LinkedIn Ads Show

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Excel Reporting Walkthroughs on Youtube

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For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 113

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Market Research Episode

Benchmarks

GA4

Product Market Fit

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Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections! A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!

For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 112

Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert

Follow AJ on LinkedIn

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Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections!

A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!

For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 111

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Chris Lavigne on LinkedIn

CMO Scorecard Report

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Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections!

A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!

For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 110

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Blog Post On Improving Lead Quality on LinkedIn Ads

Virality on LinkedIn

Demographics

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Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections!

A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!

For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 109

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Bidding/Budgeting

Relevancy Score & Auction

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Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections!

A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!

For the full show transcript, see the show notes page here: Episode 108

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Product Market Fit

How to scale your LI Ads

Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert

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So you want to scale your LinkedIn Ads? Well, beware of the blocks and hurdles on your way. We're discussing what's keeping you from scaling your performance on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, you've certainly heard the phrase, nail it, then scale it. It's referring to when you find something that works, and you want to take full advantage of it well, because of course in business and digital marketing, where things are moving so fast, something that worked well yesterday may not work at all tomorrow. This is almost always the goal that we have with LinkedIn Ads. Nail it at first, and then scale it up in the 1000s of advertising accounts that we've run and consulted on, we've seen about every possible combination of situations where a team is wanting to scale their successful efforts, we've seen about every possible combination of situations where a team is wanting to scale their successful efforts up, but there's some blocker or hurdle in the way. So today, we're gonna go through all the possible things that can hinder your ability to scale.

First in the news, one of our awesome B2Linked teammates, Landon Thorne noticed something new called group objectives on one of his accounts. And essentially what this is, when you go to create a new campaign group, LinkedIn says, if you're willing to attach an objective to that campaign group, and have every single campaign under that campaign group share the same objective, then LinkedIn can do this dynamic budget optimization thing. And this is taken directly from meta over there. It's called campaign budget optimization, or CBO. But essentially, you say, I have a whole bunch of different campaigns here, LinkedIn, I'm going to let you decide which campaign you give more budget to and which ones you give less to just optimize for whichever is performing best. Now, I'm imagining that this is something that's going to be rolling out over the next several weeks, and we'll start to see it in more accounts. Personally, I'm not in a huge hurry to try to use it simply because choosing an objective for a campaign is one of the levers that we have to test and get better performance. And so I feel like if I'm forced to choose the same objective within a campaign group, it's constraining and could hold back my performance. But for those of you listening, I'd love to hear from you. Please reach out to us at podcast at B2Linked.com. If you've got a great use case for this, and especially if you find it to work especially well.

Alright, quickly highlighting a review, Exclusive8 on Apple podcasts from the UK says, "Thank you, I'm following you for nearly a year and all the tips and tricks that you and your team shares help, and they work 100% of the time. It gives me confidence and motivation to improve strategy regularly." And the heading of that review was LinkedIn Ads Bible. Exclusive8 , I don't know who you are, but I really appreciate you leaving a review. As that is the biggest compliment you can pay us. And I'm so glad that we've been helpful to you in your LinkedIn ads journey. And you, yes you, I want to feature you here on the podcast as well. So if you haven't already, if you're a regular listener, please do go and leave a review, especially on Apple podcasts. All right onto the topic at hand, let's hit it.

First off the hurdles that keep us from scale. There are a whole bunch of different hurdles that you'll come across at different times and in different ways. So these will be a no certain order, for sure. But we'll go pretty deep into each of them. The first is audience size. So when you're trying to scale your campaigns, and you want to turn the budget up and start getting more, if you don't have a large enough audience size, you may realize that you try to turn that knob up, and nothing happens. Or what's worse is when you turn that knob up, you start increasing your budgets, and you do start spending more, but it's just your costs to increase. And it's not actually your performance, you're not reaching more people. And this is something you can test actually very easily with your current audiences. Try increasing your bids by 20%. And just see did your level of impressions and did your reach increase over that amount of time? If so, it means you probably haven't hit that level of diminishing returns, which is great. That means you have some more ability to scale if you want it. But let's say that you don't have that that ability to scale, your audiences limited. Well, there are several ways that you can go out and try to increase your audience sizes and do that thoughtfully. Episode 22 of the podcast is all about how to scale and that would probably be a really good playbook for you to go and understand how to increase that audience size. Somewhat related is what about if your audience isn't very active on the platform, and that's part of the challenge that we have with LinkedIn is it tends to be a platform that we don't go and use all all the time, well, maybe you and I do., but regular users are probably only on there three to four times a month. So you may notice if you're targeting someone like dentists, for instance, maybe you see the audience there, there are enough people in your audience. But then when you're actually advertising, it's kind of hard to serve impressions, or spend any real kind of budget. In this case, sometimes you can't really do anything about it, you can't force people to come and be more active on the platform. But there are some things you can do to help. First, you could increase your audience size. And of course, thoughtfully, we don't want to just open up the floodgates just because we want to spend, but you can also try to reach these people off of LinkedIn. And you can do that with LinkedIn Audience Network, or what we oftentimes call LAN. Now, we don't always have the most success with LAN, it's kind of hard to spot the quality signals in there, it leaves us doubting sometimes. But it can be a good way to reach these audiences all around the web, not just when we're sitting around waiting for them to come back to LinkedIn every so often. You also may be able to find segments of the population that you're not currently going after, that might be more active. Targeting like groups targeting tends to reach people who are little bit more active on the platform. So it might be worth to try that as well. The next big hurdle that we see is budget. And I know you're thinking duh, AJ. But if you're spending, let's say, 10k a month on LinkedIn ads, and you want to spend more, but your boss is saying, nope, 10k it is, well, that's a huge hurdle. And it's probably not one that you're gonna get over very easily, I would encourage you to go listen to episode 39 of the podcast, all about making the case for scaling on LinkedIn. I can't tell your boss that they should give you more budget, but that episode has some great points that you could make a business case. Somewhat related would be the daily budgets that you're actually putting in your campaigns. If you want to spend more and your budgets are in the way, this is a really easy way to say hey, I want to spend more. So I'm going to increase all my campaigns budgets by 10%, 20%, 50%. Somewhat related to budget is actually your bidding. Let's say you've taken our advice from Episode 89, all about bidding. Well, good for you. One of the pieces of advice that we give is bidding lower than LinkedIn is recommended range. But in the case of scale, sometimes this advice can hinder you. So for instance, if you have a budget of let's say, $5,000 a month, and you know, you can spend that entire $5,000 by bidding at the like $8 ranch per click. If you all of a sudden decide to increase your budget from $5,000 to $10,000 a month. At that same bid level, you might find that your budget moved, but your actual spend didn't. And in that case, increasing your bids and becoming more competitive, reaching more of your existing target audience could be the ticket for you. When you scale this way by bidding, realize that let's say you're increasing your bid by 20%, it means your cost per click and your cost per lead are probably all going to scale up by 20%. So make sure you've communicated that clearly to your other stakeholders that if we scale this way, we are going to see our costs rise. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into the sources of friction.

8:18 The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want to return on that? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, The original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ads management combined with our proprietary tools allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. To schedule a conversation, just go to B2Linked.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to chat with you.

Alright, let's jump into the friction sources that can stand in between you and scale. I absolutely love the concept of friction in physics. And it's there's this constant drag that makes your formulas not quite work as well as you'd hoped. And I think this is a very apt metaphor for LinkedIn Ads, because there are little things that introduce friction into the system that drag us down and drag our performance down. And sometimes we don't even know that it's happening. Again, in no particular order. But one of the biggest sources of friction that keep you from scaling, or even performing well is having nonperformance ads. So let's say for instance, when you're advertising on LinkedIn with sponsored content ad formats, the average click through rate is about .44%. So let's say you're performing anywhere near that average at .44%, that's less than one half of a percent of everyone who sees your ads actually clicks on it. And if you have a pretty small audience, it's going to be hard to drive very many visits with that level of performance. Now, it depends on a lot of different factors. But it's not too terribly difficult to launch an ad that gets over a 1% click through rate. So by launching these new ads, they may be going to the same call to action, it may be saying nearly the same thing. But you've made tweaks to make it stand out more and speak more to the pains that they might be feeling. And now 1%, so twice as many people are now willing and able to interact with your ads. So I hope I've painted for you this picture that if you have ads that aren't performing super great, this can be a drag to your system. And no matter how much more you're willing to pay for ads, you find trying to grow your account is like pulling teeth. By the way, the metaphor of pulling teeth is totally gross. I don't know why I use that. It makes me feel like not going to the dentist anytime soon.

So related to non performing ads, I might suggest using a different ad format, because a different ad format sometimes gets access to new inventory. Or maybe it has the capability of performing much better than your original ads. What I would highly recommend to you is trying to run video ads, there will be an element of cannibalization if you're running single image ads, for example. And then you launch video because those do take much of the same inventory, if not all, but you may find out that there's a big contingent of your audience who wants to interact with your video ads, but they were never going to interact with your single image ads, or vice versa. So let's say that you're already using your sponsored content very well, well, when you launch a new ad format, like dynamic ads, or text ads, and I probably shouldn't mention sponsored messaging, since that's probably going to be a thing of the past here in the next, I don't know, three, six months. And of course, I want this episode to be future proof. So yeah, I definitely won't mentioned sponsored messaging. But as you tried new ad formats that use new inventory, that's of course, a great way to scale, because now you're filling slots that are not competing with your other ads.

So we've talked about ads that are maybe providing some friction, some drag by not being very performant. But we can also talk about having nonperformant or non compelling offers. And as a reminder, when I say offer, I don't mean a percent off or a direct call to action, like buy my product. Now, what I mean is what we are offering our prospects in exchange for their attention, right. So an offer can be anything from read this blog post to buy something now. Well, whatever that offer is, if you have an offer that is not compelling to people, it doesn't feel valuable. It's not attention grabbing, the best copywriter and the best creative in the whole world could not create an ad that gets you a high click through rate. Although if any of you here want to challenge me on that, and we want to set up some kind of a test, I would love to watch that happen. So I would encourage you go look at the offers that you're putting out there. Look at them with fresh eyes, pretend you're one of your prospects, and you've never seen it before. Is it interesting? Is it helpful? Is it attention grabbing? And of course, you can test this, you can put three or four different ads, all pointing to a different offer to an audience and just see which one gets higher click through rates. Maybe that'll tell you the two or three offers that you shouldn't even bother running, or rethink and totally retool, and then come back when you think you've got something interesting. The next hurdle I want to talk about here is actually time. And what I mean by that is if you're going to cold audiences who've never heard of you before, just because you're willing to spend two times or three times more this month than what you were spending before, it doesn't mean all of a sudden two to three times that number of people are going to want to buy your product or service. They still need time and they still need touchpoints by being nurtured so that they can come to get to know like and trust you. Now I don't have a time machine, so there's not too much I can do to help you out with time as being a hurdle, except just set your expectations properly. When you're going to cold audiences, it may take 3, 6, 9 months to really get them thoroughly nurtured and warmed up. And then of course, once you start driving demos or discovery calls, you still have your whole sales cycle to worry about. Many of our clients are large B2B organizations with long sales cycles. And it certainly doesn't make sense if you have an average sales cycle of let's say, nine months or 12 months to expect that LinkedIn Ads is going to close any faster than that.

The next hurdle that I want us to go over is your business constraints. So maybe you're in a situation where the sales team couldn't keep up with additional leads if you were to generate them. Or if you scale very quickly. They're not equipped to handle them at that scale. And in that case, you really need to prepare internally for scaling on LinkedIn Ads. That means don't just say oh, as the marketing department, we've got more budget, we're gonna scale up by 20%, or 100%, or whatever, and just not tell the sales team. They absolutely need to know. And of course, this goes for all channels, not just LinkedIn, if you're going to scale up your Google or your meta, or whatever, please, please, please go talk to your sales team. Make sure everyone's agreed and ready and prepared. Almost nothing makes you as a marketer look worse than when you start sending really high quality traffic to the sales team and they take weeks to get back to those prospects. Not a good look.

Another big business constraint is something that we talked about on Episode 90, it's all about your product market fit. Now, I hate to suggest this to anyone, but it's totally possible that the reason that you're having a hard time scaling your LinkedIn Ads efforts, is your product doesn't actually have product market fit. It's not solving a big enough pain point to actually make people buy it. We go really deep into that on episode 90 so go listen to that.

Another hurdle here is actually your number of campaigns. Now, this is actually a pretty easy hurdle to get over. And it's one that I've been jumping over on pogo sticks for the last many years. The concept here is that if you have any campaign that's running on LinkedIn, it's only going to be in the auctions and eligible to show a certain number of times or at a certain amount of scale. And sometimes when you increase your bids, increase your budgets on just that one campaign, it still fails to get as much reach and as many impressions as it could otherwise. So sometimes, you can just create another campaign, even with the same targeting, but I usually suggest vary your targeting a little bit. So if you're targeting by something like job title, maybe try targeting by job function and seniority, or by skills with seniority, or groups with seniority, just something different. And now you'll notice that those two campaigns, or maybe you go the extra mile, and you have four campaigns all targeting a similar audience. And now because you have a higher number of campaigns, it becomes much easier to spend on that audience. Plus, like we talked about regularly, you now have more data about what types of targeting are working to drive your best traffic. It acts like little private focus groups, giving you data on what people like and what they don't like, and who likes it. Alright, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around.

17:29 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

Alright, like we mentioned in the Podcast, Episode 90 is all about product market fit. Episode 22 is all about how to actually scale your LinkedIn Ads. So in this episode, we went all through maybe different things that could stop you from scaling, we gave a couple little tips, but that's the episode that's going to go all the way and teach you how to actually plow over those hurdles. Now, if you want to be a member of the premier community for LinkedIn Ads experts, come join us at fanatics.B2linked.com. It's a very low cost subscription and it gets you access to all four of my courses taking you from absolute LinkedIn Ads beginner to expert. Plus, you get access to the whole community of other LinkedIn Ads experts to be able to ask questions and bounce ideas off of. If this is your first time listening, welcome! We're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button on whatever platform you're listening on. Now, if this is not your first time listening, please do go and pay me the biggest favor that you could possibly do and that's leave a review on the podcast. And of course, as you do, I'll shout you out live here on the episodes. With any questions, suggestions or corrections because we are open to corrections, reach out to us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Google Analytics 4 Events Episode

Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert

Follow AJ on LinkedIn

B2Linked's Youtube Channel

Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections!

A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!

Are your landing pages leaving something to be desired? If so, your LinkedIn Ads aren't performing as well as they could be. We're teaching you how to make your landing pages super powered on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show.

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

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, your landing pages dictates so much of your performance that you can get from your LinkedIn Ads. But it's really complex, because a lot of marketers who are responsible for paid social are not responsible for the landing pages or the website. But with landing pages that are inefficient, it makes everything you do look worse. Never fear, I'm about to give you a framework for landing pages that perform on LinkedIn. And let's be honest, every other channel too, because that's kind of how it works. But first in the news thought leader ads now support video. We've shared in the past how thought leader ads could only boost a post that was single image or text only. So now thought leader ads can boost video posts, which I'm really excited about. The more power we can get from thought leader ads in my book, the better. Eric Jones brought up the LinkedIn ads fanatics community that document ads now have their own version of retargeting, which is amazing. The more ways that we can retarget also the better. So now when you run a document ad, you can now retarget anyone who interacts with the ad in any way or just people who performed chargeable clicks on your ad, or those who downloaded the content of the ad. This is awesome! LinkedIn, keep it up. I really hope this means that dynamic ads retargeting, text ads retargeting, and the messaging ad formats, event ads even, I hope all of these are going to get their own retargeting very soon, I want to highlight a review that we got on the podcast Vaanee Goel says, "Such a fantastic LinkedIn Ads podcast. I've been following AJ on LinkedIn for a while. And about a week back, I subscribed to the podcast and started listening to it. When I heard the first two episodes, my mind was blown. It's been just about a week and I've listened to almost 10 episodes. They're incredible, so much content, such great explanations, and very articulate and coherent. I see these helping me a lot. I'm gonna listen to them all over the course of time. Now, thanks for sharing your knowledge with people including me. This is an abundance mindset in its truest sense. And it really helps." Vaanee, a LinkedIn Ads consultant out of India. Vaanee, I hope I'm pronouncing your name right. Thank you so much for sharing that review. That means a ton to me. And as you guessed, I am big on an abundance mindset. So I'm really excited that you're getting a lot of value out of it, as well as everyone else, too. I'm not trying to keep this all for myself. And neither are any of us here in the B2Linked team. We're constantly looking to see how we can share better. And everyone else, I want to invite you to leave a review on the podcast. I would love to shout you out live like this as well.

Alright, without further ado, let's hit it. Our topic here is on landing pages. And it's a really complex topic, because there's so many different elements of a landing page. And I want you to consider the landing pages that you're currently using. And think about ways that you can use these tips to make your landing pages even stronger, or fix them if they're not performing very well. I'm gonna list a lot of different kinds of elements, I want you to know that these are really in no particular order, unless I say this one is really important. And I will say that.

Consistency in Messaging The very first one is consistency in messaging. Now one of the big challenges that we run into is that oftentimes, we say something different in the ad than what we say on the landing page itself. It may seem like a small thing that in your ad copy, maybe you're talking about this free content. And then when they go to the landing page, they don't see you talking about the content in the same way. But this can be a real source of confusion for your visitors. So what I recommend is make sure that whatever way that you're referring to the content in your ad, make sure that the landing page itself reflects that. Use the same words, use the same title of content, any way that you can connect that original thought so that when the visitor gets there, they're not left confused or wondering if they made it to the right place.

Meeting Expectations And this leads us to our second point your landing page should fulfill and meet the expectation that it's been given. So in your ad, if you're saying something like get access to this free ebook, if they get to that landing page, and they have to hunt around to understand, like, where is this ebook? Or is it being offered? Or was I bamboozled? And is this a bait and switch for something else, you need to make sure that your offer is easy to find. They clicked on an ad specifically promising them something, as soon as they get to that landing page it should be abundantly clear exactly what it is that they requested and they get access to it right then. This also means that you need to clearly articulate the value that your visitor is getting. A lot of times when I audit landing pages, I notice that right up at the top, this is the area of the webpage that everyone is going to see, it's the most important, that people waste time. They start talking about something else, rather than getting right to the benefit. If you're offering a free piece of content, your first paragraph should not be about your product or something unrelated, it should be all about, here's the content that you're getting access to and here's why it's valuable.

Coding and Backend We do need to talk about the coding and the back end of the landing page and website as well. Hey, LinkedIn charged us for 100 clicks, but when we look at analytics, it shows only 40 visitors came from LinkedIn. No, this is not LinkedIn trying to trick you or overcharge you. What inevitably happened is someone clicked on that ad. And so LinkedIn charged you as the advertiser, but then when they sent them to the landing page, there was enough of a delay, the visitor got impatient and left before the page fully loaded. This is the same issue for all channels, but I definitely hear it a lot related to LinkedIn Ads. Anytime that you have a redirect happen, it takes some time for that redirect to occur. When you click on a LinkedIn ad, LinkedIn reroutes you through a different link. And so there's just a little delay there, maybe it's a fraction of a second. And this is exacerbated where maybe you have a bitly link or some sort of a shortened company link in your ad, then it has to go through two redirects, which takes even longer. And then your landing page will take some time to load. Generally landing pages load faster on a desktop than they do on mobile. But we know that 80% or more of your visitors from LinkedIn Ads are going to be on mobile. So my best advice to you is work on your mobile landing page experience. Make sure that it loads as fast as possible. Generally, this is going to be on mobile, you want your page to load in less than one second. You'll obviously want to talk to your developer about this. Because this is not a skill that most marketers have is being able to minify their code on their website and speed things up. But your developer will know this is incredibly important. Some things that can help here are getting faster hosting. So if your website is using any sort of like a shared hosting, that's going to slow it down, because at different times, the server may be getting more requests for another website and so it's slower to serve yours up when it's requested. So one of the best things you can do use cloud hosting, I know it's a lot more expensive, we've considered exactly the same thing for our website, but don't cheap out on hosting. Get good, fast, dedicated hosting support. Another thing that can really help your page load speed is you'll have a lot of different JavaScript libraries being called in your code. You'll also have a lot of different CSS files. There are different tools that developers can use, where they can do what's called minifying. They minify the JavaScript and the CSS files, that could mean shrinking them all into just one simplified file and getting rid of all of the redundant calls there. Or just making it so the server doesn't have to request as many documents. This is definitely outside of my paygrade, but I've worked with developers in this process of minifying, JavaScript and CSS, and you really can get a big benefit here. Now I've been a digital marketer for a long time, especially near the beginning of the WordPress heyday. WordPress is especially susceptible to this. But what happens is, if you add enough plugins into your website, because hey, there's so many plugins that do great things, well, all of those plugins can bog the website down, because every time someone requests a page, maybe four, or five, or 15, plugins all have to be called and referenced. So one of the best things you can do is remove plugins. If you're running off of something like WordPress, or Drupal. You can decrease your page load speed very quickly, just by doing some of that. Another thing that I've seen web developers do is to go through and specifically resize images just for what they need. So for instance, if you upload an image, that's like four megabytes, but you're only displaying it as a thumbnail, even though your web server is showing that only as a thumbnail, it has to load the whole four megabyte image and send it to the user. And that slows down the page, giving them anything else. So there are a few tips that you can give to your web developers, and hopefully give them a big leg up in speeding up your pages. I might also suggest have them design the page to be mobile first, because a lot of times we design a desktop version of a website. And then the mobile version is just like a scaled down version of that. But if you build the whole website or page specifically for mobile, and then maybe have a separate desktop version, that can help your page load speed quite a bit as well.

Alright, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the design and general appeal areas of your website.

9:57 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want to return on that? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency, we've worked with some of the largest LinkedIn Ads accounts over the past 12 years and our unique scientific approach to Ads management combined with our proprietary tools allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, were official LinkedIn partners. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply, we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. Alright, let's jump back into our design and appeal of websites.

Design and Appeal I want you to look at your landing page and your website and assess how easy it is to actually read the content that's there. Look at it as a new user, like you weren't the one who created it and see how attractive is it? Are there giant paragraphs that look like big walls of text that no one's going to want to start reading. If so try to break up your paragraphs to where they're just a line or two a piece. This is going to invite a lot more people to start reading and keep reading. Think about what you have above the fold. Because if we know that not everyone is going to keep scrolling all the way to the end be really thoughtful and intentional about what you put at the top of the page that you know is going to get read the most often. And of course, with landing pages, the name of the game is really minimizing distraction. The purpose of most landing pages is to get you to either fill out a form or take some action or leave. That's really lit. Like give someone an opportunity, and if they're not willing to take it, there's not much there for them. A lot of times, this means removing links that go anywhere else except that landing page itself. That means the logo at the upper left hand corner, you might want to take the link out of that so that they can't go back to your homepage. You might want to remove the navigation that's at the top of that page that's global across your whole website, just to allow fewer distractions and the ability to leave the landing page that you've crafted. Do you have multiple popups that could annoy someone, obviously try to get rid of them or at least minimize them to just like one pop up. Realize that most of the people who are visiting your landing page are going to be on mobile and a pop up takes over the entire screen so I would highly recommend don't use any pop ups if you can. Now the same thing I think goes for the GDPR cookie banners that you see, I've seen some really good cookie banners. And I've seen some really poor ones. Obviously, from a data perspective and from an analytics perspective, you want as many people to accept those cookies as possible. So make that really easy. It shouldn't take up the whole screen, but if it does, you may not want it to take up the whole screen. Or maybe you do and have it take up the whole screen just to make it really easy to click accept all. That's totally up to you how you handle it. But you should look at your cookie banner as a new user with fresh eyes and see if there's any way that you can improve it so that it's easier to click accept. Now we definitely need to talk about form fields. Because many marketers your whole goal in sending someone to a landing page is to get them to fill out a form. So first, consider how many form fields you have. Because if people have to fill out too much information, they're gonna get bored, they're gonna get distracted, they're gonna get upset or frustrated. And they may just leave entirely, whereas they were maybe close to just clicking Submit. There are some big SAS companies that make us look pretty bad. You may know the ones I'm talking about, but you go to register for a webinar. And they asked 15 questions about how much you spend, and what your title and position at the company are. I would try to keep it as short as you possibly can. First name, last name, email address, if you can keep it down to a minimum, that's going to help you way more Plus, you can always enrich that data later at a pretty low cost. So it doesn't make sense to add more form fields trying to qualify people. I think we also have to address that your landing page should be nice to look at. It shouldn't be visually offensive. Now I will say that I've sat through conversion optimization presentations, especially from Chris Daly that we've mentioned on the show before. And in his presentations. He does the results of AV tests. So he shows you the before the after which versions tested and then he shares the results. And I will say I was shocked because in one of those examples, it was the ugliest possible version of the page. It didn't match the brand colors or style guidelines. I mean, it looked like a Frankenstein of a page but it converted better. So I do realize that sometimes ugly converts, but I also realized that you're paying a significant premium to be advertising on LinkedIn and every interaction every touch that you have with someone is a touch with your brand, but it really is nice to make sure that that touch that they have with your brand, every touch is on brand. And it feels modern and appealing and isn't a real turnoff. It inspires confidence that you're good at what you do.

Social Proof And next, that brings us to a really important category, here are things that go on your landing page, which is your social proof. Wisdom of the crowds is a real thing. No one likes to be the first person to comment, or the first person to like, or the first person to click. They feel like a guinea pig, they feel like they're being tested. And maybe if no one else is willing to do this, then maybe they shouldn't be either. As humans, we just feel more comfortable taking the same action that other people have already taken. So I think a section of your landing page, specifically devoted to like, here are the companies we've worked with that can quiet people's fears, because they realize they're not the first ones who are going through this. You're already proven with other brands like them, or maybe even larger than them, I suggest the same kind of treatment with where you've been featured. So if you or your executive team has been featured, maybe they've been interviewed on podcasts, or they've been featured on the news somewhere or even in press releases, you can claim that. You're gonna have logos that say like, hey, here's where we've been featured. You can pepper in other elements like case studies and testimonials that help people realize that they're not alone. And they're making a smart decision by deciding to work with you. And this relates a little bit to the coding of the webpage. But I see a lot of marketers get tripped up here. The way that your tags fire on your page, your JavaScript tags is really important. If your analytics and conversion tags and your retargeting tags for all of your different stuff. If they all load at the very end of the page, then what's happening is these visitors that come to the page, and if they decide to leave before the whole page is downloaded into their browser and displayed to them, then your retargeting is not tracking them, your conversion tracking is not tracking them, your analytics is not tracking them, you get the idea. So most digital marketing channels have this little JavaScript pixel. LinkedIn calls their's the Insight tag, and they're pretty lightweight. So my recommendation would be to take all of your least your most important pixels, that would be your LinkedIn insight tag, maybe your Google Ads tag your meta tag, and make sure that these fires really early on in the head section of your HTML. That means even if a user leaves before the page fully loads, at least they'll qualify to be in your retargeting audience, if they were on a conversion page, then at least you get to mark that as a conversion. And your analytics is marking them as having come from LinkedIn. In episode 105, All about Google Analytics 4, we told you exactly how to set up page scroll depth and time on site events. These can be really helpful in understanding how people are interacting with your landing page. If you send a bunch of traffic and no one scrolls past 50%, or no one sticks around long enough to actually read what it is you have, then there's an obvious issue there. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

18:17 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

Alright, in the shownotes, you'll see a link to Episode 105. It was the last episode all about Google Analytics 4, so I would highly suggest checking that out if you haven't already. These are things that you can do as a marketer that help you evaluate your LinkedIn Ads traffic better. If you haven't already, make sure that you've joined the LinkedIn Ads fanatics community. That will get you access to our four courses that take you from beginner to expert, and they also give you access to the whole community of other LinkedIn Ads fanatics. You can bounce ideas off and ask questions anytime. Me and my staff are constantly in there as well. Depending on when you listen to this, you may still be able to get in at the lowest cost it will ever be, our founders rates, but you'll have to act fast. Go to fanatics.b2linked.com to see exactly how to sign up. If this is your first time listening, welcome! We're excited to have you here. Make sure to hit that subscribe button wherever you're listening. But if this is not your first time listening, please do rate and review the show. Nothing would be more meaningful to me than going and leaving a review. I would appreciate that so much. And it really helps out the show with any questions, suggestions or corrections on what we've talked about. Reach out to us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Google Analytics Login

Scroll Depth Tracking

Time On Site Tracking

Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert

Follow AJ on LinkedIn

B2Linked's Youtube Channel

Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections!

A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!

Does the mention of Google Analytics 4 send shivers through your bones as a LinkedIn advertiser? Never fear. I'm walking you through everything you need to know about GA4 on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads show.

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

Hey there LinkedIn ads fanatics, Universal Analytics is now gone. And Google Analytics, or GA4 as we'll call it, is the new reality for us marketers, I don't want you to miss a beat during this transition. So we're going to go through everything that you need to set up and use in the new GA4 that will help you analyze your LinkedIn Ads traffic. So this isn't going to be a resource for setting it up. You should already have GA4 setup. So I'm not going to go through any of that. But my aim here is to give you all the tools to analyze your LinkedIn Ads specific traffic. We're gonna go over which reports to use to actually analyze your LinkedIn Ads traffic plus specific events that you'll create to show engagement from your ad audiences and how to create conversions from them.

First, I want to highlight a review here, Vadim Aizenshtein left a review that says, "One of the most awesome professional marketing knowledge sources out there. As a performance marketer, I quite often find myself looking for inspiration and knowledge. The problem is the mass of bs and fluff, "experts" out there that help fill the airwaves with irrelevant and misleading content. AJ's blog and podcast is an oasis of amazing insights and guides for marketers who actually want actual results, and not just show that they're making noise out there. Thanks, AJ." Hey, Vadim, I really appreciate such an awesome review for us, we try extremely hard to make sure that there's no bs here. And that the information we're putting out is exactly what we wish someone would be able to share with us as we were learning. And please, everyone who's listening, do go leave us a review, it is by far the best way that you can say thank you, for us coming out with this content every week. And of course, I want to feature you here on the podcast as well. Alright, without further ado, let's hit it.

As an advertiser on LinkedIn, you're likely not just sending all of your traffic to a form asking for a conversion, or at least I hope you're not. So in this case, you're paying high LinkedIn prices for traffic, but you won't have conversions to show for it, at least not yet. But how nice would it be if you have some proof that the traffic was actually working, they were engaged with your content, they were liking what you were putting out, I've got two great ways for you to do exactly that. The first is called a scroll depth event. We've linked down in the show notes to an article by datarivenu.com. And it walks you through exactly how to do this through Google's Tag Manager. Essentially, what you're doing is you're telling Google Tag Manager to watch and see what the user is doing. Once they scroll past a certain depth of the page, it can fire an event that then gets logged into Google Analytics. Now, it's important to know that by default, Google Analytics 4 has an event that is called scroll event, but it has some serious disadvantages. So I'm going to help show you how to customize yours so you can get past all these. The default Google Analytics for scroll event, it triggers only when visitors get to 90% of the web page. So almost the bottom, this is actually pretty good practice because many websites have footers that take up a little bit of room. So you don't actually expect people to make it to a full 100% Scroll if they have consumed all the content. So 90% is a good rule of thumb. But relying solely on a 90% scroll depth is pretty weak in my book. I would like to go and add another couple scroll depths that would help us understand how intensely people are engaging with our website. So go read the article on datadrivenu that will walk you exactly through how to do this, my recommendation would probably be to create one event that's at 50% scroll, and another one that's 70% scroll, and then the default GA for one is going to trigger at 90%. So now you have three ways of finding out how many people are scrolling past 50%. One little correction that I have for the data driven you article, as you're following it through, we tried to follow it. So about halfway down the article where it actually starts teaching you how to set this up. The headline here says how to set up scroll depth in Google Analytics for with Google Tag Manager. And it starts with a tip it says before you begin copy the measurement ID on the top of your Google Tag Manager account, you will need this in step four. And then when we got down to step four, we actually tried to create this event using the Google Tag Manager ID and it actually fired an error. So we figured out what it's actually asking for is the Google Tag measurement ID from Google Analytics 4. It starts with a G- but other than that, that article is perfectly helpful at helping you get this setup. As an overview, what you're going to do is go into your Google Tag Manager, you create a new tag called scroll depth and then you're going to define how deep that depth is. You have three different choices. You have a scroll depth threshold, so past a certain threshold, you have a certain number of pixels or percentage, and then you can also fire an event based off of scroll direction, if they're scrolling vertically or horizontally. So once you've created these scroll depths inside of Google Tag Manager, now you go into Google Analytics to set to recognize those events. And the cool thing about this is they're already there. That's right, you don't actually have to go into Google Analytics and do anything, these events are being pushed right into Google Analytics. And all you need to do is know where to see them so that you can make use of them in your reports. We'll get to that here in a little bit. And I decided to make my scroll depths based off of percentages, like I said, 50%, 70%, and 90%. But you can decide to do it however you want. You can even do a certain number of pixels down the page or anything like that. I just thought percentages were sure nice.

Okay, so what if you don't really care about scroll depth. So scroll depth isn't the end all be all, because sometimes we want to measure how long they're spending on the site. So the next thing we want to do is create time on site events. In the shownotes, we linked to a really good YouTube video that walks you through exactly how to create these. Again, this is in Google Tag Manager. Similar to scroll down GA 4 already has a way of telling whether someone is engaged for a certain amount of time. GA 4 has an event that comes with it called engaged sessions. Now engaged sessions is anyone who stayed around longer than 10 seconds or converted or had two or more pageviews. So yeah, that's nice. But you know, me, I want a little bit more control here. I want to fire an event, anytime someone makes it to a one minute time on site, a three minute, and a five minute time on site. I feel like if someone spends five whole minutes on our website, they are probably super engaged. Alright, so what you do is you go and create an event inside of Google Tag Manager, and I called my first one web page timer one minute. And then for the trigger, I triggered it to fire at the interval of 60,000 milliseconds. So that equals one minute. So if you want to follow our lead here, you're going to make a three minute one, and that's going to be 180,000 milliseconds, and then a five minute one will be 300,000 milliseconds. Alright, so that's all the math that you're going to have to do here. So again, go follow that YouTube video, we've linked to it down below, it's super easy. And that's gonna get you as many of these page timers as you want to fire. So as you guess, now you have these scroll depth triggers that are firing and you have time on site triggers that are firing and Google Analytics 4 is waiting for these to come in and allowing you to just add them to your report willy nilly. It's great.

7:36 Alright, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into setting up conversions and letting you know which reports to use.

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment Do you want your return consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ADS management combined with our proprietary tools allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. To schedule a discovery call just go to B2Linkedlinkedin.com/apply and we'd absolutely love the chance to get to work together.

Alright, let's jump back into it. We're going to be setting up conversions. So the way that GA 4 works is everything is an event. Every page view is an event. These scroll depth triggers and these page timers, all of them are events. Conversions or an event. You get the idea here, okay, so all conversions are in GA 4 is just an event that you've told LinkedIn. This is really serious to me, I want to call it a conversion. And that's really easy to do. What you do is you go into the cog, the admin cog inside of GA 4, and underneath property, you click on events. Now you'll see a list of all of the different events that GA 4 is tracking. If you've been following along, you might see here a scroll depth 50%, a scrolled up 70%, a scroll depth 90%, a web page timer for one minute, three minutes, and five minutes. Okay, that's great. Over in the right hand column, you'll see this toggle switch called mark as conversion. So let's say I wanted to mark a five minute page duration and a 90% scroll as a conversion for something that I'm monitoring, I can flip that little toggle switch or I can flip that little toggle switch to on. And now anytime I'm viewing my reports, and it shows conversions, I know I'm tracking one of those things. Or you can keep conversions for when someone fills out a form. This is totally customizable by you. Now, be aware that when you set up an event inside of Google Tag Manager, it's gonna take a little bit for Google Analytics 4 to recognize it and to start calculating data based off of it. So don't be upset if you've set this up inside of Tag Manager, and then you go inside of GA 4 and you don't see it as an event yet, don't worry, it'll happen. Give it a day or two. So if you had already set up conversions in Google Analytics, chances are all of those conversions that you had previously created got automatically added to your new GA 4 property. That happened with all of ours that we had set up, we didn't have to create a single conversion event. But what if you want to create a new conversion event, let's say you just came out with some new landing pages or a new thank you page and you want to create a new event inside of GA for that's pretty easy. We were already here, but click on the cog, the admin cog, and then go down to events under property. And here, you can click the button that says Create Event. Now it's a little bit tricky. This is very technical, the way they have things worded. So I actually had to look up some help for it. So for my event name, this one's easy, I just typed or whatever, like a thank you page. Then down below, you have three boxes, you have a parameter, operator, and a value. For parameter, you put page location. This is for if someone makes it to a thank you page, you want to call them a conversion. So that's a page location, then the operator we did contains, and then the value is what you actually have in your URL. So in this case, we just said any page that contains thank dash you, let's call that as a conversion. And that's nice and easy, you would just hit submit there. And we've now created a conversion event inside of GA 4. Very cool. Now what you do is go down in that list of existing events, go find your new one that you've created, and toggle that switch to mark as conversion. And now all of your reports are going to see that as a conversion. Very cool.

Alright, so this is where rubber hits the road. Now we want to start talking about the kinds of reports that you can run and look at an actively managed inside of GA 4 in order to tell what your LinkedIn Ads traffic is doing. There are two ways that you can do this. You can either go into reports and look at the pre made reports and maybe even do some light customizations. Or you can go into the Explore menu and create Universal Analytics used to call a custom report. In full transparency here, what I wanted to do for you is I wanted to go and create an exploration, one of these custom reports that would be really easy for everyone to just be able to import right into their GA 4 accounts and use these right off the bat. I jumped into it though, and suddenly realized how difficult this was and how unhelpful this is going to be. The challenge that I found here is that in any report, whether it's one of the premade reports inside of GA 4, or whether you're creating an exploration, like if you're making a custom report, you're limited to being able to see only one event on the page at the same time. That's actually not true, you can either see all events, or you can filter down to a single event. So what I really want to do is I want to create an exploration, a custom report here, that shows me based off of my ad, or my campaign, how many one minute timers fired, how many three minutes, how many five minute timers fired, how many scrolls got down past 50%, 70%, and 90%, I want to see all of that on one page. Well, here's the big weakness in GTA 4, you can only really have one event on the page at the same time. So as much as I would love to have a single report that would be so easy for everyone to scroll through once and see exactly what their different ads were doing. I ended up giving up and going right back to the old prepackaged reports. The way that I do this is I go to reports in the left hand navigation. And then I click on acquisition under lifecycle and then traffic acquisition. This is the report that is going to tell you about where you're getting traffic from. And when you're advertising, this is the right option, we want to analyze where we're getting our traffic from. So there are a couple graphs at the top of the page. But as I scroll down to the table down below, which is where I'm going to spend most of my time, I noticed that everything that I see here are broad categories like organic social, organic search, direct email, etc. So right at the top in the header, it says session default channel group, I'm going to click down on that. And I want to go to session source/medium. So what this does is it breaks down all of my traffic by the source and the medium all in one column, which is very cool. And I can see source mediums here like Google organic, LinkedIn, organic, LinkedIn, paid, Bing, organic, etc. Now, if you've been listening for a while, we've talked pretty good length about reporting and UTM parameters. I'm a big fan of being able to break down all performance all the way down to the unique ad level. The way we do that is through the UTM content parameter. So every one of our ads, if you look at the UTM content parameter, it identifies the exact ad. And these are all 100% unique. So what I could do is right next to the header there that now says session source/medium, I can click the little down arrow and this is us adding a secondary dimension. And immediately you're on a search box. So I just searched for content and found session manual add content. So this is the UTM content parameter that was set manually by the URL that occurred at the beginning of the session. So now as I scroll down, I can see all of those individual unique UTM content parameters and how they performed during this time period. This is way awesome if you want to analyze any individual ad, but maybe that too much in depth for you. Okay, so you can go back up to where it says session manual ad content, and instead click on that and type in campaign and select session campaign. Okay, so now you're looking at each row, not just being a single ad, but you're looking at it being a campaign. For us, the way that we treat this inside of LinkedIn Ads is the campaign name on LinkedIn is what goes into our UTM campaign variable. So now looking down here, I can see my performance by individual campaign, which the way that we create campaigns describes the audience. It's very cool. I'm trying not to get too geeky out on you here. But this is really, really exciting. Once you have your table looking like you want it, scroll over to the right until you see a column called Event Count. Now, right underneath event count, you'll see all events. And that's tracking every single kind of event that you have set up. But as we've talked about in GA 4 everything is an event. So you'll see these giant numbers in the 1000s or 10s of 1000s. Depending on what you have set up. If I click that down arrow there, I can go and select which event that I want it to filter by. Alright, so let's say I want to filter by scroll 50% depth, now I can go and see which of my campaigns is driving the highest quality traffic because they tend to scroll most of the way down the page. I haven't found a sexier way to do this. So if any of you have, please let us know. And of course, you can always reach out to us at [email protected]. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to keep coming through and selecting a different event. If I want to go see a scroll at 90% or a webpage timer at three minutes, I can go and select those and analyze my traffic that way. And of course, I'm a huge Excel nerds, I want to export this into Excel as fast as I can. But boy, it's got me wishing that I could see all of this on a single page. So if any of you know how to do it, please do think to reach out. So once I got this to where I wanted it, I clicked on the little pencil to customize the report, I saved it as a report in my library. So I thought, hey, this will help me a little bit to just make sure that I don't have to set all this stuff up again in the future. Well, I came back after the weekend and went and clicked on my report that I'd created and sure enough, it had just all reset back to default. So I had to create it again anyway. I'll chalk this up to one of the weaknesses of it just being GA 4 and still being new. But I do hope this all gets fixed in the future.

Alright, so there you have it. This should be everything that you need to make Google Analytics 4 seeing and work for you as a LinkedIn Ads expert. I've got the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around.

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

Alright here the resources we talked about. First off, there's a simple link to your Google Analytics login. I find every time I go in search for any sort of Google product, finding the login button is really annoying. So go hit this link, and then add this to your bookmarks. Next is the article by datadrivenu.com, all about how to set up scroll depth tracking. So go follow that one. It's excellent. Followed by the YouTube video that helps you set up your time on site tracking. So go follow those literally, we're talking 10 minutes here max, and you can have all these events set up and tracking to your heart's content. No matter where you are on your LinkedIn Ads journey. Come join the LinkedIn Fanatics Community at fanatics.B2inked.com. This is where you're going to find the community of other LinkedIn Ads experts, as well as all four of my courses taking you from beginner to expert with LinkedIn Ads. Plus, if you join the community, as a super fanatic, you'll get to join a weekly call with me where I can give you direct feedback on the campaigns you're running. Plus, if you sign up before August 1, you'll get grandfathered into our lowest pricing ever. So go join immediately and hop in either as a fanatic or a super fanatic and we're excited to see you there. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button. But if this is not your first time listening, if you're a loyal listener, please do go especially to Apple podcasts and rate and review us there. And of course I'd love to shout you out. Alright with any questions, suggestions, or corrections reach out to us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week and I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Join the LinkedIn Ads Fanatics community and get access to our 4 courses to take you from beginner to expert

Follow AJ on LinkedIn

B2Linked's Youtube Channel

Contact us at [email protected] with any questions, suggestions, corrections!

A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review!

AJ Wilcox Do you want to guarantee that your LinkedIn Ads will be successful? This is the episode for you. Buckle up and let's go. We're talking about everything you need for success on this week's episode of the LinkedIn Ads show.

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

AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! We've talked to and worked with many 1000s of marketers all about LinkedIn Ads. And there is one common thread if I can draw this. And that's everyone wants a guarantee that their LinkedIn Ads are going to work. Although it's impossible to guarantee success. We put this episode together to give you the highest chance of success. And I brought a special guest today that I know you're going to love.

AJ Wilcox First highlighting a review Detayil from Turkey says, "Great podcast for LinkedIn Ads. This is my go to podcast for LinkedIn Ads. AJ Wilcox has insights and thoughts on different subject matter are super helpful." And then Detayil left the shooting star or shining star emoji. Now I hope I'm pronouncing your name, right. So please reach out and correct me. But I love your name. And thank you so much for the kind review. I'm so grateful that our content can be helpful to you.

AJ Wilcox Alright, I'm stoked to bring Parker Williams on as a guest. He has been working with B2Linked for years, first as an account manager, then he was our head consultant. And we've also given him in charge of sales. Parker talks to advertisers and marketers every day. And he knows the process all the way through. I'm bringing him on to share his insights for what brings success. All right, let's hit it.

AJ Wilcox Hey, everyone, I'm super excited to have Parker Williams here. For those of you who don't know, Parker is our head consultant. He's our head of sales. And I'm bringing him in on this conversation to talk about what it is that you need when you're starting LinkedIn Ads. I wanted to bring him in for this conversation to discuss are you ready for LinkedIn Ads. So Parker, thank you so much for joining me today.

Parker Williams You're welcome. I'm excited. This is gonna be awesome.

AJ Wilcox So Parker, I've got to ask you, because you're the one who was the first person to talk to all of our clients. Why should you even care about LinkedIn? What does it have that other channels don't?

Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great question. I don't believe that there's any other platform out there that allows you to target a specific company and the job title and be able to pair that with intent triggers or data that signifies that they might be in market for a service that you're selling. That's just extremely deadly to me. And that's for just companies that are wanting to add business to their pipeline. If you're using LinkedIn for other objectives, which we're going to go into that don't deal with sales, maybe it's with recruiting, or just brand equity, and employee or employer value proposition and building your brand equity. There's no other way to do that than on LinkedIn.

AJ Wilcox And I especially love the scale, because there are platforms out there that will let you target by things like job title, and company name and company size and all that. But LinkedIn, because the vast majority of white collar professionals out there have LinkedIn profiles, the scale is near endless. I don't know if you feel the same way. But it's so rare when someone comes to us with a larger budget than they can effectively spend on LinkedIn.

Parker Williams Yeah, so true.

AJ Wilcox Alright, so who should be considering advertising on LinkedIn?

Parker Williams Yeah, I get asked this question a lot. And it really depends on your purpose. And, of course, the size of your company. And if you have the budget, it is an expensive platform. We always tell people that. But it's only as expensive as you make it. So I do think it's important to always consider your purpose or the objective for advertising on the platform. So we usually break it up into three categories. The first category is if you're wanting to generate leads or sells utilizing LinkedIn Ads, you want to make sure that you have a lifetime value between 10 and 15k, or an average deal size of 10 and 15k or, or more. And then the next thing is making sure that you know that your buyer is on the platform. So we work with a lot of B2B SaaS companies. And if I told you, if you're a B2b SaaS company, and you were wanting to and I told you this platform was perfect for you, but you sold software to dentist, this probably wouldn't be the best platform because dentists aren't always necessarily very active on the platform. So the real question you want to ask yourself is, is my lifetime value, the right size for the average ticket value the deal you're selling? And is my audience active on the platform? You might also be wondering, you know, what is active mean? And that can be to me, weekly basis would mean active. If they're not active more than once a month, then it would be like fishing in a pond with very little amount of fish. And it would be extremely hard to get their attention. You'd struggle to spend your budget. And that's what we've seen with brands and companies that we've worked with where their audiences and active on the platform, we just can't spend their budget. And we can't achieve their goals of generating leads and sales for their company.

AJ Wilcox I specifically remember a campaign we were trying to run where we were hiring door to door sales reps, and I thought, oh, sales reps are on LinkedIn all the time. But I totally misjudged the idea that if someone is doing door to door sales, they're not working in front of a computer. So of course, they're not going to be active on LinkedIn. And it was intensely hard to reach those people. I would have called that campaign a failure.

Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great example. And it really is so important to just ask yourself, Are they active on the platform? And you might be wondering, well, how do I know if they're active on the platform? And this can be simply done by doing some outreach, and just running some tests by reaching out to people and seeing if you can get any responses from them? Or ask your sales team? What are you using right now to get in front of your audience? Are you getting any sales from LinkedIn and reaching out to people through LinkedIn? If you are, then it's fairly promising that if you are, then it's potentially a great opportunity to advertise on the platform. And that's a good signal that your audience is active.

AJ Wilcox Awesome. What about recruiting? We had an episode not too long ago all about recruiting on LinkedIn, we know it tends to perform pretty well. What about that as an objective?

Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great question. I really think what you want to consider here when leveraging LinkedIn ads for finding individuals for roles that you need to fill in your company, you need to ask yourself, how valuable is this employee? If you're hiring, blue collar, or I think a good rule of thumb would be anyone that's not an executive or a director, or it's probably high pay, right, like $50,000 or more, $75,000 or more and pay, how valuable is this employee to your company, would be really important to consider when you're thinking about running ads to recruit individuals for your company and getting specific talent. But it can be really deadly and it can definitely out beat recruiters themselves. Sorry, recruiters, I don't mean to hurt your feelings or anything. But we've seen this be an extremely valuable tool with finding individuals who are employed right now. Because those are your best employees. They're paid players. They're individuals that aren't out looking for a job. Those are the ones that you want to get. And I don't know of any other platform out there that really allows you to target a job title or someone already with the skills you need and the talent that you need, and be able to put a job opportunity in front of that person. I just don't think there's any other platform that allows you to do that.

AJ Wilcox Yeah, I found exactly the same thing. Alright. So aside from recruiting and selling, are there any other uses of LinkedIn Ads that you can think of?

Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great question. We've worked with some cool companies in the past, one of them was a major Japanese conglomerate, and they wanted to just increase their follower count for their company, and their employees that worked for their sister companies. And we leveraged LinkedIn to be able to do that. It was extremely powerful. We achieved their goals. So if you're trying to improve the overall brand equity, and make your company look big, it's a great tool. It's also a great tool for companies like Coca Cola, or Nike, or a Gap that want to just build more awareness of their company. For those that might be looking for jobs, maybe for the lower paid employees, maybe the blue collar, because when they are looking for jobs, it is also another way to build more awareness, where these companies just have massive amounts of employees that they need to hire for maybe seasonal periods of time. So that can also be a really powerful tool.

AJ Wilcox And another great use I can think of, we just recently worked with a major Fortune 500 retailer, and their whole goal was EVP or employer value proposition. The whole concept is raising your brand with the people who are already working for you. And LinkedIn can do this so well, because we're able to target the employees of specific companies, and especially the larger the company, the more efficient and able we are to show ads to them. You can think of it like doubling up their internal intranet with additional messaging that makes them proud to work where they are.

Parker Williams Yeah, thank you for clarifying that. I think that's really, really important.

AJ Wilcox I think it's safe to say that everyone who is talking to us wants to have success immediately. It's like they want leads in the door that are gonna close like yesterday, I have to ask, what do you need to have in place in order to be successful very quickly in a short amount of time?

Parker Williams And that's like the golden question right there. Honestly, when it comes to being successful on LinkedIn, immediately within like a month to three months, I think about targeting being the most crucial aspect, if you don't have an audience that's hot, you know, they know like and trust you, you know, they're the buying stages, right now they're the decision stages, if you don't have that, you can pretty much expect to not have any results right away. Other thing too, is you got to make sure that the messaging and the offer that you're providing that audience, so the value proposition or your product market fit is dialed in, because you could have an audience that you might consider hot, but if your messaging is off, and your product doesn't solve a need that they have, then it's fairly likely that you're also not going to see results, I wouldn't even call that a hot audience, truly. So making sure that you have product market fit, we hit on this already, your lifetime value needs to be 15k, you need to have spot on messaging, your audience needs to be dialed in, they've got to be a warm audience are a hot audience. And then one of the things people forget a lot is what kind of content do you have to support this buyers journey as well. You need to be able to answer their questions that they're going to have in the process of buying your product or your service. And then most importantly, is do you have the budget to achieve these goals? We've mentioned this a lot. LinkedIn is expensive. And so making sure that you have the budget to be able to achieve those goals is really important. And then you have something to capture sales, so does your sales team set up to be successful. And if you're generating leads, and you don't have anyone that can close the deals, you're just gonna waste your money. So I feel like those are the most important things that you need to have in place in order to be successful in a really short amount of period, the first one to three months of running ads.

AJ Wilcox Alright, let's say that we're lacking in any of these areas, or we have a brand new market or brand new company coming to advertise, when do you think they could expect to see results?

Parker Williams Yeah, that's a great question. I usually tell people, and this is based off of what we've seen as an account management company. And as a service provider for managing budgets, we tend to see companies like that that you just described, they start to see results in the months between 6 and 12. And what I mean by results that can mean sales or deals that are in cells hands, like they're working a deal that could potentially turn into a major contractor or sales opportunity for the company, or they've closed some deals. We do see outliers. There's always people that see immediate results, because there is that market that is in the buying phase or is currently in the market for the service that you provide. We know that that's between like 3 and 5% of the market. So you could potentially see results in the first three months, but it's really unlikely.

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

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

AJ Wilcox Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment want to return on that investment? Well, consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years. And our unique scientific approach to ads management, combined with our proprietary tools, allow us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, we're official LinkedIn partners. Just go to B2Linked.com/apply. And plus, you'll get to do your discovery call with Parker, our special guest today. All right, let's jump back into the interview.

AJ Wilcox So we definitely know that LinkedIn Ads is a premium platform, you've mentioned as much. What should we expect in terms of cost and performance as we're jumping into LinkedIn ads for the first time?

Parker Williams And so thisis a really hard question to answer because every company is so different. There's so many variables, we do know some average costs on LinkedIn, you can pretty much expect that your average cost per click can range between $10 and $16. And there's always outliers, we've seen some accounts where their cost per clicks are in the $30 range. And we've had some down below the $10 range. And that's mostly due to the competitiveness of that audience and who's trying to get in front of that audience. And that can also vary. I've had accounts where our average cost per clicks were in the $10 range. And then at a certain point in the year they've started to bump up and the only explanation was, we're either hitting ad fatigue and our quality scores were going down, and we had competitors come in and start targeting that person. So costs can totally vary. If you're selling this internally to your boss or to a team. And you're a first time advertiser to set clear expectations that we need to come in and set our own benchmarks and set our own expectations. You can kind of give them some range. We've seen on average cost per calls booked between $400 up to $1,500. And again, there's always outliers, I've seen lower costs, I've seen higher costs. So hopefully that gives you an idea. But if you're a first time advertiser, you've got to set some of your own benchmarks. Or you can really get yourself into some trouble and potentially lose your job because you set expectations and totally over promised and under delivered. So yeah, be careful.

AJ Wilcox So how much does someone need to budget for LinkedIn Ads? I know this is a tough question.

Parker Williams Yes. So to go back to the objectives, why are you advertising on LinkedIn? Are you wanting to generate leads? Are you wanting to recruit somebody? Or are you purely just doing EVP or increasing the brand equity of the company, the budgets going to change in range. I'm going to use the example of generating sales, because that's majority, I feel like that's what most people want to do with the platform is generate more sales and leads for the company. So for first time advertiser, we usually recommend anywhere from 5k to 8k, up to $15,000. Whenever you can budget there, your goals do play a part in that. So if if you have an objective to generate leads, but you have a quota or a company goal to generate a certain amount of sales, by a certain point, your budgets going to affect that as well. But we always recommend $5 to 8k Starting budget. And if you can get more up to 15k, that should give you enough data to be able to learn the platform, set your own benchmarks start to generate some leads and sales for your company. Of course, with all of the things we talked about previously in place as well.

AJ Wilcox Alright, so let me give you a scenario here. So I have a budget of $15,000. I come to you with a list of like 300 companies and a couple of job titles that those companies to target. What would you tell me?

Parker Williams Good luck spending that $15,000. No, but seriously, we would consider that like an ABM approach, right? You've got it an account list of companies you want to sell to and market to, it's probably not likely that you're going to spend that $15,000. If you have somebody managing that account. If you gave the keys to LinkedIn, you probably will spend that 15k. But it's still probably really not likely. So with a an account based approach, or even a retargeting approach where you're retargeting a small audience, you can expect to spend anywhere from $,1000 to $5,000 and get in front of that audience and get some results. But don't expect to yield a bunch of leads out of that. And you don't necessarily need to either,

AJ Wilcox I can definitely second that if you give the keys to LinkedIn, they really can spend that. But then you find yourself spending like $50 to $80 per click, and it's not spent wisely. Okay, so as a new advertiser, what advice do you have for me in terms of mindset? How do I need to mentally prepare for this?

Parker Williams So I love talking about mindset and marketing, because I feel like this is where I see a lot of marketers fail. I don't know if you know who Mark Rober is, but I love him, my kids love him. And we're subscribers to his crunch labs. And it's really changed my mindset to think like an engineer in marketing and sales. And so if you're a new advertiser on LinkedIn, you've got to go into this with an engineers mindset, expecting to fail in identifying where are we failing, and be okay with that, and then pull the levers and make the tweaks and changes that you need to to help improve the performance of the campaign and get the results you need. But having an engineers mindset is, is so important, because you're gonna get your feelings hurt, and you're gonna see failures. And so if you come into it thinking, oh, gosh, we're going to hit a goldmine, we know our audience is here, we're going to generate so much revenue from this, like, just understand that that's just not reality. If it was, everybody would be doing it. And everyone would be making so much money off of this platform. And there are people that are, but it takes this mindset to be able to do it.

AJ Wilcox I'm so glad you mentioned Mark Rober. Me and my kids are huge fans. And I definitely think that was really good advice that don't let your feelings get hurt. Our job as marketers is to test because ultimately, we don't know what's going to be successful. People will even ask me like, is this going to be successful on LinkedIn Ads, and I'm probably going to be wrong more than half the time. And I've got a lot of experience doing this at this point. Another question that we get really often is what kinds of ad formats and objectives do you suggest running on LinkedIn Ads?

Parker Williams This is a really important question to ask internally when you're planning to run some ads because it does help you set up our team and your team for more success. If you have in mind already, what types of ads you're going to run. So creatives, the types of formats this does set you up for some success, but we always advise that you're going to run single image ads, so newsfeed single image, and then video ads, but single image is a must. Video ads aren't always necessary, but they do help build trust really fast. So if you're wanting to get results faster, I plan on having some video ads, and then we always recommend running text and dynamic ads to help support the other ad formats. I like to refer to them as the supplemental ads. So they're kind of like the supplements you take to help with your day. I

AJ Wilcox write Yeah, I think that's really good guidance. I remember once running a test where we were running just single image ads, and then we turned on text ads to the same audience. And just by having text ads running, we saw our click through rates jumped 16% on our sponsored content. So most of our diets nowadays require supplementation. So do our ads. Yeah. And

Parker Williams I also think it's important that you don't overthink this single image. And video ads can be simple, they can be authentic, real, not overly produced. And those can do fairly well. We've also got an awesome client that I love working with, they're called Video brothers. And they're like a Harmon brothers highly produced incredible production level. And they've also seen great results from this as well. And so you can have both sides of the spectrum. But at the end of the day, I always tell people, the format and the medium doesn't matter. It's the content and the audience temperature. If you're answering these three questions, do I have the right message at the right time in front of the right audience? You're gonna be successful. Now? How do you distribute that that format, it's important to have these three in place, but it's not overly crucial. And don't put too much emphasis on having it perfect.

AJ Wilcox Yeah, that's great advice. Alright, so if you have someone who's looking to possibly work with you, what's the onboarding process look like?

Parker Williams I'm gonna kind of answer this as if you were to work with us or even do this on your own for advertising. So I always tell people, it takes our team about two to three weeks to get ads up and running. I think it could take somebody who's full time for a company to do a little bit quicker. And that's if you have all of the things in place that we've talked about previously. So you've got your messaging, your offers landing pages, content, your targeting, I don't know if I mentioned that. But you have all those key things in place, you can expect to have ads running and live fairly quickly. But just plan on two to three weeks, because there's conversion tracking, and there is targeting and you do have to wait for lists to upload sometimes that can take up to 48 hours, sometimes 72 hours, depending on the list. So there are certain things that you need to plan and prepare for but just plan on two to three weeks, whether it's working with us or doing it on your own.

AJ Wilcox Yeah, so it's definitely not one of those, like, open up the platform and you're live within a few hours. If someone's considering working with us. Can you share a little bit about what those costs look like?

Parker Williams Yeah, absolutely. So we're definitely on the higher end. I you're going to work with us, we bring a lot of value and it's mostly due to our experience, the tools we've developed the processes, the strategy that we've developed, so you definitely get what you pay for. Our price range ranges anywhere from 2k to 3k for budgets under $15,000. Of course, depending on your objectives. So if you've got an ABM approach or a retargeting audience that you want to run ads to, you can plan on spending anywhere from 2k for management fees up to $3,000. If you're from $8,000, in spend up to $15,000 plan on a $3,000 management fee. If you're over that $15,000 monthly media spend, our prices range anywhere from 20%, down to 9.5%. And if you're listening to this right now, at this time of year prices do change, we do increase the value we provide. So we do highly recommend, go check out our website public about our pricing, we try to update that regularly. So if there are any changes, you can pretty much expect to find it there.

AJ Wilcox So why would you want to work with us with B2Linked instead of another agency or hiring an in house person to run it?

Parker Williams Yeah, great question. We've been running ads since 2011. And we've got a lot of experience. We've worked with a lot of different accounts in different industries, helping solve different goals and objectives and problems that companies are dealing with the platform. The platform is constantly changing. We're always staying up to date on the changes and what's working, what's not working. We are the only ad agency out there that is partnered with LinkedIn. And so we do get a lot of information from LinkedIn that they don't necessarily always publicly shared right away. So forward thinking with the platform on top of that, I feel like one of the biggest things, though, is the proprietary tools we've developed that help us save anywhere from 30 to 40% on costs, and helps us get additional insights that the platform doesn't provide. We're able to launch ads faster than anybody else out there because of these tools, so we can learn faster. So these are some of the things that if I was a buyer, I'd be really interested in because a media buyer at the end of the day, it is somewhat of a commodity like anybody can launch ads. But without these proprietary tools and these and this experience, and just overall relationships we've developed, it'd be hard for me to decide to go somewhere else if I was buying the service.

AJ Wilcox Yeah, I think you're right on there. Something else I'm really proud of is we have access to LinkedIn's API. We've built our own reports that pull really deep data from LinkedIn that LinkedIn themselves don't have so we can give insights to our clients that they just can't get anywhere else. So that's one of those little brags I like to throw in there.

Parker Williams Yeah. And also one thing I forgot to mention, Ajay kind of struck my memory here that I feel like not a lot of agencies do this. I've shopped for agencies myself at other jobs. Something that I was really impressed with when I started working at B2Linked was that you take time to look over every single account that we are managing. You schedule office hours with all of our account managers, and you dedicate that time to make sure that they're getting their questions answered, and that they're becoming the best at LinkedIn Ads as well. And so you're still putting your own personal touch on every single account, which I think is really impressive. Not a lot of people do that. I also feel like something I've seen in the marketplace with agencies is I've seen accounts that account managers that aren't very transparent about what's going on in the account. One of our values of the company's transparency, so we strive to educate our customers on what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how we're doing it. It does take extra time, but if you're going to take this account and take it internally, we want to help set you up for success to do that, if that was your objective, and that happens a lot. We see that happen all the time. We don't necessarily like that, because we always want to keep a customer long term. But I do think it's important that if you are hiring an agency to help you discover this platform, and test it and learn it, or even just manage and optimize the account that there's that transparency.

AJ Wilcox Yeah, I totally agree with this. I absolutely hate when I hear about ad agencies that are holding the keys to an account. And then once the client leaves, they don't give them access. Everything we do, the client owns. They own their account, they own their data going forward. And I feel much better about that than trying to hold an account hostage, trying to keep a client longer.

Parker Williams Yeah, I think that's huge. And it happens more often than not, I've taken over account. And I've learned that I've that previous provider that were the person running the account had deleted a bunch of campaigns and removed things. And I just think that's ridiculous. But I think that's huge. So outside of that, though, I feel like our staff is trained by one of the best advertisers, I think in the world. Has tons of experience. We're constantly training and teaching them and helping them improve as marketers themselves. So on top of all the tools, the experience, the processes, our staff, they're incentivized to take ownership. And that's also really important as well.

AJ Wilcox Alright, so let's say someone is interested in working with us, what are the next steps to working with our team.

Parker Williams So the next steps, I would recommend reaching out to us so you can go to our website, B2Linked.com/apply, or just to our website, B2Linked.com. And you should be able to book a discovery call. You'll meet with me or AJ, or one of our other consultants. And we'll make sure that we're a fit, first off, and make sure that we can help you with your goals and objectives. And we're very transparent and honest about that. We don't take on clients that we know we can't help. And so make sure to schedule that call and visit with us first. And then we'll help put together a customized proposal that will help kind of guide you along the way of purchasing the service and also working with LinkedIn for running ads. Following that if you decide to work with us, and it's a fit, you're gonna fill out an onboarding sheet, and our team goes through that onboarding sheet, and they'll verify it with you on an onboarding call, and then pretty much off to the races from there. They'll start setting up the account and start getting ready to launch as within a two to three week period. So yeah, that's usually what you can expect with onboarding and next steps.

AJ Wilcox Love that. Will Parker, thank you so much for coming and sharing your guidance here. It's been super valuable. I tend to talk about this stuff quite a bit. So it's always really fun to hear someone else talking about it and hearing their examples and their approach. So thanks so much for sharing everything here with us. Yeah, absolutely.

Parker Williams Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

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

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

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