk. And the reason why is because they don't get clicked on very much. So it's really hard to spend too much budget, and when they get clicked, it's usually a really inexpensive click. So if you're looking for just low risk getting the cheapest clicks possible, and you like the idea of 100% of this traffic being from a desktop because this isn't even available on mobile devices, then text ads are for you. I generally recommend them to About 15% of advertisers, but certainly I think they're worth anyone's time just for the branding aspect.

23:08
Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the sponsored messaging ad formats right after this.

23:13
The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn Ads experts.

23:23
B2Linked is the LinkedIn ads focused agency. We manage many of LinkedIn's largest accounts worldwide, and we are official LinkedIn partners, do contact us on B2Linkedin.com to get in touch, and our team can help you enact these and other strategies to help you get the very best of the best performance.

23:42
All right, let's jump now into sponsored messaging. There are now two different flavors of sponsored messaging. So we'll go through both. But we'll start out with just the basics about the entire category. I want you to think of this like it's a cold email. And rather than the other ad formats we've talked about, so far, where you're only paying when someone clicks, these, you actually pay per send. So you're going to pay on average 20 to 60 cents. And that's in North America, that's about what we pay. And you send these to someone with no guarantee that they will see it or open it, or click on your call to action. So this ends up being actually the most expensive ad format, and making it also the riskiest. Here's how the math works out and how you should think about these. So you're going to pay 20 to 60 cents per person you send it to, on average about 50% will open. And then on average, about 3% to 4% of people of those who open it will end up clicking on your call to action. So when you look at your actual cost per click here, you're going to end up in the $10 to $40 range, which is insane, and that's all based off of the averages. So of course if you're going to be running these, you don't want to be average, you want to get a higher than a 50% open rate, and then a significantly higher click through rate. If you can do that, you can end up getting cost per click significantly lower than where you could with sponsored content. But it takes a very special kind of offer to make this work. When I say a special offer, I mean, it has to feel like a personal invitation. If you have an offer, like hey, because of who you are in the industry, we want to give you early access or a sneak peek at something that we're building or it's something in your industry. That feels very special. It feels very VIP. Maybe you want to invite someone as a VIP to a free event you're putting on where there's going to be drinks and networking with their peers. That also feels very special. Maybe even something like hey, we're looking for people like you. Does this position look interesting to you would you want to apply? Those are all great examples of things that performed very well as a sponsored messaging ad. The rule that I run every one of my message ads through is I asked myself if I would be excited about getting this as a cold email from someone, or if I would mark it as spam. Because if you would mark it as spam, you know, this would be the most expensive way you could advertise on LinkedIn. But if a cold email to you, you'd be excited about the opportunity, then you know that this is going to land super well as an ad. We mentioned before that these can be attached to lead gen forms, which really helps conversion rates. And because these feel very personal because there is some dynamic insertion you can do. You can insert someone's first name, last name, title, company, industry, this will feel very personal to them. It'll feel like someone is actually reaching out to them and feel a little bit special. So when you get leads here, they are generally of a much higher quality, which is great. Be aware though, when you are evaluating your performance here, realize that LinkedIn is not truthful in the metrics that they show you. Now I know that's a bold accusation. But let me explain. on all of the other ad formats, you only have two layers, you have an impression goes to a click, and then a click goes to a conversion. But with sponsored messaging ads, you effectively have one extra step in between. So LinkedIn added the opens, but when they started calculating click through rate, the same way that they always have, click through rate, as they say, it is actually just your open rate. So people look at this and go, Oh, wow, I have a 40 cent cost per click here. That sounds insane. And it really is because if you calculate it out, you're probably only going to have a three to a 4% click through rate. And so your metrics there about what your cost per click are, if you're just looking at the dashboard are definitely going to be lying to you. So if you are running any sort of sponsored messaging, I would encourage you go and manually calculate it. Go and look at your cost for how much you've sent. And then just divided by the number of actual clicks you've received on your offer. And that will tell you what your actual cost per click is. And certainly, if I had a cost per click that was 20 30%, higher on sponsored messaging, then I would be happy to pay that, because the lead quality is generally much better. And these are so good at delivering rapidly if you're trying to get the word out about something. This is a great way of pushing it out to people. So you're not just waiting for you're putting something in the feed and waiting for people to click and come to you.

28:30
When you use these, you do get a free banner ad. And not everyone takes them up on this, but realize that if you don't upload a 300 by 250 banner ad to be used on just your desktop visitors, it's just a waste because one of your competitors could pop up instead. So it's certainly worth going to your designer and having them kick out an extra banner image for you.

28:52
Okay, so let's go down to the actual flavors of what sponsored messaging commands. The very first one, the original is called Message ads, it used to be called sponsored in mail. Now, I only recommend these to about 5% of advertisers simply because you really only get one shot with someone, you send them out this message. And if they don't click on it, they're gone. And in order for someone to actually want to click on it, it really does have to be this special kind of offer that makes them feel like a VIP makes them feel very valued. This will appear in your messaging. So in your LinkedIn in mail, you get a subject line that people see first, up to 60 characters, and then you get text in the message itself up to 1500 characters. Now, if your subject line is good, you'll see your open rate be higher than 50%. So try to get it up in the %60, 70% is, I think 76% the highest I've ever seen. And then your text, even if you're allowed 1500 characters, I would recommend still shooting for less. People don't want to read a wall of text. And so start by teasing them. Don't give them everything. up front. Otherwise, they'll just see a wall of text and start to ignore you. But if that text is effective, you should see a click through rate higher than 4%. So watch for that. All of the other ad formats are relatively quick to create, we will end up designing all of our ads in Excel. So we have very quick copy and paste to create ads. But any sort of sponsored messaging is a lot more involved. It takes us about two or more minutes per ad to create a message ad, whereas it's probably going to end up taking us less than one minute to create sponsored content of any kind, and certainly texts that are super quick. There's also no retargeting here yet for message ads, so if someone doesn't make it to your landing page, they're kind of just gone to you. Now when engagement retargeting comes out in October, I'm really hopeful that they will have retargeting here where you could say something like if someone opened my message ad but didn't click, then I want to send them another one. Because these are like a cold email, they work really well to warm audiences because it's not cold anymore. It's now warm. But then I think about it like this. If I already have their email address, then why wouldn't I just email them for free? Why would I pay LinkedIn 20 to 60 cents to send it, but these can be really good for that.

31:23
But the newest variation that LinkedIn just barely came out with I mentioned a couple episodes ago in the news section. These are called conversation ads. They are Lincoln's newest ad format, and one that I'm truly excited about. I told you that I only recommend message ads to about 5% of advertisers because you have to have this special offer. But your conversation ads are essentially a chat bot experience. So you'll send this to someone and you'll give them some options. And let's say you were asking someone if they were going to be at an event because maybe you're going to be at that event and you'd like to meet them at your booth to talk. You might start off the conversation by saying, "Hey, are you going to be at this event?" And if they respond, no, they're not just gone like they would be with message ads. You can follow up and say, "Oh, well, sorry, you're not going to be there to meet us. But hey, how about do you want to join this webinar we're doing next week to talk about something that we're going to be talking about at the conference anyway, and you won't miss out on the great conference stuff". So because you get more shots on goal here, you're not just wasting it with one message that people aren't especially interested in. Now you can test different messages. And what we found we were actually part of the pilot here, and we have a case study with our clients on the initial release of conversation ads. We found that these have a 30% higher conversion rate than message ads did. So that means that 30% of the traffic that would have just seen the message and bounced, ended up converting, which is amazing. So because it's 30% more effective, it means I can end up recommending these a lot more often. So I find myself recommending conversation adds about 10% of advertisers, as opposed to the 5% from message ads. I think with these being just more versatile than message ads, and really giving us more shots on goal, I think these will very quickly become the most used sponsored messaging ad format. The big downside to you who's creating it, though, these are even more involved than message ads. I told you that it takes us about two minutes per message ad to create one with conversation ads, it takes us 20 plus minutes to create each ad.

33:46
There's no bulk creation, there's not very many shortcuts. So it's it's very difficult to do these, but knowing that they perform 30% better is enough for me to say it's worth our time in creating. Your initial message. be up to 500 characters. And you can, at least as far as we can tell, you can ask unlimited questions. And you do get to put unique links in for every answer. So if you're really insane about your UTM tracking parameters like we are, every single answer, every single question, can have a unique tracking link so you can really pay attention to what's working and what's not.

34:24
Alright, now let's move on to dynamic ads. Now, you might know dynamic ads as being LinkedIns creepiest ad format, because they stick your picture into them. That's, of course joking. I've heard a few people say that that's creepy. But I think most people understand that a company is not actually sticking your face in their ad. This is done by LinkedIn dynamically. These are shared inventory with text ads. So they are only available on desktop and they're over in the right rail, because they're essentially combining what was three different text ads, they tend to have a click through rate. That's six nificantly higher than text ads, but will still look significantly lower than your sponsored content. I recommend these to about 10% of advertisers. I used to recommend these zero percent because they used to be insanely expensive. They were usually twice the price of sponsored content, and their click through rates were low like text ads. But just recently, LinkedIn had a price reduction on these when they took all of the inventory back from their programmatic ads, and dynamic ads was the beneficiary of that reduction and got all of the ad inventory. So because of that cost per click came down significantly. And now I recommend these a lot more because you can pay between six to $8 per click on these, whereas they used to be in the 15 to $18 range. This is the best ad format that you can use to get people to follow your company page. It's a native ad format that's just asking "Hey, we want you to follow our company page". These started out life as an ad format just for talent solutions, the the talent side of the business. And then LinkedIn Marketing Solutions ended up taking it because it was already developed, and it was worth a shot. These do work very well for hiring, you've probably seen the ads that are like picture yourself at IBM. You get a 70 character description, and then a 50 character headline down below, and a 100 by 100 pixel image. These come in three different flavors. One's called spotlight ads, which funny name, but it just means that it links to your website. So if you want to send someone to an external landing page, that's on your website, you'll want to select spotlight ads. And for these, you'll get an optional 300 by 250 pixel background image. So you can customize these a little bit to maybe feel more like your brand. You can also dynamically insert their first name, their job title, and even their company name as variables.

37:05
Then, like I mentioned, there is a follower ad. And this is just to follow the company page. And it is the most efficient way to get more company page followers as you're paying for them. This is so much better after the price reduction, because now you can actually get your cost per follower down into a really palatable range. You can dynamically insert someone's first name and company name into this. The third variation is called job ads. And I don't have a whole lot to say here except they exist. And that's because I've never used them for a job ad purpose. I would much rather use sponsored content and text ad formats to get people for a position. So I haven't ever used these, I'm assuming very similar performance to the others. Okay, I've got all of the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around

38:01
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show.

38:04
Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

38:11
Okay, we're gonna go over all of the episode resources. So down in the show notes, you'll find that article we talked about at the beginning about the cities that because of COVID, their hiring either did okay, or it totally tanked. So that'll be interesting to watch. But you'll also notice links to all of the different ad specs around each of the ad formats. So check and see a link to video ad specs, carousel ad specs, single image ads, text ads, message ads, conversation ads, and dynamic ads. So whichever of these you want to start creating, go ahead and check out the specs to make sure that you've got all of the assets you need to tackle them. There's also a link to our LinkedIn Course that we did with LinkedIn Learning. You'll definitely want to check that out. It's very inexpensive and a great walkthrough and introduction In the world of LinkedIn Ads. And of course, I would implore you on whichever podcast player you are listening, please hit that subscribe button so you can hear more of this awesome deep LinkedIn ads content, if I don't say so myself. And then of course, if you're liking what you're hearing, please do rate and review. It makes a big difference because we're on Episode 12. This is very early on in the journey and certainly anyone who's interested in LinkedIn Ads, I hope they are listening to this. So please help share it with them. drop us an email at [email protected] with any ideas for episodes, any questions based off of what you've heard, and we will see you back here next week. We're cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Resources for the episode:

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Show resources:

Pages Resource

LinkedIn Learning Course

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

Transcript:

LinkedIn Pages are inextricably connected to LinkedIn Ads. And we're talking to the head of Pages today about the newest features, and you're not gonna want to miss it.

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

0:23
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. On this episode, I interview Ting Ba, LinkedIn's Head of their Pages product. I've been excited about this one for a while. Since pages are so crucial to advertising, I thought you'd love to hear the most recent updates on the product. First off, I have to apologize for the sound quality on this interview. Ting is amazing. And she's also incredibly busy. And we couldn't make this happen while I was there in person. So as soon as I found out that she could do it over zoom without good audio equipment. I said screw it, I'm happy to record however we could make this happen.

0:56
So let's hit it. Hi, everyone. I'm super excited to introduce you to Ting Ba. She is the group Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn over Pages. Ting, first of all, welcome. Thanks for coming on. And we'd love to hear about you tell us about you personally at work, anything you'd want to share.

1:13
Thanks, AJ so much for having me happy to introduce myself. So like he says, I'm a group Product Marketing Manager for LinkedIn Pages. I've been with LinkedIn for actually just over a year. It's crazy how time flies by. And in my role, I lead Product Marketing for LinkedIn Pages, and reallyall the different kind of organic opportunities a business could take advantage of on our platform. And I have to say, I truly, genuinely love my job. I get to really help businesses of all sizes all over the world find success on our platform, which is really very gratifying for me, because I come from a background of, you know,family that's largely small business owners and so very personally gratifying. Just in terms of me, personally, you know a bit about me, I live in the California Bay Area, in Paul Alto, with my husband, and we've got two little girls, Audrey and Sophie. Audrey is one, Sophie is four. And yeah, just very blessed to be able to, you know, do a job I love and have a family that I get to hang out with after work.

2:09
That's awesome. And you're in the right place because you are leading a product that we all use. And I'm sure love. And so thanks, first of all, for all your hard work on your product. As many of you may know, LinkedIn Pages are inextricably linked to advertising. So that's my interest in having Ting come on and talk about this. But there was also a recent quarterly update that went out. And so stay tuned here at the end, we'll get to talk a little bit more about that. I think foundationally we really have to start with what our LinkedIn Pages give us the very basics of how we should understand how this fits into our roles to our companies to our marketing mix.

2:47
Yeah, AJ, that's such a great question. I think it's really important to start with something foundational like that, which is essentially what is the LinkedIn Page? So really, quite simply, a LinkedIn Page is what I would consider to be a business's most Important online asset. It's essentially your foundation in the world's professional community. It's a place where businesses of all sizes really all over the world can share their mission, their vision, their values, and also promote their products and services with a professional community. It's actually the first place that LinkedIn members go so they can learn more about your brand, what you stand for, and why they should do business with you or work for you, for that matter. So I would say actually, in the same way that a LinkedIn profile offers this unique value to members to grow themselves. A LinkedIn Page offers this unique value to organizations.

3:35
And you did mention in there about kind of these employment opportunities as well as promoting the company. Can you share a little bit about how how companies can go about buoying up your page to help it look better for recruiting versus trying to look good as a company and maybe trying to get business out of that?

3:54
Yeah, it's a great question is, you know, kind of the way that you would strategize corporate branding versus talent branding. It's a great question. If you're really focused on talent branding, there are things you can just do completely for free, without spending any dollars on our platform to help showcase your talent brand. Some things I've seen some brands do a good job of is they spotlight their current employees and really showcase, you know, what their passions are for working for the company, but also by their passions outside of work, I think spotlighting employees is a really great way to humanize your brand and show your true talent potential. But in terms of corporate brand, there's a whole bunch of things that you can do with your page to really showcase what your company is all about. There's some of the features that I'll definitely talk to you as we talk about what recently launched, but some ideas that I have are off the top of my bat is just you know, leveraging video, right, or potentially leveraging document uploads to showcase the best of your brand. With document uploads. You can upload PDFs, PowerPoints, and Word docs to showcase perhaps your menu of services or customer testimonials. With video, video is just really taken off in our platform. You know, it's actually the fastest growing content type, completely free to use, and members really engage with it. So those are just some ways of how you can use some of our features to really better promote your corporate brand.

5:08
That's fantastic. So let's say there's someone out there who does not currently have a a business's company page, or sorry, I keep calling a company page, we should call them organizational pages. What would you tell someone? Why should someone go obviously, who isn't an advertiser? Why should someone go and set up a page on LinkedIn? And how should they think about filling it out and making the most of it?

5:31
That's a really common question that I get AJ. Oftentimes, people ask like, well, that's great you're sharing all this with me, but why should I care? Like, why should I actually put the time and effort into creating a LinkedIn Page? So, I can answer this question by just kind of taking a step back and sharing with you more about the LinkedIn platform.

5:49
So as you know, LinkedIn is a professional community. And generally speaking, we've seen some incredibly strong growth when it comes to the number of members that are actually joining our platform. In fact, as of today, we have over 645 million professionals that are actually on our platform. And I also want to mention that for the third year in a row, LinkedIn has been votedas the most trusted social media platform, which I think is really important in this day and age. Lastly, I want to also share that last year, an independent research agency actually put together this report, pretty cool, to understand the different mindsets that consumers have when they log into different social media platforms. And what the research showed is thatwhen people log into LinkedIn, they actually log inwith an intent and a mindset to learn and to actually look for opportunities versus when they're on other platforms, they're actually really more focused on passive entertainment. And I think it's actually really important to note that because what this means is that this is an incredibly unique and powerful opportunity for businesses of all sizes, to really get in front of a growing professional audience that's actually paying attention and engaged from the moment they login. And considering that the LinkedIn Page is really the first place people will look when they want to learn more about you want to perform means that you should really invest the effort upfront to set it up and keep it maintained.

7:06
That's perfect. I love it. What would you say to someone who is, let's say, marketing manager, they know they have five different channels that they need to manage? Why should they come to their LinkedIn page and share content specifically?

7:21
Yeah, it's a great question because we all know that people nowadays, especially in marketing are very time strapped, right, they're getting pulled in different directions. And people's attention spans are generally pretty short. And so if you do spend your valuable time on another platform, it really has to be worth your time and attention. And so in order to really influence people that LinkedIn is really a platform or the best again, I kind of go back to those stats around how we have over 645 million professionals on our platform, and that is the most trusted platform actually, of all the social media platforms. I think that trust actually is what really makes it go a long way. I think when you have trust, that means that the messages that you're hearing are actually landing with you, and actually leaving an impression on you much more so and much more long lasting than if you want a platform where you really can't trust all the advertisements and all the direct messages you're hearing. I think trust is inherent to building relationships and so of our platform has it, it's definitely a place you want to be investing your time in.

8:15
I agree. I love when I go and check out a company. And I see that they've shared something today or they shared something yesterday. It shows the lights are on em someone's home and I tend to trust that brand quite a bit more.

8:26
Yes, exactly. And it's the trust is definitely a key component. And another thing that I think a lot of brands will immediately recognize once you start investing is that the engagement quality is especially high. You're not just getting reactions or kind of like you know, your affinity metrics of like impressions and likes, you are actually getting a quality comments from people. Because, as you know, on LinkedIn, you're not anonymous. Everything's tied back to professional profile. People go on not only to learn, but they also want to demonstrate that they're thought leaders are that they're experts in their professional field. And so you oftentimes can have these really great, engaging quality conversations around topics that people care about. And I think that's very rewarding, I would think, as a marketing manager, right, to be able to actually engage and build a relationship with the community. I think that's that that kind of people will engagement is what really we should all be aiming for in marketing.

9:14
I agree, it's not just an asset you set up once and tick the box. And it's done. It's a place to actually spend time and a place to really provide value, I think.

9:22
Yeah, I think it's really all about the long term value. And I think when you have these kind of quality relationships and conversations being built, that's where you really have like, I think the framework for a long term, long term success.

9:33
So I remember the days of old where the company page, you really had four things, you could put a logo on it, you could write a paragraph, fill out a few fields, and that was kind of it. Those days are gone. Your LinkedIn page really does more now, what are the types of things that you can now do with with an organization's page?

9:51
Yes, you've been there on the journey with us from the beginning and things I've really uh, there's things have really evolved since then. And so I would love to share with you what you can do with it. Did pagers actually so much. And just to kind of make it a little bit easier to kind of understand the different opportunities, I'll bring it up into things you can do organically, as well as things you can do through paid solutions. And so in terms of what you can do organically, I'm really proud to share that actually, you can get great organic reach on LinkedIn, which is not super common lately, right? There's actually no cap to the amount of organic reach you can get. And in fact, we've created features to help you maximize your organic reach. And so a couple things I want to highlight that are my favorite features.

10:28
One of them is communities hashtags, which we introduced a couple of months ago. And so with this feature, what you can do is associate your page with up to three different hashtags around topics that you care about. And you can also see real time how many members are following these hashtags. Now, the beauty of this feature is you can actually click into the hashtag conversation feed and kind of just see what people are talking about, see what kind of posts are trending within this hashtag. And you can actually click into the conversation to actually talk to people from the perspective of your organization. Now that to me is one of the most authentic and best organic ways to grow your brand's awareness is by actually having conversations with people who care about the same topics, but just maybe haven't heard of your brand. Like, that's pretty cool.

11:12
And it's not just the followers that you get to to have. It's not you're now getting your brand in front of people who are having real active conversations. That's a big deal.

11:22
Yeah, exactly. It's not just your followers is way more broad than that. And you're still talking to people who care about the same topic because it's all around a topical hashtag. So completely true.

11:31
Another thing I would highlight as something you really effective you can do organically to increase your reach is a video. I mentioned it earlier, but I'll say it again, you know, video, it's, you know, organic video is free use on our platform. And it's such a fast growing content type. It's actually five times more likely to generate engagement than just a standard post. And very recently, we also introduced LinkedIn Live, which is essentially live video streaming on our platform. And this has just really taken off on the platform. It actually drives, even compared to regular video, 24 times more engagement, and brands are just really loving all of the engagement that they're seeing. And so that's another thing I'd highly recommend is something you can do right now today organically on your page. Now, once you start to really, you know, invest organically in your page to really make sure you're taking full advantage of all the learnings, what we recommend is that you actually check out your LinkedIn Page analytics, because there's a robust set of information you can find there. And you'll really be able to get a sense of who's visiting your page and have deeper insights into their role, their function, level of seniority, and also what kind of content resonates most with them. And once you get a sense of this target, demographic profile, and like what kind of content you should be sharing, this is where the paid solutions can really come into play and impactful role. We actually have a really strong portfolio of paid solutions that can amplify all of your organic efforts. I'll just quickly highlight some examples. Sponsored content is a really great example of a paid solution. These are essentially apps that live in our LinkedIn feed. And they include static image, video, and carousel ads. And we actually combined a sponsored content campaign in parallel with a sponsored inmail campaign, which are basically targeted messages you can send to members, you can actually see a two x lift and your overall conversion rate.

13:16
I love those stats of how each of the ad formats really works together to help your overall goal. And that's something that we can't see from our side. That's like, you guys can see it on your side. And so we love it when you share that. Thanks so much.

13:30
Yeah, for sure.

13:32
So you just recently released a new update. This came out on October 14, I believe it was a Tuesday. Oh, 15th. So it was the quarterly update for pages. Can you tell us about what you announced and maybe the effects how we as LinkedIn members, how we should use it, what we should be excited about?

13:53
Yeah, I'm so glad you asked that because we did make a pretty big announcement. We're super excited about it. I'm happy to talk about you know, what we what we talked about. So, at a high level, what we launched are a series of features that will actually make it easier for organizations to build meaningful professional communities with members. And the first feature that we launched is something called employee notifications. Now, this feature is really exciting. It's one of its kind. And what it does is it enables brands to transform their employees into brand advocates. And I think this is really important because employees are oftentimes every brands best advocate, right? They work for you. They're proud to work for you. And they do want to actually talk about the great work they're doing. But we've found that historically, it's actually pretty hard for any brand to kind of scale this. So that's why we introduced this new organic feature to make it easier for brands to leverage their employees voices to build meaningful awareness. Now, in terms of like how this should be used by members. The way this works is, if a brand has an important message that they want to have their employees share on their behalf. What they can do is they can actually prompt their employees through a push notification to reshare, that message, the employees will actually get a push notification on their mobile device available on iOS and Android. And they have an opportunity to consider whether or not they actually want to share that with their professional network. And we recommend you know that it's really something you don't do more than say once a week as a brand. So you don't over notify your employees. We actually have a built in guardrails for you can't use this feature more than once every seven days. So that's the first feature.

15:28
I love that one. I have to say, I get asked all the time from those who are marketers, obviously, on the ad side, but they're saying organically, we want to do something with our company, page too, and maybe we don't have that many followers or when we share it doesn't get all too much engagement or doesn't get more than let's say if the employees themselves shared it. And yeah, this just seems like such a great vehicle to leverage the networks and the networks networks of all of your employees as well as grow your company page. Following, this just feels like a total home run to me.

16:02
Yeah. And AJ, I think you made a good point, because I think it all comes back to what we talked about earlier, which is trust. I think the reason why a lot of brands want to lean on employees to really be brand advocates is because employees are, they're humans who are trusted within their own professional communities. And I think when you you know, really speak on behalf of a company for the company speaking itself, it lands so much more, right with like, local communities. And so I think it is actually a really powerful feature. And I think I really what I really want to encourage brands to do is really think about the messages that you're sharing, make sure that they're ones that you feel are important and are true to your company's mission versus more short term, you know, kind of messages really make sure that their core to driving forward, you know, I think a more long term message, and again, you can only use this once a week, so make sure whatever message you do pick that it's something that is a value to a larger community and is more long term thinking.

16:54
And it seems like something that we as, let's say community managers inside of companies should probably letting employees know, like, hey, just a heads up, you're probably going to start seeing notifications about the stuff that we as a company care about the most. Do you recommend that kind of a pre messaging strategy, letting them know, before you start sending push notifications?

17:14
That's such a, that's such a good insight, actually, that probably giving a heads up to your internal teams wouldbe helpful. So they won't be as caught off guard or like they won't find it jarring when they get a notification. And so I actually think that is a really good best practice that and this is a feature you plan to use frequently and right off the bat. But it's actually really helpful to give people a heads up, so they're not surprised by it or that they don't just ignore it.

17:36
That feels really good to me. So that was the first part of the announcement. What were the other two announcements that came out?

17:44
Yes. So along similar lines, right, you can kind of notice a theme around you know, kind of leveraging employees. We also introduced employee kudos and team moments as a way for brands to recognize their employees and their teams on key milestones such as work anniversaries, major Project completions or promotions. And personally, I think that recognizing your teams and your employees, the people who really do the work is important for all organizational cultures. And I believe this is actually going to be key for helping brands, humanize their brands in front of members, and also better showcase their talent brand. And so we're really excited about having watched that as well.

18:21
Is that an external thing? Or is it Do you have to be working for the company in order to see those announcements,

18:26
So anyone can see those announcements. It's going to be broadly available on your LinkedIn page. And one thing I do want to mention is that you can only give kudos or share team bonus moments with people who actually work for your company. Meaning like, you can't recognize a partner today, or you can't recognize a customer. But I think those are compelling use cases that we might consider in the future. And we're always looking for feedback. So if there are, you know, optimizations people like to see to this feature or anything I just mentioned, please send them my way because we're always looking for ways to optimize our product experiences.

18:57
Great, I think this is actually a positive thing that they have to be associated with the company page to be recognized. Because every once in a while we'll find an employee of a company who didn't type the company's name in properly or set up their profile before the company had a page or something, and they're not associated with it. This feels like a great way to get your employees all on associated to the right company page.

19:20
That's a good point, AJ, I did not think about that. That is really, really good thinking. Yeah, that absolutely is true. It's like a forcing function.

19:26
Yeah, totally.

19:29
All right. So anything else you want to share about the kudos feature?

19:33
No, just that we are really excited about it. And definitely, as you see it, you know, being launched to your page, definitely check it out. Again, I think it's really key to establishing trust and really humanizing your brand.

19:46
Great. And now tell us about the third feature announcement, or the third feature announced?

19:51
Yes, this one I'm really excited about and it really comes I would say just completely based on feedback we've gotten from our amazing page admins. They're always giving us feedback. And one of the top themes I've heard in general is like, you know, like, I get the importance of a LinkedIn page, you've shared it, I know why you'd create one, just help me, what are the first few steps? You know, I mean, and we've created kind of more long form content, or we have playbooks and videos. But, sometimes you just need something that's really simple in product that can guide you. So that's exactly what we launched is essentially a pages completion meter. And this is essentially going to be your guide for building out your LinkedIn page. And at LinkedIn, we've done the analysis on the back end to really understand what are the top actions every page needs to take to just find like baseline success, and we've broken down those steps into a simple guided onboarding process. And so every page is going to have this where they'll show you how far along you are in the journey, what additional steps you need to take, you'll get reminders, you'll be linked to best practices. Super excited about the potential this has for onboarding getting people started in a successful way.

20:52
Well, I'll tell you I'm super excited about this one, because the more complete a company's page is, the more effective we are at advertising to those companies, if you have this forcing function where you're telling someone not necessarily forcing, but you're telling someone, "Hey, your page is incomplete because you haven't included your company size, or your industry" or something along those lines, I think this can be great for advertisers.

21:15
Yes, I think so. And I think it'll be great for anyone who just wants to start promoting themselves on LinkedIn, because there's a lot of information that people don't realize, for example, there are six required fields that you need to have in order to have a complete page. And if you're missing even just one field, your page just will not come up during member search. It's such a light lift to just, you know, add a logo, add your URL, and so we'll tell you exactly what you need exactly what you're missing. And just like that, if you just simply fill out those six fields, complete pages actually get 30% more pageviews. So you're literally just boosting your traffic by these several steps, and so really excited for the potential as well offer to two pages, both new aswell as existing.

21:57
And to capture that 30% lift you, really, I mean, these aren't hard questions. It's not like an exam, you just go and fill out the company's basic information.

22:05
Like it's like your logo, you know, the city in which your business operates, your URL, your industry, you know, pretty straightforward things like that. And so all that is not going to be documented in a very clear way directly within the products.

22:19
I love that. So other than logging in and watching things change as they do quite rapidly in LinkedIn world. If someone wants to learn more about pages in general, see the announcements, where do they go? What resources do you have for them?

22:33
Yes, I have a resource that I love to share. It's our best practices page. My team keeps it updated in as close to real time as possible. The short link is lnkd.in/pagesbp. Quite a mouthful so I'll repeat that again. It's lnkd.in/pagesbp. BP for best practices. And if you scroll to, I would say the bottom third of the page, you're gonna find a section that says dive deeper. And there, we basically house all of our best practice materials, including playbooks. And we have playbooks for SMBs. For enterprises. for startups, we also have video tutorials for how to use all these different features. So definitely check that out.

23:20
Oh, that's a great resource. And don't worry if if you were exercising or driving in the car, you don't have to write that like down, don't worry, that'll be in the show notes. So on the employee push notifications, what should you encourage your employees to do with that post to create the maximum impact for the company? Is it a, you know, Hey, everyone, if you would comment and kind of build this social proof like or is it a, you know, reshare it to your network? What do you see as the best practice there?

23:49
That's a great question, AJ. I'll start by saying that ultimately, it's up to each individual employee if they actually want to engage with and further promote their company's content. And so it's really something they should think about. forehand if they actually do want to engage and reshare because it's not required, it's a decision they can make. But if they do decide that it's something they want to further promote. What we do recommend is resharing the post to really help boost that message with their professional network.

24:13
That's perfect. That comes to the end of our questions. So the biggest question I want to ask to you is just what are you most excited about? This can be your professional life, personal life, a hobby, anything that you're working towards, but let us know what's most exciting to you right now.

24:28
I love that question. And this is the right time to ask because I'm all about the holidays. And with Thanksgiving, Halloween and Christmas coming up. This is like my favorite time of year. And I'm excited to be taking two weeks off to go to Tokyo and Taipei to visit my family with my children. So that is what I'm the most excited about. And I also just got a nice new camera to help document all the photographs. And so this is something I'm really looking forward to.

24:52
Oh, that's fantastic. Well, we're gonna be cheering you on in the holidays. Enjoy that trip to Tokyo. I just want to say thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and sharing everything about pages. I think we are much better for understanding this as even advertisers. And again, thanks for all your hard work on the product making it so helpful to us.

25:13
Of course, thank you so much for having me. This was such a pleasure to chat with you.

25:23
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

25:33
All right, I hope you really enjoyed that episode, that awesome interview with Ting, the Pages resource that she mentioned, the link lnkd.in/pagesbp that link it's actually the full drawn out link in the show notes down below. So click that to check out the resource she was pointing you towards. Also anyone who's looking to get started with LinkedIn Ads, definitely check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. And of course, if you are listening to this for the first time, thank you for showing up and on whatever podcast player you're listening, make sure to hit that subscribe button. I would love to have you back here every week listening to all the updates here. And if you're liking what you're hearing, which I hope you are, hit that rate and review button wherever your podcast player is as well. I would love to see more people finding out about the show who are using LinkedInAds in their job. With any show ideas, any feedback about the show, please email us [email protected] and I will see you back here next week cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show.

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.

Transcript:

LinkedIn targeting is the reason we're willing to pay LinkedIn premium prices. Oh, you know we're about to get geeky today.

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

0:21
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! Today we're taking a deep dive into the targeting facets on LinkedIn. And I'm about to brain dump on you. If you were one of the ones who loved episode three because of how geeky we got into the history of LinkedIn Ads. I think you're gonna like this one just as much. I'm going to cover each available type of targeting that LinkedIn has to offer. Yes, all 24, and we'll discuss #1) how accurate the targeting is, #2) how it's useful, and then #3) any gotchas or nuances that you should know about or care about as you're using it. We'll also talk about how it's derived. And we'll also target the targeting facets in order presented in campaign manager so you can follow right along. Alright, let's hit it.

1:05
First up in the news, the COVID-19 pandemic is causing a lot of advertisers to pull back. I hear from those who are heavy on Facebook ads that this is something that has caused prices to significantly drop on Facebook. On LinkedIn, we are seeing advertisers pull back so you're seeing maybe slight decreases in CPMs or CPCs. You may see an increase in traffic as more and more people are working from home. And maybe there's some unrest about potential layoffs. And so they might be using LinkedIn to maybe line up their next job or check and see other opportunities. So this is a great time to be advertising on LinkedIn, because it's my belief that B2B will always move a little bit slower than B2C. So I'm guessing that b2b will recover much quicker and probably won't take as much of a hit. So right now, while costs are a little bit depressed, now is a good thing. To be running ads, and starting those conversations with people who are maybe these are longer sales cycles. So you're starting the relationship now, and not asking immediately for a demo. For any type of advertising where you are asking directly for a demo, let's say it's search ads, or maybe you are using LinkedIn as a bottom of funnel type of platform, then yeah, I think now would be a good time to either pull budget or pull back. But if you're using LinkedIn as intended to capture audience attention, and start to nurture that relationship with something like, you know, free content, gated assets, that kind of thing. Now's a really good time to continue to spend while your competitors are all fearful. All right, as we move into targeting here, LinkedIn has the most detailed business targeting of any platform on the planet. We've talked about that before. I love the fact that it's so scalable, it's access to this audience, pretty much for anyone who's a white collar professional. Plus, it was purpose built showcasing your professional self. So it's the first and sometimes only place you go to tell when you change positions. I like to joke that LinkedIn is the second person to know when I make a career change after I tell my wife. It's got unprecedented scale, since platforms like Facebook come and go with popularity. But LinkedIn is a constant. I like to call it a low level hum. LinkedIn doesn't always make a lot of noise, but it's always there and always useful. And because of that low level hum, it always seems useful, and it seems immune to pop culture attention. So while Facebooks will come and go and become the Myspaces, I think LinkedIn is here for the long haul. There's no other platform that can replace it. The way you will notice the unprecedented scale is it's really rare when one of our clients has a budget that we can't actually spend on their very ideal target audience. So that tells you the extent of the scale you get with LinkedIn, with these white collar professionals. Certainly if you're targeting someone who maybe LinkedIn isn't a perfect fit for, like, let's say something like door to door salespeople, maybe you're trying to recruit them. They're out knocking on doors all day long and so they're not in front of a computer. But for the most part, it's really not hard to spend any sort of budget you have on the perfect audience on LinkedIn.

Now, as for how LinkedIn derives each of these targeting methods, we'll dive into that. And there are three main types. LinkedIn has a lot of the first two, and is starting to incorporate more of the third. So these types are Explicit Targeting, which means you're specifically told LinkedIn something about you. Then there's Implicit or Implied Targeting, meaning that the platform looked at something that you did give it and derived or guessed something about. And then the third is where there might be a behavioral an observational bent to this data. So LinkedIn may know something about you because of actions you take on the platform, not necessarily what you told it in an open field, or anything that it derived from something else. So each of these targeting types, I'll let you know whether it's derived explicitly, meaning it's going to be very accurate. Or maybe it's implicit, were based off of something you did give the platform, they're gonna make a guess about you, and it won't be as accurate, but likely, you'll get a lot more scale. We'll also talk about inclusion and exclusion in the targeting. Now, inclusion makes audiences smaller and much more targeted in general. I like to think of exclusions as just cutting out the pieces that you don't want. Like if you've ever been cutting a potato or peeling a potato, and it's got a few bad spots. exclusion on LinkedIn is a lot like cutting off those bad spots of the potato. And even just this year, we got access to Boolean targeting, which gives us the ability to specify and targeting or, or targeting now, and they will make your audience tighter, you could say something like, I want this job title, and this company size. And that means you will only get the people who have that exact job title, and are also at a company of that size. If you use or targeting, you're going to make your audiences much broader. And an example here that we've actually used would be something like we want this job title, or if you're a member of this group. And the reason you might want to do that is maybe there aren't enough job titles, or people who own that job title to spend your budget. But maybe if you have that job title, you're just as relevant as someone who went and joined a specific group about that topic that might give you the targeting you want. Back in episode two, we talked about the difference between targeting the right company versus the right individual. And for my experience, most of the time, we're combining these we want the right ideal role in the right type of company. And I like to use the example if you told me your ideal target audience are CFOs, but your product costs $1,200 dollars a month, I would tell you that you are your target audience is certainly CFOs, but not a two person company. So you'd want to combine larger companies that could actually afford what it was you were selling with the right role who would feel that pain point and you'd be able to help them out. The most useful filters for targeting people with roles are job title, job function, which is someone's department, their level of seniority skills on their profile, and groups that their members have. So those are my star five, that's my dream team have role filters. Then you have the company filters that will allow you to target things like company size by number of employees, the industry someone is in or their company is in, as well as company name for you account based marketing advertisers out there. Alright, let's break through each of the different targeting types, starting with geography. Now this is the only required targeting type. LinkedIn from the very beginning has always made you select a geography. So if you don't care about geography, you're okay with this worldwide, then you will have to specifically select all seven continents. This is definitely explicit targeting. On someone's profile, they will list where their geography is and this has recently been updated now with all of Microsoft and Bing's geolocation data. So it used to be that here in the state of Utah, we had two major metro area. There was Salt Lake, Metro up North and Provo Metro down South. And if you didn't want to target one of those two, you just have to target the whole state. Well, now with Microsoft and Bing's break down data, and this is already rolled out, you've already got access to this, you can target all the way down to the specific city, I would expect to have maybe difficulties with targeting people by granular areas like cities, at least for the next few years. Because when people originally set up their profile, they got to choose a metro area. Like for instance, I work with people outside of the state of Utah and all over the world. So even though I don't live right in the city of Salt Lake City, I still live in Salt Lake City metro as it's more recognizable. I actually work in a city called Lehi, which if you know Utah is the tech hub of the state, and I love it, but if you're not familiar, you may question if someone in a city called Lehi is actually good at what they do that this could be some Podunk town out in the sticks, you'd never know. So as long as people are actually updating their profile geography, then targeting all the way down to the city level will make sense In the future, right now, I think there will be a lag of people who originally set up their profile in a metro and haven't yet updated to a specific city. So you'll probably want to target a little bit more broadly, at least until that catches up. Then we get into the matched audiences. Now, there are three different kinds of matched audiences a fourth of you want to get real particular here. And we'll start with an email list upload. Now, this was something we got access to back in 2017. One of my favorite features on the platform, you can upload a CSV or an Excel sheet of up to 300,000 emails. And these can be either raw emails, or they can match a 256 Sha, an encrypted list of how email addresses might be obfuscated. So if you're working with an agency, for instance, and you don't want to give them a list, like let's say your whole customer list, you can export that as a 256 Sha encrypted list and LinkedIn will still take that and be able to recognize it. This is definitely explicit targeting because if you give LinkedIn an email address that they recognize, they will then target that person. And if they don't recognize it, they won't go about trying to target anyone. They're not making any guesses here. This is very, very useful for inclusion purposes. So for instance, if I wanted to target all of my current customers, I could upload this list of email addresses as a matched audience and run targeting against them to tell them about a deal I'm running or something like that. You might be tempted to run this as a suppression list or excluding it. And be aware that it doesn't work great as a suppression list, just because there's oftentimes a pretty low match rate between here's my email address and LinkedIn saying, Oh, yes, I know someone with that email address. I much prefer using company name or what they they'll call account match. As a suppression list. It's going to be a lot more accurate and cover more If your audience. Just like any sort of LinkedIn targeting, you do need at least 300 of the emails on your list to match with LinkedIn. Because you can't target any audience smaller than 300. Personal emails will match at a higher rate, which is great, because a lot of people are more willing to give you personal email addresses. But LinkedIn also does have a great database of people's professional emails. One of the great ways that they do this is if you are working with someone and you've sent them an email, then they can upload their email list into LinkedIn and say, Hey, show me people I'm not connected with already. And LinkedIn will allow them to send invites to people that they've emailed with, even if LinkedIn doesn't know who owns that. So what happens is you've received a connection request from someone over email that says, hey, so and so would like to connect with you. And as soon as you log in to LinkedIn and click accept, LinkedIn goes, Oh, this this personal email address you usually lost. With also matches to this work email address. So whereas on Facebook, you might have a huge personal match rate, but as soon as you upload a business address, it just goes to near zero on LinkedIn, there's going to be a pretty good match rate both with your personal emails, as well as pretty decent on professional. Now LinkedIn will let you know your match rate. But it's going to be pretty broad here, it might say something like 30%. Or maybe you have a list you pulled directly from LinkedIn. So there's theoretically 100% match rate, but they'll just tell you 90% or higher. Now, this makes a lot of sense with email addresses, because you probably wouldn't want someone to be able to tell whether that email address actually matched a LinkedIn profile. That seems like there could be some privacy concerns.

13:48
But as we move on to the next matched audiences feature called account lists or account match, this is actually my favorite matched audience. And this one, the match rate doesn't make quite as much sense, but we'll get into that. You can upload a list of up to 300,000 company names matched. And again, this is explicit targeting. You tell LinkedIn, this company name we want to target. And that person says I work for that company, and therefore the match works. So this is explicit targeting. And I find this feature extremely useful, both as an inclusion for here's a list of companies I really care about, and I want to show specific ads to as well as an exclusion as a suppression list like "Hey LinkedIn, here is a list of all of my competitors, or my current customers or my current and past customers, and any ad I show, I want you to exclude these people from seeing my ads because I'm not going to get any value out of a competitor clicking my ads and charging me money". The gotchas here is that it does require the employee to have claimed working for the company. page. So as long as the employee came into the company after the company page was set up, then this is going to make a lot of sense. It also requires the company to have created a company page. Because if that company page does not exist, and you put in some company name, LinkedIn won't know who to match it to, because they won't see any employees attached to it. This all is dependent on your company page itself. Now, like I mentioned, the match rate here is pretty obfuscated, and it's understandable with personal email addresses, but I get really angry about it when it's around account names. The reason why is because there's no privacy involved in a company name. So if I uploaded a list and let's say I was trying to target IBM, and that didn't match, LinkedIn is only going to tell me that it was 90% or higher matched. And I might have missed the fact that that IBM didn't work, but if I would have typed I. B. M. it would have. So I do wish that LinkedIn would actually give us a specific percentage. And even let us know which account names did not match. But so far that hasn't happened. You can add a web URL for a much better match right here. And I highly recommend that if you can pull a list of your company names, and then in the next column over, you give the URL for that company that would totally solve for that IBM issue I mentioned before, because LinkedIn would go oh, I don't recognize IBM. Oh, but I do recognize ibm.com. Yeah, that map's to I. B. M.

16:41
The third type of matched audience targeting here is retargeting. Now this was one I was really excited for. And like we mentioned in Episode Three retargeting is about to get a lot better, but as of right now, it's it's pretty weak in how it works. It's 100% cookie based retargeting, which means someone has to land on your website that you have control of, and you've placed the LinkedIn pixel. And then their browser has to accept cookies, which as of right now, half of the browsers don't even accept cookies. That's all iOS devices running Safari won't even accept the cookie. And anything running the Mozilla Firefox browser also won't take it. And we know within the next two years, Google Chrome has already announced a sunset around third party cookies. And we also know that Microsoft is never last to the conversation about privacy. And so I'm guessing that Internet Explorer or edge will probably sunset cookies before then. So within about two years, LinkedIn's retargeting won't even work, but that's why the enhancements that they're rolling out with engagement retargeting are so exciting to me. This type of targeting is based on user behavior. It's once you've landed on a page, we're going to stick that cookie on you and make you eligible to be retargeted in the future. Now this is only mildly useful right now for exactly the reasons I talked about. But some additional things. The cookie pool minimum is 300. Because on LinkedIn, you're not allowed to advertise to any audience smaller than 300. So you have to have at least 300 people in that retargeting pool. And because only 50% of browsers accept the cookie, it makes it unreliable as a suppression list. So you might say, if you've clicked on my ad, but didn't convert, now I want to exclude you moving forward. And you could set up that rule, but of course, only 50% of the browser's out there would actually honor it. So you'd still be getting a whole bunch of return traffic there on that campaign. The other benefits that are usually associated with retargeting are that you'll be able to stay top of mind as you remind people about your product or service. Well, people just don't spend that much time on LinkedIn. And they're just not super active in general, it's like three to four log ons per month is average. And so there's not a whole lot of benefit in retargeting people on LinkedIn, just so that they have an opportunity to see your ad three or four times a month. Retargeting is also usually very economical, but on LinkedIn, it's not really the case. We oftentimes see costs lower than $1 per click coming from Facebook and Google's retargeting. And on LinkedIn, it's really rare when we see a retargeting click that's less than about $4. So sure, you'll probably get some kind of discount, but it's usually not big enough to really entice me.

19:36
Then the fourth element here of matched audience targeting is look alikes. Now we waited for look alikes for a long time any of us who have experience with Facebook Ads, the look alike targeting is one of the best technologies Facebook has. So people were screaming for it like "hey, LinkedIn, can you come out with look alikes just like we have on Facebook?". And there just wasn't a good reason for LinkedIn to have look alike functionality, because the original targeting was so good. If you want a look alike, you can just go and say I want to target everyone with that job title. Or you could say if I like targeting that company, I'm going to target all of the companies in its industry or of its size or both. So when LinkedIn acquiesced, and actually gave us look alike targeting, it just wasn't all that useful, because their original targeting was so good originally. So because of that, I do call it mildly useful. It is really good to create a look alike from your customer list where you might not have specific titles or specific types of companies, but you can let LinkedIn make those connections. It's important to understand it's actually based off of the audience expansion functionality that you find in every campaign selected as default, which I'm not a fan of. But what I do like about look alikes is that you can break it out into its own campaign. I never use audience expansion just because it muddies my current audience. But with a look alike, you pretty much get to use the same logic, the same engine that gets you additional people, but you can run it as a whole separate campaign so you can test. This is very much implicit targeting because it's derived from people have likely similar roles and also similar types of companies. And it is very much a black box, we can't see what's happening. Plus on Facebook, we get some really cool functionality this slider bar from one to 10%. Basically how tight do you want this look like to be? Do you want it to be the most precise type of targeting this is really really close. Or are you okay with most of it in there and Facebook can just use a little bit of artistic license to add to it. LinkedIn there's only one setting it's, here's my list, create a look alike from it, and you're you are kind of stuck with whatever it comes up with. If you're doing having any sort of account based marketing approach where you're targeting by company name, do make sure that you have not selected that audience expansion checkbox because you're specifically telling LinkedIn, I want to target just these companies. And then LinkedIn is going "Ooh, I know companies that look like that". And they'll start to broaden your audience, which you obviously don't want.

22:21
Then we move on to the company filters. We talked about how the three major company filters were company name, company size, and company industry. So we'll go through each of those. With company name it's just like account match, where we could upload a list of up to 300,000 company names with a few small intricacies here. First of all, you are limited to only 200 company names per campaign, which is really, really terrible to actually go and type out 200 company names. It will be one of the worst things that you do with your time. But the coolest part about it is if you will do this, you will have a 100% match rate on your company names. Because as you type IBM, LinkedIn will pop up a message that says is this the company you mean, and you can make sure that you're hitting that exact company. If you uploaded that same company list into LinkedIn through a matched audience, it may not have 100% match rate, and LinkedIn wouldn't even tell you which ones you were missing. So if I'm ever targeting fewer than 200 companies per campaign, then I'm going to use this feature just the company name targeting. Now this is explicit. Someone does say I work for this company and LinkedIn goes "Ah, I see that company's company page I know that exists, I can match these up". And I do find this very, very useful. We use company name targeting for account based marketing campaigns all the time. Then company size. This is where you can target a company by the number of employees it has. Some people would like the ability to target by revenue target, for instance. But LinkedIn asks people from the company page, hey, how many employees do you have, and that number becomes gospel. And that's what we are able to target. Because of that it is explicit. The company page owner has to say we are this size of organization for you to be able to target them by their company size. This is very, very useful. We use this all the time. It's how we make sure that we're targeting either the enterprise or small to medium sized businesses or anything in between. The gotchas and nuances here are specifically that most of the companies out there do not have a company page profile, or I guess I'll say it like this. Most LinkedIn members are not linked to a company page where LinkedIn knows their size. So that means if you are using company size targeting, you are probably going to exclude about half of everyone on LinkedIn. Now this number has improved significantly. When I very first got into LinkedIn Ads back in like 2011, it was something like seven times more people did not have a known company size. And now that's only 50/50. That's pretty good. We can actually use this to our advantage, though, because a lot of people are probably using company size targeting. But let's say that you are specifically targeting smaller companies, let's say companies with fewer than 50 employees. Rather than just targeting the companies who are explicitly less than 50 employees. What you can do is exclude all companies that are larger than 50. And what that does is it gives you the companies of the smaller size that you're looking for. But it also gives you all of the unknowns. And the majority of the unknowns are probably from companies with fewer than 50 people. It usually takes a marketing person to say, "hey, we should probably own our profiles across the web". Keep in mind that each person can fit under multiple company sizes because of their multiple positions. So imagine that someone works in an enterprise, a 5,000 and above size company. And maybe they have their own consultancy on the side. Or maybe they're on the board of some nonprofit. And so you might be targeting companies with 5000 or more employees, and then you get a lead from a tiny nonprofit. That can happen sometimes with company size targeting just because each member can be currently connected to more than one company. Make sure you don't use company size as an exclusion just because you're lazy and you don't want to select more checkboxes because anytime you use company size exclusions, you're going to be left with those who are undefined, which tend to be small. Now company industry targeting this is where you can target someone by the industry that they are in or their company is in. Now, that's a really important distinction to make. This is explicit the member on their individual profile gets to choose what industry they're in. And they are also likely associated to a company page. And the company page admin got to select an industry as well. So I might have as my industry, marketing and advertising, but my company might be in high tech or something like that. Same rules apply here that if someone has multiple roles on their profile concurrently, they can also qualify for more than one industry. Not to mention I'm pretty sure they can be targeted by their company's industry and or the industry they claim themselves. In addition to those basic company targeting, there are a couple more that are related to companies. So one's called company followers, and this is where you can reach the followers of your company page. I say your company page, and I mean it. You actually have to have admin access to any company page to be able to use this targeting feature. And I do wish that we could show ads to followers of our competitors, for instance, but we can't do that you have to own the page to either target your own followers or exclude them, which is more often what we're doing with it. And that is pretty explicit as targeting goes. Because if you're either following a company or you're not. This can be really useful for let's say, if you're in the SaaS software industry, it's really nice to show product update ads to the people who are your users of your product. Because that way, when it's time for your contract renewals to come up, you can remind them how good your product was. So hopefully they resign again. I tend to use this mostly as an exclusion, because if someone's already following my company page, they're already seeing my content and oftentimes ads for free anyway. So I might want to just exclude them from my ads so that we're not paying for them. Your ads account does have to be associated with your company page to make this work. Then there's an odd one here called company connections, where you can reach just the first degree connections of any company you select. And companies are only available if they have more than 500 employees. So you're not reaching the employees of that company, you are reaching the first degree connections of the employees, which I can't imagine a case where this would be really incredibly useful. This is of course, explicit targeting, because you're reaching just people who are first level connections and this is very clear data. One good reason I can think of to use this is messing with people. So maybe you want to target a competitors first degree connections and maybe say something bad about the competitor or embarrassed them in some way. And of course, all of these people have a connection to that brand in some way. That could be something you try if that's really your style. But more often than not, but maybe more helpful on a serious note, you could exclude this segment along with your competitors company name, if there's something that you really don't want to get back to a competitor, because you can exclude your competitors from seeing your ads. But maybe one of their connections or one of their good friends sees it and shoots them a screenshot of the ad that they saw their competitor is running, and they might send it to their friend and clue them in. So you can exclude your competitors as well as their first degree connections and really be helpful that that message isn't going to get back to them.

30:52
All right, then you have your age targeting. Now, this is really important to understand that it is an implicit type of targeting It's derived from the date that you started your first position that you claim on your profile. This is important to understand because no one ever put in their birthdate into LinkedIn, it'd be pretty easy for them to ask that when they sign up. But no one ever did that. And so LinkedIn is gonna look at it and say, ah, people usually start to graduate from college around the age of, let's call it 22 or something. And that means when you start your first position, you're probably 22 around that time, and we can calculate how old you are. This can be pretty inaccurate, especially because you'll find some people who go "uh, my earlier career experience wasn't related to marketing or wasn't really wasn't related to sales, so I'm just going to leave that stuff off of my profile", and then all of a sudden, LinkedIn thinks that you're 12 years old. So I try not to use this facet unless I absolutely need to. And it is pretty broad anyway. Then you've got gender which is also implicit. It's really interesting because of how wrong this can be. It only has two categories, male or female, I think they'll probably give additional categories in the future just to be sensitive to transgender. But this is derived based off of a probability of someone's first name being either a masculine or a feminine name. So we have a client whose name is Lenny. And it's a man his name is is Lenny. But he gets ads all the time, like, "Hey, are you a female executive?" And he's like, "No, definitely not". So I would call gender maybe mildly useful, I would imagine it's probably, I don't know, 90ish% accurate. So I try not to use it unless I absolutely have to realizing that because it's just a guess based off of someone's first name, there will be a little bit of spillover in both directions. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the rest of the targeting options.

32:53
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33:02
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33:20
Alright, let's jump into the rest of the targeting options. So next we have degrees. Now, this is explicitly derived from the profile. When you go to add education, it will ask you what your degree is. And I would say in the Higher Ed segment, this is a really, really useful and important type of targeting. As a gotcha though, there are so many degree names. You can have a Bachelor of Science in marketing, a Bachelor of Arts and marketing and a bajillion of other options. So be aware there. If you are specifically trying to target one type of person, you'll probably want to type in something like for instance, if you're going after marketers, you'll type in marketing or you'll type in bachelor's, and then just scroll through that big list trying to find anything that is relevant. Next is field of study. This is also explicitly added from your profile when you add an education. You get to say what you studied. So for me, it was marketing, I studied marketing. And this can be really helpful for Higher Ed types of targeting. And there are so many different fields of study. So be aware, again, like degrees, you'll probably be trying to target by a lot of different variations. Then you've got schools, again, this is an education. This is explicit, someone says I went to this University, and it is optional to add, but most people probably do, I think most are pretty proud of their school and their degree, so they will add it even if optional.

34:46
Then we get into some of my very favorite targeting criteria here. These are the ones that are helpful for targeting the individual. So job function is the department that someone works in. They say they call it job. function in my mind, I just tell myself department. And this is derived from several different things in a profile. LinkedIn told me they are in the process of updating and changing how this is done. But at least when I was informed about it many, many years ago, this was derived from your job title, your industry, and I believe it was skills, but it might have been something else. So they match those three, three things together and try to figure out what departments you fit in. Each member can have multiple from a single position. So let's say your job title is Chief Financial Officer or CFO, LinkedIn looks at that and goes, Oh, well, you are 100% in the finance job function, but we're also going to put you at 16% in the business development function, which is what a lot of C Executives fit into. So you can have one person fit multiple departments or job functions. Because this is pulled from some other things in your profile like your title, your industry and skills, that does make it implicit, which means it's a little bit less accurate. But it is LinkedIn's broadest targeting. And we find this to be really helpful in combination with other elements, like company name, for instance. So if I ever tried to overlay job title on top of company name, I would likely not hit nearly as many people on my audience size as I wanted to. But because job function is so broad, I love it in conjunction with other types of targeting that make it quite tight. Now, here's a nuance that you won't know until you go and try to do it. And then LinkedIn tells you you can't, you can't combine job function and job title in almost any way. That means as inclusions or exclusions, and that is because job function is derived from job title. So they look at it and go well, you can't exclude one from the other because they come from the same pot. Something interesting that we found out when LinkedIn came out with the segment breakdown several months ago, where you can look at audiences and see what LinkedIn categorizes them as we did the job title of CEO, and then went to go look at the job function of a CEO, because we've always been curious, like, what is a CEO? What is what department does the does LinkedIn think that it fits into, and CEOs are near 100% business development, which is odd to me, it didn't make sense, but I'm glad that I at least know. And of course, that opened it up to us learning a lot more about how LinkedIn categorizes these job functions. For another example here, sales manager job title, if you go into segment breakdown, LinkedIn calls them 98% sales, but 6% operations 5% business development, 4% marketing and 2% support, which is odd that they would have such small percentages. I would imagine that they are those percentages in certain industries, which tells us why they're so low

38:01
Then you have seniority and seniority we use almost all the time. It is a fantastic filter. And it is also implicit from your job title. It's derived from the perceived level of your job title. This is really easy when you have something like a manager, director, VP kind of title, but obviously more nebulous if you have something like specialist, analyst, consultant, those types of things. We find this one extremely useful. We use it all the time like I sai. There are quite a few gotchas and nuances with the job seniority filter, for instance, one of the options is unpaid. And I just wonder from the job title, how do they know that they're unpaid? If you go into segment breakdown, LinkedIn says the majority of unpaid jobs in your 30s have at least 12 years of experience. So and that's 15% of them was the biggest amount in that list. And so I look at it and go "wait, does that mean that they're categorizing CEOs or really senior people as unpaid"? It didn't seem like it jive to me. Then they have training again, I wonder how do they know that someone is in training 61% of people in training are in education. And then if you look at the years of experience 9% of training are in the 12 or more years of experience bucket. And then there's 7% in the 1, 2, 3, 4 years of experience bucket. So I wonder if they're training, what's this connection, two years of experience. And then there's entry level. 22% of entry level are registered with over 12 years of experience. So again, I maybe I'm wondering a little bit about that. Not quite sure how accurate it would be. Then senior, so many people get senior wrong as a seniority. What it means is when I think senior, I think individual contributors. This is someone who manages projects and things, but not people. And the thing everyone gets wrong. They go, "oh yeah, we're targeting senior managers or senior directors or senior VPS". That's not what it means. It doesn't mean you have a senior in your title, it means that you are an individual contributor. And then I look at that and go wait 36% of senior seniorities have 12 plus years of experience. So again, years of experience seems maybe unreliable at this point.

40:28
There's a manager seniority, which we end up using a lot. LinkedIn calls this a people manager. And I again, I wonder if you have manager in your title, how does LinkedIn know that you manage people and not just projects and things? Something interesting if you're looking at manager seniority, 4% of those people are also in Director, 3% are also owners, 2% are VPS, so again, that breakdown maybe leaves me with some more questions than I had before. Director, VP, CXO all of those make pretty good sense to me. And when I looked at owner as a seniority, it's like CEO because it's near 100% business development as a job function. I thought that was interesting. Partner, I oftentimes will equate owner and partner together. Partners are qualified as 57% business development and 53% entrepreneurship. So I guess that makes sense. It's just interesting to see how LinkedIn slices it. Okay, then we have job titles. Now, because your job title is a free form field, you can write whatever you want in there. And so LinkedIn is attempting to look at your title and understanding and equate it to other people's titles to try to build this model around it and understand which job titles make sense. When you look at it, though, LinkedIn only understands about 30% of the job titles out there. So that means that when you're using this targeting facet 70% of your audience won't be reachable with this. It is explicit and it's going to be very accurate because someone really had to closely match a job title for LinkedIn to understand it. We find this to be really useful. And we use it around a lot around roles. In fact, we probably use this with every single client, we are usually running a job title campaign for a role. Through the API, we queried and found that there are 30,223, so just over 30,000 unique titles on LinkedIn. And there are other known titles that roll up under those, which means your LinkedIn has 30,000 that you can type in and it will match that there are a whole bunch of others that LinkedIn says roll up to that that we can't see. What's been interesting to me for a long time is you know, here in marketing I know a lot of people who have PPC or demand Gen in their job title. And I've been waiting for like nine years now for when I type in PPC or demand Gen into a job title that LinkedIn will match with something. So LinkedIn tells me that they would roll up under things like digital marketing. But because I can't see it, I just don't know if maybe their index is really old, they're not looking at more current titles, maybe it's not updated very often. Or maybe LinkedIn understands all of these titles fantastically and I just don't know. Because most marketers go to LinkedIn because of the job title targeting, it's the first thing they they go to, it's the first thing they try out. This does tend to be some of the most competitive inventory out there. And because LinkedIn only understands about 30% of job titles, that means that there's diminished audience inventory, but demand for that inventory is higher, because this is job title targeting that people really like to use. So because of that job title targeting is going to be some of the most expensive targeting that you do. And you just expect it's going to be very accurate. It's going to give you more or less smaller audience sizes, and it's going to cost more, but probably give you very good lead quality. If you're targeting standard job titles like sales manager, HR manager, you'll probably capture the majority of them. Those are very easy titles for LinkedIn to understand. But then that also means that those are very easily reachable for less money with something like job function, and seniority. And because members can have multiple positions listed concurrently on their profile, let's say something like you work for a fortune 500 in the daytime, but you're also on the board of a nonprofit or you do consulting on the side so you have both titles currently running. That also means that you can qualify as multiple job titles. Then we have skills, another one we use all the time. These are explicit because each member can claim up to 50 skills on their profile when they sign up. And these are always things you can go and edit later. They are more specific than job title. So for instance, I might have the job title of digital marketing manager but I think might be really highly specialized in LinkedIn Ads, or Google Ads or Facebook Ads. So those types of ads, the channels themselves would be under skills quite easily. But I couldn't reach that person just from their job title, unless I wanted to go broader, like digital marketing manager that really could be managing anything, anything paid organic, social search, whatever. It does aid and giving us broad audiences. And so it is very, very useful. Also, for things like overlaying on top of lists of companies for ABM lists, this can be great for that. As for the nuances here, each member can have up to 50. But it's also not the strongest signal. So for instance, I took a SQL class one time SQL, a database class, and because of that, I put SQL as a skill on my profile, but certainly you wouldn't want to try to sell me a database management software. It's not what I do primarily. It's just one thing. I was proud of I liked. If you wanted to try to target people like me who might have a job title of ad specialist or PPC something, because there's no PPC job title skills can be a great way to reach someone like me who maybe LinkedIn just didn't understand their job title. One thing I would absolutely love, people claim skills and you can endorse each other, you've probably done this a lot, you've probably received a lot of endorsements. I wish that we could either bid up bid higher on people who had more endorsements on certain skills, the ones that were bidding on, and maybe even ignore, if you only have three or fewer endorsements around a skill, maybe I don't want to target you. And that would be really cool. I've given this feedback to LinkedIn, please give it to your reps as well. I think that'd be awesome. Skills, back in the day used to be free form and I think this was probably sometime around 2014 when this changed, you could write any skill you want. So we used to play jokes with this, we would nominate other people in assigned skills like snowboarding to to friends trying to get them things like contracts or influence or attention in sports. So now they have enough skills out there that you're kind of forced, there are a certain number of skills you can put in. I don't know how often these are updated. I don't know how often they add new skills. But certainly this is something that you're kind of closed into a box now.

47:21
Years of experience is another pretty interesting one. Again, just like age, this is implicitly drawn from the date you started your first claim position. The definition would be the number of years you've been in the professional world realize that it's only mildly useful because it is very implicit and you just never know how accurate it's going to be. I think rather than age or years of experience that seem very prone to error, I would much rather use seniority that doesn't seem nearly as prone to error. Then groups I absolutely love groups targeting. Now don't mistake this. This is targeting people who are members of certain groups, it doesn't mean that your ads are going to be shown when they're logged into the group, I get that question quite a bit. This is very explicit. In fact, you have to go way out of your way on LinkedIn right now to join a group. And I don't think LinkedIn is very proud of their group's product right now because you really, really have to go out of your way. If you're searching for a group, you've got to get like four clicks deep before you're ever even seeing an option for groups. I think this is very, very useful. Because if you're passionate enough about a topic to go and join a group all about it, you're probably really relevant to what I'm trying to sell you. Back when LinkedIn was really proud of their group's product, and they were really highly used. A lot of people joined groups and then kind of forgot about them, and they're still part of it, which is great. It means when I use group targeting, I'm going to have larger audience sizes, but realize that may not be quite as up to date. And because fewer people are members of groups, these will usually give you a smaller audience sizes.

48:59
Then you have member interests. There are currently 11 broad interests, and then they break down into a bunch of more micro and niche interests. It's interesting that these are part of the third category of how targeting is determined. These are part of the behavioral or observed category. The way they do it is looking at what you interact with in the feed. So subjects that you're posting on subjects that you are completing social actions on, like liking, commenting, and resharing. And if they can get the data from you, if you do any sort of searches on Bing, they will pull from your Bing search history to try to figure out what you're interested in. I think this is not very useful. I don't use interests a whole lot it just because of how broad they are and how prone to error. My big question is, what does someone have to do to be labeled as interested in a certain topic? Is it like you hit the like button once on a post about that topic? Or do you have to comment three times? Or is it a single search on Bing? Is it 15 searches on Bing with a keyword?, we just don't know this. So I would suggest using it for things like paring down an audience when there just isn't a reason for you to be targeting a million people. But your targeting isn't tight enough to get it down to like a very small group, we might overlay interests just to give yourself a better shot. It's also really interesting to look at your audience's interests just to see how much faith that you are willing to put in. So what you could do is put in the job title of someone that you're trying to target, then you look in the right rail under the breakdown, the segment breakdown, and look under interests just to see does it jive? Are you targeting developers and there's a ton of stuff about like Bitcoin? Maybe that's maybe that makes sense. If you're targeting developers, and there's a ton about travel or Instagram influencers or something like that, I wouldn't have as much faith in it.

50:56
Then you've got some new stuff called member traits. Now Member traits used to be something called custom segments that was beta targeting that you only got access to, if you had a LinkedIn Rep. And what's really cool is they're starting to slowly roll these out. And at one point, there was something like 30, or 40 different custom segments that your LinkedIn rep had access to. And now I think they've released maybe four or five of them. And I hope they keep going. I think these are so so cool. They are also behavioral and observed types of facets. But what's so cool about them is LinkedIn knows a lot about you because of your behavior on the platform. And so I feel like these are a lot more trustworthy. There's still tons that haven't been released yet. So definitely ask your rep if they have any ideas for custom segments that might be good for the audience that you go after. There's one called frequent contributor, obviously, I don't know what their baseline is for how many times you have to post or comment on something to be a frequent contributor, but it's there. This There's one called frequent traveler. And I think they know because if you're on the mobile app and you log into LinkedIn, from IP addresses that go across the country across the globe, they know that you're a business traveler. There's one called job seeker that this one makes a lot of sense. If someone has viewed at least three job postings, or applied to any one of them. LinkedIn goes, "ah, they're looking for a job", so you can target them pretty easily. There's one called open to education. There's one called device preference. And device preference is really interesting to me. I don't know where we're all the way there yet. But it'll break down into do they prefer desktop or mobile for their LinkedIn experience. And under mobile, you can actually break down to iOS and Android. It is called preference and it doesn't mean the device they're on. I believe this just means the the device that they tend to use the most often, so not quite as accurate as I have liked, but certainly that gets us closer. I certainly expect more coming out here because there's a lot of custom segments we've used in the past that aren't in the list yet. As for how useful these are, it really is a yard sale or a garage sale, whatever you want to call it, where you just have to look at the list and maybe something applies. Maybe something doesn't. It's really unorganized or disorganized. But there's lots of good options, maybe something is a good fit for you. So check that those out. Then you have something called audience templates. Now, audience templates are different from our member traits, because they don't involve anything that's behavioral. These are just templates that LinkedIn has built for you that make it easier to target certain types of people. So for instance, there's one that's expertise in Bitcoin. And if you actually apply this, you see that all LinkedIn did is they just automatically applied all of the Bitcoin and blockchain groups targeting. Then there's financial advisors and then all they did was added all of the job titles that financial advisors seem to have, and added some finance industries on to it, you can choose IT decision makers, but this is just job function of IT with a seniority of like manager and above. There's nurses, there's medical doctors, these are ones that mostly rely on job title. There's also degrees which you can exclude, which is really helpful for Higher Ed. This one, again, is kind of a yard sale, you don't know if there's going to be something that fits your audience or not until you look and there's 26 out there right now. So check those out when you get a chance.

54:37
So my recommendations for you as you're designing your targeting, use explicit as much as you possibly can. This is going to give you the highest lead quality, it's going to be the most precise, and this is so much of the reason why we like LinkedIn is this precision in targeting. So when you need quality, go explicit on your targeting options, and then use the implicit ones, when you just need volume, and you're okay with a little bit of error. Most of the time, you're going to need a little bit of a mix. And I really like testing these targeting methods against each other. For instance, if I have an audience like sales manager, I'm probably going to test job title of sales manager, and job function of sales with manager seniority against each other. And I want these in two separate campaigns. And I want to see which one gives me more volume, lower cost, better efficiency down the funnel. Because I understand the need for quality versus volume. And it's kind of a sliding scale in most cases, I would use job function with seniority on an ABM list on an account list anytime. But if I'm just using LinkedIn's native targeting to reach every one of this role in North America, I'd be much more likely to use job titles or even groups that really narrow it down. Alright, so I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around

56:04
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

56:15
All right, here are the resources for this week. Anyone looking to get into LinkedIn Ads check out course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. The link is right there in the show notes. I've said this on previous episodes, but it covers about the first hour and a half of the trainings that I give people one on one and charge $500 an hour for and I think it's only $25 bucks so it's a great value. Definitely check that out. That will get you up to speed in LinkedIn Ads pretty quick. It's also free if you have LinkedIn premium.

56:45
On whatever podcast player you are on right now. Please look down and hit that subscribe button and please consider rating and reviewing. I would love any sort of attention you could give this podcast and certainly the offers always on the table. Reach out to us at [email protected] with any feedback, anything in the future you'd like us to feature talk about, discuss, or dive into. And we will see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Show resources:

1. Conversation Ads Release
2. Content Friction Funnel Slide
3. Listables checklists – Listables.com
4. Hushly – Hushly.com
5. Chris Dayley – CRO consultant
6. 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.

Transcript:

Absolutely positively the most important element in your LinkedIn Ads. We’re talking about it today.

0:12
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.

0:19
Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, the most important part of your whole LinkedIn Ad strategy is your offer. Now the offer is whatever you’re asking your target audience to do. Sometimes advertisers will ask prospects to do things like “hey, read a blog post”, or “download a piece of content” or “buy something now”, or even “hop on the call with a sales rep”. So let’s dive deep into what offers work on LinkedIn Ads, and which don’t. Let’s hit it. As for the news, LinkedIn announced a new ad format called conversation ads. Now because this episode airs a few weeks after it’s recording, it should be available to everyone listening. These use the same inventory as message ads, what they just rebranded as from sponsored in mail, and it’s much more versatile. It feels like a conversation a lot more than message ads, which feel like cold outreach. So check out the link in the show notes for a little bit more about the release, we had really good success with these, we were part of the the early pilot with one of our clients, and it ended up going really, really well. We’re really happy with it. So definitely check out that ad format as you get a chance if there’s a good use for it. Okay, so here’s the rub on offers. You can buy ad space anywhere, and you can ask anyone to do anything, but it certainly doesn’t mean that they’re likely to do it. You could ask people to buy your teleportation machine from your new storefront on Mars, but you’ll definitely have a zero percent conversion rate, which would be actually good because if someone did buy you wouldn’t have anything to give them. So there are all kinds of different things you can ask someone to do from an offer. I’ve seen a lot of companies ask for a buy now or talk to sales, or take a trial of certain kind of software, download a piece of content, come to an in-person event, read a blog post, listen to a podcast episode even. And what influences someone as to whether they’ll be actually interested in converting on whatever you’re asking them to do from your offer totally depends on their mindset and your relationship with them. So if someone is actively searching for something, let’s say they’re searching on Google, or they came to your website to fill out a contact form, then they’re definitely ready to buy and you really can cut right to the chase. They’re asking you for something and you can just give that to them. And then we have these audiences that we call warm audiences where the audience already knows, likes, and trusts them. Maybe they’ve been subscribed to your newsletter for a long time or they regularly consume your content. That means that anything you ask, they’re probably going to be receptive to it, and they’ll give you the benefit of doubt. They will oftentimes be willing to take an action that a cold audience would not. And that’s simply because you’ve built up goodwill with them. But then when you have an audience that doesn’t know who you are, we call them a cold audience, you still have to earn their trust. And this is where LinkedIn usually sits. I picture that every impression from my LinkedIn ads go out to someone who has never heard of me before. This is the first time a member has ever heard of my client or heard of my company before. So if you have a cold audience, you really do have to lead with something that’s either going to increase their know like and trust factor, or you have to lead with something that is so incredibly attractive to them, that they are willing to jump to the middle of your funnel, rather than the top to get to know you to consume this information. If you happen to already have a strong brand, let’s say it’s your one of the Fortune 500 then the majority of your audience already knows who you are and you can cheat a little bit, you can ask more from people than they would normally give from a cold audience because you’ve already built up goodwill and name recognition with them over the years. So 95% of the time, if you go and put out a demo request ad, or a free trial, or a Buy Now, in your LinkedIn ads, it will fail. We’ve found about 95% of the time, it totally falls flat. What that failure means is we will see low click through rates that turned into really high costs per click. And then the clicks that we do get turn out to have really low conversion rates, oftentimes between about one and a half to 4%. It will feel like pulling teeth trying to get LinkedIn to give you traffic, and therefore you’ve got this inability to scale. That means that you could spend all of your budget now which is great, but if in two months, your boss comes to you and says let’s double down. Let’s spend more this channels work in great, you won’t be able to scale because LinkedIn just won’t give you the traffic, you’re not earning it. I say 95% of the time that fails, but the other 5% of the time. The exception here is that when you’re offering something that’s so Earth shatteringly disruptive that people have been waiting for it, they’re chomping at the bit. I’ve got an example from a client who ran a helicopter taxi service. And it was so funny, I was sure that this was just going to fail miserably. But asking people to sign up for like a lift ride, but in a helicopter, that was really expensive. We had from a hard offer asking people to immediately book a helicopter taxi ride, we had 17% conversion rates, which were incredible. These are what I would consider bottom of the funnel purchase behavior that we were getting at the rate of like downloading a white paper or something. It was incredible. So sure, I am totally floored and surprised 5% of the time when this works, but so 95% of the time I’m just predicting, yep, when I asked too much too soon, it’s probably going to fail. So when you choose to force it, you choose to force people who don’t know who you are, you don’t have a relationship with them to go immediately to the bottom of the funnel, we regularly see $400 to $1,000 per lead, which is incredible, because I’m amazed that anyone would pay that much for a lead. But certainly if it’s working, that’s great. I wish them well. But when you have the right offer for your audience, magic happens. LinkedIn Ads sits in this really interesting place in the market, where it’s priced like it’s the bottom of the funnel, kind of ad traffic, but it’s traffic that acts like it’s top of funnel. And if you move forward to an audience and you give them something of real value, they are willing to jump from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel, and they will give you their contact info. LinkedIn is so good at getting in front of your exact target audience. These are the most highly valuable people that you could get your business message in front of. So what you want to do is give them an offer that they are so incredibly excited about. It’s something that adds a ton of value. And what they will do, then this is your ideal target audience. By the way, they will click on your ads at a much higher than average rate, which results in tons of volume at lower costs than LinkedIn is normally going to give you traffic. It’s not uncommon for us to be able to pay below LinkedIn’s floor price, when we have excellent content offers. They also convert at 15% or higher, which results in really low costs per opt in. Some of our better ones are between $25 to $40 per opt in. And that’s awesome, especially when you compare that to companies who are paying $400 to $1,000 per bottom of funnel lead when you’re not leading with value first. So the economics here, the way that this works out, you’re willing to pay $25 to $40 per opt in. And that means for the same price that you paid for one lead, one phone call when you were trying to force people to the bottom of the funnel for 400 to $1,000, you now have 20 plus contacts, who are your most valuable target audience, and they are ready to be nurtured by email, ready to be reached out to by sales, ready to be nurtured with other retargeting ads. They’ve also consumed your content and interface somewhat with your brand. So they’re starting to know, like, and trust you, which is exactly what we need to take a cold audience and turn it into a warm one. What we found is usually about 10% to 20% of these opt ins will be open to hopping on a call with sales. So if you follow the math, would you rather have a single demo request for $400? Or would you have rather have one to four demos booked along with 10 to 20 names in your database, all with goodwill pointing towards you. That’s exactly why gated offers works so well on LinkedIn and why I recommend everyone use them. I built a model that I call the offer friction funnel, and it shows the relative friction of each type of offer each type of ask that you could give someone. And I’m actually putting a link to this in the show notes. So definitely open it up wherever you are. And I want you to take a look at it because it’s a little hard to describe a visual just over audio here, but I’ll try. It’s shaped like a funnel where the top is wide and the bottom is narrow, which we’re used to with funnel imagery. And the top tend to be offers that are lower in friction, meaning that more people are willing to do them especially cold audiences. And at the bottom, we see offers that are much higher in friction that people are less likely or willing to do. Now your conversion rate will generally follow the level of friction so low friction offers at the top will tend to convert at a higher rate and higher friction offers at the bottom will tend to convert lower. Totally make sense. The one exception here is that the very top of the funnel, you’ll see is like blog posts and infographics. And those are very low friction, because you’re asking, “Hey, come and read this blog post”. And there’s very little risk for your visitor in doing that. If they get to your blog post, and they read a paragraph or two and decide they don’t want to be there anymore, they can just leave the page and all they sacrificed was a little bit of their time. But those blog posts and infographics, they very naturally have a very weak call to action, meaning that if you’re actually measuring a conversion rate from that content, it will be very, very low or maybe even non existent. So that’s why we talk about friction being from low to high instead of just talking about conversion rates, because at the very top of the funnel, you won’t have a conversion rate. But as soon as you gate something as soon as you start asking for someone’s information. That’s when you start to see conversions. I get asked all the time, what is the content? What is the style of content, the medium that gets the highest conversion rates? Essentially these companies asking what should I build? Well, I’ll let you know, the real value is not what the content is, it’s the promise of what they’ll be able to do once they’ve consumed it. I’ll repeat that, again. Because it’s really important. It’s the promise of what someone will be able to do once they’ve consumed your content that makes them more or less likely to convert. To prove this, we did a study where we took the same report from one of our clients, and we broke it into a one page checklist, a seven page guide, and a 30 page ebook, and we advertised all of them to the same audiences. And what was so interesting to us time and time again, when we’ve done these studies, we noticed that they all have relatively similar conversion rates. So regardless of the medium that someone chose, it was just as valuable because we weren’t advertising, you know, this one’s a guide because of that you should get it. There’s probably some of that built in. But it was the promise, here’s what you’re going to be able to do, Here’s the value that you’re going to get out of this offer, once you consume it. And if it happens to be a 30 page ebook, there will be some people who love reading, and they will be willing to download it because of that. There will be certain people in your audience who go, I don’t have time to read an ebook, and so they’ll forego, but it’ll average out all about the same. So the goal here then, is to go out and build your content around something that your audience would find extremely valuable. Don’t go and build an ebook just because someone told you to go build an ebook, build it for a purpose to actually provide value. Okay, here’s a quick sponsored break. And then we’re going to jump into the different types of offers and what we’ve seen work and not

12:59
The LinkedIn Ad show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts

13:08
B2Linked is the LinkedIn Ads focused agency. We manage many of LinkedIn’s largest accounts worldwide, and we are official LinkedIn partners. So contact us on B2Linked.com to get in touch, and our team will help you enact these and other strategies to get you the best performance for your money. All right, let’s jump into the different types of offers.

13:30
We’ve talked about what happens when you go too deep into the funnel too soon. When you’re asking for a demo, asking for a trial, or asking for a purchase, those things to a cold audience just are very, very rare when they work. But you have these gated offers that are kind of in between where you’re giving value first, and all you’re asking them for is some of their personal information to be able to follow up with them, to be able to nurture them. So let’s go through each type of gated offer and from my experience what I’ve found to be a pro and con of each and what works and what doesn’t work. So very first off checklists, I love checklists. They work really well with advanced professionals, as well as beginners. Because advanced, people want to know if they’ve missed any of the checklist items. So something like “hey, the 11 things that every LinkedIn ads account needs”. If you’re a total LinkedIn Pro, you’re probably still willing to download that asset, just to see like, Oh, yeah, I probably know 10 of them. But it’s probably worth my time to figure out that 11. And, of course, if you’re a total beginner, you’re going to look at that and say that sounds like a resource I’ll want to learn, because I really should know all 11 items that LinkedIn advertisers need to know. And of course, this is just an example I don’t actually have a piece of content called the 11 items that every LinkedIn advertiser needs to know, but maybe I’ll look to create something like that. A checklist also feels really easy to consume. So it feels low risk to a prospect. You could very quickly look over it, find the one or two items that you need, and then move on, it didn’t take 30 minutes from your day. I also really like this idea of interactive checklists, meaning that people will keep it around digitally. And they love to check things off. So there’s a company out there called listables.com that does this and I’ll throw a link in the resources, where people will keep an interactive checklist around, just so people will continue to stay top of mind digitally, and their prospects will want to come back and tick things off as they complete them. All right, the next one is a cheat sheet. And think of this like a resource that people will hang up in their offices or cubicles with your branding on it. The best example for this was early on in my career, I followed a company called Moz, religiously, moz.com. And this was when I was really into search engine optimization or SEO. They had the SEO developers cheat sheet or something like that. And I remember it was a pretty PDF, I printed it off, and I kept it up in my cubicle for like five years, I had something Moz related always up in my office or cubicle. And it felt really high value to me. And it was really easy for me to consume to use as a resource. And of course, that built a lot of goodwill with me. Then you’ve got resources like guides, and the feeling you get with a guide is I’m going to hold your hand and walk you through something that you don’t already know how to do. And so it feels highly educational, it feels helpful, and it feels pretty simple to consume because you’re going to walk them through step by step. Then there’s white papers and white papers. This is a pretty old term. And think of them like long form content designed to promote the products or services from a specific company. I pulled that definition from investopedia. I didn’t come up with that one on my own. But I think white papers really depend on the promise because if this is essentially a product brochure, no one is willing to give you their email address. And first name last name in exchange for a company brochure. That’s the kind of stuff that should be made free. So make sure if you are really designing a white paper to be a white paper, make sure you’re leading with the value to them. Then you have ebooks. I think as a not great reader myself, I just get so bored when I’m reading books. And so that’s why I love podcasts and audiobooks so much. But I perceive when someone is pitching me an ebook that it’s going to take me a lot of time to consume, and that might turn people like me off, it might make it less likely to get consumed. So certainly try an ebook. But you might also take exactly the same content and package it up as a guide and see if that increases your conversion rates because people might see it being a little bit less friction or a little less difficult to consume. Then webinars. Oh man, I still love webinars for years. I’ve wondered when people are going to stop signing up for it and consuming webinars, but they just keep going. Webinars are so interesting. Of all of the different gated content I’m telling you about, webinars are the one thing that really stands out to be really nuanced. If you want to follow someone who is brilliant about webinars, go and follow Daniel Wass, his last name is spelled Waas. He’s German. He has some of the best content about webinars I’ve ever seen. He spoke at the Inbound conference back in 2019 about it, and I took so many notes during his his presentation, I felt like my hand was gonna fall off. So anyone doing webinars, make sure to go and consume his content. But here’s what’s so interesting to me about webinars, about 50% of the people who sign up won’t attend, but at some point, they put their name on the list because you are offering to solve a problem that they need solved. So even though only 50% will show up. The other 50% are definitely still marketable. So don’t write them off, continue to market to them. Now the 50%, who do show up, now they know like and trust you more than if they’d read five white papers of yours. They have heard you speak, they’ve gotten the goodwill from you sharing content that’s helpful to them, as long as the webinar was good and helpful. And now they’re going to have a much higher likelihood of closing in your sales cycle. Many signups will expect to just watch the replay so they don’t have an intent of actually showing up live. But when you do a live webinar, you can really stoke this, this FOMO this fear of missing out and this urgency that the fact that because it’s live, they’re going to miss it if they don’t put it on their calendar. I’ve seen a lot of advertisers try to use on demand webinars just because they take so many fewer resources. And what I found is your conversion rate drops on signup and your attendance rate is also much lower as well. So certainly you saved the time of yours to create content. But people see right through it, it loses that fear of missing out, it loses the urgency, because they know that they can consume it anytime. And it spurs them to inaction. So my recommendation, if you are currently using on demand, or you’re trying to use an on demand type of webinar, try just performing it live, give yourself a good three weeks ramp period to advertise it on LinkedIn, and see if you can have better results pushing towards a live webinar. Obviously, it’s more work. But if it turns out that you’re getting a much lower cost per lead, and you have a higher attendance rate of people willing to come and talk to your sales team, then it’ll be well worth your time. I found that free in-person events tend to work really well as well. And there’s a ton of urgency and FOMO on the side of the prospect here as well, because they know that there’s going to be some event that they’re not going to be a part of if they forget to put it on their calendar, and they’ll miss it. Oftentimes, there’s opportunities to network with their peers, get drinks, have food, get educated on a topic that they may care about. So I’d realize this is a ton of work to put together an in person event. But these work very well as an offer on LinkedIn. They feel very VIP. People feel really special. And so this will work especially well with message ads, with conversation ads, and with sponsored content. It’ll feel special. I get asked a lot about case studies as well. Case studies to me are surprisingly bottom of funnel even though it is something like gated content, or might be viewed by your marketing department as gated content. But to a prospect, you’re most likely not willing to download a case study and even care about the contents until you’re already considering working with that company. So if you’re not already in this consideration, phase of working with someone, meaning you would be a warm audience anyway, you’re probably not going to be interested in a case study. So what we found is to a cold audience, a case study may have a really low conversion rate. And you might get high costs, like it’s a bottom of the funnel type of asset, even though it really is content. So I don’t generally like to lead with case studies, that might be a good retargeting type of asset.

22:23
Similar to in person events, online summits can work quite well, especially because it’s the ability to run an in person event, but be able to get many, many more people because everyone’s virtual and technology is cheap. So getting someone into a big online summit with LinkedIn Ads, as a cold audience would probably be just as simple as trying to book them onto a webinar. So then you’ve got the things that are a little bit lower in the funnel, like a demo request, people expect a sales pitch, and so they’re not going to do a demo request until they’re getting pretty serious. So that’s pretty bottom of funnel. You might be able to get a few people to do it, but without that know like and trust factor built up, it’s probably going to be a very small percentage of the population leading to high costs per, and then really low conversion rates.

23:14
Free trials are pretty similar, unfortunately, because people know that there’s a big time investment into trying out a product. There’s also a huge pain in the rip and replace of a software solution. And so people dread it, they don’t want to get involved in a new trial. Doesn’t matter how attractive the trial is, or how “easy” it’s going to be for them to try. It’s a lot of work up front, meaning that this likely won’t convert with a cold audience very well. Although it might do better than a demo request, you might get a slightly higher conversion rate. And of course, asking someone directly for a purchase, this is really difficult to a cold audience and this just isn’t for LinkedIn. This is for any cold audience. Asking someone for a purchase if they are a previous customer or an existing warm audience who already has that know, like, and trust factor, those can work, okay. But this is too much to ask from a cold audience. And whether you’re selling a product that costs $2 or $2,000. Both are really problematic on LinkedIn. Because if you’re asking for something that’s cheap, let’s say it’s $2, you’ll never be able to overcome LinkedIn’s high costs to make a return on that investment. And if the cost is high, if it’s $2,000, then maybe you can recoup the cost from LinkedIn. But because it’s expensive conversion rates going to be really low and unlikely you’ll get enough people who actually will do the action. So that’s a walkthrough of pretty much all of the offers that I see regularly being used on LinkedIn. And my biggest recommendation here is to call the offer whatever you want, because as soon as everyone starts using a tactic, it ceases to work. You probably remember 20 years ago when people started offering, every company had a free consultation, and it probably worked really well back then. But now because everyone does it, it doesn’t feel special anymore. And it’s hard to actually spur someone to action with an offer that feels like everyone else is doing this too. So maybe try calling it something like a free Strategy Session or a free Power Hour. Change things up a little bit and make it feel a little bit more special. Okay, so you’re sold on this, you know that coming up with a really valuable offer is the best thing that you can do for your LinkedIn Ads program. So now you need to come up with this content offer because this hasn’t occurred to you before. My recommendation is to go and meet with people in your team who interface with customers all the time. Oftentimes, this is sales. And you go and sit down with them and find out what are the most frequently asked questions that are keeping customers up at night. What’s in the news and relevant to them that they would get excited about. An interesting example here is we ran a programmatic advertising guide to a whole bunch of marketers for one of our clients and it was so interesting. We had these crazy high conversion rates with VPS and CMOS. And we wonder why in the world was that. And it turned out that people who were, let’s say, Manager, Director level, and even individual contributors, they already knew what programmatic advertising was and they were consuming it, trying to decide if it was right for them. But you had these VPS and CMOS, these high level marketers that were expected to know what programmatic advertising was, but they didn’t kno. They were looking for someone to educate them, so that when they got asked about it, they didn’t look stupid. So think about things that will solve the pain point for someone that it’s keeping them up at night. And maybe it’s in the news and relevant to them. I think this content is so well produced within a company because you guys know your own customer and you know your own product and industry very well. But one outsource approach I found I’ve got a friend who it’s a husband and wife team and she’s a journalist, and he’s a writer, and they go and interview customers, prospective customers leads that didn’t close, and they go and find interesting subjects and pain points. And then they write it up in this pretty package of, you know, here’s the content from the research. And it just goes to show that when you actually solve the problem, people will beat down your door to get it because that content always performs super super well.

27:24
So the gist here is you go and solve a real problem for them or satisfy a real curiosity. And you really can do no wrong. You could do things like have a misspelling in your ad, or insult their intelligence or have a crappy landing page, and you’ll still see 15% or higher conversion rates, you’ll get endless scale with your audience, and you’ll have super low cost access to your ideal target audience. It will be brilliant and it will feel like magic and the only difference is the piece of content. A good example of this is we had a client who was offering five different content assets and we went through and did super hyper testing on all of these assets, we could not get our cost per conversion under like $129. And we’ve been working with this client for four months, and I was absolutely certain they were going to fire us because there’s just no way that downloading a guide or a white paper is worth $129. Then one day they came out with a new piece of content. It was titled The Definitive Guide to Onboarding and it was an HR offer to companies HR, who were constantly onboarding new employees and trying to give them a better experience. And overnight, that piece of content totally changed our entire initiative, the entire program. Click through rates tripled, and conversion rates doubled. We ended up with cost per conversion under $29, which was a total change and allowed us to scale way up. So that was a great example to me of same audience. We’re using the same tactic to get in front of them, but the content made 100% of the difference. We’ve got a client called Xant.ai. That’s the letter Xant.ai. And they have a product that connects salespeople to the buyers better. They have a dialer solution so they’ve done tons and tons of outbound sales and they have all the data around it. And we put out this offer that was like, “Here’s the best time of day to contact people”. “Here’s the best cadence to follow up”. “Here’s the best number of times to do each kind of outreach to result in the best success”. And this converted super super well. We also had a client who was partnering with Google to do a breakfast at Google’s headquarters for marketers. And the landing page wasn’t special, the targeting wasn’t special, the ad copy wasn’t special. The offer was. Marketers were so excited to go and have breakfast at Google and learn about these things. So it had a 55% conversion rate, which was Incredible. We did exactly the same thing with Microsoft and Bing, a couple months later, and it didn’t have nearly the same conversion rate. So remember, these things are very special, and they are in the offer itself. So turn all of your guns towards creating the right content that people will kill for. And you will see the results in your LinkedIn Ads. There are some people who are doing really cool things in the space for increasing your conversion rates. There’s a company called Hushly, I think it’s Hushly, who will take all of the traffic on your website who are looking at a piece of content. And using exit intent, they will pop something up and try to get that user to then re-engage and give you their information. So these are only the people who are going to leave anyway and then they charge you on a per lead basis of the people who they got to convert that wouldn’t have converted already. Really cool solution. Really not expensive. And then I mentioned listables.com earlier. That was like a dynamic checklist that someone would not only want to give their information to download, but they’ll want to keep it around so they can always check back with it and check things off. I’ve got a friend named Chris Dayley, D-A-Y-L-E-Y, who runs Smart-CRO.com. And he’s a conversion optimization consultant. And he helps companies who have a lot of traffic, do a lot of AB testing to figure out what people will convert on better and what they won’t. And so those are three of the cool things or people I’ve seen who are working wonders in this space to try to increase conversion rates on top of whatever offer it is you’re looking for. Okay, I’ve got some cool episode resources coming right up, so stick around.

31:58
Okay, as promised, here are the resources that we talked about this week, there is the link to conversation ads release that LinkedIn just came out with a week of recording. So definitely check that link out in the show notes. There’s also a link to the content friction funnel that we talked about. This is a slide that I regularly use when I do public speaking and teaching and training about LinkedIn ads. So check that one out. It’s just a link to a JPEG of my slide, where you can visualize and see what types of content work at different areas of friction in the funnel. Then we also talked about listables.com, they’re the interactive checklists that you can subscribe to get for your company or your clients. There’s hushly.com, the company who takes with exit intent and charges you by the lead only for those that you would have lost anyway. And there’s Chris Daley from smart CRO, who’s a consultant that anyone who wants to check out and hire someone to help them do AB testing better, learn about their audience. He’s a great resource that I know I use quite regularly. You’ll also see the link to the LinkedIn Ads Course on LinkedIn Learning that I did. This is a great one if you’re just getting into LinkedIn Ads. It’s a very cheap course, that goes into a lot of depth. Like I’ve said in previous episodes, it covers usually about the first hour and a half of my training that I’ll give one on one, and I charge $500 an hour for that, you can get the course for 25 bucks, not a bad deal. Also on whatever podcast player you are listening, please do subscribe. I would love it if you could have all of our future episodes just fed right to you so you don’t miss a beat. And then of course, if you like what you hear, please do rate and review on whatever podcast player you are listening on. It makes a huge, huge difference to podcasters and I would give you a personal high five anytime I see you or a big digital hug if you do that for me. As always reach out to us at [email protected] with any ideas you have for the show, or any feedback, I’d absolutely love hear it. You know, this is Episode 10 so far, and so there’s a lot more coming out. And I’ve got a lot of ideas, but certainly love your impact as well. Okay, see you back here next week and I’m cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Couple of great resources:
1. Quick video of the pros/cons of Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads for B2B: Google Ads vs LinkedIn Ads for B2B

2. 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.

Transcript:

Google Ads is the OG of ad platforms. How does it stack up currently to LinkedIn ads?

0:12
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.

0:19
Hey there LinkedIn ads fanatics. Google Ads was the original ad platform and was synonymous with digital advertising for years and years. Now, though, as competition has increased, since all of your competitors use it and use it, well, are there bigger opportunities for you there or in LinkedIn ads? We’ll dive deep into that today. Let’s hit it. My favorite lead qualification methodology is called BANT, B A N T and it stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. And the way it works is that when you’re qualifying a lead let’s say it’s a SDR, sales development representative, who’s qualifying a lead? They’re trying to score it in four separate buckets. The budget, does this person have enough budget to afford us? The authority? Does this person have the signing authority to actually make the purchase? Or do we need to reach their boss or their boss’s boss? The need, does the person actually need what it is we’re selling? And timing, is the timing right for them? Or is this a deal that’s gonna have to go down months, or even years from now? So the way that this works is, if you’re looking at search channels like Google, whether it’s SEO or paid search on Google Ads, or even Bing Ads, these channels tend to score really high on both need and timing. And the reason why is because if someone is searching for something actively, which is where they would find you, if they were searching, and you were putting yourselves out there with search, you know that there’s at least some sort of a need, something drove them to complete that search. So they’re probably going to score high in need. Of course, timing is likely pretty good, because they probably wouldn’t have been searching unless there was some kind of timing matching up for them, they at least know they have some budget in the future, or at least are looking into an initiative. So search channels like Google are going to score really high in the N and the T in BANT for need and timing, but they’re probably going to score really poorly on the budget and the authority portion, because native to what someone types, it doesn’t tell you whether they are qualified to make that purchase decision. Sometimes it’s an administrative assistant doing the searching. Sometimes it’s the person themselves. Sometimes it’s an employee, you never really know. LinkedIn is a little bit opposite. It scores really high in the budget and authority categories, but really low in the need and the timing. And it scores high in budget and authority. Because if you’re putting together an ad targeting someone who needs something that you have, that means You’re probably going to target the people who are in company sizes and industries, large enough that can actually afford what it is you do. And you’re going to be targeting the people who have the authority to make that decision. Because that is one of the things that’s so great about LinkedIn ads platform. But of course, you’re targeting people, whether or not you know that they are in need of something currently. So that’s why they’re going to score really poorly in the need and the timing aspect. That means these leads on LinkedIn are going to take longer to close, Google ones are going to close a lot quicker. So let’s jump in then to the individual pros and cons of Google, as we’ve covered already, intent is the big pro with Google. And this is the reason why we like Google so much, is because you can catch people right at the bottom of the funnel, who are already signaling that they are looking for what it is you’re offering. That means you don’t have to do too much nurturing, and you can send them right to a demo or a purchase. If they’re already down there looking for one of those services. You don’t have to hit him with a white paper or something to try to brand yourself first. We’ve done quite a few different channel studies. Every time we have a client who has a great insight into data deeper in their funnel, we’re always understanding and we’re always excited to understand which channels produced what. And the common behavior we’ve always found in our studies is that Google always closes deals the fastest because they have a fast buying cycle because they were already at the end of the buying decision when they got to you. And LinkedIn always closes the largest deals, because you’re able to target the exact right people at the exact right size companies giving you really high quality leads, but again, they may not close super quickly. So outside of intent, there’s a lot of really great things about Google’s ads platform that used to be called Google AdWords. Now we call it Google Ads.

4:51
Next is retargeting. Google’s retargeting platform is incredible. It’s ultra inexpensive, and ultra powerful. It’s great tech, and you get access to pretty much the whole Google Display Network, or GDN, as the geeks call it. That gives you pretty much 90% of the web that runs on the GDN. Pretty much anyone who’s using AdSense installed on their website, because it’s the easiest way to start having your website generate advertising revenue. Google is also very versatile, because it has this search capability that we’ve already talked about that so good at being at the bottom of the funnel. But, it also has this whole display network, which is contextual advertising based off of keywords, and they also own YouTube. So all of these very different personalities in between these networks, makes them very powerful and versatile. Pretty much any marketer can find a way to use at least one, maybe even all three. It’s also helpful to understand that Google’s platform is super well baked out. Google early on made all of its money from Adwords back early, early. And because of that, they continued to innovate and move to make advertisers lives easier with the platform. They kept adding more and more features, really thoughtfully adding new algorithms and “better things”. And it’s now very full featured. And I would say it’s almost maybe to a fault, because now you have this platform that is so so featured that you really have to be an expert at pay per click advertising to really understand all of the ins and outs. And so to someone just getting started, it probably is really daunting. But all of this leads to them having a really, really solid platform with about every option you can think of. Google started out really early on by setting a floor price that was really reasonable. They started at five cents per click early early on, and then based off of competition, other people bidding five and 10 and 15 cents for a click. We started to see competition. aggregate around certain combinations of words. Now, of course, we have tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of words in every language. And competition is driven on Google by certain combinations of these words. And so you have keywords that are like buy CRM software, that could be really, really expensive. And you might see a keyword like, which are the better options in SUVs that maybe is not very competitive, because it’s not showing a whole lot of intent. It’s still signaling that someone’s in the research phase. So what this means is you have a way for competition to really be spread out. There are so many millions of combinations of words, maybe even billions or trillions, that competition could aggregate around. And so it keeps costs relatively low for everyone until you start having real competition. Then you have this ability to really protect your brand with something that we refer to in the industry as branded search. The idea here is you are bidding on your own brands keywords. So I might bid on b2b links calm or be too linked, or p3 link in case someone makes an error. And I can make sure that even if I’m not doing well organically for that keyword, that my ad is still gonna put me at the top of the page. And it also means that any competitor who was trying to snake on my brand that I can try to beat them out. And this is really both it’s definitely a double edged sword. It’s both a blessing and a curse. Because it also means that if someone comes and clicks on your ad when you’re bidding on your branded term, there’s a really good chance they would have scrolled a little bit further down and found you organically anyway and and it wouldn’t have cost you anything. But certainly you don’t know if a competitor were bidding on your keyword and maybe they would have grabbed that traffic. Before they made it down to you. So this is both a brand protection and trying to capture keyword traffic that your competitors might be trying to steal. It also gives you something really powerful, which is something I wish we had some way of measuring on LinkedIn. It’s this ability to measure real interest in your company. If you are bidding highly for your own brand’s, keyword, your own brand’s name, then you can look at the impressions that that ad delivers and have a really accurate view of, hey, how many people are searching for my company? What is the real interest around my company? If we were to do this on LinkedIn, it would probably look like “how often is my company showing up in in searches?” and “how many people are actually viewing my my brands company page or organizational page?”. Which of course that would be somewhat powerful information, but definitely not nearly as powerful as seeing how many people are searching Google, rather than the few percent who might be actually coming to LinkedIn specifically to look at it. Google also has some really fun stuff for power users. My favorite above those is called scripts. And it’s essentially the ability for Google to say, “hey, we’re not going to build every tool that you want, but we will give you this interface where you can enter your own JavaScript code”. And you can make the platform Do whatever you want without really having API access. So certainly, if you are going to build a platform, like an ads management platform, on top of Google ads, yeah, he would definitely want to have API access. But if you’re looking to just add a little bit of expert functionality to your account, you can find someone who knows JavaScript well, and build you a cool tool that can help you manage any of your accounts really quickly and easily internally. I would love to see LinkedIn ads script basics, so we could add a little bit of our own functionality as well.

10:59
Something else that they have is called observation audiences. And I would kill for this on LinkedIn. Essentially, you have an audience that you’re already bidding on. But you can add a filter to it, that becomes an observational audience. And you can actually even change your bids on it. So you could bid up your observational audience, but we’ll get to that. So the way that it works is if you don’t change anything you just have this filter on on a campaign or an ad group level. What you’re doing is breaking out that audience by filter to see how it functions with or without, and so it’s kind of like running a private focus group. One of the big no brainers to add here for an observational audience is adding your remarketing list or your retargeting list to an existing campaign, because then you can see they’re still kept separate. You can tell exactly what is coming from those who are part of your remarketing list and those who are not. But you can also bit up a little bit. So you can say if you’re part of my remarketing list, you can maybe bid up by 30% or up by double. on Google, you can also break out your observation audiences by things like business services, parental status, marital status, education, whether they’re a college student or not, their educational background, home ownership, they have these things called affinity audiences, which is like, what do I know that they’re they like or are currently interested in. And these are all things you wouldn’t have to build out entire new campaigns or ad sets, or sorry, ad groups on Google. In order to take advantage of these you can just layer them on as observation audiences to your existing campaign and get a readout of “Hey, it looks like people who are marital status single tend to like this better. So I’m going to decide to break off a new ad set or a new ad group, just for that.” I would love this for LinkedIn. And the way I would use it is if we were running, let’s say, a job function campaign, I could add an observation audience of just certain job titles to understand how many of those job titles are being picked up by that job function. That would be really interesting to understand. I’d love the idea of layering on a retargeting audience to see how differently it performs. I’d love to throw on traits, like some of the new custom segments that that we’re getting things like, how do job seekers or how do people who are open to education, how are they interacting with my my ads and content? That could be really cool. I also would like to layer on things like interests. I don’t know how good LinkedIn interests are. I don’t know how well they play in to someone being of high quality. So I would love to add an observation audience onto my LinkedIn campaigns. Just saying, “hey, show me what people who are in Interested in B2B marketing or interested in CRMs will do”. My next absolute favorite thing about Google right now is they have access to all of YouTube inventory, and all of YouTube Ads, obviously. So YouTube is kind of a combination of search and display. Its search because it’s keyword based. But it’s display because it’s a little bit social. And you can bid by audiences and behaviors. So with Google, now you have access to all of the Google Display Network, all of Google Search. You have YouTube and you also have Gmail. And all of these things are really high market usage, meaning that if you use them, you can get access to a lot of scale very quickly and very easily. And then they do have one really awesome thing that I kind of alluded to that is YouTube only. I wish we had this for the rest of Google, but they have something called custom intent audiences and the way it works is you can say, “hey, Google, I know that I can’t see the words that people are searching. But hey, if someone searches for any of these keywords here, I want to add them to a retargeting audience for me to show just YouTube videos”. And you can imagine how powerful this gets, because you’re essentially saying, if someone’s search query contains, let’s say, my competitors’ brand name, or keywords by competitor, I’m really doing YouTube retargeting around someone else’s retargeting list. And that is so so cool and powerful to me.

15:37
Okay, obviously, Google is not all sunshine and rainbows, we spent a good bit of time talking about the great stuff. But there’s also a lot of cons here that you should be aware of as well. The first is that your sales team will likely tell you that a lot of the leads coming from Google are of poor quality, even though they’re they’re telling you right now, this is what I want and I’m ready to buy. A lot of times people are not actually qualified to buy from you. And so the sales team will tell you things like, hey, these are we’re getting a lot of mom and pops or small potatoes kinds of companies who can’t afford us if you’re, let’s say mid market or even enterprise. And because we can’t filter out the small fish, the people who can’t afford us, or we even can’t filter out our competitors, which is big, we’ll get into that here in a minute. We have to start filtering people out by ad copy. So if you could imagine you now have to write into your ad copy something like the platform for enterprise, if you’re trying to signal that your product costs too much for maybe the small to medium sized business. And that hurts your click through rate, hurting your relevancy score, as Google calls it, quality score. And it just gets the whole situation a little bit stickier, a little bit tougher. Also with Google, it’s very competitive because like we mentioned at the beginning of the episode, your competitors are all on there. And they’ve been optimizing their efforts for years. And so if you are a brand new startup who hasn’t really figured out what your lifetime value looks like, you haven’t calculated what your cost per acquisition looks like. You’ve got a lot of testing. You’re up against a big wall of all of these competitors who have all optimized into their positions and really left you in a bad spot to try to fight for your position in that market. Because it’s more competitive, it’s not uncommon to see clicks costing $40 or more, especially for enterprise software. It’s not uncommon in legal keywords to see $100, $200, $400 per click, it’s crazy. So certain keywords can get very expensive, especially because they are likely very high value keywords that have been bid up over time. The nice thing is it really is very market appropriate how these keywords are priced. You know people are willing to pay them. That much for a keyword because it’s worth that much. Google is also very bottom of the funnel. So if you don’t have a list of keywords that are already searched for, that people might try to find your product or service with, you’re really stuck with whatever you can get. That means, let’s say you’re bidding on all of the right keywords, and your boss comes to you and says, “Hey, this is working really well, let’s double our budget for next month”, you don’t have a quick, easy way to turn that dial up to double and can’t spend it because if you’ve already gotten 100% of the impressions of that keyword, then you’re really stuck. You can’t just generate more without scaling broader and watching your quality fall. So if you have a disruptive product or service that people don’t know about already, so they don’t know to search it, they don’t know it exists. It’s gonna be really hard on search to drum that up. You could use Google’s Display Network and try to spray a little bit broader to try to build that awareness so that people will then come and search for you. And that’s what people have done for years and years. But certainly, it’s not nearly as good as if you already have people in your market who know to look for you already. Also really hard for business to business startups for a lot of reasons. Also, a lot of these B2B startups are doing something that is disruptive, so people don’t know to look for them. But then they have the same challenges of like, how do I muscle my way into this industry, you know, against all these people who’ve already optimized their way here and made things work, I’m going to be really inefficient while I try to find where I can fit. Competitive transparency is so so tough on Google, because everyone Google’s their own keywords to see how they rank and to see their own ads. And then of course, when they do this, they see their competitors what their ads say, and a lot of times they will click on their ads to punish them. Brands really like to do this click fraud to charge the other guy money. Well, of course your competitor is doing this to you as well. And so everyone loses here, the fact that you can’t exclude your competition from seeing your ads is a big deal. It’s a constant struggle to not have to pay for competitor click fraud. And really my final con about Google is that Google is so large, they just don’t care about you anymore. They’re so massive, they only really have to listen to their top, let’s say, hundred or 500 customers, and so they don’t care about you unless you’re throwing around hundreds of millions of dollars a quarter. And what’s even worse, in B2B, Google has a track record of just not caring about business to business. They do so much great around business to consumer advertising, that they really leave us B2B advertisers out in the cold. They don’t give us new features. They’re not actively thinking about ways to help us out. Okay, here’s a quick sponsor break and then we’ll dive into LinkedIn pros and cons.

20:57
The LinkedIn Ad show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

21:06
You guessed it B2LinkedIn, the LinkedIn Ads focused ad agency. We manage many of Lincoln’s largest accounts worldwide. And we’re official LinkedIn partners. Contact us on B2Linked.com to get in touch. And our team can help you enact these and all other strategies to get you the best performance.

21:24
All right, with that being said, let’s jump into LinkedIn pros and cons. One of the top reasons you want to use LinkedIn is this ability to capture new audiences to get in front of people who didn’t know that you or your product or your service existed before, and so they wouldn’t have been reachable with search. You can grow the whole funnel by filling up the top with people who are brand new audiences who didn’t know who you were. And this is especially amazing for those of you who have really maxed out your search channels. And now if you could add any more to that funnel, if you could add more awareness from social channels, it would just superpower your search results. Like we talked about early on in the episode, LinkedIn brings really high quality leads, because we can target the people by their budget, their authority. And this gives us the types of leads that when they get to your sales team, your sales team is saying thank you. These are exactly the right people. They may give you crap because they’re not sales ready yet. But that is just where this sits in the funnel. Any social channel will be really difficult to find that level of intent, the need and the timing aspect to BANT. But certainly with LinkedIn, you are getting the budget and the authority and you’re getting access to your very ideal audience. You can get very micro targeted or you can spread it broader and try to hit more of the right people. You’re also catching people when they’re in the right mindset. When they are on LinkedIn. You know, they’re either thinking about their job or their career broadly. And so you’re giving them some kind of offer that augments their job or their career, it’s a great place to be, you’re going to end up having really good positive associations with them, as well as having high conversion rates. Another pro is LinkedIn can be cheaper than Google Ads, depending on the keyword, depending on the industry. We have worked with some clients who will see a LinkedIn $12 per click, and they get excited because they’re paying double that on Google and they can definitely make that work. I absolutely love on LinkedIn, how we can layer on exclusions to help cut out unqualified people, because we’re paying really expensive clicks here, you know, eight to $11 for a click. And so we don’t want to waste that eight to $11 on someone like a competitor, a past customer, a current customer, and we can pretty much virtually eliminate click fraud if we’ve set up our exclusions properly. So that means us as an agent See, we would exclude ourselves from being able to see our clients ads, we would exclude the clients company, so employees aren’t clicking. And we can upload lists of customer lists, email address lists, and try to cut those errant clicks down to a minimum. If you want to spy on someone, because you’re a very sophisticated advertiser, you still have access to some transparency. If you navigate to your competitors page on LinkedIn, and click on the ads tab, you can see their last six months of advertising. And it won’t cost them for a click, which I think is really good, but you can spy a little bit, you can tell at least what their ads say, and what offers they go to. And finally, LinkedIn is constantly improving, now. Certainly it has a ways to go still before it’s really playing in Google and Facebook’s arena. But we do see LinkedIn putting a lot more effort into improving the platform. And of course, I am so grateful for those strides.

25:01
So now we get into LinkedIn cons, it really is not great for the bottom of the funnel like search, especially like Google is. Every advertiser we talked to wants to jump right to the demo and the purchase. They want to pay a certain amount of dollars to get a demo, hardcore lead, someone who wants to buy something. But because LinkedIn is very top to middle of funnel, the audience is not ready for an offer like that. They’re not ready, like search would be. So if you can’t go right for the kill, you need to start a little bit higher up in the funnel, and think about them more in the middle of the sales process. You also have to keep in mind that on LinkedIn, people are busy and you’re actively trying to distract someone from doing what they wanted to do otherwise. So you have to make it valuable for them to actually lure them in with your content or your thought leadership or something that actually solves a pain point or a problem for them. And this will Create a non-sales ready lead for the most part, but it’s getting you in touch with exactly the right kind of people that will want to be your best customers. Certainly the largest con that we hear from people all the time about LinkedIn is the cost. You can expect to pay between $8 to $11, a click, and some much more even than that. And that immediately prices much of the B2B market out of the market. So we’re constantly telling people, if your lifetime value isn’t over, you know, $10,000, $15,000, then LinkedIn is probably too expensive for you to have a return on your investment, even if the targeting is just perfect for what you do. The high cost really comes from a supply and demand problem where both supply and demand are really challenged. On the supply side, LinkedIn traffic is really low compared to Google or Facebook. It’s kind of the platform that you would come back to, you know, three or four times a month to comment on something, to connect with someone, to see who is viewing your profile. And so it’s going to have limited ad inventory, keeping the supply of ads relatively low. And then advertiser demand is pretty high, because advertiser demand on LinkedIn pools around a narrow set of professional facets. And so with Google, you’re looking at combinations of words. And there are millions, billions, trillions of combinations of words. Now we’re looking at certain individual sets that people tend to congregate around. Like for instance, there are only so many senorities out there. So something like managers, directors, VPS C level, there’s only so many buckets. And so it creates fewer combinations of things, meaning that the demand is going to be higher around these relatively few combinations of things. And advertisers who find really high value in certain audiences and they’re going to bid it up. So LinkedIn is at a little bit of a disadvantage. On the cost side, competition can rise faster on social, especially with so few options than it would on search. LinkedIn has these long sales cycles, usually, most likely for a few reasons. But I would say mostly it’s because the traffic is mid funnel. And we often times have these larger purchases we’re making we’re asking people to make, so a larger purchase is going to take more consideration more time, and it’s mid funnel, so they haven’t made the decision yet. They’re still working on that. So these long sales cycles. Most of the time, these sales require committees and specific budget allocation, further lengthening the sales cycle, and increasing involvement from people who are outside of just the one person you were targeting, who was feeling the pain that you can solve.

28:54
And finally, LinkedIn significantly lags behind the other platforms on just the table. stakes. For instance, we don’t have the ability to target by device yet. The retargeting platform, although is going to get a lot better in October of 2020. It’s still really weak right now. We don’t have anything like an ad set or an ad group level. And I could go on and on about improvements that are needed for the platform, in order for it to compete with the other world class platforms. So it has a long way to go still to catch up to Facebook and Google. But certainly, like I mentioned before, they’re in the process of improving. I think LinkedIn really catches the vision for what their, their platform can become. And I’m cheering them on. Your style as you’re an advertiser, Google’s style is going to be very search, meaning it’s going to be very high intent, getting people who are all ready to close. The types of other platforms that you might look into. If this is a great style of traffic for you would be things like G2 crowd and Capterra, who are already looking to make a decision about software and now they’re just trying to compare. Also Bing Ads does really well, Yahoo search will be in the same arena. And also kind of Cora advertising. I really am intrigued by Cora. I like that it’s very search focused because it’s around keywords of questions. But it’s probably more middle of funnel more learning kind of like a social channel would be. The search style is going to close deals quickly and really give your sales team sales ready leads. LinkedIn, on the other hand is going to be a very targeted display type of platform. So very highly targeted with low intent. It’s going to play a more in the middle to top of funnel and produce longer sales cycles. So I hope that that gives you a really good view as you’re trying to figure out pros and cons. How do I weight each of the different platforms in my marketing mix? So let’s talk about opportunities in each of these channels. First of all in Google, I think you have the awesome opportunity to capture the whole bottom of the funnel. You can send your amazing LinkedIn traffic who is highly highly qualified, send them to your website and then retarget them on Google to stay in front of them on the whole Google Display Network really inexpensively with really good technology. I think this is by far one of the things I would recommend. If you are running nothing else on Google except for just retargeting, do it in combination with your LinkedIn traffic, you will supercharge your LinkedIn traffic. Also do what we talked about earlier about targeting and protecting your brand terms. Don’t let a competitor come in and start stealing your bottom of funnel traffic away. Because these are people who are already looking for you and you don’t want to lose that. I know there is some disagreement out there in the digital marketing world about, you know, paying for your own brand terms when they would have come to you anyway. But ultimately, I think it’s worthwhile. You probably want to do it just for the pure brand protection. It’s like brand insurance. I talked about how amazing I think YouTube ads are. They’re amazing for video. It’s cheap, and it’s great technology to run video ads. And of course, we have those custom intent audiences that are like it feels like cheating to retarget the traffic that was probably going to your competitors. Amazing. Then on LinkedIn, I think there are some significant opportunities as well. I use LinkedIn to capture the most valuable top of funnel or middle of funnel approach and reaching the people who are in the right mindset who are the most qualified to do business with me. I love the idea if you’re not using lead gen forms to send traffic to pages that your Google remarketing and your Facebook retargeting can take over and try to stay top of mind with those people. As you know from previous episodes, LinkedIn is amazing at ABM, or account based marketing. Every company I talked to has at least a list of 20 to 50 brands that they would kill to work with. So it’s worth putting together a campaign targeting just those brands, even if it doesn’t spend very much just to make sure you’re staying in front of the most valuable people that you would kill to be in front of, you’d kill to have their logo on your website. All right, I’ve got some episode resources coming up for you. So stick around.

33:30
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

33:39
First resource for you here is a video that we created that really just breaks down the basics of Google Ads versus LinkedIn Ads. So check that one out. It’s like six, seven minutes long, not big. You can easily send this if you’re trying to make the case someone internally. Send it to them to help make up their mind. Also, I created the course on LinkedIn Learning around LinkedIn Ads. So if you’re looking to just get started on LinkedIn, check that course out super high quality. And of course, it’s endorsed by LinkedIn. So can’t be half bad, right? The standard ask here, please make sure whatever podcast player you’re listening to this on, make sure you hit the subscribe button. Make sure that all of these episodes as I go deeper and deeper down the LinkedIn ads rabbit hole are coming right into your ear holes. And as a favor, please do rate and review this podcast. There are relatively few listeners right now. I’m actually refusing to look at the analytics because I’m a little bit scared. I put a lot into this podcast and any sort of rating and review you can give that would help those metrics out will really make me feel a lot better as soon as I actually let myself look at them. If you have any questions or suggestions about what we should do on the show in the future, give us an email to [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you. And of course, we’ll see you back here next week, cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Resources for this week:
LinkedIn Ads vs FB Ads for B2B Video
Marketing Land Article – FB :37 min per day
Wordstream article from 2018 with 17 mins per week
Course

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

Transcript:

Facebook ads are all the rage and have been for years in the world of digital marketing. But how do they stack up versus LinkedIn ads for B2B in 2020?

0:16
Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.

0:23
Hey there LinkedIn ads fanatics. So Facebook ads are incredible. And so many marketers swear by them. And it’s probably all you’ve heard for the last five years. But they’re sure a heck of a lot harder to make work for B2B companies. So let’s walk through what you should be using Facebook for and what you should be using LinkedIn ads for, and you’ll find they actually work quite well hand in hand. Let’s hit it. So first, a little bit about each one of the platforms. So Facebook, and I’m sure so much of this is going to be like, like, yeah, AJ, we get this. We know what Facebook is. But it’s a social network that owns about nine percent of your social activity. I mean, between the time that you spend on Facebook and Instagram, and WhatsApp and Oculus VR, and any other sort of Facebook properties out there, it is an incredible time suck and it’s a place where they have access to you. It’s so very powerful for B2C. The interest targeting the level of data that Facebook has on you that marketers can then leverage is incredible. They also and we’ll go a lot deeper into that this, they have the best retargeting technology on the planet. And it’s not the most, it’s one of the most recent ones created. So they’ve done amazing things. And just by virtue of their technology, and the way people use it, it makes it the best retargeting platform. It’s also really insanely good for the top of the funnel, because it’s cheap, and this is what display is supposed to be. It’s about getting your message in front of people who haven’t heard of you before, but also because of their amazing retargeting technology, it plays a significant part all the way through your buyers journey as well. So it’s not just a top of funnel strategy. We know that because it owns about 90% of your social activity, it has high usage. The averages that we see are somewhere around 37 minutes per day used on Facebook. And that’s a lot of time where marketers can be in front of you. It’s a very intensely personal platform. This is where people go to connect to people that they love their friends. And that’s the mindset they’re in is really connecting, consuming, and generally being entertained. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is also a social network, but it’s very, very different. It’s focused 100% around who people are professionally. And if you’re listening to this podcast, I know this is probably not news to you. But LinkedIn started out as kind of like your online resume, and it started that way, but ended up becoming something into like, where you consume professional content and get advice and connect to people. So LinkedIn is really in this resurgence right now or I guess it’s not resurging, it’s a surgence. Starting from where people didn’t really know what it was good for to now we’re seeing a lot of value coming out of it. Now, LinkedIn does not release their usage numbers, but estimates from a 2018 word stream study, say that people spend about 17 minutes per month on LinkedIn. And we know usage has gone up significantly so I wouldn’t be surprised to see, you know, 25-30 minutes a month, on average, maybe even higher here in 2020. But, you know, LinkedIn does not release these numbers, probably because if you compare them to what Facebook is at 37 minutes per day, 25 minutes per month doesn’t sound very amazing. But because of the capabilities of the platform, and if you’re listening to this, I know you believe this. It’s very, very worthwhile. We all know that LinkedIn ads are expensive. But you know, we get the best b2b focused targeting on the planet. And that makes it worthwhile for the vast majority of us. It’s also best used for the middle of the funnel, as we learned from Episode 01, if you listen to that, and that’s really where we want to focus with LinkedIn. It’s too expensive to be at the top of the funnel, you know, at $8 to $11 bucks a click, it’s pretty hard to send people to your blog posts or whatever. And because it’s a social platform, we can’t send people right to the bottom of the funnel to buy something or hop on the phone with a sales rep with any sort of volume because it’s just too much too soon, so it plays best in the middle of the funnel. Okay, so jumping into Facebook’s pros, because there are a lot of pros to it. I will never knock Facebook as a platform. It’s got some incredible technology. It’s just not always of the best use for my clients, but I certainly respect it. So first off, we’ve talked about retargeting. How they have the best retargeting platform on the planet. And because of their amazing reach of having 90% of social activity. When you do retargeting, you can be in front of someone, you know, during so much of what they do and interact with online. That’s pretty amazing.

5:15
They also have a technology called look alikes that LinkedIn recently rolled out look alikes. But Facebook has incredible look alike. You can pretty much create a look alike off of any data set that you have. If it’s a retargeting like a web retargeting audience, or maybe a list that you’ve uploaded, or something like that. There’s a slider from 1% to 10%, where you get to say, here’s how tight I want you to make my look alike. So if you leave it at 1%, the minimum This is going to make it the tightest audience that Facebook knows how they’re going to not explore very far outside, just the immediate criteria that makes that person valuable to you. And you can slide it all the way up to 10% where it’s like, hey, show this to anyone who is remotely like this person and everything in between. Very, very cool. But realize that this is a machine that you have to feed with good data. The garbage in garbage out model is especially effective here. If you feed a look alike audience with garbage, it’s going to give you a totally unrelated audience, that’s not going to be helpful. And vice versa. You feed it with great data, like, here’s a list of all of our past customers who have already paid us money. And it might give you a really good list of potential customers you want to go after. Facebook is really good at their optimized objectives. They have so so much data on each person, because they have their whole personal life there in front of them. So all of these millions and millions and millions of interactions, interests likes, who you’re connected to. All of that plays really well into their model. So when you tell them I want you to optimize towards this objective, lots of times it nails it, Facebook video and ads have been incredible for a long time. Now there’s kind of this regular ongoing battle between people who like Facebook video ads and YouTube ads, because they are a very different kind of model how you pay for them and how they’re used. But it’s really hard to deny Facebook came out with video ads very inexpensively. Of course, they lied about how many times your videos were getting seen and all that early on. They’ve set the tones for that. But even still, video advertising on Facebook is very inexpensive. And the best part it works right in with their retargeting platform, you can put two videos in sequence and say once you’ve watched 50% of my video, now I want to show you the next one. And we’re going to get that with LinkedIn here in October of 2020 is current estimates. But yeah, Facebook started with it and it’s great.

7:51
There’s also some functionality around events that are really, really cool. So you can run event ads on Facebook, that and then you can actually retarget anyone who clicked that they were interested. And they also have a native integration with Eventbrite. So if you’re putting on a kind of in person event, it’s a, an incredible ad format that I hope LinkedIn has a copy of at some point. And what I’m imagining is, if you had something like a digital meeting, like a webinar or a summit, something like that could be really cool on LinkedIn. And when you use an event ad, the day before your event happens, you get a free push notification to anyone who said that they were interested, which I think is awesome. Facebook was one of the first to the chatbot game. So you can go in and do a type of ad format called messenger ads. And you can do lead generation through messenger with prompts instead of form fields. And that really leads to high conversion rates, makes you feel like you have a relationship with this company because of how interactive it is. And you can connect with things like drift and mobile Monkey and other chat bot types of software. And then really keep in front of people keep conversations alive, keep a relationship happening. And that’s again, something I think LinkedIn will fall into step with here at some point. But you know, for right now, Facebook is just amazing for the chat bot experience where you don’t have to have a live human chatting with someone. Now, Facebook does have some targeting around B2bB that you should probably be aware of. They have things like your job title, your industry, company name, and they used to have things like company size, office type, seniority, and other types of targeting. Now, I don’t know what was fueled by Facebook guessing or how much was fed by third party data sources. But the B2B targeting on Facebook has always been really rough, very small proportion of people I’m estimating something like 4% to 6% of people would even bother to write their professional information in so there’s just not much there to begin with. And those who did have it, oftentimes it would be outdated, they would have their position from, you know, six months ago or a year and a half ago listed. And then, of course, all of us B2B marketers, we would target these same people by job title, because that’s who we want to go after. And we would try to max that out. And so it becomes competitive really quickly driving prices up. Facebook also owns Instagram. So Instagram reach is, you know, great right now. And it’s such a hot network, the younger generation tends to have really adopted Instagram. So the older generation going to be on Facebook, the younger going to be on Instagram, with a large subset of the population using really both Costs on Facebook have always been a subject of interest, because they started out being very low cost. And we keep hearing rapidly how costs are rising on Facebook, sometimes triple digit percentages every quarter. So we’re getting to a point now where Facebook is going To start getting into the realm of being LinkedIn expensive, but there are still opportunities, there’s tons and tons of inventory out there. And they’re always opening up new targeting, new inventory, new ad formats, which really do help keep costs low. But you know, certainly, we’re seeing costs rise quickly. And people do spend a ton of time on Facebook. It’s really the go to app, especially with messenger. You know, people are on there talking to their friends all the time. This is definitely a network where people will spend a lot of time. And of course, Facebook is not all sunshine and rainbows. On the con side here. When you put B2B stuff on Facebook, it’s perceived as boring and it tends to get punished with really heavy costs. So on the B2C side, you might see costs in the, you know, .30 to .80 cents to get someone to your website. But on Facebook, you might see it’s really hard to get someone onto your website for a B2B offer. You might be looking at similar cost per click clicked to LinkedIn. I was looking at an example yesterday with someone paying $6 to $12 per website visitor from Facebook. So yeah, that’s definitely definitely in LinkedIn territory. And of course, like we mentioned, the cons here about Facebook, the B2B data that it has is outdated. And also, you know, pretty weak. It’s not over much of the population. And as soon as you’ve really maxed out the data that seems to be pretty exact for you in b2B, like around job title or company name, of course, you then have to scale up and start getting into things like interests and other ways of targeting your type of professional, and of course, costs come down when you do that, but so does your lead quality. So your quality of lead gets really low on Facebook because of how weak the targeting is. But it’s also less expensive in a lot of cases. So people want to start there. They want to dip their toe into the B2B marketing or social advertising realm there on facebook. And that makes a lot of sense to me. When you are a b2b advertiser, you have to understand the mindset that they’re in, they are most likely distracted, they are there to be entertained. They could be on their way to go play Farmville, they might be looking at pictures of grandkids, or anything in between, you just don’t know. And so if you’re giving them an offer, it’s really hard to predict what mindset they’re in and how ready they’re going to be for that offer.

13:27
All right, let’s jump into LinkedIn then. The pros, people are there for work, they’re in the right mindset. And what that means is you give them an offer that augments either their professional life, their career, and they’re going to have high conversion rates, and really hold you in a professional, very favorable kind of light. As I’m sure you know, it has by far the best targeting for professionals on the planet. So you as a B2B advertiser, you care about this targeting a lot. You want to be able to target them by their job title, their department, their seniority, their skills, the groups that their members of, their company name, their company size, industry, skills, groups, all of these things really spell out exactly the way you’d want to target and speak to your ideal audience here. And one of the favorite things of mine about the network is not only is this targeting amazing, but if you’re targeting white collar professionals, especially in North America, where I am, so many people, so many of these professionals have a LinkedIn profile. And so it’s really near perfect scale. Whereas on Facebook, you might hope to hit you know, 4% to 6% of your ideal target audience, because that’s really all who would bother to put their professional information into their profile. On LinkedIn, you might hit 95% of them as long as you’ve got the budget for it. So it’s a great way of giving you perfect access to your ideal audience, even if the costs are quite high. We also know that LinkedIn professionals tend to keep their profiles up to date, because it’s a reflection of their professional self. They are interested in what other people think about them and know about their careers. And this is really the point of LinkedIn. This is where you go to kind of update your resume, as people expect. So LinkedIn tends to have the most updated version of, you know, where someone is at in their career. I like to joke that I, you know, LinkedIn is the second person to know after I make a career change, after my wife, I tell my wife first, and then I go and update my LinkedIn, because I’m proud of who I am professionally and I want everyone that I’ve done business with in the past to see what I’m up to. And, you know, be able to also generate leads going forward, because as long as people know what it is you’re doing, they can refer people and so it becomes this virtuous cycle. The lead quality from LinkedIn tends to be crazy high, and that is probably because of two different factors. Number one is the targeting you’re only going to target the people who would make a really good fit for your product or service, of course, but then it’s also really high quality. Because the mindset that people were there for when they saw your ad, they didn’t associate you with the belly fat ads of Facebook, they associate you with their colleagues, their work, their professional life, and so they’re going to tend to trust you more right off the bat. Now, certainly LinkedIn has its cons as well, chief and foremost here, is the cost. Now we’re seeing an average cost per click of between $8 to $11 cost per click right now. And that’s only going to rise. You know, some of our clients have to bid in the $14, $15, $16 range to get traffic. Certainly we have clients who are paying well below that as well. But that’s really the new normal, this is where we’re going to be paying.

16:44
You also have to grab their attention quick, because while they’re on LinkedIn, they are usually busy, they’re on their way to go do something. And so you’ve got to get the value out very quickly. On Facebook, the real common knowledge and practice is make your ads long, tell a story, try to lead them in, and you know, tease them. On LinkedIn, you don’t really get to bug someone for 45 seconds while they try to figure out what you’re trying to sell them. You really have to get right to the point. So think on LinkedIn, you move quick. And that’s not necessarily a con, it’s just the approach you have to use. We also know that LinkedIn tends to be pretty middle of the funnel, because of the cost. Like, it’s difficult to treat it like a top of funnel platform. When the costs are so high. It’s, you know, maybe middle of funnel cost, but top of funnel type of mindset. So if I could have my wish with LinkedIn, I would love to see costs go down. So we could treat it as more of a top of funnel type of traffic, but because of the cost, we have to send them right to the middle of the funnel, most of the time asking for some kind of information in exchange for a content asset of some kind. Okay, now we’re going to take a quick break for a sponsor, and then afterwards, we’ll dive right into some other areas here, like retargeting and how each of these should fit into your marketing mix.

18:07
The LinkedIn ad show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn ads experts.

18:17
B2Linked as an ad agency and LinkedIn ads is all we do. So fill out the form on any of the pages of B2Linked.com to get in touch, and our team will help you enact all of these strategies and more to get you the best ad performance. All right, now we can jump right into retargeting. So LinkedIn has a retargeting platform as of 2017, as you’ll know from Episode 03, where we went through the whole history, and the retargeting platform is just it’s pretty weak and nothing against LinkedIn on this. It’s a technological hindrance here. The reason why is because the retargeting is all cookie based. And we know that half of LinkedIn traffic comes from mobile and about half of mobile traffic is on iOS devices like iPhone, iPad, and those and any Safari browser, or Mozilla Firefox browser, none of those will accept this third party cookie. And so immediately, you know, let’s say you pay for 300 visitors to come to your website, because you know that the minimum audience size to retarget on LinkedIn is 300. But then you find out I’ve actually got to buy more like 600 visitors to my website before I’ll fill up that that audience so that I can start targeting them. So you really have to have a high amount of traffic for this to really be valuable. And you know that half of your visitors won’t even qualify to be retargeted. The other thing about LinkedIn retargeting is that people don’t spend very much time on LinkedIn. And so if there’s not a lot of time to get in front of them. Not a lot of opportunities for you as a marketer to stay top of mind. And it’s not exactly inexpensive either. You know, we see that if we pay $10 bucks for a click, we might pay $5 for a retargeting click. So it’s not a huge discount, but certainly it is appreciated. And I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t use LinkedIn’s retargeting, you absolutely should. There’s no reason not to because it’s certainly cheaper and it’s a way to get in front of a warm audience. But if you’re relying on it on its own, you’re missing out on a lot of value. So the retargeting Dream Team, as I like to call this, and I would recommend you send all of your traffic, maybe not all, you’ll have other traffic sources too, but you’ll use LinkedIn to send exactly the right people to your website. But then you’ll use Facebook’s retargeting platform, which is the best tech on the planet for retargeting to stay in front of them. What that gets you is this ability to stay in front of these people that you might have paid $8 to $10 bucks a click on LinkedIn to acquire them. But then once you have them on Facebook, you might be paying, you know, $1 to $1.50 per click to your stay in front of them and that’s incredibly powerful. Not to mention Facebook’s retargeting is all engagement based, so it doesn’t rely on the cookie like LinkedIn’s does. And so any action they take whether they are on desktop on mobile, they’re always logged in Facebook has an incredible reach and insight into who these people are. And you can stay in front of them on multiple machines. Basically, wherever they are on the planet. It’s awesome. Now, Google’s tech is not half bad either. If you’re retargeting on Facebook, you pretty much get access to them anywhere on Facebook or Instagram. But if you do the same retargeting logic on Google, you get access to probably 90% of the web, which is what we call the Google Display Network, or GDN. And this is a great way of using very similar awesome retargeting technology for very inexpensive to stay in front of people wherever they are on the web. So Facebook hits them on social Google hits them on the web, that is my ideal retargeting audience. Now, when we get Engagement retargeting from LinkedIn, I’m definitely going to recommend layering that on there. And this is probably in October. So if you’re listening to this after October, I hope you in the future are getting to use this. Then I will probably recommend always using all three. And I’m really excited for LinkedIn’s retargeting to get much better so that I can use a lot for exclusions. That’s my excitement there.

22:23
So as you’re thinking about your marketing mix, what part really should Facebook play in that? Well, I would say if your audience is on Facebook, and you can reach them there for less expensive, then I would go at it all day long, I would put as much budget towards it as possible. But let me qualify this when when I say if you can reach your audience there for less expensive, I don’t mean if you can show your ad there for less expensive because you can. I mean, if your cost per qualified lead is less on Facebook than it is on LinkedIn, then I would continue to invest there and I would invest big. This doesn’t always happen. And in fact, it doesn’t happen really often at all, for my experience, because Facebook sure is cheaper. But as soon as you start throwing out all of the bad leads, because they were unqualified, or they were mom and pop kinds of audiences, you know, tangentially related, you start looking at, okay, what do we actually get for the sales team here, and lots of times you’re going to notice that your costs are much higher than they even would be on LinkedIn. So your job as a marketer is to get much more sophisticated than the platform’s are by default. It means you have to use these channels at the acquisition level, and then blend them all with their costs after the form fill with a CRM to get this data and understand what your cost per qualified lead is, or cost per proposal or cost per closed customer. All of these are things that none of the platforms will give you readily, but you as a sophisticated B2B marketer are going to be able to do and you will be able to see exactly how much you should continue to spend on Facebook versus LinkedIn. I would suggest here that Facebook is really good for dipping your toe into the water of social ads, and getting a feel for how people like your content and your ads. It’s a really good testing ground, I think, because for not very much money, you can put your content and offers out there and see how people engage with them. So if you are a small company just getting started, or you don’t have very much budget, I love the idea of starting on Facebook, put an offer together, target the very best you can and just see, does my content get a 6% conversion rate? Does it get a 50% conversion rate or somewhere in between. And keep in mind that if you’re doing business for business sake, you’re probably not going to work very well on Facebook. What I mean by that is if work is a core part of you, and you hang out with your friends talking about work, then Facebook is going going to be a good place to get in front of those types of people, because they’re going to be on Facebook, and they’re going to be in this business mindset. If you’re going after jobs where people tend to check out at 5pm, and they just don’t want to be thinking more about work, then reaching them on Facebook, when they’re trying to take their relaxation time is probably not going to work very well. There are some segments that I found to be very reachable on Facebook. And that would be things like small business owners, freelancers, real estate agents, people who are into MLM or multi level marketing. Those are the types of people who really make Facebook their playground, even if they shouldn’t. This is just, it’s where they’re comfortable personally, and then that’s where they try to build their businesses. Now, forgive me for the ammunition and the guns reference here. But I like to think of Facebook like a shotgun approach to marketing. It’s one bullet that doesn’t cost very much but it spreads really broadly across a target. It’ll hit the target a few times, a few times it’ll miss, it’s really good value. And you can really do a lot of it, you can do a lot of damage, tends to be a very broad kind of approach, not very precise. So then as we start thinking about LinkedIn, how it plays into your marketing mix, let’s carry that metaphor a little bit further. LinkedIn is really a lot like a sniper rifle kind of approach to marketing. It is highly targeted, you are going to hit that target come hell or high water, it takes a much more thoughtful approach. And you know that a shotgun shell doesn’t cost very much, but that sniper round costs a lot. And so you invest a lot more into it. And you really only get a few shots on goal with this. Whereas Facebook, you kind of get to spray and pray a little bit. And if you have a very narrow subset of highly valuable target audience, LinkedIn really is a no brainer. I was talking to a client the other day who has a an audience of 3,000 people worldwide who could buy their product. And I said, it really doesn’t matter what you offer them, you should just be in front of them at every possible turn because if there’s only 3000 people that doesn’t cost very much on LinkedIn to stay in front of them and get every chance for an impression, you can. Now you are obviously a sophisticated marketer if you’re listening to this. So you’re going to be measuring how the leads convert past the initial form fill. And this is where LinkedIn really wins, because everyone who isn’t measuring is, is complaining about how high the cost per lead is, or cost per form fill, but you’re going to go deeper, you’re going to be measuring what’s my cost per marketing qualified lead from the CRM, what’s my cost per sales qualified lead, my cost per proposa,l cost per closed deal, what’s my ROI, and as you’re doing this, you will be comparing the platforms and my guess is for the vast majority of you, LinkedIn is going to start looking really good. Sure that initial cost per click is high, but your access to the most highly targeted, the most valuable prospects that would ever do business with you is totally unprecedented.

28:09
So as we start talking about opportunities here, and you know what the outlook looks like for each of these networks, I would say that on Facebook, B2B brands tend to be pretty hung up on brand image. And so they tend to keep things pretty drab, which on Facebook, you really have to come across as conversational, as fun, as funny. And so Facebook does not work very well for B2B brands, unless they get a little bit fun. And on LinkedIn, lots of people are starting to push the envelope on LinkedIn, and trying to be creative. And this makes for a really fun kind of environment. And of course, the name of the game in marketing has always been standing out to get a disproportionate amount of attention. So anything you can do on LinkedIn right now, especially where people aren’t totally understanding of, you know this is a professional place, but we can also have fun. Try to push the envelope with things like meme ads, or one of the best performing images I ever had was an illustrated cartoon or comic just stand out a little bit. And don’t be don’t take your brand image too seriously. Unless your brand guidelines team is really down your throat. User generated content creative is trending really high right now on Facebook. And I don’t think it’s going to be very long until we start seeing a lot of that on LinkedIn, too. So feel free to jump the gun and start moving the direction that we’ve seen people on Facebook have success with in the past. Okay, I’ve got some great episode resources for you coming up right after the break. So stick around.

29:51
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

30:01
Okay, here’s some great resources for you. First of all, in the show notes, you’ll see a link to a YouTube video where I did in just a quick seven minutes, LinkedIn ads versus Facebook ads for B2B. So pretty much a breakdown of this episode. So if you want to send this to a boss or a co worker, so that they just get the gist, that would be a great one to send them. There’s also a link to the Marketing Land article that talks about how Facebook users spend about 37 minutes per day on average. So you can see how Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram all compare with daily usage. You’ll also see the link to the word stream article from 2018, where they show that people spend about 17 minutes per month on LinkedIn. Also, if you’re just looking to get started with LinkedIn ads, because I know many of you are, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning, All About LinkedIn Ads. It is pretty much the whole first hour and a half of what I teach people when I go to train teams internally, individually, and for that, I charge $500 an hour for that training. And I think on LinkedIn, you get it for $25 bucks if you don’t have LinkedIn Pro, or if you do have LinkedIn Pro, it’s free. So it’s a great course to get you started. On whatever podcast player you’re on, please hit that subscribe button so you can keep hearing these episodes. We’re going to keep coming out with them. And of course, I would love it if you would rate and review, because that’s going to help other people know that there’s even a podcast out there about LinkedIn ads. Of course, any ideas you have for the show any subjects you’d like covered. If you want to reach out, hit us up at [email protected]. And I will see you back here next week cheering you on and your LinkedIn ads initiatives.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show.

Resources for this week:

LinkedIn Learning Course

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

Transcript:

Getting the right account organization and AB testing strategy on LinkedIn ads is crucial. Buckle up, we’re about to get nerdy.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. So as you know from the teaser, today, we’re going to be diving super deep into account organization, and AB testing strategy. We’ll cover things like your optimal account organization, your ad rotation settings, how many ads you should have in each campaign, and more. Let’s hit it. For a count organization. Let’s start at the account level. So on LinkedIn, you can have one page. That’s a company’s organizational page per account. But you can have many different ad accounts for a single page. And that’s for purposes like let’s say if you were Microsoft, you wanted to have a separate team or Separate agency running your Xbox ads and from someone running office or someone running Windows. So you can have multiple ad accounts for each page. But for any single ad account you have, you can’t publish to multiple pages. And at the account level, when you very first created, there are a couple things that are totally final that you can’t change afterwards. You can change things like the name of the account, and all kinds of things, but you can’t ever change your currency. Once you’ve locked in which currency you’re going to be working in that account is done. So we had a client where we launched in US dollar. And as it turns out, we needed to use a Canadian credit card to fund the account. And we had to just throw the entire account away and start a new account that runs just off Canadian currency. As soon as you associate a company page or an organization page to your ads account, that’s done. It’s totally now baked into that account, and you can’t disassociate it later. All right past the record. counts level, we get into an organizational grouping called a campaign group. Now campaign groups, from my opinion, are pieces of garbage and the bane of my existence. But what they’re supposed to be what they were originally designed to be is kind of like with Google ads, we had ad groups and Facebook ads, we have ad sets. But instead of putting them underneath the campaign, they put them up above in the hierarchy. And it didn’t really make a whole lot of sense. So as I understood, they were supposed to be a way where we could put in like multiple credit cards on the same account. So companies like Microsoft could break it up and have, you know, a different credit card within the same account for the office team, the Xbox team, the windows team, etc. And then those totally separate groups could be on separate budgets without having to create a new ads account. Unfortunately, this really never happened. And they weren’t very well engineered, and now they really can’t be easily removed. So we’re kind of stuck with them, and they don’t seem to be doing a whole lot of touch up or development on them. So they’re a little bit of a nuisance when you have campaigns in multiple campaign groups, and you can’t see them all in one view, you have to click up, and then down a different level to, you know, compare different performance. So I don’t love them. But there are some ways that we work with them that tend to work pretty well. So any account that is an online account, meaning that it’s self service, you set it up yourself, LinkedIn didn’t set it up for you. You’re going to have a campaign group in there called default campaign group. And it’s very rigid, you can’t delete it, you can’t rename it. There’s a lot of things you can’t do with it. But what it is, is a campaign group that you cannot turn off or back on, you can’t rename, but it is in every account, and it can hold up to 1000 campaigns. That is its only strength. That’s the only campaign group that can hold a lot of campaigns. So if you have a big account, and you’re likely going to have 200 or more campaigns in it, go ahead and just build everything in the default campaign group. And that really, that’s going to be your best bet. If you go and create a new campaign group, you get a little bit of a perk, you can turn it on or off, meaning you can pause the entire campaign group. You can also name it something descriptive. So it’s not just default campaign group taking up space. The big downside is they can only hold up to 200 campaigns total, which is why they are the bane of my existence. So anytime I have a large account, I can’t rely on a new campaign group to hold everything. I’ve got to go with the default. But one really cool thing you can do here because you can turn these off and on is, let’s say your landing pages go down or, you know, something at the company means you know, we’ve got to pause all ads. It’s really easy if they’re all in a single new campaign group to go in and just hit pause on the campaign group and be done. You’re not sending traffic to a landing page that’s down or something. Also, if you were doing manual day parting or scheduling, it’s nice to have a single entity you can turn off or turn back on. As you’re heading out of the office or coming in. It’s a lot easier than what I used to do, which was go by individual campaigns, one after another, pausing and pausing that kind of thing. So my rule of thumb here is, if you do plan to have fewer than 200 total campaigns, go ahead and build it right within a new campaign group. Name it something descriptive that you care about and if you need a logical separation between campaigns, like for the quarter or something like that, sure, you can do one of these new every quarter, but I sure like to build an account that is evergreen that is everything is exactly as it will be forever in a single campaign group just so things aren’t changing around. I can still do more granular reporting. Having a separate campaign group for a different initiative doesn’t help me very much.

5:57
All right, past campaign groups, you get into to the individual campaign level. Now from Episode 02, you’ll remember we talked all about the targeting the different things that live at the campaign level, are number one, most importantly, your targeting. Also the ad format you choose whether it’s text ads, sponsored content, message ads, dynamic ads, all of that lives at the campaign level and can’t be changed. You also have your bidding and budgeting section, that these things can be adjusted. And you’ll remember these from Episode 06. Everything about how you bid, what your budgets are, everything like that is living there at the campaign level. And then finally, your objective lives at the campaign level to which you also can’t change. That means if you chose one campaign to be a website visits, a focused campaign, you will not be able to choose to change that if you ever want to run a conversion focused one or a lead gen version of that campaign, it has to be a whole other campaign. And your accounts structure is really, really important for general account organization. Just understanding where you’re at and making it easy to read and interpret what’s going on. But also for reporting, as you’re building campaigns, think about how easy this is going to be to break down performance later for your reporting. So I’m going to share with you my personal strategy on how I build all of this out, so that you can do the same if you are so inclined. I found this strategy to make it beautiful for reporting, as well as making it really easy to understand what’s in an account, and then interpreting the results outside of the platform as well. So as you’re naming campaigns, I want you to think evergreen. That means every campaign you build, plan on this being evergreen, something that will run forever. Don’t think that you’ll ever get rid of a campaign or have to create a new version unless you absolutely have to. The reason why this is is in a single campaign that represents an objective, an ad format, and an audience, you are going to be building history. You’re building what LinkedIn calls their relevancy score in that campaign. And relevancy score, we’ll have a whole separate episode on this. But basically, this is Lincoln’s way of pinning to your individual ad or your campaign, how well it’s going to perform. And in a way, it’s level of risk. Because LinkedIn, if they keep showing an ad that never gets clicked on, and you’re paying by cost per click, then that is a risk to them, that’s money totally lost. Versus if they start showing your ad that gets clicked on a lot, then that takes away their risk and makes them more money. So you build this history in a campaign, the more dollars you spend in it. And that means that let’s say you have two ads active in a campaign, you pause both of those ads and launch two new ads. LinkedIn looks at that and goes, ooh, the two new ads, we don’t know how these are going to perform. We don’t know if they’re going to have a good relevancy score or not. We Don’t know if they’re high risk. So what we’ll do, we’ll just look at the relevancy score of the campaign. Historically, how has have all the ads in this campaign performed, and if there’s some good positive history, they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. They’ll say, Okay, the last relevancy score in this campaign was an eight. Let’s assume the new ones are going to be an eight as well. And so immediately out of the gate, you get better performance, they won’t charge, you as much you’ll win more auctions, have access to more traffic. And it goes like that. If you tried to build a brand new campaign around the same audience, LinkedIn wouldn’t have any sort of history to rely on. And you’d start out with presumed lower relevancy scores, and you’d have to prove your way out, meaning that at least for the first few days to a week, you probably pay more per click and get less traffic than you would otherwise. So try to build your entire account to be evergreen. Build this history so that everything you launch, you’re giving LinkedIn the best signals and the best chance to let your ads perform welll. Then, like I shared earlier, the strategy here won’t be, hey, I ran my 2020 webinar ads, you’re not going to throw that campaign away. Because now that offers dead, you’re just going to pause those ads that were promoting it. And instead launch two new ads promoting, let’s say, your white paper. And so now, if you want to report based off of your, you know, certain objective, you just are going to report based off of the ads that were in that objective, don’t try to go to the campaign level, and be sad that you didn’t name your campaign name like webinar. So it’s easy for reporting, just bubble your ads up that were around the webinar report based on those bubble up the ads based off of your, your new webinar and report separately on those. So it’s still super easy, and you’ll get better cost performance. And on that note, I really hate looking at accounts where people have named the campaigns things like 2018 webinar, and I look at those and go, Ah, that just tells me nothing. What you want to do is name your campaigns, after the things that don’t change. So you don’t want to put like CPC bidding or auto bidding in the campaign name, because you can change that stuff at any time. But do name your campaigns after the three things that don’t change, your ad format, your objective, and your audience targeting. That way this campaign will always be evergreen, as long as you are still targeting that audience, or as long as you’re still using that, that objective this campaign will live on and be a great receptacle for whichever ads you have going to that audience. A good example and I’ll put this here in the show notes. A good example for how I might name a campaign would be something like if this were a sponsored content campaign, I might do sc for sponsored content and then I like the vertical separator bar, but some kind of delineation here. So sc and then the the bar or pipe is We call it and then if this is a website visits campaign, I might do WV for website visits another pipe. And then I might call this campaign CEO job titles, pipe, company sizes 51 and above pipe, banking industry, pipe US. And you’ll see in the show notes exactly how this comes out. You don’t have to follow my recommendations here. You can name it however you want. But what this does is it allows me very quickly to segment all of my campaigns all of my performance, because the ad format itself are the first two letters. When LinkedIn automatically, alphabetically organizes my whole account, I’m going to see all of the different ad types right together, which is great because they tend to perform similarly. I don’t like it when my sponsored content and my text ads data is all mixed together, because they’re so different. It doesn’t mean anything. Also, my objective is there which makes it really easy, especially if I’m pulling this out to Excel or or something else, I can keep all of my objectives together and report on them separately. And then because all of my targeting is there in the URL, as I’m looking through my account, and I see something that’s performing well, I already know what that performance represents. In this example. I know that this represents people with CEO job titles. I know the targeting was around title. And I know these are CEOs. I know they.re companies with at least 51 people. I know that they’re in the banking industry. And I know that this is just the US. This makes account organization beautiful. It makes segmenting things out amazing. It also means that if I ever wanted to run a report and say, hey, how do we tend to perform at companies with more than 51 people, I could easily pull that segment out in this campaign name. And I could compare it against campaigns that let’s say they had one through 50 employees. I’ve consulted for some companies who need the initiative somehow in the campaign name, or maybe the the internal name, they give personas. And that’s fine, I would just encourage you to make your account as evergreen as possible, so you can always take advantage of that building history in your campaigns relevancy score. All right after a quick sponsor break, then we’ll dive into information about ads, and AB testing strategy.

14:18
The LinkedIn ads show is proudly brought to you by B2linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts

14:28
B2Linked is an ad agency that LinkedIn ads is all we do. So go ahead and fill out the form on any of the pages of B2linked.com to get in touch, and our team will help you enact all of these strategies and more to help get you the best ad performance. All right, now let’s jump into ads. I get this question all the time. How many ads should I have per campaign? My answer 99% of the time is two. Two current ads in every campaign and here’s why. If you just put a single ad in any campaign, you won’t have anything to compare against. And that ad could be terrible, or it could be amazing. Or it could be average. And you’d never know. It’s not a good AB test, you won’t ever learn anything from running just a single thing. As soon as you launch a second ad, now you have something to compare against. And both of those ads will definitely receive at least some exposure. So if one was truly terrible, LinkedIn would optimize it out of the running and just run the one that tended to perform much better the whole time. But, most of the time, you’ll probably get some kind of split, it might be like 60/40, split between, you know, ad one and ad two in there, but both will get some exposure. As soon as you add three or more ads, and remember, this is the same on every other platform, Google and Facebook, they all have the same issue. One of those ads will get a lot of exposure, one will do okay. And the rest will, unfairly as I call it, get labeled with a poor relevancy score, and get nearly ignored. So you might have one ad that gets 1,000 impressions, one that gets 600. And then ads three, four, and five might get 24. 3 impressions, I’ve seen some get one on Facebook, or literally zero, it’s never ever been seen. And the auction can say, Ah, that’s a bad performer, I know it and just refuse to even give it a chance. That means those ads that you’ve launched, that didn’t get a chance that were labeled with a poor relevancy score from the beginning, there is no reviving them. It really could be a great ad, but you’d never know because you could bid up way high on it, and it would still never get shown. Those ads are effectively dead. So if you’re asking me if there’s a value in going ahead and creating ads 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 in a single campaign, I would say definitely not. The ad test that I launched never really had a chance to gather any data, so it won’t be statistically significant. And I put a whole lot of work into writing, you know, six extra ads for this campaign that likely won’t ever get used. So my recommendation here is always to run two ads at a time. And if you’ve got four ads or four offers that you want to run, just run them two at a time. Run, you know, the first two for a week, pause them, then run the next two. And that’s, I think, the right way to do it. Now, I mentioned I only do this 99% of the time, the other 1% of the time, I recommend launching for ad creative in the single campaign. And the reason why is because LinkedIn has this rule about their max frequency cap in sponsored content campaigns, where by default, each member can only see one ad from a company per day. And that’s how they make sure that people can’t get annoyed or or won’t get annoyed as easily. They won’t be fully saturated by someone. However, and this is as of October of 2019, this is very recent. You can now if you have at least four ad creatives in a single campaign, you are now eligible to receive five impressions from a member every 48 hour period. So that means you used to be able to have to be seen during that 48 hour period twice. If you’re bidding really aggressively. Now you can be shown five times during that time period. Before October, we’ve had this access for a while. Before October, it was you could be shown four times in 48 hours. But now it’s five, which is potentially really good, especially from those types of offers. Let’s say you have a webinar coming up three days from now or an event starting, and you want as much exposure as you can possibly get. This is the way to do it. You run four ad creatives in a single campaign, qualify for the higher frequency cap, and you’re off to the races. Now why don’t I do this normally, Well, normally, what I want is a slow burn across all of my audience. I know the average user on LinkedIn only logs in three or four times a month. And that’s okay with me. So if I’m bidding steadily, and I’m showing that with the same rules steadily, I’m going to evenly saturate that audience over time. And I know it’s usually about every 27 to 33 days before an ad will saturate an audience. But if I’m showing more times more actively, I’m going to burn out my most active audience members in my segment faster than the average member. And there are quite a few people who will log in and use LinkedIn every single day. It’s so hot on the organic side right now. So because of that, I know some people will get way more saturated. And I’m going to start segmenting my audience in a way that I can’t track. Some people will be really upset but they’re seeing you all the time. And some will just, you know, think that you’re normal. And then as soon as you you show that audience a different ad, they’re going to start reacting in a different way. So I’m a big fan of a slow burn for that average user. I want it to show evenly over time. And I really like LinkedIn frequency capping, that’s pretty conservative for that reason. But if I really want to blow an audience out and get the word out about something where there’s a time limit based off of it, I will do this. So you might ask, okay, well, now I have to write two extra ads, because I was running two campaigns or two ads in a campaign. And now I have to write two more. So I can have four. I don’t recommend that. I still want data around my AB test, I don’t want to have just two extra ads that I know potentially will get ignored, like we talked about. So what I’ll do is I will make a duplicate of each of the ads. So let’s say I have ad A and ad B in that campaign, I’m going to make a duplicate of A and a duplicate of B. Now, according to LinkedIn, I have four ad creatives in the same campaign and there are there are four separate ads there. But because two of them are identical to the other two. Now when I go to report and I bubble up all of the performance by ad, I will still only have two ads in the account. And all of the data will aggregate together, which we’ll cover in a lot more detail here in just a little bit. I told you we were going to get nerdy. And one other reason you might want to take advantage of that five impressions every 48 hours thing is if you have a lot of budget to spend, and you’re just trying to spend it as effectively as possible. You could do that by doing things like turning on LinkedIn audience network, so that there’s more inventory to show in. You could also do that by bidding up. You can also do that by bidding CPM because you’re kind of bypassing the auction at that point. You’re taking the risk away from LinkedIn and showing your ads. And then of course, you can show more impressions to the same users by using this strategy as well. Every once in a while, I’ll hear someone advocate using the Rotate ads evenly function. And I came from the world of Google Ads many, many years ago. Because of that, I definitely understand the viewpoint, I understand that if you launch two ads, you want them to show as evenly as possible. So you get a really good AB test and your data makes a lot of sense. The idea of this is really alluring to us data geeks. But on this instance, don’t be fooled. I do not recommend using the Rotate evenly function. The default that LinkedIn puts you into is optimizing your ads for the best click through rate. And obviously, the higher click through rate doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to convert at a higher rate. But what it does, a higher click through rate qualifies you for better pricing. And so if you will let LinkedIn do that, you won’t pay as much. So this rotate evenly function, I oftentimes call it the charge me more and show me less button. The way that it works is it doesn’t actually show your ads evenly. So it’s not accomplishing the purpose of what you’re actually after. What it does is it enters both of your ad creatives into the auction evenly the same number of times, but it doesn’t show it evenly. And there’s a big difference here. The difference is that each creative is given its own relevancy score by LinkedIn. And assuming that the campaign has the same bids for both ads, the one ad with the poorer relevancy score will lose more auctions, meaning that you’ll get less traffic every time that ad is shown. And the auctions that it does win, you won’t win at as favorable of a price. So when you’re doing this rotate evenly, assuming that one of your ads doesn’t perform quite as well, you will be shown less, you’ll get fewer impressions while you’re doing it, and your cost per click will rise. So certainly not what I like. This is one of those features that I just can’t figure out a reason why I would ever use it. So my definite rule is don’t use rotate evenly. It’s never a good idea. Certainly, if any of you have a good use case for this, please let me know. I would love to change my tune at some point. And I don’t know if I’m allowed to share this, but I’m going to anyway, I know LinkedIn is working on a real AB testing solution where it won’t be affected by auction dynamics. And you actually will be able to do a split test of ads. So I’m excited to hear more about this when LinkedIn releases it. But as for right now, just use the default, which is optimized towards your click through rate. And we realize what that means is one of your ads isn’t going to get as many impressions it won’t be a perfect AB test. But you’ll get better pricing along the way, which is great.

24:37
So now we get into AB testing strategy. And I apologize, I’m going to get really geeky here, so bear with me. So you now know why we run two ads per campaign. But you might be asking something like, So does this mean I’m going to be writing thousands of unique different ad copy for each of my campaigns? And that answer is no, absolutely not. For all of your campaigns where you’re targeting a single persona, you’re going to put the same two ads in each campaign. Now from LinkedIn perspective, they will be separate ads, each on the back end will have its own creative ID. That means you as an advertiser, you’re going to have ad A in every campaign. Here is my intro. Here’s my title. Here’s my headline. Here’s my landing page. And you’re going to put it in separately, creating a whole separate ad. But, when you’re looking at the data, everything tells you across the whole account that there are only two ads running. All intros of ad A are the same. All headlines for ad A, all destination URLs, aside from tracking parameters for ad A are all the same. And ditto for B. And because you have an individual tracking parameter in every single one of these URLs, if you’re a really sophisticated advertiser, you’re going to be passing all of those separate tracking parameters into your CRM for tracking past down funnel into the sales process. Because of this, when your team closes a deal, they can come back to you and you can see the exact ad in the exact campaign that introduced that closed deal, and everyone wins. The shortcut here is if you do create a single ad that you share among all of your different campaigns, that is a shortcut. It means you’ll be building fewer individual ads. But you know, at my peak, I can get each ad created in less than a minute if it’s, you know, text ad or sponsored content. So I’m not super worried about having to spend an extra half hour or an hour once a month creating ads. I more care about the tracking and performance aspect to it. If you do something like a boosted post, where you create the ad on your company page publicly, and then you go and promote that ad to your audience. The one cool thing there is that you preserve all of the social proof in that campaign. That means the numbers likes, the comments that occurred are all going to carry with it into all of those campaigns. But then what you lose is all of your tracking, you have no way of telling once they convert and go into the sales process, whether they came from an organic company page follower, which is going to have a higher affinity for your brand, a higher likelihood to convert versus your ads, which might be going to cold traffic, which are far less likely to convert. And you’re actually spending dollars for those. So because of that I like to create individual unique ads for every campaign, but just keep the same AB test running in each of the campaigns for data analysis purposes. If you listen to Episode 02, you’ll know how I micro segment my audiences by targeting type and other facets that you might like to break down. I really like to break down my audiences by seniority, that’s kind of my default, but you can also break them down by company size to see if enterprise responds different than mid market. So now you’ve placed the same two ads, same to you, but according to LinkedIn, they’re all different, in all of these campaigns. And in some of the campaigns because you’re optimizing towards click through rate, and sometimes LinkedIn makes the wrong decision, and wrongly awards, the losing ad the higher relevancy score. Sometimes the, let’s say ad B will win out when it should have been ad A that won. But because you’ve placed these in so many different campaigns, multiple campaigns, the exact same test, the majority of the time, LinkedIn will choose right. And the winning ad by click through rate will win out across the whole account. And then when you get all of your data into Excel, a single pivot table will aggregate and tell you whether ad A or ad B how it performed across the entire account. Realizing each of these individual campaigns, let’s say they only spent $20, $40, $100. Each one individually wouldn’t tell you much. You would look at very small sample sizes. But because you aggregate all of the performance of ad A and B across the entire account for that time period, now you’re getting very, very quickly, very relevant and statistically significant data about your click through rates. Telling you very quickly, what messaging your audience likes, dislikes, what they resonate with. And, like I said to significance, this is really fast to do. If you’re wondering how I do this in Excel, what I do is aggregate each individual ads performance. And I do this because I know that let’s say if I’m running a messaging test in my intros, for instance, so everything else is the same between two sponsored content. The image is the same, the headline is the same. But I’m doing a test just on my messaging in the intro, and this is a test I like to do very often. What I’ll do is, I understand that only the intros are different. So I’m going to in my pivot table, break down all performance by intro, and then I’ll break out and understand, you know, intro A, intro B, all of their performance will be there. And I can very quickly and easily tell which of those two ads wins. You can make this really easy to by putting something in the ad name that maybe includes your tracking parameters or includes a designation of whether this is ad A or ad B. So one test that I might recommend doing is in my intro, maybe I’m using a motivation that’s aspirational, like I’m gonna make you feel like the hero if you take the action I want you to. And I might test that against an intro that is more fear based, like you’ll get fired or you’ll look bad if you don’t take the action that I’m I’m asking you to do. Every one of my aspirational ads, I might put some kind of designation in the ad name, which is optional on sponsored content. And I might put the day’s date the ad was launched. And the letter A and the fear based one might be today’s date, and the letter B. We’re actually a little bit nervous. Hear on tracking. So we have a unique tracking code for every single ad we launch that we based off of the day’s date, and the source and the medium. So we would do that. We’d have our unique tracking code, and then the letter A, or unique tracking code, and B. So now when we build a pivot table, or even in our dashboard in Google Data Studio, we can aggregate all of our performance metrics by the ad was launched and whether it was an A or a B. And then it becomes really easy to test and tune, because you can go and say, Hey, it looks like you know, after four days, we found the ad B is way outperforming or converts much higher. So we can go and say let’s go pause every ad that has B in it, and we’ll know very quickly, what’s performing and what’s not. Alright, coming right up is our resources section. So stick around.

31:56
Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn ad show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

32:06
All right, I’ve got a couple of great resources for you. If you’re looking to get into LinkedIn ads, there is a course that will stick here. It’s actually the course on LinkedInlearning.com. It was by me. And I walk you through essentially the first hour and a half of what I would teach if you hired me directly to train your team or your company. And because it’s on LinkedIn learning, it’s only $25. Or if any of you on your team have LinkedIn premium, it’s free. So definitely check that out. The link is in the show notes. Also, whatever podcast player you are listening on, please hit that subscribe button. I want to have all of these episodes right in your earholes. So you can be a super sophisticated advertiser on LinkedIn. So definitely subscribe, and then a plea for you. Please, please, please do rate and review this podcast on whatever player or network you’re listening to it on. This is still new, and so the more ratings and reviews we have, the more people will get to enjoy this podcast and the more friends you’ll get to geek out with over the watercooler. If you’ve got ideas for the show, any sort of episode that you want to hear about, please reach out to us at podcast@b2linked com. We’d love to hear from you. And of course, as we’re building the show family, it’s so great to hear from you, what you’re looking for, and what we can deliver. Alright, we’ll see you back here next week. We are cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show

On this episode, we're going to be talking about bidding and budgeting to get the lowest costs and the highest performance on LinkedIn's ads platform.

Resources for this week:

Budget tracking software: shape.io and adstage.io

Chart of how LinkedIn bidding works: https://www.dropbox.com/s/co4fxjg04uy1d67/Economics%20of%20LinkedIn%20Ads%20Bidding%20Slide.pdf?dl=0

LinkedIn Learning (Lynda) Course: http://j.mp/linkedin-ads-course

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

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show

On this episode, I will be interviewing Tom Kim - Senior Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn

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

On this episode, I will be interviewing Amita Paul at LinkedIn and discussing LinkedIn ads objectives!

In my conversations with LinkedIn's heads of product, I'm often wishing that other advertisers could be present. I finally made that happen here.

Plenty more interesting conversations to come!

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